Photo by Alberto Lammers
ORLANDO—Javie White typically dances Saturday nights at Pulse in Orlando. But this weekend, he gave up his dancing shift to bartend at another nearby club. So the young go-go dancer wasn’t on his box next to Pulse’s entrance when a gunman came in and opened fire.
“I’ve been crying home alone for seven hours,” he says.
[…]
“Orlando is the most tightly-knit gay community I’ve ever been in. We are here to support each other and we are not afraid,” he says.
He hugs a friend, Tyler Block, who is barely holding together. Block found out only an hour ago one of his closest friends was killed. She had a 2-year-old son.
“For someone to come into my home and murder my family, it’s beyond anything you will ever feel,” Block says, trembling and eyes full of tears.
[…]
“I cried all day. I’m done crying. I’m ready to be myself again,” Adonis said. “I’m trying to be my funny, catty self for the kids.”
Moving forward, she knows that safety will be a priority among those left behind.
“Everything’s up in the air. (The police) don’t want us to do things that put us all together,” she said. “But no one is going to break us. No one is going to break this community.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda accepts the award for best original score for “Hamilton” at the Tony Awards at the Beacon Theatre on Sunday, June 12, 2016, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
“Hate will never win,” host James Corden said at the opening of this year’s Tony Awards at the Beacon Theater in New York City. “Theater is a place where every race, creed, sexuality and gender is equal, is embraced and is loved.” Those attending the ceremony, which was dedicated to the victims of the Orlando mass shooting, wore silver ribbons in solidarity.
Upon winning for Best Original Score, Hamilton‘s Lin-Manuel Miranda performed a sonnet he wrote as tribute to his wife and victims of Orlando.
Will Orlando Attacks Bring Congress to its Senses on Gun Control? Don’t Count On It.
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Gay, Bisexual Blood Donations Still Restricted After Orlando Massacre.
Sky news Orlando.
A highly-regarded journalist stormed off the set of a live television segment when the host and guest refused to recognize the Orlando shooting as an attack on LGBT people.
Owen Jones, a gay Guardian columnist and the author of The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, appeared on the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky News on Sunday with the show’s host, Mark Longhurst, and guest Julia Hartley-Brewer. In the group’s discussion about the Orlando tragedy, Jones continually called the event a “homophobic hate crime” and “an intentional attack on LGBT people.” Longhurst and Hartley-Brewer disagreed, calling it a crime against humanity instead.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
I was angry. Hell, I was fucking pissed.
Initially, an immense sadness washed over me at the news of the Orlando mass shooting, the deadliest in American history. A sadness that I wasn’t surprised that this happened, a helpless, hopeless sadness for the dozens of people lost due to hate and ignorance. But the sadness was quickly replaced by anger.
Anger that this type of violence, to this degree, only happens in this country, and happens far too often, but still nothing is done about it. Once I realized that in America it’s okay for 20 children, ages six and seven, to die in the middle of the day at an elementary school, I knew that a couple dozen faggots dead in an Orlando nightclub would never and could never move the needle on gun control.
Willfully ignorant is all you can call someone who denies that the LGBT community was targeted, not just “humanity”. The shooter had admitted that seeing two men kissing made him mad. Damned bigots will do everything they can to deny even the legitimate existence of LGBT people.
From where I sit, this ‘crime against humanity’ is the worst possible insult, because so far, hetero Christians, many of them white, most of them conservative, have been working their asses off, stripping humanity from all LGBTQ people, across the world.
During that farcical “news” show, Owen Jones pointed out that if the targets and location had been jews at a synagogue, the media wouldn’t hesitate to call the crime anti-semitism. To which the “host” bristled at the suggestion.
It’s not gays and lesbians trying to make political mileage out of this event.
All of that.
I have no real words for the other articles, just a combination of outrage and massive sadness and frustration and Holy Shit, even the local national LGTBQ group came out and said this wasn’t necessarily about homophobia, but about the increased radicalisation in the world in general, and I’m just, holy shit, how can you be so dense. I suppose the underlying point made a sort of sense (there’s been no increase in homophobia as such, but the homophobia observed has become more violent -- eh?), but the general sentiment felt like a giant ‘fuck you’ to members of their own extended community.