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By Jack Nichols
Seldom, in fact, is what seems to be a person's deliberate, malicious desire to do significant random harm, the real culprit. More often, what others perceive as an evil deed is simply abject ignorance in action. Or running amuck. Thus did Mr. Gay smile proudly after randomly shooting seven complete strangers. He imagined—in his ignorance-- that he'd been heroic. He'd gone slaughtering the only Viet Cong he knew about—the homos Jerry Falwell fumes against and Pat Robertson threatens with hellfire, fire so hot one can almost smell it wafting to Roanoke, across The Old Dominion, scorching in its path all of Virginia's placid Southwestern hills and turning too many locals into yokels. And in Gay's Vietnam vet tattooed world of Marine-macho-mentality (i.e. Paris Island is extreme machismo's main U.S. training ground) and given the fact that probably he was one of those Vietnam boys unfairly booed on his mid-1970s return to an ungrateful nation that no longer regarded Vietnam vets as heroes, Mr. Gay has become, in the meantime, a testy, broken bloke, no doubt. He probably couldn't begin to understand or recuperate from what he regarded as pure ingratitude from his fellow citizens, those for whom he had put himself, perhaps, in harm's way. I'm simply fantasizing, I'll admit, drawing my own fictional mental picture of him, one that's based on only a small number of things reported such as his Marine-tatoo, his reputation as a drinker, and his reputed suffering of post-Vietnam vet stress. How insightful will this analysis be? I will only know after we find out more about this ordinary Mr. Gay. Hopefully, he'll spill out his guts like Ollie North did September 19th when Ollie clearly seemed to admit that males in military barracks and showers are tempting morsels indeed.
I am not convinced by Mr. Gay's sad attempt to put on a show of his manliness. Blowing away people at random seems to me first nothing more than a typical macho resort to such violence as a solution. Unfortunately, this kind of resort to violence exemplified ad nauseum as entertainment, is, I'm afraid, not only the sign of a culture's ignorance, but a hallmark of its weakness as well. The man too eager to shoot eventually brings harm to himself after convincing himself of a false invincibility. In this strictly imaginative portrait of mine, Mr. Gay is the prototype of a conventional male who has become, at 53, horribly insecure about his masculinity. He's going through a kind of life change. He's hated being ridiculed because he's called Mr. Gay and this clinging to his identity, his name, through the years, no doubt has exacerbated his insecurities, especially if time after time he'd been asked, implicitly, to verify his heterosexual credentials, the most significant ingredient needed for his fragile macho pose. Machismo, rising into prominence in Mr. Gay's psychological profile here, began its reign, of course, long before his military training began. It was commonly taught to young men in his 1950s era. Prior to kindergarten, in fact, his father may have repeatedly challenged him to 'put up your dukes'. Gay could barely have been 20 when he landed in Vietnam. Boot camp in the military, no doubt, had already stripped him of what might have been his real and somewhat gentler self-image— one which flashed when he reportedly bought pizzas for total strangers on the day of the killing. Ollie North, another Virginian military vet dude, was appearing on CNN's Larry King Live at the beginning of the week and spoke eloquently pre-promo-ing the near mind-state of Mr. Gay the Killer when he had the following exchange with Arizona's Steve May, fighting to retain his place in the military: North had referred obliquely to the "laws of biology" that are what truly make all gays in the military, in his mind, a no no. His phrasing seemed odd--but then North--after being pushed— revealed what he'd meant by invoking the 'laws of biology' to explain why he believed gay men should stay out of nearby bunks: Ollie North: The reality of it is the reason we give separate bunk spaces to women on Navy ships, the reason we have separate and segregated showers and heads, is so that temptation, the laws of biology, does not become overwhelming and we create even bigger problems than we already have today, given that this administration wants to use the military like a bunch of lab rats in a radical social experiment.
Obviously, it appears that like North, Mr. Gay has long had a serious problem. Both men—from the same generation almost-- apparently perceive homosexuality—same-sex love-making and affection--as the worst thing, period, that can possibly happen. Both, obviously, also feel there's some justification in killing a guy who's simply willing to fulfill for them those fantasies to which their erotic temptations or their unwanted surnames have led, away away from their phony macho poses and charades. A trouble that faces many men, straight or gay, is that they reach a certain age when machismo is no longer practical. It worked to get them married and to impregnate the women they've bamboozled, perhaps, but what they've failed to notice is that gentle diplomacy, and not swaggering bravado, wins the better chips, which are also the more personally satisfying ones as a rule. It is sad to see an aging man who clings to an unflattering swagger as if its all he's got left of himself. The women these macho-maniacs batter— because such men have been ignorantly taught to fear the advance of the feminine in every form, especially within themselves—these same women must learn the hard way about the irrational props, taboos and fears that surround America's old-fashioned fashions in masculinity. Homophobia has remained the principal belt-buckle of the macho pose. Roanoke's well-loved denizen, Danny Lee Overstreet, and his surviving grieving family certainly found out about the existence of festering homophobic rages the hard way. The four women and two men who were wounded at the Backstreet Café were also made far more aware of its existence than they'd ever hoped to be, I'm sure. The great late Buddhist scholar and author, Alan Watts, who was married with children, wrote of machismo with precise words that seem to aim directly at such military types as Ollie North, men willing to admit subliminally, it appears, that males having sex constitutes a valid temptation. In Ollie's case, however, he offered to kill the source of temptation in order to avoid it. It's likely that Alan Watts' uncanny insights could well apply to Mr. Gay also. We'll have wait and see. But for or those suffering Ollie North's predicament, Alan Watts prudently suggests: If they (young and unrealized homosexuals who affect machismo, ultramasculinity, and who constitute the hard core of our military-industrial-police-mafia-combine) would go fuck each other (and I use that word in its most positive and appreciative sense) the world would be vastly improved. They make it with women only to brag about it, but are actually far happier in the barracks than in the boudoirs. This is, perhaps, the real meaning of 'Make Love, Not War'. We may be destroying ourselves through the repression of homosexuality. Who gets the blame? It can be passed around and linked to the notions of the ignoramuses, that's who. And these folks are mentally-challenged macho mini-minds no swifter than Ollie North's, I'm afraid. They surely aren't being deliberately evil. It is just that intellectually, they're in hock. Like Ollie, they don't even realize the sinister implications of what they say and do. Many Virginians, scarily, almost succeeded electing Ollie to office not very long ago. Yes, Ollie, the very tease once reported to have said of President Reagan, 'The old man loves my ass.” It figures. And then there's Virginia's Neanderthal legislature too, one that patently refused only recently to enact a hate crime law and that continues to demonstrate its preference for those holy hate-preachers—moneyed lunatics of the Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell stripe, fanatics and zealots who've been allowed to set the whole laughable fundamentalist moral tone of the Old Dominion, except, perhaps, in Washington, D.C.'s wicked 'liberal' Virginia suburbs or maybe around Charlottesville, seat of the university. I used to live in those D.C. liberal suburbs with my very first lover! I was eighteen at the time and my affair with this 25-year-old hunk lasted a whole three months. He'd been booted out of the Navy. Pity, because he looked better in his sailor's uniform than he did in that Safeway Store apron. Our gay Navy housemates were still working at the Pentagon, however, which was only a few blocks distant. They called our little brick house in Arlington 'Haddie's Hacienda for Homeless Homosexuals'. These were young military men who actually lived Alan Watts' idea of how to “vastly” improve the world long before he'd ever addressed that particular advice to barracks-loving machos. Ollie North and Mr. Gay might both have learned to live a little, to relax and to have a blast at Haddie's. I sure did. |
Oliver North 
Openly-gay Arizona State Assemblyman Steve May 
© 1997-2000 BEI