by Ifan Llewelyn
It was a sun-drenched Sunday afternoon outside the New York Public Library. At the foot of its brilliant stone steps a cluster of people had gathered, some dressed in white, others in graffiti slogan t-shirts. Once organised, twenty four of them began unfurling a 24-foot Gilbert Baker banner, familiar to most of us as a symbol of liberation and celebration. This, however, was no celebration. Emblazoned on the iconic rainbow banner in chunky black letters were the words ‘GAYS AGAINST GUNS’. This was a protest. With megaphones and placards in hand they slowly made their way to the red steps at Duffy Square to vent their frustration in the wake of two more mass shootings.
The day before they each had experienced that all too familiar stomach-flip when reading the news of yet another mass shooting. The first came around midday when outlets began reporting that 22 people had been shot dead in an El Paso supermarket. A lone gunman, a nationalist had opened fire at a crowd of civilians with a semi-automatic AK-47 riffle when they were busy doing their back to school shopping at a busy Walmart. The second came in the early hours of Sunday when news began spreading of another mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio where nine people were shot dead in just 32 seconds. A shooter had opened fire at a crowd of revellers in the city’s nightlife district with a semi-automatic AM-15 pistol.
Outraged and despairing, organisers from Gays Against Guns immediately sprung into action, organizing a march and rally in reaction. While others spent the exceptionally hot Sunday distracting themselves with trips to the beach or cooling down in their air conditioning, these queer activists took to the streets. Present was organiser Cathy Marino-Thomas, who has been involved in the fight for gun safety since the groups inception. We caught up with her to hear about more about the queer voice raging in the gun violence debate.
Give us a little history of how Gays Against Guns came to be.
We came together in 2016, two days after the Orlando nightclub shooting. That was on June 12th, and we had our first meeting on June 14th. As many grassroots LGBTQ groups begin, Kevin Hertzog (who’s still involved with our committee) and a couple of other activists decided that the community needed to come together to discuss the shooting, because someone was able to come into somewhere we consider to be a safe space, a nightclub, and shoot a hundred people, 49 of whom died, was immense to our community. These guys booked a room for 60 people at our LGBTQ centre in Manhattan, New York just to have a place where people can come commiserate and mourn. Over a hundred people showed up, making it clear that the community needed to do something. We decided that the current gun violence protection groups in the US weren’t doing any direct action. They were lobbying, they were trying to polite in their requests for gun-reform. We decided we didn’t want to be polite, much in the way of Act Up in the wake of the AIDS crisis. This felt to us very similar.
The first thing we did was getting a city councilman to give us his spot in the New York City Pride Parade which was right at the front. He donated his location to us and we produced a couple of different things there. We had an angry mob more or less, and the person who created the pride flag, Gilbert Baker, sewed us a three-block-long banner that said Gays Against Guns on the front. One of our more talented members created this thing called the Human Being, people all dressed in white, silent, standing in protest in memoriam of someone killed in gun violence. The first 49 human beings each represented someone from the Pulse nightclub. They each held a photograph of the person and a short description of them. One of them actually held a disco ball, marching in silence behind the angry mob shouting “Fuck the NRA”. That was our foray as a community into the Pride March, two weeks after the Pulse nightclub shooting.
After that, we held a couple of big town halls and forums, and a few of us stepped up to take loose leadership roles. Around eight of us at the time. I have a long history of activism in the LGBTQ community, and this occurrence really inspired me as it did others, so we all heard the community wanted direct action. We’ve been doing various demonstrations for around three years now. We’ve had some moderate success but it’s getting better with each day. This past year there have been 252 mass shooting in the US. Since January 1st, 2019. That’s a ridiculous statistic. We are 4% of the world’s population, yet we own 40% of its guns. It’s absurd.
Our slice of participation is direct action. We’ve had people be arrested, we’ve had direct protests. That’s our piece of it. We’ve been able to get overnight services, like UPS, to drop their discounts for NRA members, the last of which was Federal Express which had a 26% discount for NRA members. Another of our main campaigns in that vein is Follow The Money. In this country, our politicians are owned by the NRA. We’ve exposed them, we shame them, we blame them. We put their voting records on gun violence issues out there in the public. Some of us follow how the money is invested, starting from the manufacturer and where it goes from there, what banks support the NRA, we follow the hedge-funds, we protest them. Once we made a stamp with “Blood Money NRA” on it, and we stamped $300 of singles with it and went into the office buildings of these banks and spent that money in their coffee shops. It sounds like a small thing, but one of the executives went into that coffee shop and got change and wound up with that bill, so it’s a subtle reminder.
A lot of this we do around Trump Tower, because we’re unlucky enough to be in his home town. That friggin’ moron. Let it be on the record that Trump is a friggin’ moron. Most civilised Americans think that way and aren’t sure how it happened. We have someone go sit in the lobby with a Human Being standing behind them, following them with a placard about someone lost to gun violence. We also go to Gun Shows here and line up the Human Beings outside the gun shows. They love us. We give out flyers about gun statistics in the United States. If you buy a gun at a gun show rather then at a gun shop, you can bypass the background check altogether. What is THAT? We’re trying to target, pardon the pun, these inequities in our gun laws.
We weren’t expecting someone like Donald Trump to get elected, so when that happened, it threw us into a tizzy. So we came up with this campaign in parks and subway stations. The marriage of the Cheeto Trump drag queen and the NRA. We got a big orange ballgown, and a big orange wig, with a trump mask on, then we had a young lady dress up in a suit with ‘NRA’ written on the back. They did this little skit back and forth, where Cheeto Trump had a fan and he’s being all coy, and the NRA is throwing money at him. People were stopped and entertained, but then the volunteers behind them had signs that read “40,000 people killed with a gun every year in the United States”. It was a way of catching people’s attention. Grassroots work is getting people to think about an issue that they wouldn’t normally think about.
A lot of queer people got involved against gun violence in the wake of the Orlando shooting. What had you sticking with the larger issue of gun violence?
Well, I’m a 58-year-old lesbian. I’ve been out since I was a teenager. I have a wife of 29 years and a 19-year-old daughter. One day in the ‘90s the AIDS crisis got under my skin and I couldn’t sit still anymore. I got up and volunteered to be a buddy. I was a buddy for eight years, helping people with AIDS. Then one day my then partner, now wife, got really down in the dumps because we had no legal protections as a couple. We didn’t have any real legal recourse that couldn’t be protected and she wanted to have a family. We found people who also felt like us and got together. I spent years as the Board President of Marriage Equality USA. When an issue burns my soul somehow, I have to stand up and get involved in it somehow. I stay involved with it until there’s some sort of resolution. I would’ve been an AIDS buddy forever, but I was inseminating to have my daughter and my doctor told me I had to give up the hospital advocacy work. It was interesting because when straight people get pregnant, nobody gives a shit what they do. Lesbians go get pregnant we’ve got to go through all of this crap. Background checks and psychological tests.
I’m with the issue of gun violence because it still burns me. We haven’t reached any resolution yet. Maybe that might change when that happens.
Why is it important to have a queer voice in the gun violence debate?
There are a couple of reasons. One is that we’re incredibly good at grassroots work. We’re very familiar with epidemics and gun violence is an epidemic in this country. There are a lot of connections between the loss of our queer and trans siblings and the AIDS crisis. Another reason is because it touched our community in a very personal way. It woke a lot of people up. There weren’t many queers working on the issue before Pulse. It’s like the school kids after Parkland. After that happened in their school, they felt compelled to get involved. The same is true of the queer community since Pulse. We feel compelled to do something here.
Find out more about Gays Against Guns at GaysAgainstGuns.net
