Paula Martinac: Lesbian Notions
Ask any lesbian or gay man about
the First Amendment and its protections of religion, speech, and the right
of assembly, and you'll undoubtedly get some very passionate responses.
But what about our Second Amendment right 'to keep and bear arms'? Although
many of us support gun control, there's a new movement of pro-gun queers
raising provocative questions that may help our community arrive at solutions
to the problem of antigay violence.
It would be easy for progressives to
dismiss the new attention-grabbing gays-for-guns movement as a strange
offshoot of the gay male right. After all, the Pink Pistols, the lesbian
and gay 'shooters' group that already has chapters in nine cities, took
its inspiration from an opinion piece by conservative gay journalist Jonathan
Rauch.
In Web magazine Salon last year, Rauch
complained that gay people have too often presented themselves as victims
and haven't been able to escape the stereotype of homosexuals as limp-wristed
fags. Carrying concealed weapons that we know how to use could change our
image and serve as the perfect deterrent to gay bashers. Unfortunately,
Rauch forgot to talk about
lesbians, whose stereotype as swaggering bulldykes would have messed
up his tidy argument.
Rauch's position on guns is consistent
with his politics. But now progressive-thinking queers are coming out as
pro-gun as well, and lesbians and bisexual women are reportedly joining
shooters groups, too. The co-founder of Pink Pistols, for example, voted
for Ralph Nader in 2000. And a recent article in the Pittsburgh City Paper
about the fledgling Pink Pistols chapter there interviewed a member of
the group who is active in the Democratic Party but rejects the traditional
liberal stance for tighter gun controls.
What's all this about? Understandably,
there is frustration in the queer community about our inability to protect
ourselves. While we spend valuable money and time lobbying a resistant
Congress for inclusion in the federal hate-crimes act, lesbians and gay
men continue to be bashed and killed.
Now some in our community are arguing
that hate-crimes legislation won't do any good anyway. The answer, they
suggest, is for us to start toting guns not to stage a revolution, but
just to brandish or use them when attacked. Once youthful gay bashers get
the message that we're armed and dangerous, hate crimes won't seem like
so much fun and the stereotype of
gays as weak will shatter.
It's an interesting idea and one that
crops up in the women's movement, too, since so often violent men view
women and children as easy prey. The Massachusetts-based group Arming Women
Against Rape and Endangerment (AWARE) runs workshops that train participants
to use everything from pepper spray to semiautomatic weapons.
In addition, there's a historical precedent
for suggesting that the lesbian and gay community arm itself. In 1966,
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
because they were fed up with the lack of progress the moderate, nonviolent
leadership of the civil rights movement had made through legislative channels.
The Black
Panthers encouraged blacks to protest gun control and to arm themselves
against persistent racial violence. Interestingly, the Web site for the
Pink Pistols (www.pinkpistols.org) displays a quote attributed to Black
Panther Stokely Carmichael: 'I will be nonviolent with you as long as you
are nonviolent with me.'
But the persistent stereotype of men
of color as violent and dangerous Upsets the strategy of arming gay people.
In New York City, for example, police officers have been known to open
fire when they 'mistake' an unarmed black man's wallet or pager for a handgun.
For queer men of color, then, race complicates what to white pro-gun gays
may look like an 'easy'
solution.
Although I don't agree with Rauch and
the Pink Pistols about guns, hate-crimes legislation, or cowboy individualism,
I do believe we need to come up with new answers to antigay violence. And
I don't mean sending additional lesbian and gay lobbyists to Washington.
For more than 30 years now, a variety of queer community-based solutions
everything from rioting in
the streets to engaging in civil disobedience to founding social services
to operating hate-crime hotlines have enabled us to take care of our ourselves
when straight people turned away from our issues.
Here's one idea that a few communities
have already tried. Because antigay crimes often occur in neighborhoods
where queers are visible and out, we might take New York City's Guardian
Angels as a model for group action. Founded in 1978, the Angels are volunteers
who receive training in physical self-defense, the art of verbal negotiation,
and first aid. They
also learn civilian law and how to make citizens' arrests.
In the same way, queer safety patrols
could operate as visual deterrents to crime by sending an important message
to potential bashers: Dykes and fags know how to take care of their own.
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