GAYS AGAINST GUNS

Immediately after the Pulse massacre last June in which 49 people were shot dead in a gay nightclub, a group of LGBT+ activists, veteran and edgling, came together to try and do something about the atrocious gun laws in America. One year on, post the election of Donald Trump, Gays Against Guns are ghting with all their might against a cycle of death. Brian Finnegan attends a meeting.

The Human Beings represent people who die from gunshot wounds in America every day

It’s a rainy Thursday night in New York and people are streaming into a room in the city’s LGBT Center on West 13th Street. The atmosphere is bubbly, friends are kissing hello and exchanging news, but beneath the chatter there’s an impatient energy. We’re here for a meeting, and time is ticking on.

Gays Against Guns, or GAG as everyone in the room calls it, was set up in the immediate aftermath of the Orlando massacre in June 2016, when Omar Mateen, a 29-year old security guard, killed 49 people and wounded 53 others inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in the city. Although there are LGBTs of all ages at the meeting, the core of GAG is made up of veteran activists, some of whom were members of the original ACT UP, which fought for medical research and treatment for AIDS in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and some who were key players in the more recent marriage equality movement.

Machine Dazzle leads the Human Beings down 5th Avenue at NYC Pride, 2016

We were solely there to represent for people who should have been enjoying their own Pride day, and would never get to again.

Ken Kidd, who as a member of ACT UP staged die-ins on the streets of New York, and with Queer Nation was heavily involved in a series of actions in the lead-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, is one of the founding members of GAG. “The day of Pulse my Queer Nation buddies called me and said we’ve got to rally at Stonewall,” he tells me. “So five of us immediately put together an event in the village, and I spoke from the steps. This was the greatest atrocity against gay people in America, and the biggest ever mass shooting. The very next day I saw a thread on Facebook saying we really need to do something about this, so I signed up. We had a meeting here at the centre, and we sprung into action immediately.