No matter how politicians and pundits spin things, Pulse was a gay bar on Latin night.
—
“You need to do your best to say it correct.” — Father Roger Schmidt in The Laramie Project (2001)
The sky was bright that summer evening when I opened the door to The Jolly Farmer, a small Oxford pub. I was an Arkansas farm kid, studying abroad on scholarship and figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. It was my first gay bar. I had a pint. I talked with a fellow from Northern Ireland. I felt as if I had shaken something off — no, as if I had found refuge.
When you’re queer, the threat of violence — emotional, psychological, and literal — is never far away.
|
My memory of the Jolly Farmer kept coming back this week, maybe because stories about bars as safe spaces for queer people kept appearing in the media.
But that is not the story I should tell now. Maybe I should tell instead how when I left the Jolly Farmer that night with new friends, the guy from Northern Ireland pointedly scanned the dark street. When you’re queer, the threat of violence — emotional, psychological, and literal — is never far away.
Or I should tell a story about a Columbia drag queen. Only an hour or so before the news from Orlando hit, my friend posted on Facebook about a man threatening her and her friends outside a Columbia bar — not a gay bar, but a diverse and usually queer-friendly one. “You better walk fast, faggot,” the man said. When they left, he was standing near their car — “We had to walk past him again and I could hear his friends saying things like ‘Hold him back, they’re not worth going to jail.’”
At that moment, 400 miles away, a man with a gun was stalking a gay bar.
◊♦◊
The news has been filled with the mass shooting in Orlando, and the mass shooting a year ago in Charleston.
|
The stories we tell matter. The news has been filled with the mass shooting in Orlando, and the mass shooting a year ago in Charleston. The pain and heartbreak of one story amplifies that of the other story. And each of us brings our own experience to how we understand what has happened — your own experiences of racism or gay-bashing (both now violently real), your own experiences of violence, your own grief.
The stories we tell convince and convict of things we believe and things we want to believe. I remember the priest at the end of the play The Laramie Project, a play about the murder of a gay man, who charges the theatre troupe: “You need to do your best to say it correct.” Yes, we need to say it right.
Some stories — safe space, hate crime, terrorism — have become frames for understanding, or misunderstanding, what happened. No matter how politicians and pundits spin things, it was a gay bar on Latin night. It was a hate crime. The victims were mostly gay men, mostly Latino.
◊♦◊
As The New York Times recently reported, LGBT people are more likely to be targets of hate crimes than any other group. A recent study from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs determined that 80 percent of LGBT people killed in hate crimes are people of color — especially transgender people of color. So it matters that we call it a hate crime. It matters that we emphasize that the victims were people of color. It matters that the media keeps telling the stories of those lost — as South Carolina media has done since the loss of the Emanuel 9.
President Obama called what happened both “an act of terror and an act of hate.” It’s not an either/or, but let’s be clear about how we use the word “terrorism.” If terrorism means the use of violence toward some political end, then Dylann Roof was a terrorist — though we haven’t seen that word invoked as readily for a white kid from the rural South as we have seen it invoked for a dark-skinned American citizen who is Muslim. I fear the media all too easily connects or even conflates those words. Terrorist does not mean Muslim, Muslim does not mean terrorist.
That is, we also have to realize that mass murder doesn’t take place in a vacuum.
|
A focus on terrorism to the exclusion of hate crime allows people in power, the politicians and preachers and pundits, to ignore their own complicity in fostering a culture that stigmatizes LGBT people. Another story of last week was that Omar Mateen went to gay nightclubs — to case them, perhaps, or because he himself was sexually conflicted. This story is a tricky one. Told the way it’s usually told, as the story of an individual psyche, it confirms that the worst killers of gay people are themselves gay people — a story that lets everyone else off the hook. When told as cultural rather than individual story, however, we have to ask what kind of culture creates such monsters. We have to ask whose words and actions — politicians, preachers, families — cause such damage and sustain such hatred.
That is, we also have to realize that mass murder doesn’t take place in a vacuum. We have to remember that on the same weekend, an Indiana man was headed to a California gay pride celebration with a car filled with weapons and explosives and an intent to harm. Nor should we forget the context: There were about 200 anti-LGBT bills in state legislatures this spring. Hating gay people is an American political platform right now.
Another story that appeared early on was a story from Mateen’s father, who said his son became very angry when he saw two men kissing in Miami, and that he thought “that might be related to the shooting.” That anger, that homophobia, is learned, not natural, but the story remains too often a cause and effect story, again not one that interrogates a culture that creates and enables such responses. Cause-effect. Your visibility puts you in danger.
Let me tell it differently.
Wednesday night, as I was walking back from a concert in the dark, I saw two men holding hands. They stopped and kissed, briefly, sweetly, on the street. And for that moment, despite all the overwhelming darkness beyond, the street was different, the lights brighter, the storm forecast changed for this one night, this place.
We face what we face. Tell the story right.
Originally Published at Free-Times.com
—
Photo: Getty Images
Speaking of getting it right, Pulse is a gay bar with a vast majority latino clientele 24/7, 365 that happened to be attacked on a night when they were specializing in traditional Latin music. Every night is Latin night at Pulse.