My first experience as an openly queer person was going out dancing at a gay club in Boston in 1982, when I was 15 years old. Like all the other gay bars I knew, the windows were painted black, and there was only a small sign out front - to find it, you had to know there was a club there, and you had to know what it was like. Like most gay clubs at the time, it didn't serve Coors beer. Golden, Colo.-based Coors Brewing has been accused of using polygraph tests to screen out gays from job applicants, which the brewery has denied. (It was just one part of the record of discrimination at that company, and the queer community just one of those who boycotted its products for decades.) Ten years later, when the people of Colorado overwhelmingly approved changes to the state constitution and practically built antigay discrimination into it, the gay and lesbian community began to boycott the entire state of Colorado. (The US Supreme Court later ruled the amendment unconstitutional.) It made such a deep impression on my teenage mind that when I heard about the recent shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ venue in Colorado Springs, that left five dead and 18 injured, I first what I thought was: Colorado, of course. I wasn't the only journalist with a long memory: the first reports about the attack recalled the state and city history of anti-gay organizing in these areas.
However, the accused attacker is 22 years old; he's too young to remember Colorado's anti-gay amendment. He was a young teenager when that country recognized same-sex marriage. He probably has no idea that gay bars used to be hidden from the public.
The idea that mass murder can be explained by where it happened is silly. A slightly less silly idea is that politics, including the politics of hate, can explain mass murder. People love to hate and devalue someone - if they feel like it. Then the panicked public tries to use historical analogies to give it some meaning and help us as a community understand what happened. But at the root of all terror is its meaninglessness.
On the day of the Q Club shooting, I watched a film made with the ambition to explain how the Russian attack on Ukraine came to be. The title of the film is "Manifesto", and the director signed a pseudonym in fear of the consequences. The film consists of mobile phone footage that Russian students posted on social networks. The story begins with a charming everyday life: children document their morning routine and going to school, only to have more and more terrifying episodes. We see teachers yelling at children, scolding and humiliating them. The following are siren alarms, from a school fire drill, a bomb drill, an active shooter or bomb threat drill, to an actual school fire siren. Sometimes the children in the video seem indifferent, sometimes they are scared, hiding under the table or running through the snow-covered streets, in a frantic search for shelter. There are also videos of actual school shootings: some children hide under desks, some jump out of the school window - probably to their deaths.
Many Russian writers and filmmakers these days are embarking on similar projects of examining - and questioning - experiences and assumptions that once seemed normal, and recasting them as harbingers of war. Some of these artistic attempts are successful, some are not. "Manifesto" seemed unconvincing to me, partly because much of what it portrays also exists in America: school shootings, non-stop drills, routinized expectation of a terrorist attack.
I saw the film at the festival in Amsterdam in the company of a friend there. On the ferry ride back after the screening, she cautiously noticed that Russian and American cultures are strangely similar. She was shocked by the footage of the shooting at the school, but also by the routine violence in the greater part of the film - teachers' shouting, students being herded into crowds and raids. I told her that I know all that from my Soviet childhood, but also from my American adolescence and my children's experience in American schools. I described to her the bizarre disciplinary measures in American schools such as detention and the ban on recess, as well as the bizarre training of children to be prepared for fires and school shootings.
Perhaps the Russian film explains more than meets the eye. It reveals the face of terror - the faces of victims and the faces of terrorists. The film does not deal with ideology, which is an integral part of any discussion about terrorism. Experts know that ideology is often an afterthought, almost an afterthought — as in the latest mass shooting at a gay club in the US, or the 2016 massacre at the Pulse club in Orlando, where the gunman allegedly announced he was a member of Isis. He killed 49 people and wounded dozens of others. Perhaps it would be more useful to think of terror - the desire and ability to carry it out - as the primary driver of this type of violence.
When we talk about mass violence in the United States, rather than ideology, we're usually talking about how readily available guns are. Of course, access to weapons is also important. The technically easier it is to kill people, the more people will be killed. But terror can also be carried out with a knife, an ax and homemade explosives. Of course, the politics of homophobia, racism and anti-Semitism are important - among other things, that's how violence spreads, which was clearly the case when a man threw a brick through the window of a gay bar in New York last week. In Russia, after the Kremlin launched an anti-gay campaign, reports of anti-gay violence, including rape and murder, spiked. And yet, even though no one is leading a policy of hatred or exclusion towards children and saying they should be killed, school shootings are on the rise, because no greater violence than that inflicted on children and their families can be imagined. The essential prerequisite for mass violence does not seem to be weapons or hatred, but a culture of terror, a fiction that implies the possibility of mass murder. Perhaps it would be most useful to think about the politics of terror. People - and states - carry out terror for terror's sake. The point is the absence of meaning, as our mind desperately tries to make logical connections and find explanations.
In late 2013, the extraordinary American journalist Jeff Charlett traveled to Russia to witness the growing anti-gay violence. He began his reportage for GQ magazine by describing a shooting in an LGBTQ space in St. Petersburg. I quote the passage: Dmitri bent down, and Rose ran, so Dmitri began to crawl. The men followed him, kicking him. One of them was holding a bat, "a baseball bat, yes," says Dmitri. They roared. "Fag, fag, fag". The club hit him. And then queers from another room rushed at the masked men armed with a gun and a bat, and the men ran away. Dmitri and Anna, who was shot in the back, examined each other's wounds.
When I heard that the guests at Club Q resisted and overpowered the attacker, I remembered that description from Charlotte's reportage. I thought, maybe the experience of standing up to a society or family that convinces you that being queer is bad makes you more willing to stand up to violence. I automatically associated a meaningful narrative with something that is by definition meaningless. Then I heard that Richard Fierro, the man who disarmed the assailant at Club Q, was straight and went out to the club with his wife and daughter. Fierro and his wife Jess are the owners of the brewery whose motto is "Variety on tap!"
(The New Yorker; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
Bonus video:
