From a piece I wrote for Contexts in the wake of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs: The public only takes note of gay bars when something bad happens. It makes being a gay bar expert utterly depressing. I feel an obligation to share my knowledge, but I also feel like a…
Greggor Mattson, interviewing Lisa Stampnitzky, author of Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” and Politics Lecturer at Sheffield University. GM: Experts have been walking back classifications of Omar Mateen’s massacre at Orlando’s pulse nightclub as terrorism. And yet, LGBTQ people have consistently described the attack as terrorism. How can we understand the different understandings of…
Police actions in the aftermath of the terrorist massacre at Orlando’s Pulse were heroic. This is noteworthy because until recently police were often agents of violence at gay clubs. For most of the 20th century, going to gay bars meant that “you may be placing yourself in a position that you’re not just going to…
Gay bars have always been sites of danger, Terrorists and gay bashers have long used gay bars to find LGBTQ people- only last weekend, my boyfriend and I had “faggots” shouted at us from a speeding car outside a Columbus, Ohio gay bar. The massacre at Pulse’s nightclub is the worst mass shooting in U.S.…
Pundits, sociologists, and activists frequently use the term “moral panic” to describe what they perceive as a public overreaction to an issue (or non-issue). Examples include “Prostitution and Human Trafficking – The Anatomy of a Moral Panic,” “What’s Flakka and is it Real? A Guide to the New Moral Panic Drugs,” From Miasma to Ebola:…
Greggor Mattson