Mark Doty's Firebird after Orlando

After the shooting in Orlando last weekend, I pulled Mark Doty’s memoir, Firebird, off the shelf to re-read a few passages. Doty is a wonderful writer, a poet with a gift for storytelling, and I thought this book – which tells the story of his childhood, his coming out, and his troubled relationship with his alcoholic mother – might provide some wisdom and perspective. It did, particularly its climactic scene, near the end, in which 16 year old Doty has come home from school to find his mother drunk – “an ordinary day.”

I’ve gone to my room to put away my books, my notebook covered with inked peace signs and slogans, the denim jacket whose back I’ve embroidered in swirls of silky floss. Then she calls me out into the hall. She says, Son, come on out here.

            And I do. She’s standing at the other end of the hallway, by the doorway to the kitchen, holding the black pistol in both hands, my father’s Luger, holding it the way he taught her to years ago, when we used to shoot at bottles and cans in the desert: well out in front of her, away from her face.

            She holds the gun out, and she waits; I stand in the line of fire, and I wait.

            And now we’re in a movie: oh God, a safety movie. I can only see us – them – through a diminishing lens, the telescope’s wrong end: they’re tiny, in the impossibly elongated hall, the mother swaying a little from side to side in order to maintain her balance, her eye lined up with the sight at the top of the pistol, lined up with the heart of the boy, who stands with his hands at his side, as if in acquiescence. They’ve been moving toward this moment for years, mother and son, and now they don’t move at all, except for her slight swaying.

            What I don’t know is: does she pull the trigger?

            Does she hesitate, does her hand refuse the task she’s set it? I want her to hesitate, but perhaps she merely goes ahead and squeezes, maybe again and again, I don’t know. I don’t know because I’m not there. I’m closed, gone away, already dead behind the eyes, no longer at home, halfway to the next life already and good riddance to this one. Where is it we go, when we leave the body? Maybe I’m thinking I won’t miss it, this sorry stubborn queer flesh, maybe I’m thinking nothing at all, meerely empty, ready to receive what my mother offers.

For years Doty had been coming to terms not just with the fact that he is attracted to boys, but with what it means to be a boy at all. At 16 he has seen enough to know that mainstream culture’s definition of masculinity is too narrow – unrealistically, painfully, dangerously narrow – and he has begun to find the courage to challenge it. His mother, for her own dark reasons, is not up to this challenge.

If the mass murder in Orlando is a grim reminder of just how risky it can be to challenge sexual norms in public, Doty’s experience reminds us that danger extends to our private lives as well, to our homes, which is to say that for some of us danger is everywhere. Simple acts like being affectionate with a loved one, or choosing a haircut or a shirt or pair of pants or skirt or dress that push past gender stereotypes can mean, literally, putting our bodies on the line between safety and harm, life and death.

Why? The stories that the Orlando killer and Doty's mother had been told all their lives, about the roles men and women play and who must do what, couldn’t accommodate what they saw out in the world. Both of them held these stories so tightly that revising them seemed impossible. Both made decisions, consciously or not, that it was more acceptable to kill dozens of innocent strangers, or to threaten to kill a son, than it was to expand the category of “boy,” “girl,” or “intimacy.” Even in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision for same sex marriage, millions still feel the same attachment to these old stories. You can see it in the 200+ anti-LBGT bills recently introduced in the US.

The Doty passage also gives the lie to one of gun rights activists’ favorite arguments: that a gun in the home makes the family safer. In study after study, researchers confirm what common sense suggests: where there are more bullet-shooting tools, more people end up with bullets in them. Generally speaking, a gun is far more likely to harm a family member than it is to protect them from outside threats. This doesn’t mean no one should have a gun in their home. But it does mean we can do much more to keep guns out of the hands of people predisposed to violence, and to see that gun owners are better trained in their use and storage.

Thinking and talking about gun ownership as a simple right instead of as a grave responsibility, as a birthright like shelter rather than as something earned like a job, has flooded our society with deadly weapons unaccompanied by respect for their meaning. And thinking of guns themselves as mute objects that “don’t kill people” has led us to the dishonest conclusion that they have no capability of their own. In fact, like any tool, a gun creates possibilities and plans that don’t exist without it. Every single day in this country, a Smith & Wesson in a waistband, or a Glock in a glove compartment, turns a grievance into a murder. Without the gun there’s simply too much effort and danger involved in getting close enough to throw a punch, and even if you do throw it no one is likely to die. Twice as often, a Beretta in a drawer turns pleading self-harm into irreversible self-death. The gun itself exerts an undeniable agency.

We will always want to hurt each other. And we will especially want to hurt people we see as so different from ourselves that they threaten our ideas of who we are. But who we think we are needs to be threatened. Rote scripts for “man,” “woman,” “sex,” “intimacy,” and a million other roles and acts limit who we can be. And when we argue that every citizen can be their own police officer, what we are also saying, whether we like it or not, is that every citizen can choose what to police. We should not be at all surprised when what is policed, under threat of force with a deadly weapon, is not just threats but norms – the scripts we should be able to openly question. It is this very questioning of norms, in thought and action, that is the real freedom we need to fight for.