“My Father’s Pulse”

One of the first things I encountered while scouring news media outlets on the morning of June 12 were the words of a father, Seddique Mateen, outraged and upset over what his son had done, disavowing his child’s actions. “I don’t want any father to go through what we are going through,” he said. “What he did was … against what I taught him. This is against the principles of me and the whole family.”¹

I talked to my own father not long after that. He checked in on me with a joke, his way of dealing with serious topics. We chatted for a bit, and he told me he was glad I was safe. I was more worried about my students, especially my queer students, whom I knew frequented Pulse. Facebook became an instant lifeline, and I was grateful so many students had requested my e-friendship in the previous year, their safety quickly confirmed with an online check-in. A vigil at Lake Eola was already being planned for the following Sunday. Someone had objected: “but that’s Father’s Day.” Grief and fatherhood, it seemed, were going to have to reckon with one another. Later in the day my dad sent me a text about jihad. I didn’t reply.

Perhaps, of course, my father is right about jihad, but the morning of the shooting the lieutenant governor of Texas tweeted a verse from Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”² And I had a conversation with another relative who seemed to believe that my own life was spared because I’m not (anymore) one of those queers who goes out clubbing on Saturday nights. “Of course,” I thought while she talked. “People will think we somehow brought this on ourselves.” Deep down, I am reminded, people believe that queer life is inherently dangerous. It is dangerous; they’re right. But not because of anything intrinsic to queerness. The dangers reside in our attempts to live full lives in societies insisting that queerness is destructive. When Paul wrote to the Christians in Galatia he failed to mention that we often reap what others have sown, as well.

Jihad perhaps, but something that keeps insisting its way into my thoughts is that that shooter could have been me. I’ve never owned a SIG MCX, but I recognize that hate. I’ve felt it deep in my own body, planted there when I was small, attending a Baptist church three times a week. One slightly different spin of the globe, a different set of friends, a different reading list, and I could’ve been that gunman. I know this. And I feel an enormous gulf between my father and me as we speak about this violence. He blames the massacre on something he calls “radical Islam,” but it is indelibly written on my body that the United States already works hard to quash queer desire, to tell queers we aren’t wanted, to convince us to live otherwise than the ways we wish to live.

This gulf opened in a different way a few days later when I read that a father of one of the young men killed refused to claim the corpse of his son, his body unforgivably queer, even in death.³ Queer desire is powerful enough to queer our fathers, too. They must know this. Some welcome this queerness. My student Jeremiah’s dad asked his family to donate to help Pulse families instead of giving him Father’s Day gifts. But for those fathers who wish to disavow queerness, the power of our own desires to queer our dads must surely feel dangerous or scary.

I thought about my father a great deal in the week between the shooting and Father’s Day as I spent time with my Orlando friends. Students came by my office to visit and talk; it felt good to be an adult queer on whom they could rely. And maybe it’s important that I am specifically not a relative, even though a few jokingly...