Part 3 of the Post's series on gay teens in real America goes to Newark, NJ, to look at inner-city dirt-poor lesbian life, and is also very much worth your time.

Leafy suburbs have after-school gay organizations and parent support groups. Felicia's Newark has nothing. On Friday nights, a rattletrap teen dance hall called the African Globe is the one beacon in an otherwise empty landscape for gay teenagers. They descend by the hundreds, Felicia among them, waiting to get inside their dingy sanctuary.

Felicia felt none of the windfall of victory many American gays experienced last year when the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalized homosexual relations between adults, or when the Massachusetts high court allowed gays to marry in that state. Getting married was someone else's dream. Felicia was more worried about staying alive.

Survival is a part of everyday Newark, but for Felicia it intensified in May 2003 with the killing of her friend, a 15-year-old lesbian named Sakia Gunn, who was at a bus stop downtown when she rejected a man's pickup attempt with the declaration that she was gay. A fight followed and Sakia was stabbed to death.

The slaying was Newark's version of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student found beaten and lashed to a fence post in 1998 in Wyoming. In Shepard's case, gay and lesbian organizations flew into the town of Laramie to maximize the political moment. President Bill Clinton spoke out against the hate crime, and in New York thousands of protesters marched down Fifth Avenue. No such forces rallied around the poor black teenager from Newark.

There's lots more.