Notes from Orlando — on grief, generosity and how there is no fair way to cover a mass shooting
Marketplace’s Lewis Wallace spent some time in Orlando last month just after a mass shooting killed 50 people at a local night club. Below is his account of how people were feeling on the ground at the time, and his thoughts while reporting.
The Parliament House Resort, on a quiet industrial street not far from downtown Orlando, is a dance club and poolside bar with an attached motel — that motel is where I’m staying on my visit to Orlando to report two stories for Marketplace. It’s my kind of place: The pool is surrounded by strings of lights and a cheap cement patio, and it has the feel of a joint that would have fake palm trees. But it’s Florida, so the palm trees at the entrance are real.
It’s late June — about two weeks have passed since the shooting at Pulse. The Parliament House Resort’s entryway and stage are still decorated with memorials to Pulse and its victims: the Pulse logo in rainbow glitter and “Orlando Strong” signs are posted between full-color posters for drag shows and upcoming fundraisers.
I check in after spending the day about two hours away in St. Petersburg, where I attended a Pride parade that felt both magical and haunted. People were dancing in the streets; there was a foam machine and face painting and kids blowing bubbles; 200,000 people strong crowded into a few short blocks on a ridiculously hot day to sweat and laugh and yell. But as the parade kicked off at dusk, a procession walked by silently: 100 people from Orlando holding the names of all the victims of the Pulse massacre, living and dead. There was still music blasting, but from the back of the crowd I saw a few people’s shoulders heaving with sobs. People leaned into each other, hung their heads.
In Orlando, after a day full of interviewing people who are both stunned with grief and incredibly busy dealing with the fallout, I sit out at a picnic table on Parliament House’s cement patio to watch the crowd. A pair of queer people in their 20s sits down next to me, still processing the latest in a stream of memorials; there’s one still going on pretty much every day. Eventually they turn to me and explain that Parliament House is the other place people go to party, the sister club to Pulse. One of them tells me that after he came out as gay, he went to Pulse multiple times a week. He used to work there as a bouncer. Now, he expects the club will never open again.
Everyone seems to know someone who was there. Later in the evening I meet whole groups of young men with fresh tattoos of the Pulse logo on their arms and chests. I see a drag queen who people say was there at Pulse that night. Now, just a couple weeks later, she’s lip-syncing her heart out at a weekly midnight show.
The next morning, I drive by Pulse nightclub by accident, on my way to a coffee shop, finding myself suddenly in slow rubbernecking traffic. I stop and park to join a handful of visitors quietly milling around a makeshift memorial. People have sent things from all over the world, and there are Latino families walking through, kids in strollers, people alone crouching and crying. It’s hard to know without intruding on people’s mourning whether they are visitors or locals, here to grieve a friend or family member, or here to join in the collective grief. The club itself is fenced off, and a sheriff’s car waits in the alley.
In downtown Orlando, there’s another memorial, an overflow that covers the lawn of a large performing arts center. Puerto Rican and American flags arranged in heart patterns are flapping in the humid wind. People move through this place slowly, seeming stunned by the scope of 49 deaths.
For a few weeks, almost everyone I know personally seemed to be posting constantly to social media about Pulse. This makes sense. I’m queer and white, and part of a multiracial community — queer communities are small, and Latino/Latina/Latinx queer communities are even smaller. In towns and small cities like Orlando, these scenes are also tight-knit, in part because they are vulnerable. People go to gay clubs always knowing they might face violence along the way — especially trans women, black and Latinx people, and people who are immigrants. I learn from an interviewee that dozens of survivors that night were undocumented and are struggling to access services without legal status; potentially many more haven’t come forward for fear of deportation if they seek help.
Now that I am here, I feel it would be hard to overstate what 49 deaths and almost 300 witnesses means in a community this small.
But the biggest thing I take away from a few days in Orlando is the immense amount of support that has poured out of this small community. Millions of dollars have come in from around the world, and people here on the ground are struggling to distribute it quickly and fairly to all victims and their families. The local community is facing incredibly painful divides that already existed here — for example, between white-run LGBTQ organizations and Spanish-speaking queer people who haven’t felt welcome in those groups. Between Hispanic and Latino organizations that have been historically homophobic, and local queer Latinx people hoping to bridge the gap in this moment. Between local organizers and state politicians who’ve opposed LGBT rights but showed up to give speeches at Pulse memorials. These divides aren’t just about visibility — they are about real imbalances in power. And I think violence is so often a symptom of distorted power relations.
More from Lewis on how the Orlando shooting highlights the divide within the LGBTQ and Latino communities.
In the face of all that, the overwhelming feeling is one of generosity. These communities are absorbing a huge shock with dignity. A lot of LGBTQ people of color I talk to say they are scared about the massacre, angry about the lack of support for them in Florida, and worried about the rhetoric against Muslims following Pulse. But somehow, they’re still treating this as a moment of opportunity.
It makes me think about Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Cameroon, Libya, Somalia, Nigeria, Yemen, all places hit by mass killings in public places in the same month of June, 2016. It makes me think about how those faces won’t flash through my Facebook feed, my friends and I in the United States will never know their names. And I think there is no fair, complete story about a mass killing or a killing of any kind; it’s clear in Orlando that the ripple effects are almost endless. But so are the remarkable human responses, the ways of showing up in grief and healing.
