What binds us in the end.

The Club Q shooter was not checking for gold stars.

Not long after the Club Q shooting, as the details began to come out, I saw someone make an offhand comment after learning that the gun man had been subdued by an unarmed patron. It wasn’t a good guy with a gun who’d stop shooters, the person quipped, but rather a good gay with no gun. It was a cute enough play on words that no one thought to question the central premise: that any person motivated enough to put their life on the line for the patrons of a gay bar — that person who was at a gay bar themselves — would, of course, be gay.

Except when I read about the army veteran who took down the gun man and prevented further deaths, it became clear that early assumption was incorrect. Richard M. Fierro, the man who pinned the Club Q shooter to the ground and beat him with a pistol as a trans woman patron stomped him, was, as far as I can tell, a cishet man who was at Club Q with his wife, daughter, and his daughter’s boyfriend — the latter of whom, Raymond Green Vance, wound up one of the evening’s victims.

It’s also unclear what Vance’s connection to the LGBTQ community was: perhaps he was trans, maybe he was bi, maybe he was just a cishet dude in a long term relationship with a woman (who, herself, may have been trans or bi) who was just checking out a drag show at a queer club because he wanted to support a friend who was performing. I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters. The gun man who murdered Vance and four others certainly wasn’t checking for gold stars before he slaughtered people; simply being at Club Q was enough to warrant a death sentence.

We spend so much talking about this often abstract notion of “straight privilege,” and whether or not bi (and usually specifically cis bi) people have the ability to wield it, but what does straight privilege mean when even straight people have no access to it as they’re staring down the barrel of a gun? What does straight privilege mean when merely entering a queer or even just queer-friendly space is enough to void it?

This morning I found my thoughts drifting back to this past summer, when a corner of Twitter exploded in one more predictable conversation about bi women bringing their boyfriends to Pride parties — an offense, the instigating poster noted, that was mostly bad simply because these straight boyfriends were just so dull. That assessment of what queer spaces are supposed to be — elite parties full of only the coolest folks, I guess? — felt off even then; now, after yet another shooting, it feels even more grotesque and detached from reality. What are queer spaces, what are Pride parties, if not open venues that provide havens for anyone who wants to live in a world where queerness is celebrated, where trans lives are centered? What are these spaces if not a plea for a world where these identity labels don’t matter, where we all have the freedom to merely exist, in whatever way feels best?

It feels, at times, like we have lost the plot, that all the internal bickering and division and attempts to rank who is most at risk and who sits where in the hierarchy of pain have rendered us ignorant to the true divisions, the true structure of how things are. Because yes, there is an us and a them, but it is not the queers versus the straights, or the bis versus the monos, or any of the other configurations that get banded about. When it truly comes down to it, the dividing line is who is likely to wind up on the wrong side of a pistol, and who is likely to be the one who is wielding it. The former group is far bigger, far more diverse, than many of us readily admit. And despite our differences, despite our disagreements, what binds us in the end is the most important thing of all.