Orlando: The hate that kills
Omar Mateen, the mass murderer, was a regular at the gay club, Pulse, for at least three years prior to killing 49 people at the club. He was active on gay cruising apps Grindr and Jack’d. People speculate whether Mateen was homo- or bisexual, or if he was doing reconnaissance before the attack. The answer is actually irrelevant. What is relevant is that the hatred driving him had fertile ground in the ambient hatred, intolerance and shaming, not from IS-supporters, but from ordinary people like you and me. The same hatred, intolerance and shaming that LGBT people in Sweden, the U.S. and the rest of the world are still exposed to daily in 2016. It is this hatred that makes LGBT people a more likely target of hate crimes than any other minority. Hate is no excuse for the atrocity committed by Mateen, but it is a partial explanation. An explanation that is uncomfortable, because it paints most of us as accomplices.
I experienced that hatred throughout adolescence. When I was six years old, I knew I was gay. Or rather, I knew that boys were much more interesting and exciting than girls, but I didn’t yet have neither the vocabulary nor consciousness to express it. When I was thirteen, I had the vocabulary and consciousness, but lacked the courage. I remember looking up “homosexuality” in the green checkered biology book that most high schools in Sweden used. It said that homosexuality was a phase that many young people went through, and that adult homosexuals were tragic and lonely people who often sought out young people.
I remember the relief I felt; there was a chance that I would be cured! I also remember the frantic fear that I would turn out to be a Homosexual. I had heard the adult world whispering about Jacob Dahlin and Sighsten Herrgård (two Swedish news personalities who were gay and died of AIDS), and understood that being homosexual, gay, a fag was something terrible. Now it was in black and white right in my textbook: fags were ostracized, lonely, tragic. I remember making plans to kill myself if my phase didn’t end. I would make sure my body sank to the bottom of the ocean so nobody could find me, because I was afraid that an apparent suicide would somehow out me. I had turned fifteen before I lost all hope of being “cured”. Fortunately, that coincided with my first infatuation, which made me start doubting some of my worst fears and eventually led to my coming out to family and friends at 17 and 18.
While I was in the closet, there was no room to love, or even like myself. In that darkness my self fused with the shame, contempt, hatred and intolerance. I wore the darkness like a second skin. Coming out stopped the fusion, but it took more than ten years after that to shed the darkness, the hate, the shame. I don’t know what kind of person I would be had that darkness continued to fester inside me, but I’m sure that even a parent would find it hard to love that person.
I can not help but wonder whether the hatred that Omar Mateen harbored against his victims was the same hatred I harbored toward myself and others.
Times have changed and Dan Savage is right: it gets better. But ‘better’ is not ‘good’ and so intolerance, hatred and shaming still happens every day. It happens as compliments, “You are GAY? I would never have guessed!”
It happens in very obvious and vitriolic ways, like when preachers claim that the victims in Orlando brought it on themselves or Supreme Court justices saying that banning gay sex is like banning murder.
It happens in its most common form: conditioned tolerance -
“Do you have to flaunt your sexuality all the time?”
“Why do lesbians have to be so butch?”
“There’s no straight pride, why do you need one?”
“Stop being such a sissy!”
The obvious hatred is like a baseball bat to the head, visible to all who pass by. In Sweden we thankfully have a majority who act when they see vitriol against LGBT people. They speak up and show support; their actions forming a shield that attenuates the damage. What hurts the most is the everyday intolerance, like when we’re compared to pedophiles. What really fuses the shame and hate with ourselves is conditional tolerance, when we are expected to meet individuals’ subjective demands on how to act, dress, talk, behave and exist if we are to be tolerated.
These things are like paper cuts, often doled out with ignorance but without malice, are impossible to fend off and difficult to respond to without seemingly overreacting. Being able to tolerate that paper cut every now and then is the (fair) price we pay for a society where individuals are free to make widely different choices and therefore have widely disparate experiences. But, what when the paper cuts are doled out in hundreds, in thousands, in tens of thousands? No drop feels responsible, and yet there is a flood.
