NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Sakia Gunn knew her sexual orientation — and the challenge it might pose for her — before she knew sex.

“She was 11,” Sakia’s mother, LaTona Gunn, said in a recent interview, three months after her daughter’s killing. “She said, ‘Mommy, I don’t know if anything’s wrong with me, but I don’t like boys. I like girls.’”

Sakia was always as candid about her sexuality, whether talking about it, being affectionate with her girlfriend, or wearing basketball jerseys and other apparel breaking from gender norms that classified her as a self-described “AG” (aggressive lesbian).

In May, the 15-year-old was stabbed to death at a Newark bus stop after a night in Manhattan, when she told a man that she and her friends were lesbians.

The killing outraged GLBT and civil rights leaders, who held rallies in Newark, New York, Boston and Washington. It also drew comparisons to the widely publicized killings of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 2000, and of Teena Brandon in Nebraska in 1993.

About 2,500 mourners attended Sakia’s funeral, an event that gay rights advocates said revealed the numbers and commitment of the city’s young gay and lesbian community.

In the wake of Sakia’s death, Latona Gunn has become an ad hoc spokesperson for the difficulties faced by young black lesbians like her daughter. She and others also are trying to win support from the city and school district for a proposed community center for GLBT teens.

One goal of the Newark Pride Alliance, a group formed after Sakia’s death, is to create a community center to provide counseling and other services to gay and lesbian youth. The center might also serve as a gathering place for the city’s teenage GLBT community.

After criticism that he was slow to react to the slaying, Newark Mayor Sharpe James attended Sakia’s funeral. LaTona Gunn said the mayor approached her at the funeral to pledge his support for a community center. But, she said, after three months they have yet to schedule a meeting.

City officials declined to be interviewed for this story.

People struggling for gay rights in Newark, a predominantly black city, say it is especially difficult because of a particularly strong anti-gay bias within the African-American community.

“Because of the church,” said Laquetta Nelson, a co-founder of the Newark Pride Alliance. “Preaching hatred from the pulpit has contributed to the homophobia toward the gay and lesbian community, so they have a responsibility for Sakia’s murder.”

Groups including the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey and the Archdiocese of Newark either did not return calls or declined to comment.

The case also has generated criticism that Gunn’s violent death did not prompt the same degree of press coverage or outrage among mainstream gay rights groups as other anti-gay killings, because Sakia was a young black woman from a working-class Newark neighborhood.

“I was shocked at the lack of response, the lack of support,” said Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now” on WBAI Pacifica Radio out of New York.

The Gay City News, a Manhattan-based weekly newspaper, ran an editorial headlined, “Where is the Outrage?”

“I think there’s racism in the LGBT community, and no doubt there’s classism,” Mick Meenan, the paper’s assistant editor, said in an interview. “Whatever attitudes that occur within the community at large occur within the LGBT community.”

Calls to groups including Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the New Jersey Lesbian & Gay Coalition were not returned.

It’s a 30-minute subway ride to Christopher Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village from Newark Penn Station, just around the corner from the intersection of Broad and Market Streets. But in some sense, the two locations are worlds away.

The area around Christopher Street is known as a haven for gays and lesbians, and is where Sakia and her friends had spent the Saturday night just hours before she died.

Market and Broad is where they were waiting for a bus when approached by Richard McCullough, 29, of Newark, a passenger in a car driven by another man.

Valencia Bailey, 16, a fellow “AG” who was so close to Sakia they called each other cousins, said McCullough tried to pick up the “fem” girls in the group, before they and Sakia told him they were lesbians.

Bailey said McCullough grabbed Sakia, she broke loose, and he lunged and stabbed her in the chest.

“I’m holding her, and her head is in my hand, and I’m saying you gotta breathe, you gotta breathe,” Bailey said. “And she takes a breath, and then she looks at me, and turns her head. And then her eyes roll back, and her head goes heavy in my hand, and her body just goes limp.”

“You killed my cousin because she was a lesbian?” Bailey said of her feelings since then. “It hurts, because this is who I am and you can’t accept me.”

McCullough has pleaded innocent to murder and weapons offenses with an added bias element that would increase his sentence if convicted.

The reaction to Sakia’s death was more personal than outraged among her peers.

“I took it real, real hard,” said Jamon Marsh, 19, of Newark, Sakia’s girlfriend. The couple met at West Side High School. “That next day I was in the hospital myself — I had a panic attack, I was dehydrated.”

Marsh and Bailey founded the Sakia Gunn Aggressive and Fem Organization as a support group for young lesbians. They say there is no school-sponsored group, despite a large gay and lesbian population.

Several West Side students asked the principal, Fernand Williams, for a moment of silence. But the students say Williams refused.

Michelle Baldwin, a spokesperson for the school district, said she referred a request for interviews to Williams and other school officials, who did not respond.