Kiss Me, St Cloud

Love may be the most mysterious motivator in the universe. The mystery is not a question of the quality or value of the emotion, its fickleness, its seeming ubiquity. It's not the way it makes you feel, the way it will change you, the things it will make you do—anecdotally at least, the condition and action of love is well-documented. No: love is mysterious because of its origins, so apparently passive, and so immensely subtle that no amount of scientific doodling has yet produced a dating site which will allow you to upload GC/MS samples of your bodily fluids to ideally match pheromones with another. No document, refined over thousands of years, can teach you to inspire it in others. Love is effectively spontaneous, and it seems to act as its own fuel, burning until it has consumed itself. That's the mystery of love.

There is no such mystery with hate. We hate because something has been taken from us. 

This weekend's massacre is disgusting, horrifying, heartbreaking, and familiar in all the wrong ways—and the longer the investigation goes on, the more we'll realize that some of the truest tragedy was born out of factors that will be more familiar to the clubgoers than the shooter's Afghan-American family. We hate because something has been taken from us: and by all accounts, the shooter was sick and full of hate. What was taken from him?

We'll no doubt spend thousands of hours on TV talking about gun control (easy verdict and easier talking points), radical Islam and 'homegrown terror' (as though there is another type), and homophobia—but so far we've avoided what, to my gay little mind, is the purest and simplest explanation for the choice of target and timing and style of attack: the crisis, the absolute deadly crossroads, where being gay meets a cultural impossibility. In the shooter's case? That culture was Islam. But it could just as easily have been a Southern Baptist upbringing, or the AME, or any sort of secular conservative upbringing—or some more specific family dynamic where a son simply CANNOT BE GAY FOR ANY REASON. This shooting, from its first eaklings on the internet, has been connected to watching two gay men kiss in Miami. (First of all... had you been to Miami before?) You have a father saying, "No, it's impossible my son was gay. He was a terrorist. Why would he have shot gay people if he was gay?" Because, dad: you said "it's impossible my son was gay". It was a cultural impossibility, and yet, it was a part of his son that no amount of prayer, marriage, or violence could or should have expunged.

The knife's-edge dance between forbidden desire and filial duty (and what's going to get you to heaven) is maddening and injurious to even the healthiest, best-adjusted closeted gay man. But this shooter was not healthy, was not well-adjusted, and in wanting—needing—something that he could not have, he set himself up for the most American crime I can imagine: a man awash with opportunity but divested of the wherewithal to take healthy advantage of it is a man infected by hate, and that germen can, in conditions of deprivation and emotional turmoil, crystallize and spread until we are left what always happens when hatred hits critical mass. 

The parts of himself at war, a true jihad in the purest Muslim sense, which was not won by Western liberalism or even Islamic values—it was won by hate and despair, two nationless, godless, loveless forces which we will touch on in passing as we go on to squawk about assault rifles and what Muhammed thought of people whose hips like to touch hips with similar structural features. Yeah, obviously, we've got to have a wide-ranging conversation—a true conversation—after what has been so rapturously touted as the deadliest mass-shooting in American history: like we've been breathlessly waiting to see who Guinness will put in next year's book. And that conversation, without question, needs to result in actions. But those conversations and those actions should not be confined to policy: it is well past time that we as a nation confront what we perceive as the morality of homosexuality, and the pragmatics of its expression within families and cultures that don't traditionally conform to the mindset which allows it. 

I've said it before, and I must admit that the line comes straight from Dr Rex Patch in slightly modified form, but I hope never to have to say it again: it doesn't matter if gay people are legally allowed to be married if they can't invite their families to the wedding. I'll extend this here: it doesn't matter if "gay rights" are codified in the letter of our law if multiple extensive cultures simply turn a blind eye to (or worse, turn to aggressive 'therapy' for) same-sex attraction. There is no way to legislate morality, and no attempt should ever be made. Instead, religious and cultural leaders must, without fail, confront their biases and beliefs, and decide whether they want to create a world in which their congregants and adherants kill with impunity. Half measures are no measures. Love the gays or kill them. No qualifications. No rationale. It's not necessary. Get real, get right, get ready. Decide for yourself. But talk with everyone you can about it.

I choose love. I also choose to believe that an implacably vast majority of our nation will do the same. There is no Instructable for how to cherish your fellow human beings. But there is one for how to hate. We as a nation can do better to make certain that emotional and romantic needs are met, regardless of cultural background. It involves a nationwide ideological shift: something as subtle as love itself, and as powerful. That shift will never come while we can be diverted into reality TV like Celebrity POTUS. It's going to take commitment and sustained focus from all quarters. And no, this is not simply about gay people. Hell no. It's about the war between belief (secular and religious alike) and reality. Hatred comes in familiar pathways, ones we've all visited, ones that hopefully you readers have been able to mark on the maps and avoid for the future. We can't close all of those paths, but we can put roadblocks up for a lot of them. If we want to.

Want to.