When Hate Meets Love: Queer Reflections on the Death of Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk is dead. The founder and president of the conservative organization, Turning Point USA, was assassinated. He was a man who dedicated his career to spreading racism, white supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia. According to a BBC report, “He was against gay marriage and abortion, argued for Christian nationalism and was highly critical of Islam, and famously said that gun deaths were ‘worth it’ for the right to own firearms. He was also an opponent of diversity programmes and spread falsehoods about topics such as Covid vaccines and voting fraud.”

His personal brand — one rooted in MAGA cruelty — has been taken from this world.

My first reaction was relief. Maybe even joy. Then, shame. Shame for feeling glad that someone was murdered. As always, I stepped back to honestly ask myself, “How do I really feel? What do I really need?”

It is intoxicatingly easy to want people like Charlie Kirk gone. Over the past 20 years, I’ve dreamed of those that wanted me dead would die before their wishes came true. Maybe that’s survival? Maybe that’s why I felt the way I felt about Charlie Kirk? After all, he made a living at our expense. His voice amplified policies that I find not only hateful, but inhumane. He supported ICE raids, denied healthcare, and mocked queer love. In a 2024 episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, he even suggested that children should watch public executions. I could not have disagreed with him more. He wielded his platform to make life harder for anyone not white, straight, Christian, and conservative.

And yet, I can’t stop thinking about the danger of my first impulse. The temptation to believe that violence is justice is not what I need. Someone’s death is not the same thing as liberation. It’s debatable whether or not we are freer without him. I don’t know.

But the truth is this, one man is dead. However, the system that raised him and rewarded him is still very much alive and well. The hatred that gave him power did not die with him.

When an ant bites our ankle, we slap it away, not too concerned for the life of the ant, you know? I suppose it’s human to wish away our enemies. It is human to want to destroy what threatens us. But history shows us what happens when we allow that impulse to lead. We create more of what we hate. An eye for an eye is not a very sustainable way to live. Violence justifies violence. Hatred fertilizes hatred. But the crops of that field are putrid.

James Baldwin warned us that “love has never been a popular movement.” It is not popular because love requires more of us than hate ever will. I don’t think hate is easy — at least not in the long term. It rots you from the inside out. But hate is fast. Love, on the other hand, asks us to slow down, to breathe, to imagine a world where even those who oppose us are transformed by our radical empathy and care.

And yet — how do we love someone like Charlie Kirk? A man whose entire identity was rooted in a baffling contempt for ours?

My friend, Anooj Bhandari, taught me years ago about restorative justice: the idea that when harm is done, the answer is not punishment, but repair. Not a carceral response, but a human one.

What does it mean to extend love to the unloving? To call in those who would never call us “family”?

I’ve also dreamed about having an earnest conversation with people like Charlie Kirk. People like Donald Trump. People like Mike Pence. People that hate me. And to truly love them despite how they feel about me.

This is where I believe queerness offers a blueprint. Not queer as in who we sleep with. Queer as in radical defiance of the world’s expectations. When the world tells us to be hard, queerness invites us to soften. When the world tempts us to hate, queerness insists on empathy. When the world demands conformity, queerness declares: there is another way.

I have to believe that even Charlie Kirk could have been reached. I’ve seen it. I was estranged from so many for nearly 20 years because of their beliefs about the LGBTQ+ community. But, somehow, I found love for them. A few years ago, my dreams came true. I sat with dozens of those people and had a non-violent-communication-style conversation. I only wish I had done it years sooner.

Why bother? Because I believe the world deserves better than cycles of violence. If Charlie Kirk could have been called in — rehabilitated into his humanity instead of weaponized against ours — maybe we’d all be safer. I don’t think killing him made any of us safer. Or happier.

Right now, humans in the U.S. are being trained to believe the opposite. Trump pulled the U.S. from the United Nations’ human rights review, a move that was both symbolic and practical: a refusal to be accountable to the rest of the world.

Accountability in the U.S. usually means punishment — like prison or deportation. In Charlie’s case, maybe to some it meant assassination. But what if it meant transformation? What if, instead of killing our enemies, we taught them how to live among us in shared humanity?

Imagine if Charlie Kirk’s platform had been redirected to service. In the same way, what if Trump decided to love more radically than he ever hated? Imagine if, instead of monetizing hatred, Charlie Kirk had been invited into communities that showed him what love and dignity actually feel like. Imagine if, instead of thriving on cruelty, he had been restored into a human being who could see others — even queers like me — as human, too.

If we committed — all of us — to radical empathy, what might disappear?

Would political parties collapse under the weight of shared humanity? Would we need mutual aid networks if every neighbor looked after those around them? Would racism dissolve when we chose repair over supremacy? Would we need courts to tell us who could marry? Would we ever deport an immigrant seeking a better life? Would we roll back hard-won rights that inch us closer to equality?

I know this sounds utopian. I know some will dismiss it as naïve — I’m even tempted to believe that. But is it more naïve than continuing to believe that the endless churn of violence will save us? I don’t think so.

If queerness teaches us anything, it is that love is not passive. Love is certainly not a Hallmark card, though that’s what it feels like in a culture of domination where our sentiment after tragedy is reduced to thoughts and prayers. 

Love is disruptive. Love is refusal. Love is the audacity to care deeply when the world tells you to hate blindly.

Charlie Kirk’s death tempts us to believe we are safer without him. But I don’t think that’s true. His death does not dismantle the system he served. His death does not restore the lives harmed by his words. His death does not replace cruelty with care.

Only we can do that. Only queerness can do that.

As always, I plead for all of us to practice an abundance of shared humanity. I’m not asking us to excuse harm. But I’m begging us to try something radical. To call people back from the abyss of hatred. 

That transformation is possible. That love, though unpopular, is the only way out.

We owe it to ourselves — and to the generations that follow — to build a world where no Charlie Kirk ever rises in the first place. Not because we killed him. But because we loved hard enough, early enough, to make his message impossible.

______

Amended:
It didn’t even occur to me to talk about Melissa Hortman, the 61st speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives from 2019 to 2025, who was also assassinated earlier this year. She was a democrat. Her death says just as much to me about how emotionally and spiritually depleted so many of us are. A return to love and a commitment to repair could have saved the lives of both Melissa and Charlie.