When I look at the images of the young people targeted, they are me when I was younger - and I didn’t think about being in danger when I was in places like that.” He adds, “Even though we know this guy was really disturbed, he still targeted gay people and murdered them en masse,” and that the attack comes at a pinnacle in the LGBT rights movement - just a year after the federal legalization of same-sex marriage, when perhaps the community was feeling more ready to let down its guard. LGBT historian Eric Marcus, author of Making Gay History, tells Yahoo Beauty, “I am hardwired to be fearful because of my sexual orientation, so this kind of news triggers my worst fear of not being safe in the world. These spaces were my salvation.”Ī defiant fist is raised at a vigil in Los Angeles on June 13. It’s where I grew up, found my voice, made my friends, created my family, found liberation and the strength to feel OK in a world that said I was different. Supporting and creating safe spaces for the queer community has been my passion and my mission most of my adult life. As she shared on Facebook, “I have been entrenched in the LGBTQI community for over two decades.
An attack like this only reinforces the negative feelings we already have about ourselves, that we are not worthy of freedom or joy or safety.”įormer New York City lesbian party promoter and nightclub proprietor Wanda Acosta was one of the many who felt the pain of Orlando acutely this week. “When you’re a member of the LGBT community, it means you grew up feeling different, and that you often got shamed, physically attacked, or humiliated. When attacks on the gay community do occur - as they have with regularity over the decades, from a 1973 arson attack on a New Orleans gay bar to the shooting attack in 2000 at a gay bar in Virginia - they can be “triggers to a lot of deeper traumas,” Ghassemlou says. And even though there are now places online, there’s nothing like being in an actual space where someone looks you in your eyes and says, ‘Hey, you’re OK.’” So it’s not just a nightclub - it’s like a launching pad to go into greater society with more confidence. “You need a space to feel like you’re normal and in which to embrace your identity. “These are not just places to dance, they are places where you get mirrored, and that plays a vital role,” L.A.-based psychotherapist Payam Ghassemlou, who specializes in serving the LGBT community, tells Yahoo Beauty, regarding bars and dance clubs like Pulse. That’s because LGBT people, like other minorities, can carry some heavy psychological baggage when it comes to fearing rejection and harm because of who they are - and because gay nightclubs are both symbolic and actual havens, providing solace and love and security in communities that are not always accepting or safe. Nash, tall and blond and wearing a rainbow bow tie, stood amid a fast-growing mass of hundreds who had come to mourn the Orlando shooting victims in front of the Stonewall Inn - the bar that gave birth to the LGBT rights movement in 1969 - and to ponder the chilling idea that yes, it could have been us.Īs details of the deadly mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub have begun to sink in this week, the impact on LGBT people - who were the targets of this, the country’s worst mass shooting ever - has been particularly wrought, giving rise to events not only in New York but across the country and around the world, from Seattle and Austin, Texas, to Chicago and Provincetown, Mass., and even as far as Perth, Australia. “We would’ve been going out and living our lives and not being ashamed.”
“It could have been us,” said Steven Nash, a 25-year-old gay man who had come with three friends to honor the Orlando shooting victims at a New York City rally and vigil on Monday night.
A candlelight vigil on June 13 for the victims of the shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.