NEWS & POLITICS Queer gun owners are ‘American as fuck’

FEATURE

A sense of freedom connects Dina Simone’s music and their work as a firearms instructor.

By KATIE PROUT

Content warning: This story contains references to hate crimes.

Ifirst met Dina Simone last December, at the west-side house venue VCR, where they were playing bass in Starter Wife, the perfect name for “a band of homosexuals in Chicago” who came of age in the 90s. (When I saw their band name printed in Starter jacket logo font, I had a powerful flashback to 1997, watching someone write “D.A.R.E. is shit” on a dumpster while I shivered and wiped my nose on my own Detroit Lions Starter jacket during recess.) Besides

Dina, the band is composed of Amy Ramelli on vocals and guitar, and Tricia Scully on drums. It was the band’s first show, but you wouldn’t know it: under bisexual mood lighting, the trio played confidently and easily, their breezy rock and good-natured jokes between songs stirring up within me a reckless, midwinter longing for porch beers and sunny windows flung open wide.

Dina is also an independent act: they make “pussy-popping booty music for the soul,” live-looping keyboards and other instruments to create an electronic sound that’s slouchy, sticky, and makes you wanna bop. Currently, they’re on month three of a half-year artist residency at Montrose Saloon, where they curate shows as well as perform monthly on first Tuesdays. It’s an opportunity for them to return to their solo set—they push themselves to unveil one or two new pieces each time. “It’s also a chance to showcase people who are getting new projects together,” they said, “[I’ve been] kind of pitching them, ‘Are you ready to come play my show? You should come play my show.’”

I can imagine the tone this invitation is offered in—friendly, confident, direct—because it’s how Dina talked to me the second time I

A Poem For America

By Myquale

met them, singing karaoke, when they invited me to join them at a gun range sometime. In between songs, Dina spoke passionately about how trans, queer, and other marginalized people—especially Black and Brown folks—have the right to defend themselves, and of their desire to teach marginalized people in particular gun safety. When I asked if they conceal and carry, Dina took my hand and carefully pressed it against their hoodie, where I could feel their holstered handgun. “Every damn day.”

Igrew up in Michigan around guns. My dad is a hunter, and I remember the musky whi , faintly sweet, of the oil he used to clean his rifle after coming back from the woods. Under the yellow light of our small dining room, the table like a surgeon’s theater, he’d dismantle the gun into discrete pieces, using a wire to shove greased rags ripped from old T-shirts down the empty barrel, naming the parts while I watched.

I don’t know when I became afraid of guns, or when I began to associate their ownership with being a bad person—not bad as in criminal, but bad as in foolish, selfish, disregarding of statistics, and uninterested in the greater good. As a child, I felt cautious around guns—my dad respected them, and I respected my dad—but there wasn’t fear, perhaps because, in childhood, I was only familiar with gun violence from old Westerns and Die Hard . That seemed a far difference from my dad and my grandpa’s hunting rifles. But in college, I was a research assistant for a book on intimate partner violence—a murder-suicide that took place in my dorm. Then there was Sandy Hook, Isla Vista, Charleston, Pulse. Men, almost universally white, murdering women, children, elderly Black churchgoers, and queers. Men, almost universally white, braying on television about their right to defend themselves to the death while open carrying in grocery stores. This wasn’t the kind of gun ownership I’d grown up with, but as I grew into my own political and cultural awareness, it seemed like there was no room for individual gun use in the paradigm of my values.

And yet, if I’m being honest, I’ve grown gun-curious again. In Iowa, I met and briefly dated a queer woman, a high femme who went hunting every deer season and butchered what she shot. Then, beyond using guns as tools when hunting and farming, there’s my own family history, in which a great- or two back was a gunrunner for the early Irish

Republican Army, smuggling arms into the homeland in the fi ght to free ourselves from centuries of cruel British rule.

“You know what I actually do feel like forming a well regulated militia,” tweeted one woman after Roe v. Wade was overturned. I felt that. I’m a queer, borderline-vegetarian woman who is on the abolition train, but I’ve never claimed to be nonviolent, not if I needed to defend myself or the people I love.

I’ve been shoved on the street by a man who got angry when he catcalled me and I told him to fuck o , and I shoved him back. Leaving a sexual health clinic, I was followed a block by antiabortion freaks, men whose keen interest in telling me I was going to hell as they looked me up and down felt sexual and violent. If needed, I know I’ll throw a rock. I’d swing a fist. I also know that having a gun in your home statistically increases your chances of accidental injury, homicide, and suicide. I understand this intellectually, but if the police have guns, if 75 percent of murders by farright or anti-Semitic extremists are shootings, what about the rest of us? In a country where there are more guns than people, why shouldn’t I at least know how to use one?

“My name is Dina Simone. I’m a gaythey. I was born in Oak Park, spent some time in Bartlett, and now reside in Chicago.” A month after the show, we met for our first interview. It was snowing heavily, and we both wore as many layers as possible. They carried a small piece, comfortable to wear under all the bulk: a Sig Sauer P365X pistol, which, a few weeks later, I would hold in my hands and shoot.

What is the connection between pussypopping booty music and the Second Amendment? I asked Dina in the co ee shop, halfway through our fi rst interview. I was worried the question would come o as fl ippant or jokey, but Dina nodded their head. Their stage persona gives them a way to “juggle vulnerability, empowerment, truth, and play.” The connection between that persona and their work as a fi rearms instructor is freedom, they told me, “the freedom to embody both personas.”

“The more I think about that question—I’m American as fuck,” they continued. “Like, there’s so many di erent iterations of what it means to be American, and I’m an out, fucking queer, trans person who wears a gun on my waist. I’m American as fuck. I have the freedom to marry who the fuck I want. I am fucking here. I didn’t choose to be here, but I am fucking here.” july 4th, 2007 i watched my father empty the clip of a handgun aimed towards the heavens a common celebration. in the midst of the fireworks, it’s become increasingly di cult to see light inside the darkness the irony. i was told the oceans mirror the sky. and by that logic, america mirrors it’s crimes, a reflection of the times. this afternoon another mass shooting was carried out by robert e. lee edit: robert e. crimo*** (freudian slip) shots were camouflaged by the sound of cherry bombs, sky rockets and roman candles. american independence. july 4th sounds like civil war, the country smells of gun powder, the chemical used in fireworks, 365 days. today i prayed for the world. i prayed for the victims & families of this tragedy empathy.

Milwaukee-raised, Chicago-based artist, Myquale (pronounced my-kwell) is on his way to becoming a standout beyond Midwestern borders. With a background rooted in ingenuity and creativity, the rapper and producer takes inspiration from jazz, combining it with sly lyricism and raw musicality to produce a sound of his own. He’s done shows with notable artists such as Omar Apollo, Mavi and Kenny Hooplah. In 2020, he featured on Hush Forte’s “DOMINICANA” which amassed 4M streams and ushered in new digital fans. Myquale has since released “Gangsta Party” (ft. Trapo) and “Never or Now,” which he calls the nucleus of his debut album Above All, set to release later this year.

Poem curated by Chima “Naira” Ikoro. Naira is an interdisciplinary writer from the South Side of Chicago. She is a Columbia College Chicago alum, a teaching artist at Young Chicago Authors, and South Side Weekly’s Community Builder. Alongside her friends, Naira co-founded Blck Rising, a mutual aid abolitionist collective created in direct response to the ongoing pandemic and 2020 uprisings. A biweekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

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Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org continued from p. 11

Dina’s own perception of guns has changed over time. Growing up, it was a “no guns in the house, not even a paintball gun” situation. But there was music. “I was legitimately in the womb while my mom was performing regularly onstage,” they told me, “so I feel like there was some epigenetic imprinting that happened . . . [Music fuels] my soul in a di erent way than anything else.”

In the early 2000s, when Dina was taking criminal justice classes in college and playing bass for someone who was a contender on American Idol (“We booked a lot of gigs because of that time in the spotlight”), they became friends with a classmate who used to teach fi rearm safety in the military. Dina was curious about fi rearms, and told him so. In their late teens, Dina worked in electrical discharge machining, a metal fabrication process. “You make a lot of small components,” they explained, “that would end up completing, making something bigger.” That’s not a far cry from gunsmithing, Dina realized: “I’m very, very interested in how all these tiny parts work together to make something happen.”

Soon, the friend invited Dina over to his house, where they went over his PowerPoint safety slides. “Come to think of it, that’s the exact same way I introduce new shooters!” they said during our fi rst interview. “It was very sweet; his wife cooked us lunch.”

After the safety lessons, it was time for the real thing. Their friend took them to a gun range. The fi rst gun Dina shot was a .22 pistol, at a range and under their friend’s supervision. Pleased and invigorated, they moved onto the .357 Magnum. (The decimal numbers refer to bullet diameter: the first gun Dina shot used bullets .22 inches in diameter; the second, .357 inches.)

“First time shooting, and I got some pretty good groupings,” referring to clusters of bullets in one small area of a target—which means their aim really wasn’t bad. How do you feel? their friend asked. “Great,” Dina remembered saying. “Empowered. I wish I could do it more often.”

Dina fascinated me. So much of the national conversation around gun use and control depicts gun owners as white, conservative, heterosexual men, but here in Chicago was a trans, nonbinary musician and performer who makes songs about pussy, money, weed, and pizza, and who also conceals and carries. They believe so deeply that fi rearm training should be accessible and inclusive to other marginalized people that in 2020 they became a certified NRA Pistol Instructor and a certified Concealed Carry Firearms Instructor through the Illinois State Police.

Since then, Dina has carried a gun every day. “I think it’s important to practice what I preach as an instructor,” they said, to have real-life knowledge of how to safely carry a fi rearm while navigating aspects of everyday, ordinary life. Walking the dog, using a public restroom. “But more importantly—and I wish I remembered more hate crime victims’ names—Matthew Shepard comes to mind,” they continued. “And there’s no fucking way I’m gonna become Matthew Shepard.”

In 1998, around the time when Dina and a crew of other high school metalheads in the Chicago suburbs were making some hardcore noise, feeling themselves and finding community via their band Self Inflicted Nightmare (SIN), a 21-year-old gay college student named Matthew Shepard was beaten, tortured, tied to a barbed wire fence, and left to die under the open skies of Laramie, Wyoming. During trial, a lawyer for one of the men who murdered Matthew argued that his client was driven to “temporary insanity” by his victim’s alleged “sexual advances.” Basically, if a gay man hit on you, the argument went, and your homophobia and internalized fear of being seen as effeminate or queer made you panic, you were justified in blotting out his life.

In 2020, when Dina noticed “a shift in people’s mental energy” at the start of the pandemic that “made me want to protect my family and my home,” at least 44 trans and gender nonconforming people were murdered by guns or other violent means in the U.S. Seventy-nine percent of those who died were people of color, with Black trans women facing particularly high rates of violence. In 2021, that number jumped to at least 57 fatalities; in 2022, it fell to at least

38. “We say ‘at least’ because too often these stories go unreported—or misreported,” said the Human Rights Campaign, who has been tracking violent deaths of trans and gender nonconforming people in the U.S. since 2015.

“Since 2020, more trans people have been killed in Chicago than any other U.S. city,” reported ABC7 Chicago in November 2022. The judge presiding over the murder trial of the men who killed Matthew rejected this “gay panic” defense (and e ective in 2018, Illinois became the second state in the country to ban its use in court), but the ethos behind the reasoning of defense has splintered and metastasized into a full moral panic about the very existence of queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people in American life. That panic presents in di erent ways across di erent states—on March 2, Tennessee governor Bill Lee banned public drag shows and gender-a rming health care for youth on the same day. Here in Illinois, Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas spoke at a fundraiser for Awake Illinois, a group opposed to LGBTQ+-inclusive education in public schools and who has used transphobic and homophobic rhetoric in the past.

And yet, queers are here, and some of them own guns. As years passed and Dina continued going to Chicago area ranges, they noticed there were no other visibly queer people. “I think I’d only seen one at the range.” And even beyond that, there were very few women there alone—the majority of women seemed to be with husbands or boyfriends, many reluctant to be there at all. “That’s the reason why I started the business,” they said, “to create a safe space where people would be honored for their background, and feel comfortable to learn about something that might be uncomfortable.”

In 2020, Dina founded Intuitive Tactical Solutions, with the mission to serve anyone interested in firearms safety, regardless of their experience or demographic. “We understand the nuances and assumptions involved [in gun use], as well as the fluid nature of inclusivity, and we adapt by continually updating our courses in response to world events, state and federal regulations, student feedback, and instructor introspection,” reads their website. Courses o ered include Introduction to Firearms and Firearms Safety (two hours), Illinois Concealed Carry Course (16 hours) and Renewal (three hours), and Private Instruction at a range (time varies). Safety courses take place in the privacy of clients’ homes, where students practice handling and “fi ring” a Shot Indicating Resetting Trigger (SIRT), a laser-simulated fi rearm that allows students to practice shooting fundamentals without using a potentially deadly weapon fi rst.

It’d been a long time since I’d held a gun, and I’d never been to the range. I wanted to learn more. And with Dina, I wanted to shoot.

Afew weeks later, when I arrived early in the morning to Dina’s apartment, drenched by the kind of bleak February