Hi, I shared this post today and someone suggested I share it here. I hope people can see themselves in these words.
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This is what I want people outside the queer community to understand about Orlando.There are a lot of people right now grieving, and everyone has the right to grieve about such immense and senseless loss of life. But for a lot of queer people at this moment it is not just about grief, or this one horrific tragedy: for many of us this violence is a mirror.You may not have noticed, but hatred like this opens up a wound for a lot of queer people. Day to day, we try to keep our traumas contained so that we are able keep living and loving as best we can, but moments like this have the ability to tear us right open. When such direct hatred touches our community, we remember every person who bullied us, yelled at us on the street, punched us on a train. We see the parent who stopped loving us, or the school that let us believe that we wouldn't make it out of our teens intact. We remember, viscerally, the ways people have made us feel alone, threatened, and worthless because of our sexualities or gender identities. These moments where we feel just how much contempt the world has for us can be extremely difficult, they make us question how long we can ever escape the stranglehold of oppression, and sometimes it causes us to wonder how much the fight is worth.And while we are remembering these private blows and battles, we are also looking into the faces of the dead and wondering just what this means for us now. I think for people like me – young and living in a decently progressive city – this massacre comes as a deep shock. I think many of us were starting to believe that for our generation it would be different. For our generation, we wouldn’t have to make the decision between authenticity and safety, to decide between making ourselves invisible or carrying fear with us like a shield, as our elders have done, and importantly as our elders have fought tooth and nail against. At the very least, I think many of us thought that death for who we loved was off the cards. Of course not everyone within the queer community has the privilege to feel this safe in our world, in fact mileage varies wildly and violence is still far too common towards some of us. But this tragedy in Orlando hits us in the very heart of whatever security we had and asks us how are we any different, any less hated than these brutally murdered victims.
...It needs to be understood that queer people around the world see ourselves terrifyingly reflected in the faces of the dead and their families (biological or chosen) in Orlando. We see ourselves in the family members standing by Pulse, not knowing if their loved ones are dead or alive. We see ourselves in the pictures of young people murdered in a place where they thought they were free and safe. This is especially true for queer people in the Latinx community, queer people of colour, gender diverse and transgender people, and young queer people, whose communities bear the brunt of this tragedy. We see ourselves in this violence and we wonder if the difference between us and them is gun law, or geography, or just circumstance, and something in us is markedly different from before. The world is now uglier and scarier, and suddenly the comfort we took for granted has left behind a pit of sadness and doubt that we weren’t prepared to face.
And we are speechless. Or we are shouting at the top of our lungs at the injustice. We are singing, or we are crying, or we are cycling through all of these things and more at lightning speed. We are going through the motions of life trying to work out where to put this fear and heartbreak. I don’t yet know where to put any of this.
But what I do know is this: as much as Orlando is a profound tragedy, and an ugly reminder of how dangerous our world is for queer people no matter where they live, it is also a call to action. This is a moment where queer communities say that we will not take violence lying down, and that we desperately need our world to be better to us.
Critically, in the aftermath we will not let people take this grief away from us, or overlook their own culpability in creating cultures which produce homophobia. We will not let our leaders generalise this violence – as if the murder of queer people at a gay club was a sidenote in a more significant story about terrorism and borders – while at the same time scoring political points by conceding to people who call us deviants and paedophiles. We will not accept the condolences of politicians who simultaneously give in to the same extremists who literally compare queer rights to the rise of Nazism, because you cannot extend sympathy with the one hand and beat us down with the other...
...We cannot accept these dishonest sympathies, because as Victorian Premier Dan Andrews so aptly said at the Orlando Vigil in Melbourne, “Thoughts and prayers alone won’t save lives, they won’t make people safe”.
This escalation of violence is part of why I and so many others have been furious at the attacks on the Safe Schools Coalition and the deeply homophobic and transphobic push behind it, because the logical conclusion of the idea that we don't inherently deserve safety is the belief that it is ok to hurt us. People don't specifically attack queer people because of religion or mental illness, they do so because others have allowed them to think that we are not worthy of the protection extended to other human beings. Queer people understand this connection between subjugation and violence, we know when our worth as human beings is being devalued, and it’s time for everyone else to start understanding that too and doing something about it.
What I think we truly need now in this unstable and devastating time is for people to take action, and take responsibility. We need it to be you, personally. If you want a world where we are not mourning the loss of 49 lives to hatred, vote for someone this election who not only won’t throw us under the bus for votes and cares about issues like marriage equality, but who plans to do something about the issues that affect queer people disproportionally such as homelessness and mental illness. Volunteer or donate to groups that support our communities, or even join an ally-friendly community group and support us through joy. Challenge the people around you when they make homophobic or transphobic comments and listen when someone asks you to reconsider your actions, no matter how small they seem to you, because hate is violence and silence is acceptance. Reach out to the queer people you know, right now, and ask if they're ok, if they want to talk, if they want to just do something stupid for a couple of hours instead of thinking about death and hatred. If we want a different world, we have to work together to create it with empathy and honesty, and as much as I feel lost and heart-broken I am as sure now as I ever was that it is possible. And I am more certain than I ever was that we need to do everything in our power to make it happen.
Fellow queers, look after yourselves, I hope this pain passes soon for all of us. If you want to share this feel free xx ❤️
