I’ve completed a workshop on active shooters for the LGBTQ+ community. Conquering Anxiety – Lesson #1

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On Saturday, I took active shooting classes, and eight hours later, in Southern California, a gunman shot 20 people, killing 11 of them. Less than 36 hours later, another gunman shot and killed eight people, killing seven, in Half Moon Bay.

The two-hour training took place at the Eagle Tavern, the more or less spiritual seat of Western SoMa’s Leather and LGBTQ+ Cultural District. The bar’s outdoor patio was open for business, with groups of people enjoying afternoon beers, while inside a few dozen of us focused on keeping each other alive in the event that an angry homophobe suddenly walked in and gunned down the place.

Like most people, I try to never think about it when I’m hanging out with my friends, because once an idea grabs you, it doesn’t let go.

This, more or less, made sense. In light of last fall’s Q Club shooting in Colorado Springs and before that the 2016 Orlando Pulse massacre, the San Francisco Bay Area LGBTQ+ community is debating their collective safety amid a growing sense it’s only a matter of time before. before anything happens. something terrible is happening here.

Now in America there is a big Weimar energy, among the main targets of which are homosexuals and transgender people. If you have seen Cabaret or heard of Florida, you know the free-hedonism of LGBTQ+ spaces repels Nazis and white supremacists like almost nothing else.

“Don’t get paranoid. Get trained.”

The dark premonition that sooner or later a terrible event with mass casualties will happen in San Francisco is why most people attended the classes. Taught by Ken Craig and Greg Carey of Castro Community on Patrol, an LGBTQ-focused non-profit that has partnered with the San Francisco Police Department for public safety for over a decade, it was heavily focused on nightlife. Among the visitors were bartenders and bouncers.

Most of the classes were devoted to practical advice, interspersed with dispelling myths.

“Active shootings aren’t always the kind of events you see on the news that focus on spectacular events with AR-15 weapons,” said Craig, a trained martial artist and graduate of the FBI’s Civic Academy. “This is the tip of the iceberg. People with a gun or even a knife can do a lot of damage, even if it’s not a massive event.”

In other words, the course was a version of the course “How to keep a drunk patron from stabbing someone who was dancing with their significant other at 1:50 a.m. and how to avoid a civil liability lawsuit after that”, modified to cover more modern The danger of a militant inchel who considers all LGBTQ+ people to be pedophiles who worship Satan.

We watched a short film with a much higher production value than any of the cautionary videos you’ve seen in a driver’s manual, which depicts bar staff reacting to a gunman. There was something slightly infantile about it, but it also emphasized the serious responsibility of bars and clubs to protect human life.

“In the US, first graders know what to do in an active shooting situation,” Craig said. “Most adults don’t know.”

We learned a lot of useful things. Active shooters operate alone and rely on shock to succeed, while terrorists tend to act methodically and in groups. Workers rarely suddenly break down; usually the pressure builds and builds and warning signs build up.

Incidents typically last two to five minutes. It’s best to run. If you’re hiding, barricade the doors with heavy furniture because most ammo can penetrate drywall. If someone manages to disarm the shooter, who will almost always be a man, they must never raise their weapon or the cops will think it’s the attacker. Also, the muzzle will be white-hot. And if you find yourself fighting for your life, don’t fight fair.

The psychological toll of all this is especially hard on people who work in the nightlife industry, who simultaneously face the possibility of workplace shootings and nighttime terror. We were told that such a state of constant fear was undesirable.

“Don’t get paranoid,” Craig said. “Learn.”

It can happen here – and has already happened

San Francisco has seen mass shootings in its recent history. It’s not particularly present in our collective consciousness, but on June 14, 2017, Jimmy Lam shot and killed three employees with a semi-automatic weapon at the UPS facility on San Bruno Avenue in Potrero Hill before pointing the gun at himself.

Although the death toll – one fatality – was lower, a more appropriate case would have been a 2006 episode at 1015 Folsom, a SoMa club with a mixed crowd. Craig and Carey agreed that the establishment has done an excellent job of security ever since, checking for contraband at a separate security checkpoint where employees check IDs.

Part of our normalization of these events is to normalize readiness in the form of low-grade paranoia. Whenever you enter a room, especially a crowded room with black walls and club lights, mark the exits. Head to the shooting range in Alameda and learn to distinguish shots from fireworks and other explosive sounds. If you run a bar, call the Department of Homeland Security for a free security assessment. If you are hosting a drag event at a public library, report it to the police.

Staff should be trained in first aid and develop an instinct for crowd observation without stereotyping or profiling individual patrons. How to do it right was never explained, and neither the film nor the two white hosts paid much attention to racial inequality. After seeing what happened to Oscar Grant, Alejandro Nieto, Tyr Nichols and many others, it is difficult for many Americans, whether straight or gay, to trust law enforcement. Add to that a long and brutal history of police brutality and raids by the LGBTQ+ community, and the potentially violent situation becomes even more chaotic.

This kind of insecurity is the seed of readiness, but it can also swell to existential proportions and lead to fatalism or, worse, a pointless security theater like taking off your shoes at an airport. Is the famous LGBT-friendly bay area, like the rifts it sits on, too late for a deadly attack? I spoke to several nightlife professionals in the background who confirmed my feeling of nervousness. Their concern for the safety of society was matched only by their desire to stay away from the record.

There are more and more haters on Twitter. Metal detectors in San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ clubs have become more common since the Q club. The overnight robbery and brutal beating of a gay man in Soma over the weekend could have been accidental or could have been a hate crime. Anxiety makes it difficult to understand which dots to connect.

Perhaps even more ominous, the workshop mentioned an outdoor celebratory drag event held in the Castro in December that caught the attention of a group of protesters who called themselves Christians. They threatened his perimeter and yelled into a bullhorn, but otherwise left the crowd unscathed, though the discipline they displayed struck Carey and Craig as nervously stiff.

We know that San Francisco is an attractive target for members of some far-right groups who want to defend their position. But instead of a queer-friendly freak show, perhaps at best people will acquire the skills to help each other in a crisis. We can see this already in the presence of Narcan. If people with hatred in their hearts decide to enter a space filled with joy—whether to cause harm and death, sow panic, or simply own freedom—then the communitarian response may only be the latest chapter in a decades-long struggle for liberation.

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