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Gays Against Guns: can LGBTQ community curb the gun lobby?

After the Orlando nightclub shootings, Americas queer community has the gun lobby firmly in its sights. Can they succeed where so many have failed, asks Rupert Neate

Patty Sheehans biggest worries on 11 June 2016 were parking tickets, potholes and whether her latest artwork was a good enough likeness of her cat, Loui. The Orlando city commissioner had stayed up late painting Loui that muggy Saturday night.

Seven months later the portrait remains unfinished. Sheehan was woken by a phone call early the next morning telling her that a gunman armed with a military-style assault rifle had opened fire on clubbers at Pulse, an LGBT nightclub three miles from her door.

Within minutes, she was on the scene. Sheehan stood watch outside Pulse until 11pm, getting home to realise the blood-splattered pavement shed been standing on had been so hot that the soles of her feet had burned through her shoes. She had helped the 53 wounded and the families of the 49 people who lost their lives in less time than it took to read their names at the memorial service. She went back the next day at 4am, and the next, for two weeks. Emails about parking permits, recycling and other day-to-day concerns of a city commissioner were left to pile up in her inbox.

Gay protest group stages die-in against gun stock investments

Sheehan, who became the first out official in central Florida when she was elected in 2000, had a new mission: gun control. Potholes, regrettably, would have to wait. As a city official, gun control measures dont normally apply to me, she said. I frankly thought: Let the big guys in Washington deal with it, but when the Pulse attack happened it came to our streets. If DC cant do this, someone has got to do it. If it takes a little city commissioner in Orlando to say it, so be it.

Sheehan is part of a growing movement among gay people across America vowing to take on the gun death epidemic, following successful campaigns for marriage equality and the repeal of the governments Dont Ask Dont Tell policy, which prevented gay soldiers from serving their country openly.

Gays Against Guns (Gag) is a collective, based in New York City, that includes several veterans of Act Up, the activist group that forced President Reagan to respond to the Aids epidemic. It has begun a campaign of civil disobedience and direct action against gun companies and their supporters.

It devastated me: Patty Sheehan with clergyman Kelvin Cobaris (centre) and a local gay rights campaigner after the Pulse shooting. Photograph: Joe Burbank/AP

John Grauwiler, one of Gags three founders, makes for an unlikely activist. He is a muscled, 6ft, 46-year-old teacher and fitness fanatic who commutes on his beaten-up bike from his East Village apartment to his school in Brooklyn. Over Sunday brunch at NoHo B Bar, Grauwiler recalled the moment he heard the news about the Pulse attack in a text from his mother in New Jersey.

OMG, John, Im so sorry, her text read. He initially had no idea what she was referring to, but it became painfully clear when he scrolled through other texts and checked Facebook.

It devastated me, quite frankly, Grauwiler said. When Sandy Hook [the 2012 massacre of 20 children at a school in Connecticut] happened, it hit me as a teacher. With the Charleston church shooting [in which nine African-American parishioners were killed in 2015] it hit me as a black man. And now with Orlando, it hit me as a gay man, he said. I thought: Fuck it, lets do something!

Grauwiler, who teaches English in Brooklyns leafy Carroll Gardens neighbourhood, said he believes so strongly in the need for tougher gun control under a Donald Trump presidency that he is prepared to break the law to draw attention to it. He thinks direct action is the only way to achieve change. It has always worked, and it always will, he said. Lobbying has a value, but it tends to happen at a slower pace and behind closed doors.

Grauwiler didnt intend to become an activist, not now nor during the Aids crisis, when he was one of the youngest members of Act Up. I had come to the city in 1989 from Jersey City as an 18-year-old to live my life, he said. But, of course I heard about Aids, and people were dying. I thought I was going to die as well, and I had to do something. He went to his first Monday night Act Up organising meeting at the arts and architecture university Cooper Union. I belonged. I felt like I finally, somehow, had some control of my destiny, Grauwiler said. He helped by handing out clean needles to drug addicts in the then no-go Lower East Side.

Man with a message: John Grauwiler, one of the founders of Gays Against Guns. Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Observer

Now Grauwiler, with Gag co-founders Kevin Hertzog and Texas-born Brian Worth, runs his own organising meetings on Thursday nights at the Center, New Yorks LGBTQ community space in the West Village. At the slightly chaotic meetings, Gag members debate the best ways to end the corporate machine profiting from gun death.

Campaigns have included die-in protests that saw Gag members storm the Manhattan offices of money manager BlackRock, which is one of the biggest investors in gun companies, including Smith & Wesson. Dressed in white T-shirts cropped to display as much gym-honed bicep as possible and spray painted with the Gays Against Guns slogan, the protesters held placards stating: Gun$ sell. People die. $tock soars.

The protesters ranging in age from teenagers to people in their 80s gathered in Paley Park and marched towards BlackRocks headquarters. They were led by dozens of silent, white-veiled figures carrying placards with the names and faces of victims from Pulse and other massacres, including some of the 20 six- and seven-year-olds who had been at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012.

After BlackRock refused to send anyone out to listen to their concerns, they performed a die-in in the foyer 12 people lying on the floor to represent the dozen people killed with weapons including a Smith & Wesson MP assault rifle at a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. Outside the office on 52nd Street protesters dropped blood red-dyed popcorn around white chalk-outlines of victims.

Our actions are in your face. Theyre very visceral with people screaming about death and demanding change, Grauwiler said. Theyre something the world will see.

Some of them are funny, too. Grauwiler and his Gaggers sing tongue-in-cheek Christmas carols adapted by Broadway performer and Gag member Mark Leydorf to draw attention to horrors of gun violence and the National Rifle Associations (NRA) influence. Gags version of Silent Night sung to Christmas shoppers at Rockefeller Center goes like this: Silent night. Holy night. Terrified until we died. This is life in the USA, where we worship the NRA.

Rock and a hard place: Gays Against Guns stage a protest at the Manhattan offices of BlackRock, massive investors in gun companies. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Gag also targets high-street brands that partner with the NRA, including car rental companies, Visa, and Wyndham Hotels. Grauwilers message to those firms: Its us or them. End your relationship with the death business or the LGBTQ community ends its relationship with you. According to a recent study, the combined annual disposable income of the LGBTQ community in the US is estimated at $917bn.

The numbers turning up at Gags weekly meetings have increased in the wake of Trumps victory, as, Grauwiler says, people are increasingly looking for a focus to direct their anger at after the reality TV stars election. The most recent Gag meeting lasted eight hours as members debated whether or not Gag should become Gat Gays Against Trump. It was decided that Gag would retain its focus on gun control, but the group has joined the wider protest movement picketing Trump Tower.

Gag the acronym was chosen knowingly secured a last-minute prime spot at the front of New York Citys Pride parade leading Grauwiler and the others to pull an all-nighter spray-painting banners demanding stricter gun control measures.

Like Grauwiler, Iraq war veteran and DC political consultant Jason Lindsay immediately started forming his own anti-gun campaign group on 12 June. While Gag is visceral and direct, Lindsays Pride Fund to End Gun Violence is taking a considered and targeted lobbying approach to help gay people and their allies elect candidates who will act on sensible gun policy reforms while championing LGBTQ safety and equality.

I was shocked to my stomach when I saw it on the news, Lindsay said from Dupont Circle, DCs historically gay but now yuppified neighbourhood. At the same time, it was just another example of the senseless epidemic of gun violence. But this was different in scale and it was incredibly personal for me, as it was an attack on my community.

Lindsay came out in rural North Carolina when he was 15, but he only felt comfortable telling his mother, and kept his life and feelings very private. The intense privacy would continue for years. At 18, he signed up as an army reservist serving for 14 years including a tour of Iraq in 2003 when the Dont Ask Dont Tell policy was still in force. I didnt tell anyone all of that time and no one found out, he said.

Hes less private now. Today he is leading a campaign on one of the most contentious issues in America, as a gay man with hundreds of LGBTQ supporters. Why do I think gays can change this? he asked. The gay community, and its allies, are an incredible force. These are people in high-powered positions across all walks of life. And we have won battles before. People thought marriage equality would never happen, thought that Dont Ask Dont Tell would never be repealed, he said. This is a new fight for the gay community, adding our incredible strength and political experience to the existing campaigns, and that will make a difference.

Lindsay is uniquely placed to take on this fight as a gay man working in politics who has fired military assault rifles similar to those used by the Pulse killer. These are weapons of war and have no place on American streets, he said. People in the military have to undergo enhanced safety training before using a gun like that. But in the civilian world, you can go into a store and take away a gun with no training.

Lindsay said the public are already onboard, but lawmakers are lagging behind public opinion because of their reliance on donations and support from the gun lobby and the NRA. Political polling since the Pulse shooting has consistently shown 90% of Americans support stricter background checks and 85% want to block suspected terrorists on the no-fly list from buying weapons.

The NRA, said Lindsay, is trying to distort the aim of the campaign. They are playing the fear factor, saying we want to take away peoples guns and repeal the second amendment [the right to bear arms]. We dont want to take away anyones guns.

In fact, many of Pride Funds board own guns and enjoy hunting or days at the shooting range. All we are advocating for is a review of assault weapon sales and access to high-capacity magazines. No one needs them, he said. They are designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible.

Barbara Poma the owner of Pulse, who created the club as a place welcoming anyone and everyone in memory of her gay brother John who died of Aids-related complications in 1991 carries, and her husband and son own, several firearms. She said the attack, which claimed the lives of several of her friends, hasnt changed her support of the second amendment. My life changed forever that night, all of our lives changed. But it hasnt changed my point of view on guns. The right to bear arms is a fundamental part of being American.

Patty Sheehan, who also serves on the Pride Fund board, has a handgun she bought after being threatened because of her sexuality and for campaigning for equality. Shes not going to give up her gun either, but vowed to continue to demand a ban on assault weapons even if it costs her job. She fears that when she comes up for re-election later this year the NRA which pumped millions of dollars into Trumps campaign will deploy its vast war chest against her. I am scared, I know it might cost me my job, but if I dont stand up and protect my community I cant do my job.

Sheehan, who is single and has devoted her life to public service, Loui and her urban chickens, said: Everything I do as an elected public official doesnt matter if its all shattered by gun violence. These kids at Pulse didnt sign up for the military, they went out to dance and got shot.