Gun Violence and the Targeting of Gays

While Congress has enacted the Respect Marriage Act - soon to be signed by President Biden - with some small degree of Republican support, the official platform of the Republican Party (as noted in  a lengthy piece in Salon) and likely a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is to dismantle gay rights and re-stigmatize gays in every manner possible, particulary by reviving the lie that gays are a threat to children.  Never mind that the data clear shows that the vast, vast majority of pedophiles and molesters are heterosexual men (a shocking  number of whom are also pastors and church youth group leaders).  After more than 30 years following "Christian Right" organizations I've learned one thing in particular: these people never let the truth get in the way of their theocratic agenda and frankly, many of them would happily see gays dead.   Frighteningly, with America's out of control gun violence problem this Republican/Christofascist anti-gay rhetoric is proving increasingly deadly.  The Pulse mass murder and the recent Club Q shootings are the more extreme examples and are symptomatic of the hate and violence anti-gay, anti-minority and anti-Muslim propoganda disseminated by opportunistic politicans, scamvangelists and the professional Christian set are engendering.  It's both and exciting time and a frightening time to be gay in America.  Here are highlights from the piece in Salon that looks at the dichotomy (like the author, I will not remain silent):

On Sunday, November 20, 2022 I learned that an armed killer entered Club Q, a queer bar and nightlife space in Colorado Springs, and prematurely ended the lives of five patrons and injured 22 more. I knew it would happen again. This time, though, I reacted differently. I felt personally violated, passionately angered and deeply unsettled. I stood there for a long time trying to figure out why this mass shooting was different, other than the obvious reason that it had targeted queer people like me. The news of the immeasurable, yet familiar, loss of life weighed heavily on my mind, but something immensely somber wrapped around my soul.

Gun violence is endemic in America; it is a strange and dangerous reality our society has made normal and seemingly immovable. Accounts of perpetrators — mostly cisgender heterosexual white men — slinging firearms and donning combat gear to enter public spaces and reap the lives of innocent people date back decades.

Mass shootings, which easy access to guns enables as evidenced by the limited successes of the federal government's assault weapons ban, should not be viewed as an anomaly within American culture because the adoration of firearms generally is part of the bedrock upon which we have built our society. As I stated previously, gun violence in America is endemic, yet we react to it as a merely pervasive problem which will somehow resolve itself. Until Congress and 38 state legislatures decide we have reached an appropriate amount of bloodshed to take truly effective action, every person you know and love in America should be on alert in every public space. Every person you see at a Walmart or in the crowd of a concert on American soil should prepare to enjoy their day with the expectation of being shot at, and potentially senselessly murdered in cold blood. 

Every time you step into a nightclub, especially spaces of liberation and joy the queer community has created for itself, you should take note of every exit, every hiding place and every potential item you can use to protect yourself for the inevitable.

David Mack, senior breaking news reporter for BuzzFeed News, was outraged. . . . . "I am angry because it is very clear that there has been a political strategy in this country to try to demonize LGBTQ people as a way of mobilizing a political base in a way that we haven't really seen in a few years."

The American public today generally supports the idea that queer people are human beings who deserve equal legal and social footing, at least in regards to gay marriage and especially in the case of conventionally attractive, white, able-bodied, cisgender gay men. Despite this, the prevailing attitudes that have begun to work in favor of America's queer community mustn't be taken for granted.

Millions of American conservatives remain furious queer people have a designated 30 days in June to proclaim we deserve to be equal to them. In addition to the rhetoric Mack described that relentlessly and baselessly vilifies people like us, the Republican party has further emboldened these irrational sects with the canonization of these attitudes. In the GOP's official 2016 platform, the party included the outright objective of hopefully overturning Obergefell v. Hodges — the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage in all of the United States

This platform, the GOP believed, was so perfect they recycled it for the 2020 general election. The Republican Party's mission to turn back the clock on queer rights is in motion, and we've seen with the religious right's determined success to roll back federal abortion protections that no victory should be considered secure, that every inch of progress we have made must be zealously protected.

Though the queer community has faced its own unique challenges in America, the problem of gun violence and mass shootings is universally shared. It should be noted, though, that the June 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting remains the deadliest mass shooting targeted towards queer people and the second deadliest mass shooting in American history. What I've been trying to deduce is what it means exactly when a problem every American faces is so vigorously applied to a group of people who already experience discrimination. These mass shootings targeted at queer people specifically, and the visceral hatred those individuals have towards people like me — what does that mean? What greater message lain beneath their outer derision for queer people?

Queer people everywhere across the globe are conditioned to respond to threats our entire lives. Bullies made my life difficult in grade school, and I consider myself extremely lucky to have only been victim to childhood taunts and as-of-then unsubstantiated claims of my sexuality. Both my parents were accepting and supportive when I came out to them, but shortly afterwards, my mom expressed her serious concern for my safety. She was never able to shake her feelings of despair and heartbreak at the news of Matthew Shephard's 1998 murder. She said she couldn't even bring herself to imagine me befalling a similar fate.

"There's not a lot of places where you can let that guard down," Balof said. "To have someone come in and violate that and try to destroy that makes it that much more traumatic, not just for the people who experienced it, of course, but for the entire community."

In this modern era of the inclusion of queer people in American society and advocating for queer rights more broadly, especially in the case of our community's trans people of color, the political right has responded with more than the standard gamut of taunts and slurs. The escalation of prejudiced violence in our spaces from outside perpetrators, in instances like the Club Q shooting, is the most up-front and bloody confrontation my community has to prepare itself for. Other, less violent means of intimidation and purposeful exclusion include the record number of anti-trans bills introduced in state legislatures. While the cancerous growth of vile anti-queer rhetoric the right wing manufactures hurts all queer people, it is now especially targeted towards gender-obscuring, gender-defying and transgender people, artificially juxtaposing some of the most vulnerable and courageous people in my community against children. Baselessly accusing queer people of coercing children into being queer and trans is not a new lie, but it has been dusted off and viciously clamped around the right's portrayal of who we are. And, as we've seen, this barrage of unfounded accusations results in the very real disruption of our everyday lives beyond a showering of bullets. 

On Dec. 3, a strange attack on Moore County, North Carolina's power grid left thousands of people without electricity. The FBI has joined the investigation, and queer activists believe there is strong suspicion to support the theory the attacks targeted a drag performance, cutting off the power supply and sending a queer space of joy into literal darkness.

The phenomenon of gunmen shooting us down in bars and clubs, I believe, goes deeper than merely being a place where queer people will be. These killers' qualms about my community being joyous and having fun, to me, is not just about what we do but also where we do it. They don't want us to openly be a part of society; they don't want our elation and bliss visible to the world, even in the semi-private enclaves we've created. Attackers choosing to murder queer people in nightclubs and bars, on dancefloors and during drag shows, is an exercise in dismantling the spaces we have intentionally created for ourselves. These venues are an essential component of queer culture, acting as social settings and safe havens away from judgement and the fear of being othered. We can hold hands and make out without a coward in a moving car yelling at us, calling us a slur. We can breathe, and live, in a space we have designed to cater to our agenda: not just staying alive, but living in the most vulnerable and open sense.

[F]earing further violence for drawing attention to the hatred pointed at our community is exactly what the shooters want. He said that this coercion of silence is exactly what terrorism does, because that's what we are: terrorized. To speak out regardless — not just me, but anyone who has the privilege to do so safely or chooses to otherwise — is an act of defiance worth doing.

Queer people are forced every day to decide whether we will be silent or vocal about our existence in America. We live in a society of abject terror that every person in this country shares. Queer people understand this as well as today's grade school children. Unlike children, we also wonder if we will be shot because of who we are, of which our spaces are an extension. As long as our society fails to act in the wake of imminent tragedies, killers will put our bars, clubs and other spaces of joy in the path of danger. 

I don't expect the laws to change favorably for the hunted anytime soon. Until then, I remain hopeful that one day there will be an empty space between the First and Third Amendments, and years will have passed since the last mass shooting in America.