West Hollywood, CA- A vigil was held this evening in honor of Gemmel Moore, 26, and Timothy Dean, 55. Both men were found dead inside Ed Buck’s (formerly Edward Bernard Peter Buckmelter) Hollywood apartment.
Dean was found Monday morning and Moore was found July 2017.
The family of Moore including his mother, father, grandmother and younger sister were in attendance at the vigil.
His mother, sister and grandmother were in town to celebrate Moore’s birthday, who turns 28 this weekend.
As fate would have it, however, most likely due to the ignored cries of Moore’s family by Hollywood police and city officials, Moore’s family was in Los Angeles from Texas the same week Dean’s body was found inside Buck’s apartment.
Moore’s mother, LaTisha Dixon, had a message for media outlets who only describe her son as a ‘prostitute.’
“My son was more than an escort. Timothy Dean was more than a porn star. These people have people who loved them. They are more than that. There is a story behind everything. Not one time have any of you said anything about Ed Buck other than he was a political donor.”
A Black male LGBTQ member shared a very raw and poignant analysis of the underlying issues surrounding dead Black men inside Buck’s apartment.
“He is not just preying on vulnerability. He’s preying on Black men. It is a sensitive issue that a few of us talk about. Our body parts are being hunted. The gay community has come up with an acronym for my body parts. It’s called a BBC. WE didn’t make that up. It’s a daily construct that we have to endure.”
Transgender activist Ashlee Marie Preston knew Buck while she was a former board member of the Stonewall Democratic Club of Los Angeles. She told NBCNews that:
“There’s a larger story that people aren’t looking at. It’s really about money, power, chemsex culture, and raceplay. It’s this underground thing that many people aren’t talking about, and essentially it’s murder rebranded. He’s forcibly giving people lethal injections of drugs in exchange for money.”
Preston later worked to eject Buck from the club where he had been a lifetime member after Moore’s death. Preston says that prior to Moore’s death, Buck had shown her a photo of a Black male and said, “he’s so hot.”
“I was like, ‘Who?,’ and he showed me his phone, and there was a black man sitting in a dark room, and the only light in the room was the light from the lighter, and he was smoking methamphetamine,” (NBC News).
The intersections of race, power, and privilege are clear to those who study and deal with these issues daily.
Journalist and Political Strategist Jasmyne Cannick broke the story of Moore’s death inside Buck’s home.
She said that the media has been calling her, asking if the entries that she published from Moore’s journal were real.
Cannick held up the small journal at the vigil to show that it was in fact real and she said that it would not be released to any news outlets.
She has worked with Moore’s family in the last 18 months to bring awareness to Buck so that he can be criminally charged for Moore’s death.
What Cannick and the family quickly ran into, was what they referred to as, “people willing to bury their head in the sand in exchange for monetary gains.”
Cannick relayed that it is going to take a community effort of people beyond race for Ed Buck to be arrested.
“This man has spread around over $100,000 to the right people. Taking Ed Buck down, getting him arrested and charged so that he can be prosecuted is going to take Black folks, white folks, everybody. We are all going to have to work together to make this happen.”
