Yesterday, I was at Boston Pride in a crowd of rainbows under gray skies, complaining about the corporatization of pride celebrations. A friend and I grumbled about the fallacy of treating marriage rights as a trophy at the end of the struggle when the struggle is so far from over. We mentioned how we should be focusing on things like combating employment discrimination.
Or, you know, death. Hate crimes.
Tonight, I got home and opened my email to messages of mourning and prayer for Orlando, Florida. Clearly, I was a little behind with my news--I’d known nothing the whole day, and then suddenly I was hollowly scrolling through articles that mixed mourning with fearmongering, and the cogs of the media machine are already crunching through the grief and confusion and small shining moments of humanity to create a portrait of a terrorist attack, to shore up our paranoia and our anger and our insecurity.
It is, of course, an act of terror to walk into an LGBTQ nightclub and open fire until fifty people join the shooter as dead bodies on the floor, and then a SWAT team storms the building, and the city shuts down in a state of emergency. It's being called the deadliest mass shooting in US history, and Obama has yet again addressed the country and urged unity and strength in the face of this violence (I feel sometimes as though some of Obama's finest moments as president have been the powerful speeches he makes after mass shootings. But how wretched is it that he has had the chance to get so much practice with this?).
It is critically important as well that we acknowledge this also as a hate crime, targeting a gay nightclub during Pride Month, and especially a gay nightclub featuring Latinx night, providing a space for people facing at least a double oppression. And it is too a crime enabled by the easy procurement of assault rifles--incidentally, the same assault rifle in this case (the AR-15) has a remarkable tally of mass shootings to its name, building its death toll from Aurora, Colorado, to Newtowne, Connecticut, to Orlando, Florida; from those alone the body count is over 75 people.
That the shooter was Muslim and claimed ties to ISIS does more to provide a convenient and profitable narrative for the media and fearmongers than it does to help us parse our grief and reconcile with our trauma, both as individuals affected and as a nation. It gives us a target, a familiar target, into which to channel anger and sorrow. It offers ammunition to people who already believe the Other is also eternally the Enemy, that terrorism is inherent to Islam, perhaps even that the victims deserved it.
However, if we chose to take back our storytelling agency, we could reframe the narrative. We could talk about the violent danger of allowing such a lackadaisical preponderance of assault rifles without laws to leash them or keep them from the hands of those who would misuse them. (For those who say that gun laws won’t stop criminals because criminals ignore laws anyway, I might mention that the Orlando shooter bought his guns legally.) We could talk about the government’s inability to identify real threats, even while they batten down the hatches in this police-state-lite that we’re living in (the FBI had previously identified the Orlando shooter as a potential threat because of his radicalized beliefs; also, radicalized or not may be irrelevant, since the shooter’s parents report that he had a history of violence and was far from a devout Muslim anyhow). We could talk about the dangerous, shortsighted, and irresponsible outsourcing of blame to already-marginalized groups, be it Muslims or mentally ill people, scapegoating them for crimes that were nurtured just as much by our culture of normalized violence, homophobia, racism, militarism, and fear.
It is imperative in this case, as always, to challenge the story about terrorism and Islam, to duck the derailing of the conversation into the quagmire of rabid gun rights, to acknowledge the ways in which this crime, too, might be a manifestation of blowback from US foreign policy if indeed the shooter had developed ties to so-called Islamic extremists.
But as this is also a hate crime, the LGBTQ community is also at the heart of the issue. It is our particular pain to grapple with as we decide how to move forward. It is a brutal reality check for us that safety, let alone civil rights, is still not guaranteed. We must remember and reify our conviction that this--the work for equity and respect of gender and sexuality--is a fight, a struggle. It is not a trend to be mainstreamed or a flashy aesthetic to be adopted or an opportunity to be capitalized on. Of every social movement that I have been involved in, I have never witnessed one that has won more mainstream acceptance yet currently comports itself as less struggle-minded than the LGBTQ movement. Have we traded away our duty to protest for the right to celebrate ourselves? Have we taken the quickly-turned tide in favor of our rights and let that be called a lasting victory? This fight is so far from over. If there is any moment to re-mobilize, it is now.
In mourning and in shock, however, we must also respond with compassion. We must resist the pressure to bow to Islamophobia and to paint Muslims as inherently and violently homophobic. We above all, the affected people, must not give in to the fear narrative. We must not let ourselves be divided, or exile from our spaces of mourning the Muslim members of the LGBTQ umbrella.
I think the early signs are hopeful here. As in Charleston after the A.M.E. church shooting, the community has gathered to affirm love and reject hatred. Statements from various religious denominations--including Islam--have condemned the attack and offered prayers and support to the survivors and the grieving. People organized vigils from Canada to Mexico and across the US tonight, and spread the word about blood drives for those injured in Orlando.
In disaster we find solidarity--“a paradise built in hell,” as the essayist Rebecca Solnit titled her book about this phenomenon. In shock and suffering there is blame and fear and bigotry, but there is also the brighter side of human reaction--strength, compassion, care. There is hope. There are many ways to deal with tragedy and terror and hatred, and already, signs of responses both harmful and helpful are visible. The coming days will be our test--for the average citizen, for Orlando, for the LGBTQ, Latinx, and Muslim communities--of whether we will stand up to violence with solidarity or dissolve into divisive and accusatory static.
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