To know us is to love us, right?
Five years After Ellen, mainstream media are crawling with queer characters,
darn near every last one adorable, well-off and usually ten times more
entertaining than the hets around them. It’s gotten so you can’t swing
a plate of Petrossian caviar anywhere on NBC without hitting a few witty,
urbane, non-heterosexual persons squarely in their bottles of Johnny
Walker Blue.
Somehow this hasn’t stopped people from trying to kill us.
Even if the queer community’s growing—and overwhelmingly non-threatening—presence
in pop culture hasn’t slowed the rate of gay-bashing, you might expect
the last decade’s tide of state-level legislation against hate crimes
at least to stabilize the rate at which queer folks are getting attacked.
It hasn’t yet. Hate-crime laws specifically protect sexual orientation
in 22 states (and gender identity in an additional five—including Minnesota—plus
the District of Columbia). The FBI’s latest Hate Crimes Statistics report,
released Nov. 25, however, indicates a 7.2% increase from 2000 to 2001
in the number of reported hate crimes based on a victim’s sexual orientation.
So we haven’t won them over with Rosie and Will & Grace. And we haven’t
yet found legislative measures that increase our safety. What can we
do?
One organization has an idea. It’s so simple. So obvious. So brilliant.
Make gay-bashing dangerous.
Pink Pistols was started as a target-shooting club two years ago by Doug Krick, a 30-something gay man now living in Boston.
“I got some friends together to go shooting,” Krick says today. “I thought,
‘What else do we have in common? Aha! We’re all queer.’”
Krick noticed that scattered handfuls of people would go target-shooting
together. “And I thought, ‘Okay, how can we work on this to coordinate
within local areas?’ Internet. That means a website. Then I began thinking
I could probably have some fun with this one. Let’s put out a press
release.”
Armed with a list of national media fax numbers assembled during an
unsuccessful run at state office (as a Libertarian), he fired off a press
release announcing the formation of the Pink Pistols.
“I wasn’t expecting Newsweek to bite,” he says with a laugh. Newsweek
ran a short article on Pink Pistols in September, 2000. “Next thing
I know, people are saying, ‘I want to play, too. Can I start a chapter
here?’ Sure, knock yourself out.”
A political agenda
Krick had drawn inspiration for the name Pink Pistols from a www.Salon.com article by Jonathan Rauch,
a gay, Libertarian writer who saw the bright side of arming as many gay
people as possible. Krick also drew inspiration for an unmistakable
political agenda: No longer did he simply want Pink Pistols to help
pro-handgun GLBT people locate each other. He wanted Pink Pistols to start
working for the right to carry handguns.
The discussion on whether the citizenry ought to have legal access to
handguns and assault weapons is, of course, much larger than the queer
community. The debate stretches from sea to shining sea and extends as
far back as the accidental invention of gunpowder. Whoever had gunpowder
(or the recipe for gunpowder) had an extraordinary tactical advantage
over an enemy whose armament was limited to catapults, archers, and
swordsmen.
The twist here is that Pink Pistols actively promotes gun ownership,
education and training for GLBT people in response to having become the
third-most-frequently targeted group for hate crimes. It’s not about
some lofty ideal about minimizing government regulation of a person’s
second-amendment rights; it’s an unambiguous call to fight back.
As you can see from the artwork at www.pinkpistols.org.
Krick enlisted Oleg Volk, a Minneapolis man who runs the pro-gun-ownership
website A-human-right.com, to come up with some graphics that illustrate
Pink Pistols’ position. Volk, who moved to Nashville last year, came
up with some images “mainly by analogy with any other group singled
out for persecution,” he says. The most jarring one doesn’t really work
in on a black-and-white page. The pistol has a rainbow stripe on the
handle, and the triangle is pink.
Linking the atrocities of World War II to their own struggle to keep
handguns is a common tactic for the pro-handgun community. The Million
Mom March, a national organization composed primarily of women who work
for more-strict gun control, has attracted the particular animosity
of many pro-handgun groups. One website screams, “Be prepared for the
brutal truth about what happens when your guns and means of self-defense,
and the defense of Liberty are given up or taken away” and shows two
horrifying photos of what it mockingly calls “the first Million Mom
March”— a crowd of women gunned down by Germans and Ukrainian collaborators.
Local chapter
Today over 2,300 people participate in over 30 Pink Pistols chapters
nationwide.
The local chapter started up in October. Bob Odden organized the first
meeting. “If anyone needs guns,” he says, “it’s gays.”
Odden himself doesn’t own a firearm. “It is fun to shoot, though,” he
says. “I enjoy that.”
Odden started the chapter in part to meet other gay conservatives like
himself. “I can read (in the media) anytime I want about some liberal
position,” he says. “They get a lot of coverage. I talk to other gays,
and I would say a good portion of them are Republicans and Libertarians,
but you don’t really read about them. They have good opinions, too.
I’d like to get to know some of these people.”
In fact, he himself isn’t really comfortable with guns. Suppose, he says,
that he did carry a concealed handgun. “I would have a tremendous fear
about firing when I shouldn’t be firing … or suppose someone walks in
between you and your target. … Now, that’s the kind of thing you can
learn, but I’m hesitant.”
His vision for the chapter is to have a social club to get people
comfortable with guns. “If they wanted to, (guns) might be another
consideration in their self-defense strategy, and certainly we’ll look into
non-lethal strategies.” The emphasis, he says, is on “our own personal
safety, with the idea being that people need to accept some responsibility
for protecting themselves. It’s not up to the government to protect us.”
Just as Log Cabin Republicans raise eyebrows among their GLBT Democrat
friends, Libertarians—with their lefty social ideals and right-leaning
ideas about taxation, the role of government, and the second amendment—remain
a mystery to many queer folk.
Nancy Burkholder attended the first local Pink Pistol meeting in October,
which drew a mixed crowd (queer and heterosexual). She’s been a sport
shooter for 20 years.
“I’m always in someone’s sights,” Burkholder says. “(Republican
Governor-elect Tim) Pawlenty and (Republican Senator-elect Norm) Coleman—they’re
not my friends. But the Democrats aren’t my friends, either. … For the
most part, I think that if you advertise that you enjoy shooting, it’s
not going to win you many friends in the (GLBT) community. The community
is not friendly to gun enthusiasts.”
In fact, many pro-gun GLBT people will tell you that the gun community
is more welcoming to GLBT people than the GLBT community is to gun owners.
A few years ago, Odden attended a lobbying event at the state capitol
with a pro-handgun group called Minnesota Concealed Carry Reform, Now!
“I think they liked us.” It was fun, he says, “to see a gay group there
at a redneck event” and be so welcomed. “And it’s kind of neat to go
into a group like that, and when they see your plight, you can form
alliances.”
Krick thinks the anti-gun attitude might come more from GLBT community
leaders than from the GLBT community itself. “One reason we’re getting
such an open-armed welcome from the gun community,” he says, “is that
they take a ‘we don’t care’ approach. They’re getting beat up by everyone
lately, so they’re welcoming any new faces to the cause.”
“Beat up on”? Maybe, maybe not. Two months ago the east coast was paralyzed
with fear of a random sniper, and the gun lobby was ridiculed for only
managing to say, “No, we really don’t see the need for a national registry
that could trace which gun shot which bullets.” Bowling for Columbine
is making every hipster’s must-see list, as much for its politics as
for its giftedly contemptuous host, Michael Moore.
But the gun lobby can give as good as it gets. Visit www.Handguncontrol.net, a
pro-handgun website. In odd, all-caps typography, the site handily accuses
Handgun Control, Inc.,—now The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence—of
racism. One prominent page reads—and these are their parentheses—“HCI’s
major themes: Average citizens (especially lower-income and minorities)
lack the intelligence or judgment to own any type of gun, much less
a handgun.”
Even Minnesota Nice can get a little ugly. At that first local meeting
in October, you couldn’t help but notice the way a few people renamed
the Million Mom March: the “Million Moron March.”
Dueling statistics
Both the gun-control side and the pro-gun-ownership side can produce
a stack of statistics telling you why their ideas about gun ownership
are correct. One often-quoted 1998 Journal of Trauma article by Arthur
Kellermann (an MD with a master’s in public health) reported that guns
kept in the home for self-protection are 22 times more likely to kill
somebody the gun owner knows than to kill in self-defense.
In 2000, John Lott, a senior research fellow at Yale University Law School,
published More Guns, Less Crime, suggesting that allowing people to carry
concealed handguns reduced the crime rate. (In fact, he wrote in an August,
2001, New York Post column, “In up to 98 percent of the cases, simply
brandishing a gun is sufficient to stop a crime.”)
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence counters that crime was falling
throughout the nation in the 1990s, and in fact fell slower in states
that allowed people to carry concealed handguns.
Victimology
But what about GLBT people who carry handguns?
Bob Smith, a straight guy at the first meeting, had an interesting way
of putting it. “Gays are nice people,” he said, “and nice people make
good victims.”
He’s got a point, at least metaphorically. The image of the helpless
homosexual who got beat up every day on the playground and now minces
around as if made of glass doesn’t seem to want to go away. Everyone
watches Jack McFarland; no one watched Butch Gamble (John Goodman’s
gay character on Normal, Ohio).
Compounding the pervasive belief that GLBT people are weak is the fact
that many out-of-town, closeted GLBT people will visit a gay bar when
they come to the Twin Cities. That they’re closeted often means they
carry cash in order not to use a check or a credit card at a gay bar.
And it means they’re less likely to report an assault or robbery. So
if you’re a thug who can wave a gun, grab a wallet, and run away, you’re
likely home free.
OutFront Minnesota, the state’s largest GLBT advocacy organization, has
not yet taken a position on handgun ownership. OutFront deputy director
Doug Federhart describes himself as “being more of the Gandhi school
of things.” He says, “Speaking from a personal perspective, I just don’t
think it’s ever a good idea to respond to violence with more violence,
even if it’s in self-defense.”
A missing piece of this conversation is that it’s pretty difficult to
get a permit to carry a concealed handgun in many parts of Minnesota.
Most people are allowed to have a gun in their homes, but they can’t
tuck it into their briefcase or backpack and carry it around. Permits
are issued at the discretion of a city’s police chief. Good luck getting
one in the Twin Cities.
Burkholder had a license when she lived in New Hampshire, but didn’t
need one when she lived in Vermont. “I usually carried then, but I never
had to use it. It really was a shock to come to Minnesota and discover
Minnesota’s attitude toward guns,” she says. “The government treats
me the exact same as a criminal. We have the same chances to get a conceal
carry permit. That hurts. That’s really hard.”
Her years of safely carrying a handgun and her successful completion
of gun-safety courses count for nothing. “The government doesn’t trust
us,” she says.
Clearly, arming a bunch of people in a call to fight back creates its
own dangers. Having more guns around means having more accidents. And
little incidents—someone looks at someone wrong, or two people get into
a shoving match—can escalate quickly when one’s packing heat.
And vigilantism. No member of Pink Pistols will ever tell you that they
want to arm and train queer people so that we can all go settle some
scores. But one gets a sense that some Pink Pistols members wouldn’t
mind engaging the enemy.
For example, Burkholder opposes non-concealed carry permits—where a person
could just carry a handgun in plain site. “That’s a very bad idea,” she
says. “The idea with concealed carry is that no one should know you have
it. If there is criminal intent, you’ve just tipped your hand. The criminal
knows to avoid you.”
Volk’s interest in handgun-ownership stems from live-and-let-live
philosophy. “My sense of justice,” he says, “required that anyone be able
to fend off hostiles.” Volk invokes more WWII imagery when he says,
“In real life, I’d like to see the brownshirts of all types to become
an endangered species, thanks to the ability of their traditional victims
to return fire with interest.”
Range of response
Pink Pistols isn’t saying you have to own a gun, or even that you ought
to. Increasingly, Pink Pistols chapters are discovering the range of
how to serve their members best. “Different chapters emphasize different
things,” founder Krick says. “Here in Boston, it’s more focused on the
handgun. The Virginia chapter will go out and do self-defense courses.
Some people are talking about the possibility of hunting.”
The message, fundamentally, is the same—that GLBT people aren’t afraid
of guns, or of fighting back.
Brad Fletcher probably best represents the middle-of-the-road Pink Pistol
member. He’s never fired a gun. “They scare me,” he says. “It is such
a dangerous weapon. There’s really no challenge you can put back. A
sword, at least you can fight back. People had a chance with things
like that.”
He was a little skeptical when he first heard about the local chapter’s
first meeting. “I thought, hmm, a gun group, huh?” he says. “I thought,
Oh my God, what’s going on, are we really getting some interesting faction
groups in our community now? Is this going to be a dangerous thing?
Something we need to be concerned about? What kind of wackos would go
to something like this? And then we started talking, and I was like,
phew, wipe the sweat from my brow. And then they said it was going to
be more about self-defense, and a light bulb went off. Now I get it.”
Fletcher himself was attacked in downtown Minneapolis in the early 1990s.
After that, he took a few self-defense classes through community ed.
He plans to continue being involved with Pink Pistols because it sounds
like a comfortable place for him to learn more self-defense.
Bottom line
Your garden-variety patron does not walk into Over the Rainbow or the
Saloon with a handgun. And it’s unlikely they’d have a permit to do
it legally, anyway, which actually does deter peaceful, law-abiding
people. But consider this.
On Sept. 22, 2000, in Roanoke, Va., a man named Ronald Edward Gay walked
into a gay bar called Backstreet Café. He opened fire, killing
one person and wounding six others. The Washington Post reported that
Gay told police that he was angry at jokes people made about his last
name. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and is serving a life
sentence.
What if he had heard about a group called Pink Pistols, where gay men,
lesbians, bisexual people and transgendered people were learning to handle
firearms? What if he’d heard that they were working for change in the
concealed carry laws? What if he’d heard that they thought it was just
flat-out wrong that they couldn’t carry wherever they wanted?
Would he suspect some people at a gay bar might bend the rules a little
and carry a handgun? Would he consider that the bartender might have
a firearm behind the bar, and five years of target-shooting experience,
and a faster draw than Doc Holliday?
Would he still have walked into the Backstreet Café looking—as
he reportedly told police—“to waste some faggots”?
On one level, it doesn’t matter if Pink Pistol members ever get the gun
laws they want. As soon as they can create doubt in a potential attacker’s
mind, their most important work is done.
Even a peacenik like Federhart agrees. “I don’t think that’s necessarily
a bad idea,” he says. “I could see that as more of a psychological tool.
I’m more a fan of psychological and nonviolent tools than of violence.”