Gay gun group grows as NRA tagged for anti-gay speakers NRA president Charlton Heston holds a musket during the group's annual convention in May 2000. The group’s high-profile president has repeatedly cast the NRA as on the frontline in 'the culture war,' rhetoric members of the gay gun owners group Pink Pistols say makes it difficult to battle stereotypes.

(Photo of Charlton Heston by Roc Feld/AP; photo illustration by John Nail)
 

Not-so straight shooters?
Gay gun group grows as NRA tagged for anti-gay speakers

Pink Pistols founder Doug Krick says members of the ‘pink shooting community’ can help build bridges between traditionally conservative gun owners and gays who are often perceived as anti-gun.

By LAURA DOUGLAS-BROWN

When a gay bartender and community activist in Knoxville, Tenn., was found dead April 21, many gay men and lesbians in the small city reacted with shock and fear.

At least one vowed to fight back.

Carl Cate said the death of Joseph Camber, a homicide that remains unsolved, inspired him to launch Knoxville’s chapter of the Pink Pistols, a gay gun group that now cites 29 chapters in 19 states. That includes at least six in the Southeast, although some certainly remain fledgling, like Cate’s, of which he is currently the only member.

"I had been thinking about it for awhile, and that pushed me over the edge," said Cate, who knew Camber and lives two blocks from the University of Tennessee campus where the bartender’s body was found.

"I’m hoping to get people who are gay to be comfortable with the idea of carrying a weapon and defending themselves," he said.

A week after Camber was slain in Knoxville, the conservative National Rifle Association -- the country’s politically powerful gun lobby -- held its massive annual convention in Reno, Nev., featuring an April 27 keynote speech by U.S. Sen. Zell Miller, Georgia’s former governor and one of the few Democrats to address the NRA.

The next day, an NRA panel on media coverage of the pro-gun movement "degenerated… into a session of gay-bashing," according to a report on the gay Web site PlanetOut.com. The event included a commentator who called gun control advocate Rosie O’Donnell a "freak" for coming out as a lesbian, according to PlanetOut.

Gays, guns and stereotypes

In addition to the comments about O’Donnell, made by conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel, PlanetOut reported that pollster Kellyanne Conway remarked on how public schools are "so worried now about how many mommies Heather has" that they don’t teach basic civics lessons.

American Spectator columnist Grover Norquist said liberals "don’t want [men] to date girls" and gun owners don’t get as much media coverage because "we don’t have annual parades… so that everyone can appreciate that gun ownership is an alternative lifestyle," the Web site reported.

Schlussel said this week she disagreed with PlanetOut’s characterization of her comments, explaining that her "major beef" with O’Donnell is that she "is out of touch because she lives in a good community and has body guards that are armed, but doesn’t want the rest of us to be allowed to have arms."

Still, Schlussel -- who has appeared on Fox News and "The Howard Stern Show" -- didn’t deny referring to O’Donnell’s coming out as a gay parent, and said she disagrees with her on gay issues.

"I believe gays should be able to live their lives as they please, however I don’t believe in gay rights and I don’t believe that churches, synagogues and schools should be forced to hire gay teachers and things of that nature," Schlussel said.

O’Donnell is "probably the most prominent gay there is, and she is also the most prominent celebrity against the Second Amendment and gun owners’ rights, and I don’t think that is mere coincidence," Schlussel said. "I think gays tend to be liberal and against gun owners rights."

Staff at O’Donnell’s "Rosie" magazine, which has published stories on gun control, did not respond to interview requests.

But Schlussel’s comments may show the divide between gays and gun advocates that can leave little room for gays who are interested in guns for sport or self-defense.

Enter the Pink Pistols.

"We want to try and do outreach to both sides, to show the stereotypes are not correct," said Brian Hepler, a co-founder of the Northern Virginia Pink Pistols chapter, one of the group’s largest with 40 active members.

Hepler, who is heterosexual, said he got involved with the group through a bisexual ex-girlfriend, and became the de facto leader when she stepped back because of job responsibilities.

Most gay people stereotype gun owners "as white trash rednecks driving pickup trucks with gun racks in the back," while most gun owners assume gay people to be "limp-wristed guys with cravats around their throats, prancing around… wanting to ban guns because they are icky," he said.

"We want to show that both sides are wrong," Hepler said.

Doug Krick, a bisexual Massachusetts Libertarian activist who founded the Pink Pistols in 2000, agreed that the "pink shooting community" faces barriers -- and opportunities -- in both of the groups it wants to represent.

"Your very existence is a type of activism," the Pink Pistols’ Web site tells its members, "and can have great effect by helping to shatter some of the mental dichotomies people use to pigeonhole each other."

Both Hepler and Krick report generally good interactions with the NRA -- "we’ve been better received in the shooting community than in the gay community," said Hepler, whose group visits the shooting range at the NRA’s national headquarters in Fairfax, Va., every other week.

But both also acknowledge that the gun lobby isn’t perceived as a welcoming place by many gay gun owners, perhaps fueling the growth of Pink Pistols.

"Every so often someone starts spewing forth with they don’t want to deal with queers, but almost immediately they are shouted down," Krick said. "We’ve gotten quite a bit of support."

Still, Krick said he hasn’t worked extensively with NRA’s national leadership, and he was less than impressed with the group’s response to his questions about the media panel at last month’s NRA convention.

"NRA is a single issue organization," John Robbins, a communications manager for the group, wrote in a response to Krick. "As always, our efforts will continue to reflect our members concerns. … The panelists were expressing their own personal views."

Krick said taking "no position" on the remarks made by the panel members -- at least one of whom, Norquist, is a NRA board member -- is not enough.

"I think they should have made a stronger statement as a counter example," Krick said. "I think they would have responded much differently if a speaker had made anti-Semitic or anti-black remarks."

The NRA "does not discriminate against anyone," a staff member in the public relations department said this week. But requests for further interviews were not answered by press time.

Fighting the ‘culture war’

While the NRA officially describes itself as a single issue group, its leaders -- including actor Charlton Heston, the group’s high-profile president -- have repeatedly cast the organization as on the frontline in what they dub "the culture war" that pits conservatives versus "political correctness."

In a December 1997 speech to the Free Congress Foundation, Heston acknowledged that he had "dear friends" who are gay.

"As long as gay and lesbian Americans are as productive, law-abiding and private as the rest of us, I think America owes them absolute tolerance," he said.

But Heston went on to urge supporters to "draw your sword and fight" against enemies including "the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition," along with "feminists who preach it’s divine duty for women to hate men" and "blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they see preferences with the other."

Heston said his "blood pressure rising when Clinton’s cultural shock troops participate in homosexual rights fund-raisers but boycott gun-rights fund-raisers… and then claim it’s time to place homosexual men in tents with Boy Scouts, and suggest that sperm donor babies born into lesbian relationships are somehow better served and more loved."

The remarks drew rebukes from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and PFLAG, as well as the NAACP, Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. magazine.

In several speeches in the last three years, Heston has repeatedly alluded to the incident and backlash as evidence of the culture war he faces and wants NRA members to fight.

"I’ve worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life," Heston said in a speech he has repeated to audiences including Harvard Law School, Brandeis University and the Young Republicans.

"But when I told another audience that gay rights should be given no greater consideration than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe," he added.

Although Krick and other Pink Pistols members report good relationships with several local NRA chapters, especially in California, other NRA chapter leaders acknowledge that gays may not feel welcome.

The Georgia Sport Shooting Association, the state NRA chapter, cites 950 members, but president Jan Monningh said he doesn’t "have any idea" if any are gay.

"My thought is that with this group, as with most any group, if you have a gay member that made a point of making everyone know they are gay, they might have problems," Monningh said. "I don’t think I would have a problem, but I can’t speak for every individual member."

Maria Helena Dolan, a longtime lesbian activist in Atlanta and self-described "radical," defies the stereotype of the conservative gun owner, and said she hasn’t hidden her sexual orientation when interacting with other gun owners.

"The thing about the gun folks I've dealt with is that they tend to be more interested in individualism than in groups, except when it comes to anti-gun fanatics," Dolan said. "In fact, they haven't been at all taken aback by a great big dyke, [which is] refreshing in comparison to some of the struggles I've experienced trying to do political work."

‘Armed gays don’t get bashed’

The conservatism of the NRA may be one reason for the rapid growth of the Pink Pistols, which takes its name from an essay by gay writer Jonathan Rauch published in Salon Magazine on March 13, 2000.

In states that allow concealed weapons, Rauch wrote, "homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them.

"They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry," he wrote.

Rauch made the suggestion in the context of ways to stem the tide of gay-bashing, and while Krick said he first launched the group "because I wanted to have people to go shooting with," it has taken on a decidedly self-defense tone.

Slogans used by the group include "pick on someone your own caliber," "never again," and "armed gays don’t get bashed."

Rauch said this week he hasn’t worked with the Pink Pistols, despite supplying its inspiration, but he thinks gay people should seriously consider armed self-defense.

"It’s important to send the signal that if the police can’t protect us, than we are willing to protect ourselves," said Rauch, a senior writer for the National Journal and correspondent for Atlantic Monthly.

Dolan, who participates in the Pink Pistols e-mail list and said she is "ready" for Atlanta to form a chapter, said she bought a gun for just that reason.

"About 20 years ago, I lived in Midtown and twice had the unpleasant experience of having men come up the backstairs to my apartment, trying to get at me," she said. "I realized I needed more than a cane to beat them off, so I bought a shotgun.

"Funny, no one came up the stairs after that," Dolan added, noting that after being held up at gunpoint, she also bought a handgun.

Still, Dolan said that being open about being a gun owner among gays isn’t easy.

"It's much more acceptable to have some skeevy sexual perversion than to ‘admit’ to having a gun," she said.

She said the discomfort may come down to internalized stereotypes, as well as class issues.

"We believe in coming up with new definitions [but say] firearms are always ‘patriarchal’ even when a lesbian feminist holds it," Dolan said.

Pink Pistols has attracted a lot of interest from gay individuals, but not much support from gay groups, Krick said.

The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force rejected two workshop proposals from the group for the annual "Creating Change" activist conference in 2000, officials said.

Sue Hyde, director of Creating Change, said she turned down the workshops not because they dealt with guns, but because she thought Pink Pistols had been too personal when criticizing a lesbian Massachusetts state senator who supported a stringent gun control bill there.

Yet even without that concern, Hyde said still she would have wanted NGLTF leaders to have a serious discussion about hosting a gun workshop.

Pink Pistols 617-686-2564 www.pinkpistols.com National Rifle Association 703-267-1000 www.nra.org

"I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there wasn’t a general feeling amongst people in our organization that the interpretation of the Second Amendment as supporting the right of individuals to bear arms would not be in our interest," she said.

Hyde said she believes fighting for comprehensive anti-bias education in schools would be a better strategy to fighting hate crimes than using guns for self defense.

"I don’t believe arming ourselves is a sustainable response to a subculture of hate towards homosexuality," she said. "We are not going to settle our scores as a community by having a shootout at the OK Corral."

Laura Douglas-Brown can be reached at lbrown@sovo.com.

This article appeared in the issue of:
May 17, 2002