In honor of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America, I am keeping my eyes open for clues about America’s gun cultures as Sandy and I travel from our home in North Carolina to Yellowstone National Park and back. My inaugural post on this series can be found here.

After leaving the Wyoming Territorial Prison, Sandy and I made our way to the campus of the University of Wyoming in Laramie. My goal was to visit and record a “Light Over Heat” video at the site of a memorial to Matthew Shepard.

Unfortunately, the audio and video I recorded there did not come out, so this post will cover what I wanted to say about Matthew Shepard and American gun culture.

The name Matthew Shepard is very familiar to people of a certain age and to supporters of LGBT rights. For many, it is synonymous with Laramie itself, due to the play (and later movie) “The Laramie Project.”

For those not familiar with the story, Shepard was a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student who was brutally tortured and murdered outside of Laramie in 1998. Because he was gay, friends of his advanced the theory that his killing was a homophobic hate crime. As homophobia clearly existed, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, and one of his killers cited gay panic in his police confession, the theory took hold. When President Barack Obama signed anti-hate crime legislation in 2009, it was named The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The Matthew Shepard Foundation continues to do anti-hate/pro-acceptance LGBTQ outreach and advocacy work.

The gay hate crime narrative was disrupted in 2013 when journalist Stephen Jimenez published a book arguing that Shepard’s murder was primarily drug-related, not sexuality-related. But as seen on the bench that serves as Matthew Shepard’s memorial on the University of Wyoming campus, he is still thought of as representing the struggle for LGBTQ rights and acceptance. As the plaque reads, “He continues to make a difference.”

What, then, does this have to do with gun culture?

In the year 2000, the journalist Jonathan Rauch, a gay man, wrote an essay in the online magazine Salon called “Pink Pistols.” The subtitle: “The gay movement often portrays homosexuals as helpless victims. Here’s an alternative: Arm them.”

The essay was motivated, in part, by the murder of Matthew Shepard and its aftermath. Rauch writes:

After 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was beaten, tied to a fence post and left to die in 1998, hate-crimes laws emerged as straight America’s favorite gay-rights measure. Today almost half the states have bias-crimes laws that cover gay-bashing, and anyway, gay-bashing is already a crime in every state.

Rauch noted that hate crimes legislation could only go so far at alleviating the fear felt and danger faced by out LGBTQ people. His proposed solution:

So it is remarkable that the gay movement in America has never seriously considered a strategy that ought to be glaringly obvious. Thirty-one states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, 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. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible.

Beyond the immediate safety provided — as well as possible benefits of herd immunity by some gays being armed — Rauch argued that being armed would play against the “defining stereotype of homosexuality”: weakness. A stereotype into which Matthew Shepard played so well.

Hate-crimes laws, whatever their other attributes, do nothing to challenge the stereotype of the pathetic faggot. Indeed, they confirm it. By running to the heterosexual majority for protection, homosexuals reaffirm their vulnerability and victimhood.

Shortly after Rauch published his essay, The Pink Pistols were founded (in July 2000) and dozens of chapters exist today across the country, alongside other LGBTQ+ gun groups.

Scholarship on LGBTQ+ gun owners, alas, still lags far behind reality. When I have taught this unit in my Sociology of Guns class, I have had only one scholarly research article to assign: Thatcher Phoenix Combs’ “Queers with Guns? Against the LGBT Grain” (published in 2021 in a special issue of a journal I co-edited).

I recently found another article published in late 2021 by a British scholar, Joe Anderson. “The Extraordinary Ethics of Self-Defence: Embodied Vulnerability and Gun Rights among Transgender Shooters in the United States”, based on 12 months of ethnographic research with the Pink Pistols in San Diego.

But there is not much beyond this, which is not surprising given that we’re talking about the intersection of two still too often stigmatized identities: queer and gun owner.

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