My client is a person with an abiding interest in the magnificence of life. He was not prompted to bring up prayer because of the shooting at Club Q. Nor was he inspired because this is Thanksgiving week in the United States. Our discussion was instead a continuation of our longstanding conversations about meaning and purpose, embodiment and contemplation.
There is something about the insistence that one express gratitude on a particular day that rubs me the wrong way. Though I appreciate the idea of gathering and expressing reverence for all that one has, I think that forcing a person to express gratitude when he feels otherwise can engender in him the belief that everyone else has so much to be thankful for, and he must muzzle himself or risk exclusion from his community.
The person who believes he’s been robbed of the gifts he thinks are the patriarchal right of men; the person who is forced to say he is thankful for his riches when instead he feels inhuman and reviled, or who believes he cannot measure up to the strict definitions of white patriarchal masculinity; this is a person who may fantasize he can force others to feel as he does, drag them into his misery and loneliness. These are the psychological characteristics of men who engage in mass shooting events.
Richard Fierro is not a person who needs to be reminded of the preciousness of life, or to be told he should be grateful for what he has. He willingly threw himself into the face of death, again, and survived. Watching him, knowing veterans like him, I know he would do it again tomorrow.
Here are three men—my client, the shooter, and Richard Fierro—each of whom is expressing a different form of masculinity, of power, of identity and meaning, all in negotiation with the dominant culture’s ideal of what white patriarchal masculinity means, what it looks like, and what its power confers.
What I find hopeful in this moment is that so many men are in negotiation with the limitations of a singular ideal of masculinity. So many men are taking the risk of talking about the ways they have been barred from their full range of feeling, and from expressing vulnerability and intimacy. Even in their loneliness and fear that they are unique, or odd, or misfits, for wanting to be able to express themselves, they are speaking up. Even in the face of a uniform, white patriarchal ideal of masculinity, men from different identities, ethnicities, and subcultures, are describing and valuing different ways of being men.
One of the gifts of queer culture is that it has an entire vocabulary, a storied history, a theoretical apparatus, and practices of celebration, all of which are designed to help people grapple with the violence of patriarchy and the limitations of binary conceptualizations of gender. This is in part why queer culture, and queer people, are so often attacked and destroyed.
