Dave Cullen writes: My mantra after every mass-shooting tragedy is and always will be: don’t jump to conclusions too quickly, especially on motive. It’s healthy to discuss possibilities, particularly as the evidence piles up, but remember that early facts often turn out to point in the wrong direction. The media and even the president lunged way too quickly to assume that the Orlando massacre was an act of international terrorism, which it may or may not have been. Today we’re all asking a different question: Was the shooter gay? A rapidly accumulating set of evidence — including reports that he had been to Pulse in the years prior to the shooting — suggests that he was, or that he was still struggling with gay urges. But he might also just have been casing the place.

The idea that the killer, Omar Mateen, was gay himself may sound baffling, and much of the national media has treated it that way in the day or so since news of his bar-hopping habits surfaced. But it’s no surprise to most gay people. Many of my gay friends assumed as much from the beginning, and predicted this before the first scraps of evidence surfaced. It sounds as if he was a self-loathing gay — which is almost the same as saying he was just coming to terms with being gay. Has anyone ever discovered his gayness and not wanted to tear it out of himself?

Most of us haven’t just known that guy, we’ve been that guy. I never touched a man, or admitted how badly I wanted to, until I was 28. That initiated a seven-year bi phase, which I called “experimenting” for the first half, even after a friend said, “Experimenting? How many times do you need to rerun the experiment?” I had slept with at least a hundred men by then. Still not convinced. Hmmm.[Continue reading…]