I just stumbled upon this fascinating post in Mark Doty's blog. He has closed the comment thread and amicably resolved any dispute that had arisen with the owner of the establishment the post describes, so before I say anything else, I would like to make it perfectly, perfectly clear that I have no intention of reopening the conversation about the event itself. Rather, I'd like to make what I hope are politically productive observations about the comment thread.

I think Mark Doty (Doty feels too formal but I feel weird calling him "Mark") set out to question the context for what went down ("Something about the nature and complexity of violence -- which this very nearly turned out to be -- makes it feel impossible for me to really understand the scene."), to understand exactly what the Italian restaurant owner meant when he said, "even though you are who you are," whether this statement was about class, or city/neighborhood of origin, or culture, or ethnicity ("I have no idea what this means. Does "who you are" mean gay man, middle-class man, entitled person?"). His original post, as I read it, shows at least some degree of consciousness about privilege, about the complexities of context and about the intersections of sexuality with other axes of identity, and a desire to better understand how these things may have contributed to escalating the violence of this encounter.

What I find informative is how these complexities and Mark Doty's attempt to better understand them were more or less ignored by those who commented, how the outpouring of (incredibly well-intentioned) support and anger toward the restauranter escalated the situation and in a way almost reproduced it within the comment thread. The rush to bash bashers, I believe, sometimes prevents us from having potentially more transformative conversations about all of the systemic forms of violence at play in a given situation. I do not mean to be an apologist for violence, but rather to reassert that it's incredibly important to look at the context in which violence occurs and to engage in a practice critical race theorist Mari Matsuda calls "asking the other question." If an act of violence seems motivated primarily by sexuality, question how class, race or gender might enter into the picture. I think this process is particularly informative when combined with a closer examination of the victim-perpetrator dichotomy -- who are we calling which and why? How might the perpetrators in a given situation of violence be themselves harmed by violence or survivors of trauma, either within the given situation or more broadly, in more systematic or institutional ways?

The impulse to incarcerate and condemn perpetrators of violence often forecloses any potential to use situations of violence as opportunities for deeper and broader social transformation, and I see aspects of the impules being reproduced, relatively uncritically, in this comment thread.