Gay murder
Even in his final seconds of life, first lgbtq+ imam pushed boundaries
BBC News, Johannesburg
The execution-style killing ofan openly gay imam, Muhsin Hendricks, in South Africa has left people in the LGBTQ+ people fearful for their security - but also determined to forge ahead with the campaign to cease their marginalisation in religious circles.
Reverend Toni Kruger-Ayebazibwe, an openly gay Christian cleric, told the BBC that Hendricks was a "gentle spirit" who brought light into any room he occupied.
"The gap Muhsin leaves is massive," she said, adding that she knew for a fact that there were "a large number of queer Muslims around the world who are grief stricken".
The 57-year-old was shot dead in what appeared to be a hit on Saturday in the small coastal metropolis of Gqeberha.
Initial reports that Cape Town-based Hendricks had been in Gqeberha to perform the wedding ceremony of a lgbtq+ couple have been dismissed as untrue by his Al-Gurbaah Foundation.
"He was visiting Gqeberha to officiate the marriages of two interfaith heterosexual couples when he was tragically shot and killed," it said in a statemen
Dubbed the “world’s first openly gay Imam”, South African religious leader Muhsin Hendrickswas gunned down on 15 February 2025 in an attack that many have faith was targeted. Tributes include poured in across the world, but so own online comments that his death was justified.
His passing intensifies a global debate about whether queer Muslims belong in the faith. Amanullah De Sondy was a friend of his and is a scholar of Muslim sexuality and masculinity, including the contributions of Hendricks. He pays tribute and discusses the bigger issues.
Who was Imam Muhsin Hendricks?
Muhsin Hendricks was born in 1967 in Cape Town and raised in a Muslim common. He married and started a family with a woman before coming out as gay in 1996. He would later commit a Hindu man. His marriage touched on two complex issues for many Muslims: that it was between two men, and that it was with someone of a alternative faith.
Muhsin Hendricks was a learned scholar of Islam who had become a globally renowned religious chief. He created and managed large queer Muslim organisations in South Africa that brought people together from Karachi to London.
He worked first as an Arabic language teache
Former classmate sentenced to existence without parole in murder of gay teen Blaze Bernstein
Samuel Woodward, a California man found guilty of murdering his former classmate in 2018 in a hate crime, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Friday.
Blaze Bernstein -- a 19-year-old queer , Jewish student at the University of Pennsylvania -- went missing while visiting his family in Newport Beach during winter fracture in January 2018. His body was found, accompanying a dayslong search, buried in a park in Lake Forest he went to with Woodward the night he went missing, authorities said. He had been stabbed 28 times, prosecutors said.
Woodward, now 27, was charged with first-degree murder as a abhor crime. Prosecutors had argued that Woodward murdered his high school classmate because Bernstein was gay.
In issuing the sentence during a lengthy hearing on Friday, Judge Kimberly Menninger said there was evidence that the defendant planned the murder, and that the jury found it genuine that the crime was committed because of Bernstein's sexual orientation.
Menninger also denied Woodward probation.
On whether the defendant is remorseful, Menninger said, "Unfo
Scott Johnson's 1988 gay loathe murder finally solved after decades of hurt, crusade for justice
Thirty-three years ago last month, a local fisherman came across a gruesome scene on the rocks off Blue Fish Point in the idyllic northern beaches of Sydney.
The naked body of American PhD mathematics student Scott Johnson lay at the foot of a steep cliff face at Manly's North Head.
On the cliffs above were Mr Johnson's clothes — complete with a pen resting on top.
It was December 10, 1988, and it marked the beginning of one of Sydney's longest-running unsolved murders, even if it was initially dominated as suicide.
But Mr Johnson's family never believed their beloved Scott, who moved to Australia to be with his partner in 1986, had killed himself.
Their tireless campaign to discover the truth led to the finding at a third coronal inquest, held in 2017, that Mr Johnson had been the victim of a "gay hate crime".
A renewed police investigation was launched, and in 2018 a $1 million reward for data which could help solve the crime was announced.
That was doubled to $2 million in 2020 when Mr Johnson's tech entrepreneur brother, Steve, put his
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