10 Years After Pulse, Now What?

10 years is a crazy amount of time. Do you know all that has happened in the past 10 years? The insurrection. iPhone 13s. Shakira JLO Superbowl. The fucked up CGI version of Cats with Taylor Swift and James Corden. Hurricane Maria. Lemonade. Brexit. Ukraine. Palestine. The year we were all locked up in our apartments washing groceries. The cunty new trans Cats set in the ballroom world. So many mass shootings I can’t keep up at this point—you hear about a new one every other day. Can you remember 10 years ago when that shit wasn’t true?

2016 is the last time I can. It’s the last year I can remember going to a gay bar and feeling totally, completely, safe. I think that’s one of the reasons the Pulse shooting was such a big deal back then, when we weren’t as jaded by the constant news of mass shootings we hear about now.

10 years ago today, I was still in Orlando, living at my mom’s house, twenty minutes from Pulse. After the shooting it seemed like the whole city was in mourning. IDK what systems of production were already in place, but overnight I swear everyone had a Pulse T-shirt, every shop had a memorial poster on its window, murals were up honoring the victims, crosswalks were painted with rainbows. Even McDonald’s put #OrlandoStrong on their marquee, right under an announcement heralding the return of the McRib.

It all felt admittedly a little weird to me, not the intention, which was nice of course, but grieving something so personal with millions of strangers. Just months before the shooting, I’d been at Pulse with my best friend, sitting cross legged in the middle of the dancefloor eating pizza and watching RuPaul’s Drag Race; Pulse was the bar we went to on Thanksgiving, Christmas; it was usually crowded and loud but it was where we went when we wanted some peace. Then suddenly our place was a national tragedy. I remember in the days after the shooting, all the sad eyes I got from people who clocked me as gay, the strange pressure thrust upon me to perform my grief for them like a show pony, the afternoon a woman at a yard sale marched across the lawn to ask, “Did any of your friends die?” How I’d said no because I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I said yes. I remember going into work at The Flip Flop Shop at the mall in a numb daze, wanting to just lie on the floor and cry like a baby, and the relief I felt when a customer walked in, a tourist from somewhere in Europe who hadn’t heard the news of the shooting. She’d sat on a bench in the shop, kicked off her shoes, and said, “You don’t know the week I’ve been having, running around Disney all day! Please tell me you have some flip flops for me.” I could have hugged her with gratitude, because for a few minutes I could pretend nothing was wrong and keep my grief to myself. In that moment I was so happy for the world to move on.

These days, I’m not sure what I want people to do.

For the last 9 years, on every June 12^th, the anniversary of the shooting, I’ve had a ritual where I pull up the names and photos of the 49 victims and I spend a little time with each of them. I say their names out loud, just in case that thing I heard once about keeping people alive by saying their names is true. I imagine us all at the club on Latin night, sipping blue drinks, dancing to Thalia and Ivy Queen, the smell of Aqua di Gio and sweat in the air. I try to imagine their lives outside of Pulse. The mother of 11 children, a member of the Latin American Motorcycle Association, she was there that night with her son, who survived because she shielded him from bullets. Brenda Marquez McCool, 49 years old. The boy who worked at the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios and whose photos all feature him in a wizard robe holding up a wand. Luis S. Vielma, 22 years old. The kid who’d just graduated from high school and was out celebrating that she was going to play basketball in college. Akyra Murray, 18 years old.

This year was the first year that I didn’t do the ritual. It’d been a stressful week of work and travelling. I got to New York the day before the 10 year anniversary. On June 12^th there was this big queer award ceremony that I was going to at a ballroom in Times Square, and I guess a part of me assumed there would be a moment of silence of something. I’ll be honest, maybe there was a moment (I was like ten minutes late…). What I do know is that there was an open bar and I was in my feelings so let’s just say I don’t remember much, other than that someone mentioned it in their acceptance speech and I thought, Thank God, because I was afraid it’d been forgotten. I’d been feeling so guilty for skipping the ritual, as if I was just another bitch who had moved on, and it turned into this ugly self-righteousness/annoyance that more people weren’t talking about Pulse, which was really just me being upset with myself. To be clear: the ceremony was fab. I savor any time I can be in a room celebrating queer people.

I know I can be sensitive about Pulse. Having a man walk into my hometown gay bar with an assault rifle and kill 49 of my people so deeply rocked my soul that I now divide my life into Before and After. Before, when I could go to a gay bar and dance and be stupid and goof around and have fun. After, when I always have to keep an eye on the front door and on anybody with a bag. I’ve seen enough people roll their eyes when they even hear the word Florida to understand that the impression the world has of us is that we’re just a bunch of Republican freaks, and there aren’t actually any gay people there worth caring about. I don’t have anything articulate to say to that other than: It really fucking sucks. It sucks that they painted over the rainbow crosswalk memorial at Pulse a few months ago, literally trying to erase our history, it sucks that my queer Floridian friends have to closet themselves at work and fight book bans and deal with homophobes and ICE detention centers and police brutality and still on top of that be constantly reminded that the so-called progressives in the country want to get rid of them too. The only thing that makes it better is knowing that fighting people on both sides has brought us closer together. Queers in Florida have each other’s backs like nobody else.

Dancing at Orlando Pride forever ago, when I was in high school… MESS, but see, we had each other’s backs!

Another one from that same Pride.

A part of me wants people to remember Pulse like they remember Stonewall, like they remember Harvey Milk, like they remember all the other queer history that shaped us. But I also understand those things are different. Stonewall was a riot, and because of it, we now have Pride every year. Harvey Milk paved the way for so many queer politicians. After Pulse, there was no gun reform. Queer people didn’t get safer. No new path was paved for future generations. It’s just sad. And there is so much to be sad about, it’s overwhelming, why would anyone want to remember a sad thing from 10 years ago? A sad thing from Florida?

It’s kind of hard to argue that it’s so we don’t repeat history… it already has been repeated at Club Q in Colorado, at the gay bar in Brooklyn where a man walked in with a canister of gas and set the place on fire, at another Orlando gay bar earlier this year where a man was shot dead in the street. Julien Emmanuel Cruz, 33 years old. The shooter was acquitted.

I don’t want to say to remember the victims because of what the shooting has to teach us: that life is short, that we never know when it might get taken from us and so we need to do the most with the time we have. That may be true—I left Florida a few months after the shooting, feeling like I needed to do something with my life after 49 of my people lost there’s—but reducing the victims into some cliché life lesson or a learning opportunity doesn’t feel right either.

I suppose I remember them for no other reason than that these people mattered to me, and you remember the people who matter to you. All the nights sweating on the dancefloor, all the times we waited in line at the bathroom together cracking jokes, or stood side by side tipping our favorite go-go boys on the bar, or sat watching Drag Race on the floor like we were in our living rooms, like Pulse was our home.

I haven’t found anything like it since then. The tougher things get, the more I want to remember when we had it so good. Whoever you are, remember what you need to.

Thank you for reminding me what’s possible:

• Stanley Almodovar III, 23

• Amanda Alvear, 25

• Oscar A. Aracena-Montero, 26

• Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, 33

• Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21

• Martin Benitez Torres, 33

• Antonio D. Brown, 30

• Darryl R. Burt II, 29

• Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24

• Angel L. Candelario-Padro, 28

• Simon A. Carrillo Fernandez, 31

• Juan Chavez-Martinez, 25

• Luis D. Conde, 39

• Cory J. Connell, 21

• Tevin E. Crosby, 25

• Franky J. Dejesus Velazquez, 50

• Deonka D. Drayton, 32

• Mercedez M. Flores, 26

• Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, 22

• Juan R. Guerrero, 22

• Paul T. Henry, 41

• Frank Hernandez, 27

• Miguel A. Honorato, 30

• Javier Jorge-Reyes, 40

• Jason B. Josaphat, 19

• Eddie J. Justice, 30

• Anthony L. Laureano Disla, 25

• Christopher A. Leinonen, 32

• Brenda L. Marquez McCool, 49

• Jean C. Mendez Perez, 35

• Akyra Monet Murray, 18

• Kimberly Morris, 37

• Jean C. Nieves Rodriguez, 27

• Luis O. Ocasio-Capo, 20

• Geraldo A. Ortiz-Jimenez, 25

• Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36

• Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32

• Enrique L. Rios Jr., 25

• Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, 37

• Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan, 24

• Christopher J. Sanfeliz, 24

• Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35

• Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, 25

• Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34

• Shane E. Tomlinson, 33

• Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25

• Luis S. Vielma, 22

• Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37

• Jerald Arthur Wright, 31