Queer and Present Danger
Pittsburgh Pink Pistols ask, "Guns and gays -- why not?"

Any kid yelling "faggot" at Terry McIntyre should do it from a distance: At 6'4" and well over 200 pounds, McIntyre is not someone to mess with. "Muggers cross the street when they see me coming," he says. He says he carried a gun only once, when he received a call to work at 2 a.m. (McIntyre works as a computer security consultant.)

Despite the safety his size affords him, McIntyre is a strong supporter of what he and other gun supporters call "the RKBA" -- the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms. He even criticizes the National Rifle Association as "the nation's largest gun control group." He owns a plastic 9 mm Glock ("combat Tupperware," he calls it), which he casually places unloaded on his glass-topped end-table, next to a miniature lamp and a dried flower arrangement.

Yep, he's as gay as the day is long. So what? All the more reason to own a gun, says McIntyre. Publicly.

In fact, McIntyre is setting up a Pittsburgh chapter of the Pink Pistols, a group started last year in Boston. The Pink Pistols shoot together but say their very existence is a form of civil rights activism. As one founding member wrote, they question "whether shooters and pink people should be adversarial and why."

McIntyre's Pittsburgh chapter is "still in the talking stages." Right now he's recruiting members and organizing the first shooting trip.

An active Libertarian who grants both William F. Buckley and Noam Chomsky space on his many bookshelves, McIntyre himself used to favor stricter gun controls, but, he says, "When I realized there were 100 million guns in America -- one for every household -- I realized we'd need a police state to get rid of them all. And we already have too much of that with the War on Drugs." After eight years of "intellectual exploration" he decided to buy the Glock.

While McIntyre doesn't fear for himself, he worries about his partner, Javier Coronado-Aliegro.

"I'm 140 pounds wearing this" -- Coronado-Aliegro gestures to his heavy sweater -- "and soaking wet with a good meal." Originally from Colombia by way of West Virginia University, Coronado-Aliegro adds, "Plus, I'm brown. 'Hey that kid's foreign. He's gonna take my thing, I don't know what -- something!'" he mimics. "And I'm out there -- way out! My closet is for clothes," he says.

Still he's not ready to start carrying. After leaving behind Colombia's political violence, he says, a gun was the last thing he wanted to deal with. "I still feel uncomfortable going to the range."

Coronado-Aliegro picks up McIntyre's gun. "They'll think I'm one of the Bond girls," he jokes. "Tomorrow never dies!" he says dramatically, blowing imaginary smoke off the barrel of the Glock.

Despite his reticence, Coronado-Aliegro has decided that he'll learn to use the gun eventually. "If it's at home, I better learn to deal with it or else it'll be worse." Even for a plastic gun, the Glock seems to have weight. "It's heavy with symbolism," adds Coronado-Aleigro, an instructor at Pitt. "Guns are a macho thing, but that's very overblown. It shouldn't be shocking to see me with a gun just because I don't fit the John Wayne image."

"Pink Pistols" takes its name from an essay published in Salon last year in which journalist Jonathan Rauch argues that gays should publicly arm themselves for self-defense. Rauch wrote, "[I]t is remarkable that the gay movement in America has never seriously considered a strategy that ought to be glaringly obvious."

Although comprehensive statistics on anti-gay violence don't exist, gays are clearly a target of hate crimes. Statistics compiled voluntarily by some law-enforcement jurisdictions and submitted to the FBI counted 9,235 reported hate crimes nationwide in 1998; 1,439 of these were directed against gays. Tracking by the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, which counts crimes reported to both victims' services groups and law enforcement in ten different U.S. locations, totaled 3,411 anti-gay offenses in 1999.

If gays were armed, Rauch argued, gay-bashers would think twice. Not everyone would have to carry a gun -- just enough to make thugs consider the possibility. Because the very nature of gay-bashing is to make sport of pummeling someone weak, he explains, bashers would be less likely to arm themselves in response and risk being harmed by their "inferiors." In fact, his essay opens with the story of a friend whose companion sent would-be bashers on their way with a warning shot.

Plus, Rauch writes, gays needed to beef up their image, because "we have tried to make a political virtue of our vulnerability, but the gay-bashers aren't listening." As he told City Paper, "It's trying to broaden our repertoire -- we benefit if we get beyond being perceived as sissies, pansies, fairies, limp-wrists. And the victim role has helped perpetuate that stereotype."

Though his essay helped spawn the movement, Rauch says he learned of the Pink Pistols chapters only secondhand. "I am surprised. I think it's pretty darn neat. I think I may be a small part of something larger."

In addition to practical utility, Rauch acknowledges that a sizable group of gay gun-toters could change gays' political positioning. Carrying guns would be a move away from conventional liberal, gun-control politics. In his 1999 speech at the Log Cabin Republicans convention, Rauch argued that gays should quit being "linked at the belly button with the Democratic Party" and should try to make themselves into a swing voting bloc that the parties would have to compete for. "[T]he radical center, I think, is where we will go and where we belong," Rauch said, citing Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura as a poster child for the "radical center."

Still, the gay mainstream is anti-gun, says Clarence Patton, of the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. "I'm certainly anti-gun, as are most of my colleagues across the country. I don't think we need more weapons in the world. I don't think an armed gay community is going to diffuse someone's hatred or diffuse that person from acting on that hatred. [A hate crime] is an inherently irrational act: If people are doing it to protect themselves from hate crimes, they're kidding themselves."

If that's the mainstream, then meet the radical center: Boston's Pink Pistols' Doug Krick and founding member David Rostcheck, a Libertarian and a progressive Nader-voter, respectively.

"We're actually political rivals," says Rostcheck. They joke that they met at the "Forces of Good-Forces of Evil Convention," although they don't say who represented which delegation. Krick conceived the Pink Pistols as not just for gays and lesbians, but also for polyamorous individuals and practitioners of sadomasochism, dominance and submission, or bondage and discipline. Meanwhile, Rostcheck packed the group's Web site with solid organizing advice under such headings as "Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges" which instructs readers how to "stop being 'those queers' or 'those gun nuts' and start being 'our queers' and 'our gun nuts.'"

Krick figures that the Pink Pistols in Boston number about 50, with approximately 120 people in about a half-dozen chapters across the nation. He says they have a large proportion of women, who he says welcome a non-macho atmosphere. Besides, Rostcheck says, "Shooting's really fun."

So why not just join an ordinary gun group or the National Rifle Association? First, the Pistols say, part of their agenda is to publicize the fact that some gays have guns, and a specific group can best do that. Also, several of the Pistols interviewed were critical of the right-wing image the NRA has established. As Rostcheck says, "You need to argue from a position that doesn't alienate people," which he says means pitching the right to self-defense as another civil right, as just another part of the Bill of Rights. "Why not? It's in the list with the other ten," he says.

Still, gun ownership remains taboo for some. When asked when he came out, Richard Meritzer of Stanton Heights responds, "You mean as a gun owner?"

"My parents are very very very pro-gun control," says Meritzer, a third-generation Pittsburgher. "I was nervous." Now, he says, he's out in both respects. When he got a call from McIntyre about forming the Pink Pistols, he told him, "I'm gay. I'm a gun owner. I'd fit right in! You don't have to be John Wayne or Charlton Heston. And gays and lesbians have a right to protect themselves."

Forty-seven years old, Meritzer has a mild-mannered government job as a city planner. He's a stalwart liberal and even self-described "Democratic party functionary." Yet he's owned a pistol for about 10 years.

Meritzer also owns a semi-automatic gun, an AK-47. (Semi-automatic weapons automatically refeed, but require the shooter to pull the trigger with each fire). He says he prefers to rely on the pistol. "The AK's a little too much firepower for regular household protection. It's a little showy to pull out: 'Mine's bigger than yours,' that sort of thing."

"I don't shoot," says Meritzer. "I have the guns in my house for protection. [My housemate and I] have been harassed substantially, windows broken. We've both been beaten. Twice we've used [the pistol] to defend ourselves.

"I don't know many gay men who haven't been attacked."

About ten years ago, Meritzer was walking home when "a group of neighborhood kids followed me, pelting me with ice balls" as he rushed to his house. "When I fell down, they started kicking me." Meritzer was able to get back to the house, but the teenagers followed him up to the door. Meritzer's housemate grabbed his pistol and pointed it at the kids, shouting, "Get off our porch!" Away they went. Another time, Meritzer's housemate defended one of their friends from an unwanted visitor who forced his way into the house. Twice the gun was pointed, but no shots were fired, Meritzer stresses.

"In both cases," Meritzer says, "it did what it was supposed to do. I'm perfectly happy not firing it."