The mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando June 12 sent shockwaves of horror and grief through gay communities across the country. The suffering has been particularly acute for queer Latinx communities; the shooting took place on Pulse’s Latin night, and nearly half the people killed were of Puerto Rican descent.
It was early Sunday morning. I was still in bed. My partner, Bryan, shook me, woke me up, and told me that there had been a shooting in a gay nightclub in Orlando. Unfortunately in today’s day and age, mass shootings have become all too common. So, it wasn’t a shock. “Oh, another mass shooting?” Then I got out of bed, and my partner was just really really sad. He’d been listening to NPR and I sat down and started watching MSNBC. Then it really struck me. As I saw pictures of the victims, I started to cry. I understood why my partner had been so affected by it and why he felt the need to wake me up. Then we kind of just embraced each other. It really hit close to home.
But then the Latino community started to really take note that the vast majority of the victims were Latino, that it was a gay Latino night. Many of us started to talk about the role that Latino night at a gay club plays. Sometimes you may not be out to your family—you may be closeted because you don’t feel comfortable coming out to them, or you’re scared that they won’t accept you. Having that space once per month that you come together as a community, is in many ways sacred. In many ways that space is a place of resistance, where you can finally be yourself.
But we can’t get caught in this trap to think that the way that we will avoid future incidents like Orlando is to have more police or more police surveillance. The police, historically, have also committed acts of violence against LGBT people and LGBT people of color. We have to be very sensitive about this and we have to understand that ultimately, it’s not more guns, it’s not more police that will be able to stop these crimes. It’s not more surveillance, it’s not excluding Muslims from coming into the country. What we really have to do is address the hatred and bigotry that have been pushed both culturally and politically by politicians and by individuals who seek to capitalize off of it. So until we address that hatred, until we change the culture in our society, no one is going to be safe.
