I have been expecting a mass shooting at a gay bar for at least a year. This is not because I’m clairvoyant, but because I am a gay person with eyes and ears. The mass-murder at Club Q in Colorado Springs on November 19 was the result of what is now all-too-familiar rhetoric—a campaign that is both a cynical attempt to gain political power and a conscious effort to inspire stochastic violence that murders gay and trans people on the theory that there should be fewer of us.
The United States has become one of the front lines of a broad global front of transphobic and homophobic reaction. At least two of the five people confirmed to have been murdered at Club Q were the kinds of trans activists regularly described by a wide range of media personalities from far-right to center-left as emblematic of a dangerous element threatening American children. No one with a functioning brain could fail to realize the kind of violence rhetoric like that was likely to inspire when fed to a rage-filled, violent nation where guns outnumber people.
There has really only ever been one debate about queer and trans life outside our community, and it is simple: whether or not we deserve to exist and to live meaningful and joyful lives.
The shooter’s court filings identifying as nonbinary could be serious or could be some sick own-the-libs joke being played on us all. No evidence has yet come forward that the shooter lived a non-binary life or existed in queer community. We do know the shooter’s father sighed with relief when he found out his child had merely shot up rather than patronizing a gay bar. A distracting and offensive media circus has focused on that father’s background in porn acting and documented struggles with addiction. In this year alone, we have seen multiple far-right activists call bomb threats into children’s hospitals. We have seen multiple armed fascist militias disrupting pride events around the country. I do not know whether any of their fathers have ever appeared in porn films or struggled with meth addiction. The constant has been not family trauma but murderous rhetoric, and the various actions—from legislative to terroristic—that rhetoric has inspired.
Hundreds of anti-gay and anti-trans bills have been introduced and passed this year in state legislatures: bills that mandate government genital inspections of child athletes, bills that outlaw teachers from discussing the existence of gay and trans people in schools, bills that outlaw gender-affirming care for kids, and bills that aim to make even the provision of that care a felony. Many of those bills have already become law. Far-right agitators like Christopher Rufo declare openly they plan to use anti-queer allegations of child abuse to win elections. The merits of that strategy are bloodlessly discussed by political reporters, as though they were talking about the weather. More polite centrist outlets, rather than reporting urgently on this violent turn, instead obsessively publish story after story wondering whether it isn’t too easy to get trans health care or whether trans kids are a social contagion. This year, in Oslo and Bratislava, we’ve seen far-right attacks on gay bars whose shooters left behind manifestos detailing the anti-trans propaganda from which they took inspiration. Another bomb threat called into a children’s hospital that provides health care to trans children, another op-ed from a national paper musing on the question of whether these trans kids aren’t just confused. Another armed fascist rally in front of a gay bar, another op-ed in a national publication describing innocent kids seduced into transgender identity by assault from older trans people. Trans critics’ urgent responses to this wave have been too often ignored. Trans people remain mostly absent from newsrooms. And now this.
Even after the mass murder at Club Q—and with the blood of the queer and trans people murdered there not yet dried on the floor—critics from far-right to center-left continue to pursue this agenda. In an elegy for the shooting victims, one prominent columnist, midway through a passionate attack on the far-right for having inspired this mass murder, took pains to set the hate-mongers she was critiquing apart from “legitimate debates over questions like when puberty blockers should be prescribed or gender-confirming surgeries performed on minors.” Those debates, published in magazines such as The Atlantic, are cited in the bills backed by the state legislators whose grandsons commit mass murder in our bars. Those bills define being trans as a form of pornography, they aim to make public trans existence in front of children—walking down the street, going to the supermarket—a felony. They inspire bomb threats called in to children’s hospitals. The articles cited in these bills and legislative debates are the politest possible version of blood libel. They are no more legitimate in a discussion of these murders than rhetoric about Jewish lust for the blood of Christian children would have been in coverage of the Tree of Life murders. What liberals are desperate to call “legitimate debates” are united with the cruder, crasser incitement of less-sophisticated reactionaries by the same underlying argument: that some nebulous group of queer and trans “activists” are pushing an “agenda” that might permanently mutilate children, who must be protected from the threat. Matt Walsh and Chris Rufo say it’s drag queens committing sexual abuse in gay bars. Abigail Shrier says it’s the “transgender craze seducing our daughters” into “Irreversible Damage.” The liberal outlets describe it as misguided doctors and activists going too far, contributing to a social contagion of trans kids. All of them are making versions of the same argument designed to convince different audiences of the same age-old blood libel about queer people: that we are preternatural abusers from whom your children need protecting.
When you tell a country with more guns than people that the queers are abusing children at your local gay bar or school or gender clinic, you don’t get to act surprised when someone believes you and acts accordingly.
There has really only ever been one debate about queer and trans life outside our community, and it is simple: whether or not we deserve to exist and to live meaningful and joyful lives. On one side of that question we queer and trans people stand with our friends, families, and allies like Richard Fierro, who likely saved dozens of lives when he charged the gunman, pistol-whipped him, and held him while a trans patron stomped his head in with her heels. (That’s what allyship looks like.) On the other side of that question stands a broad front from Anderson Lee Aldrich, to Chris Rufo and Matt Walsh, to the coordinated, nationwide Republican political campaign to amass Congressional, state, and local elected seats, to the nice liberal journalists at well-funded and respected publications who just have a few seemingly innocent questions about whether or not trans people represent a dangerous social contagion that threatens America’s children. On the far-right side of that brigade, people like Tim Pool and Tucker Carlson—whose yearbook photo identified him as a member of the Dan White Society, a fun little joke about his admiration for the man who assassinated Harvey Milk—are all-but-openly praising the shooting. Days after the shooting, a guest on Carlson’s show said shootings will keep happening until the “evil agenda” of gays and trans people grooming kids comes to an end. I can only interpret that as a direct threat.
When you tell a country with more guns than people that the queers are abusing or irreversibly damaging children at your local gay bar or school or gender clinic, you don’t get to act surprised when someone believes you and acts accordingly, and you don’t get to scrub the blood off your hands, ever. I am not deluded enough to believe that either the openly fascist agitators or the small but influential transphobic networks—networks with documented links to far-right activism globally—are likely to feel, or are even capable of feeling, shame. But it is important that people who are horrified by these murders see their causes clearly, so they can ask themselves the only question that matters in such situations. Which side are you on?
Ben Miller is a writer and historian. He is a doctoral fellow in Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin, has written for Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere, and co-hosts the podcast Bad Gays about evil and complicated queers in history.
