Fine, I'll Do a VICE Debate
Sitting on this panel discussion about gun violence and 2A rights was painful, but worthwhile
By T. Bloom
[CW: gun violence, suicide]
Last fall I was invited to join a filmed discussion hosted by VICE about gun issues. I said yes! And have basically been a nervous wreck ever since. And now I have a few other things to say.
Firstly, that episode has finally been launched, and you can watch it here:
A lot of people were probably left wondering why I’m there at all. One of the many sacrifices made in editing was our round of introductions. Some of the participants have more obvious reasons for being there, which come up right away. One is a cop, for example. Four of them are pro-gun activists/educators. Who the fuck am I?
I was sought out as the voice of someone who has left guns and gun culture behind. But not everyone knows that about me — that’s how “behind” I left it. And since it never comes up in the edited version, as far as anyone knows I’m just a “guy from California” who maybe fired a gun once, and it traumatized him so badly that he was never able to dress normally again.
As I explained during the filming, I was raised up in Arizona by very country people, the rootingest and the shootingest. I was given age-appropriate (by their standards) gun safety training and taught how to shoot. My first part-time job as a teenager was at an outdoor pistol range, where I painted targets, registered shooters in the tiny office, and scrounged through gravel in the 110° heat for all their spent brass so my dad could recycle it and sell ammunition.
Once I was even hit with a stray piece of exploded bullet casing on the job; a few days later in gym class I noticed a tiny glint of metal poking through the skin of my knee. Worried the school nurse might ask questions, I spent the afternoon delicately working it loose myself: a heat-warped shard of copper about a quarter-inch long, a trophy which I treasured.
I’ve been in the room when guns were drawn in self-defense. I have come home from school to find an ambulance and the sheriff’s car in our driveway, tending to the aftermath of a purely accidental shooting.
And, I must underscore, all of these events involved people who respected guns and gun safety immensely, who took pride in educating others, who existed around so many guns and fired so many rounds over a lifetime that even these scary accidents and occasional slipups constituted just a teeny-tiny percentage of their overall experience — an appropriate level of risk, I’m sure it seemed to them.
And having learned from their example (including their mistakes) I was deemed safe around guns from an early age. Too safe. Too early.
That was the environment that produced me, and really almost killed me. So perhaps it’s better to go through life slipping under the radar as “guy from California.” If folks who watch this debate see me as just another commie fag urbanite who “probably has pronouns” — I can live with that. Please also know that I work in fragrance, walk in heels better than your mom, and carry around a white Pomeranian in a bag. Sounds like a pretty good life to me!
Much better than whatever this was:
So yeah, I did speak about my background during the debate. We all did, in different ways. And very little of that made the cut, which really muffles the impact of what’s shared later on.
VICE selected each of us because of who we are, but then largely omitted those details from the conversation, choosing to focus strictly on the issues. Which is a little deceptive, because that conversation was only possible as a result of getting to know each other’s stories a little bit, opening up onstage and (we imagined) to the viewers. And that’s why I think this debate was fairly civil and constructive, helping many of us find common ground in surprising ways. (I haven’t watched the other debates in the series, but heard they didn’t fare as well.)
I’m not complaining about the edit, because again: it’s actually a relief? I talked that day — during a brutal three-hour session with no breaks, the day after a cross-country flight — about some really personal stuff.
Stuff I haven’t talked about before.
And going by the final cut, I still haven’t! Those parts never aired, but since they are alluded to a bit, I might as well make it clear.
At fifteen, I was desperate to be dead. I wasn’t well. There was often violence at school. Sometimes there was violence at home. I thought about the guns a lot. Played with them sometimes, when no one else was home. Even learned what some of them tasted like. Imagined bringing them to school.
Knowing how deeply wrong this was made me even more fanatically secretive. There was no human being on the planet I would have trusted to help me, so I prayed to God on a regular basis, begging him to end my life before anything worse could happen.
Eventually I crawled out of that hole on my own, with help from friends who never had any idea how bad it was. Even so, I barely graduated high school, sort of skidding out into the world on a trash can lid. Things got much better eventually, but never healed all the way. That’s the work I’m doing now, a humiliating amount of years later.
So yeah. That was a really big thing to share, with anyone. It was difficult to share it with producers ahead of the taping, it was difficult to open up about it onstage in front of cameras, and it’s been really fucking agonizing to spend the past few months believing it would be shared with hundreds of thousands of strangers, plus everyone I knew.
Maybe that whole subject, though, is really best suited to just a few seconds of selectively edited video, and then a relatively quiet blog post. Maybe I’m not ready for more. Maybe those talks belong in smaller spaces, where they can’t be picked apart by ravenous YouTube comment trolls. Maybe it’s fine that I appeared unqualified, and then suddenly emotional for no reason. Who cares? I win anyway, because I still get to be me, the way I am now.
In a strange way, the VICE studio was a small space. There were nine of us, all suffering the same awkwardness, breaking our ass-bones on those cold metal stools. A lot of our bonding moments got cut, and I think it would have been valuable for Americans to see that. Many of us have continued to talk afterward. The realness of the session did go on to affect our realities, and may still yet for a while, now that others are invited to watch and weigh in.
That closeness was not one of VICE’s goals, but I will give them credit: it only happened that way because the panelists were extremely well chosen. These are sincere people who have each answered a calling in their own way, and submitted to this miserable ordeal because of who they imagined their message might reach.
Will this skimmed and de-fatted final product really help anyone, change anything? Maybe not as much as we panelists had hoped.
But would this many viewers sit through an “unedited” two- or three-hour version? No way. Would our critics be more forgiving if they could see every one of our fumbles and digressions, would they stick with us through our tense periods of anxious silence? Would they have any respect for the tears that were shed? Doubtful.
To anyone watching who thinks you could have performed better than us: trust me, you could not. And even if you miraculously did, you’d have suffered the same chop as the rest of us, and the misunderstanding haters would come for you too, picking you apart.
Even speaking from this smaller platform, it’s paralyzing to know there are probably friends or family who are learning this stuff about me for the first time. I hope you aren’t too disturbed. I turned out fine, see?
Hopefully you thought that was funny.
But please know, I have had great difficulty opening up to people about how hard life was for me in the past, mainly because things are so much better now — and that’s the part of the story I really want to live in.
I still have the nightmares, though.
And I still have plenty to learn about what I require in order to feel safe and at peace in this fucked up world, and how to help others feel safe.
That need to “feel safe” is roundly mocked by many right-wingers — who are all so obviously, unconsciously ruled by the same unmet need, their whole reality and identity have been built around it. Their guns, their private fortresses, their elected lawmakers, their cop-adoration, these are all gifts they give themselves to fill that void. And then they’ll sneer at the rest of us: “Real safety doesn’t exist, get over it.”
Believe me, we know. We learned that from growing up in your households, from all your warnings that followed us into adulthood. I lived through all the hard stuff without an armed protector — and sometimes in spite of one. The risks we queer folks have taken to explore, come out, and find each other would be unfathomable to you. And the forms of safety we afford to each other in our community are of a caliber most others never get to experience.
Facing life’s uncertainties without a gun might not seem safe, but wow, here I still am. I lock my doors at night and keep a small stash of survival tools, but if I die, I die. There are far worse things than getting shot and killed — like being so scared of growing up to become the aging fag with the white Pomeranian that you never make it to this godlike tier of life-enjoyment.
One thing I spoke about that never aired was what it feels like for a child to grow up under armed authority. On a good day, you might feel safe because the person you depend on most has a gun and knows how to use it; on a bad day, when that person is aggressive or out of control, when they truly seem to hate you, you’re still well aware that they have this ultimate destructive power and you don’t.
It isn’t necessarily a conscious thought. Sometimes it takes twenty years or longer to understand why you’re still so afraid of a person you’ve long since outgrown, why you grew up looking forward to the day when you could finally have guns of your own, fantasizing about what you’d do with that power.
Owning firearms will probably never be an option for me, nor do I wish others to take up arms on my behalf. Or even fisticuffs for that matter — the last time a well-meaning “straight ally” picked a fight in my defense, I ended up having to dive in and save that guy from getting his head caved in. Trust, I can take care of myself better than you can.
So I’m not a strict pacifist. I simply don't feel reassured by these specific forms of protection, and I’d implore others to examine their own feelings more closely before committing to that path. I don’t believe in “arming the community,” because there’s no way to do so without accepting mindsets and conditions that I see as essentially conservative.
To me, these don’t sound like extreme positions to hold. But in that room, among those specific people, suddenly they were. To many viewers, they are. But to the other panelists’ immense credit, they made room for me, doing their best to make me feel safe, both during and afterward.
I hope I have done the same. And I share Jessica’s sentiment at the very end of the program — I would feel much safer at a shooting range with Marchelle or Kendra than with anyone I ever grew up with. It’s not an experience I’m likely to pursue; it’s enough that anyone in their position finally listened to what I thought, and cared enough to make me feel that way.
VICE chose not to include any of my own exit interview lines, which turned out to be the kindest cut of all.
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If you are thinking about harming yourself, please know The Trevor Project provides phone, text, or chat options with trained counselors 24 hours a day; please reach out to someone for help.
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