Collected Perspectives on Orlando from (mostly) LGBTQ+ Latinx voices
2017–06–12: I put this together a year ago, but it was never published it on this account. I figured I’d rectify that. The “mostly” is in the title as to not make assumptions about how these authors identify.
THE PEOPLE
Names and bios of those who died here (from The Advocate) or here (from The Guardian).
Violence all around him, and he found the love. Omar, we are stronger than your hate. We always will be.
An Open Letter to Omar Mateen from a Survivor of the Orlando Nightclub Shooting, Alejandro A. Francisco (xoJane)
WHY MAKE THIS POST?
LGBT Latinos Demand To Be Seen In Wake Of Orlando Attack, Adolfo Flores (Buzzfeed)
Latinx LGBTQ Community & Its Stories of Survival Should Be at Center of Orlando Response (video with transcript), Isa Noyola interviewed by Amy Goodman (DemocracyNow)
If healing is what we want, then we must give the marginalized voices targeted by this tragedy the space to articulate their suffering. This is what will emancipate them of their pain. This is what will empower others in communities who are suffering . . . These are the voices that will generate empathy, create cultural shifts, and reset the dial on progress. Please give them a chance to do so.
Dear White, Hetero, Cis People: Please Don’t Co-Opt This Tragedy, Mariella Mosthof (Bustle)
It seems no coincidence that this massacre takes place as the nation engages in an increasingly vitriolic argument about gender-neutral bathrooms which portrays trans people as predators; or during an electoral season in which one of the presidential candidates has shamelessly characterized Latinxs as rapists and criminals. In fact, expressions of hate toward these two (overlapping) groups have become so normalized they’re commonplace in tweets, Facebook posts and elementary school bully refrains.
Orlando Nightclub Shooting Was a Hate Crime, Sabrina Vourvoulias (Philadelphia Magazine)
RESPONSES
COLLECTIONS
What are your thoughts on the #PulseOrlando shooting? (Facebook video), Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement
Queer Latinos After Shooting: ‘Mi Existir es Resistir’, Yezmin Villarreal (The Advocate)
Here’s How Queer Latinx People Are Reacting To The Orlando Shooting, Zeba Blay (Huffington Post)
LGBT Latinx Voices Speak Out Against Orlando Tragedy, Julio Ricardo Varela (LatinoUSA)
Reflections at Philadelphia vigil for Orlando, 6/13/2016 (Facebook video), Various Latinx speakers (Galaei at 15:45, Nikki Lopez at 19:00, Deja Lynn Alvarez at 26:07)
“They Are Our Dead”: LGBTQ Latinos Speak Out After Orlando, Andrea Gonzalez-Ramirez, Refinery29
INDIVIDUALS
As an Afro-Latinx gender-non-conforming immigrant, I must emphasize that Sunday’s massacre cannot be isolated as a random act or purely an act of Islamic terrorism. Too many people are dismissing that the shooting took place during Pride month at a Latin night event. Even friends on social media have said that this shooting has nothing to do with race, because, after all, white gay people go clubbing, too. But Sunday’s shooting was an attack against a primarily young crowd of Latinx and Black individuals celebrating their existence in a world that has continually tried to silence them. We can’t deny that it occurred because our (American) culture devalues the lives of womyn and people of color, and has through our history.
It’s not safe to be a queer person of color in America, Alan PeLaez Lopez (Fusion.net)
The larger queer community must be willing to come to terms with the fact that this attack was fueled by much more than homophobia. This attack was fueled by the same anti-blackness and disregard of black and brown bodies that continues to exist in the fabric of every rainbow flag swinging in every gayborhood in this country.
Queer Latinx: Tired of Being Targets, Louie A. Ortiz-Fonseca (The Advocate)
The truth is that some of the primary actors of terrorism against LGBTQ people of color in this country are in fact much more homegrown: our legislatures and bodies of law enforcement. The victims of this weekend’s tragedy were celebrating the anniversary of a night when mostly queer and trans people of color — many of whom were Latinxs — fought back against discriminatory policing.
The Pulse Nightclub Shooting Robbed The Queer Latinx Community Of A Sanctuary, Veronica Bayetti Flores (Remezcla)
But there is another pain, a specific pain, that is proving harder to process. This pain has a voice, a face, and a name. He says “Hola cariño” as I step into the room. He kisses me on both cheeks. His name is Victor, his name is Manuel, his name is Luis and Jesús and Chuy, and maybe he is me, too, and in my head, he was gunned down. That’s the pain. That’s the sadness. That’s the thing that has ruined my peace of mind, the reason I couldn’t sleep last night. Us. They killed us.
I say “they,” and I do not say “the shooter,” because the grim reality is they have always been around and they have always killed us. Entire political careers can be founded on the platform of ripping us from our homes and away from our families. They lock up our transgender sisters in Immigration and Customs Enforcement where they are harassed and assaulted and raped, women who were fleeing violence only to meet more of it. Today, they want to build a wall. We don’t even want to think about what they might do tomorrow.
There has never been a place safe enough, holy enough where they won’t kill us.
Why It Matters That It Was Latin Night at Pulse, John Paul Brammer (Slate.com)
I know firsthand just how difficult it is to fully embrace your sexual or gender identity when you come from a Latino household defined by factors like faith or machismo; when you walk into rooms where words like joto and maricón are sprinkled into casual conversation; when you look around and (rightly) assume that the LGBT movement oftentimes neglects your diverse existence. Plain and simple, it’s tough being a minority twice over.
Because let’s be frank: those of us from the barrios of Gay America have persistently looked on from the outskirts wondering when we’d finally get a seat at the brand name-sponsored table during Pride. And in waiting for that invitation, we’ve actively created our own opportunities to contribute to our country’s rainbow-hued narrative that currently skews toward one end of the spectrum,
My Queer Latino Heart Aches for Orlando Victims, Xorje Olivares (Out.com)
Surely, gay nightclubs become religious spaces amidst the communitas of queer bodies inhabiting space together in kinship, but our people, Latin@s and Latin Americans, have a long history of creating ceremonial centers when our own homes became violent landscapes.
And just so, Latin@ queer spaces were always spaces of healing — migratory spaces we journeyed to, to be in solidarity with one another in our shared pain and suffering, but also in our shared joy and triumph.
We anointed one another with affirmation and laughter. We created fellowship and communion — because too many of us had traversed dangerous landscapes just to get there in the first place. The Spirit lived and carried through each and every one of us. We emerged from the shadows we worshipped in to survive and to be storytellers about our journeys. These are our sacred spaces.
Sacred Geography: A Queer Latino Theological Response to Orlando, Vincent Cervantes (Religion Dispatches, USC)
It’s hard to explain just how beautiful it feels to be surrounded by queer Latinxs, listening to the music of our childhoods, dancing the dances we learned at family parties, but doing it in beautiful transversive queer pairings. Nothing gives me more joy than seeing two queer Latina women dancing salsa, one of them leading the other even though she probably had to teach herself that role. Or two gay Latino men dancing close and sexy to a bachata rhythm. The lyrics may not be about our love, but in those moments we reclaim it wholeheartedly.
When the One Place That Feels Like Home is Invaded, Miriam Zoila Pérez (ColorLines)
The politics of dancing is the politics of feeling good; the politics of dancing is also the politics of willing yourself to feel good. Pop is replete with miniature psychodramas in which memory and desire, subject and object, play out on the dance floor. The teen in The Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” gets a happy ending. So does Sylvester in 1978’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” For others, the scenarios were more fraught. In Donna Summer’s “Love’s Unkind,” released in 1977, the clomping girl-group beat forces Summer to the sideline, “standing on the outside of the inside where I wanna be.” Shannon’s forlorn “Let the Music Play” literalizes the trauma: Freestyle’s urtext depicts a couple for whom sharing dance-floor space presents a congeries of competing lusts, where the right signals go to the wrong people, the wrong ones go to the wrong people, and in the meantime the androgynously sung refrain repeats “Let the music play” as if in prayer.
Only When I’m Dancing Can I Feel This Free, Alfred Soto (MTV)
You have known violence. You have known violence. You are queer and you are brown and you have known violence. You have known a masculinity, a machismo, stupid with its own fragility. You learned basic queer safety, you have learned to scan, casually, quickly, before any public display of affection. Outside, the world can be murderous to you and your kind. Lord knows.
But inside, it is loud and sexy and on. If you’re lucky, it’s a mixed crowd, muscle Marys and bois and femme fags and butch dykes and genderqueers. If you’re lucky, no one is wearing much clothing, and the dance floor is full. If you’re lucky, they’re playing reggaeton, salsa, and you can move.
In praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club, Justin Torres (Washington Post)
No podemos dejar de bailar. No podemos dejar de sudar, de menear, de desear. No podemos dejar de insistir en la complejidad del asunto, de insistir en la crítica a la misoginia, la homofobia, la islamofobia, la masculinidad tóxica, en constante crisis. Periodistas que preguntaban lo típico: ¿cómo te sentís, te sentís seguro, por qué viniste al Stonewall?
Travestis, Negras, Boricuas, Maricas, Joseph M. Pierce (Anfibia)
We honestly never know what lies ahead for the fates of our chosen family members. Tell them you love them. Tell them you cherish them. Tell them you miss them. Tell them you celebrate them.
After the Orlando Shooting: Finding Hope and Healing As A Gay Latino, Julián Bugarín Quezada (Black Girl Dangerous)
I don’t want to hear another story about a man, woman or child’s last moments on earth being filled with unimaginable horror. I will not watch another interview with a heartbroken parent in tears because their child was murdered by a maniac with a gun and these grieving families can’t do anything about it.
I won’t let my rage gnaw away at my belief that we can do better than this.
I never want to forget that hate is cheap and love is everything. Everything is possible if we are willing to make it so.
This Spanish Word Captures My Anger Over Guns, Orlando Shooting, Carmen Pelaez (NBC)
That pride — of both heritage and queerness — is what has made this massacre all the more real for me as a bisexual Puerto Rican. The massacre was a stark reminder that I can be murdered in one of the few spaces that accepts me fully as I am. There are layers to this violence, and each that is peeled back reveals new horrors for me and my queer Latinx siblings. We are used to fear. The shooting in Orlando has only served to deepen the fear in the lives of queer people, especially queer Latinx who live in the margins, some undocumented, some trans and non-conforming. This has shaken our community to the core.
My Pride Is Bulletproof: A Queer Puerto Rican on Life After Orlando, Eliel Cruz (Rolling Stone)
There is a conversation that we need to have beyond this tragedy. It’s not religion that is inherently oppressing us. It is bad interpretations to theology that are hurting us. We lost 50 queer individuals last weekend due to radicalized beliefs, and yet we lose thousands of LGBT youth on a yearly basis because they hear the messages from the pulpit that they are less than.
There are thousands of LGBT individuals who are kicked out of their homes by Christian parents because that’s what they believe is okay to do. This is an ongoing issue, and lives are being affected by anti-LGBT theology everyday.
You cannot preach this and wash your hands of the deadly effects.
LGBTQ religion activist: it’s time to talk about America’s faith-based homophobia problem, Victoria Massie interviewing Elial Cruz (Vox)
