Orlando Reminds Us LGBT People Are Still Targets

On Saturday, for the first time in years, I rode my bike into town to watch Boston’s Pride Parade. It’s been a while since I wasn’t busy with my young son’s baseball games or weekend errands on Pride day—and besides, we won, right? More or less every American under 40, and many over that, yawn at the idea that women now marry women, and men marry men. My 13-year-old doesn’t even remember a time that his mom and I couldn’t be married.

But ever since the Boston Marathon bombing that put a knife in my city’s heart, I’ve yearned to be part of more community moments, more comings-together that let us celebrate being human. So on Saturday, a friend and I marveled at how very different—how much more ordinary—the contingents are than when we were young.

Sure, there are still the dykes on bikes, the queer activist groups, the wild party guys, the drag queens. But now there are also endless cohorts of politicians looking for our votes and corporate groups looking for our dollars: employees’ groups from insurance companies, grocery stores, dental practices, sneaker manufacturers, along with veterans’ groups, high school groups, church groups. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have imagined it was a town Fourth of July parade with the rainbow subbed in for the red, white, and blue.

You might have thought the hatred was gone.

But of course, early the next morning we—meaning all of us, around the country—woke up to the news that some lunatic man with an assault weapon had opened fire in a gay bar, executing 20—no, then it was 49—people for the sin of dancing, hanging out with their friends, and enjoying being alive. Terror had already struck my city; now it was striking my other home, my community of queers. It was a punch in the gut, a flashback to those days of being hated and afraid.

The terror is different now than it once was, of course.

I don’t think the adorable young lesbian and gay and bi and trans kids I saw in Boston Saturday can fully imagine that time. How we scarcely dared mention our “roommates” at work, how teenagers spat on us on the street, threatening us and calling us vile names. Back then, if you went to the “women’s” bar (in my day, we didn’t say “gay”) and left by yourself, the big butch bouncer would walk you out the door and watch as you headed for your car just in case some homo-hater was lurking there, looking to assault a queer girl or two. On Sunday, thousands of us remembered that there’s always someone who wants to murder you just for being gay—or even worse, wants to murder the young ones just coming up, the baby dykes and pretty young men who have the energy and life to be bouncing around at 2 AM on a Sunday.

The terror is different now than it once was, of course. Forty-three years ago, someone set fire to a gay bar in New Orleans, killing 32 people, and the community reaction was revulsion against the homos, dead and alive. Twenty years ago, Eric Rudolph bombed a lesbian bar, and almost no one but the gay press noticed—until he also bombed the Atlanta Olympics. This time the mainstream media and the FBI were on it instantly, grieving with us over the biggest mass shooting in US history. This time, the president of the United States understood that this strike at our bodies and hearts was at a critical space for LGBT people, the place we’ve always found one another so we could love and organize, “to be with friends, to dance and to sing, and to live… to raise awareness, to speak their minds, and to advocate for their civil rights.”

But even if the response to this attack was dramatically different, I don’t think that memory of being profoundly despised simply for being who you are ever goes away. It might shift over into a separate compartment, a closet in the back of your mind. You learn to forget about it day to day, to not bring it up, since doctors’ offices and government forms and fellow parents have apparently begun to forget that you’re an outcast and have lapsed into treating you like a regular person. But it’s waiting there, ready to drop you through its trap door when someone decides to enforce that hatred again, dropping you back into isolation and fear and grief.

Which is why, I so urgently hope—no, pray—that my country won’t turn this incident into Muslims versus gays. Because I know perfectly well that my Muslim friends and neighbors and fellow citizens and fellow humans are suffering from the same kind of hatred that we’ve faced for being queer.

Just a little over a year ago in North Carolina, an angry white man shot and killed three young Muslims, two of them students, in what was either a parking spot dispute or a hate crime or some combination of both. Last fall, a nerdy teenager, Ahmed Mohamed, got excited about figuring out how to build a clock and brought it to school—and was arrested and taken out of school in handcuffs for building what someone else thought was a bomb. A handful of weeks ago, a UC Berkeley student was kicked off his plane for speaking Arabic on the phone with his uncle. I could go on. Muslim friends and colleagues of Arabic or south Asian descent could go on even more.

Belonging to some tribe or another seems to be an essential part of being human. All of us are unavoidably part of something larger, some community based on geography, family, ethnicity, sexuality, political persuasion, religion, fandom, profession—whatever. Within every group, there are members who pull either inward or outward, who are tugged by the impulse to be exclusive and reject outsiders or to be inclusive and reach out to all.

Muhammad Ali’s Louisville funeral was a heart-soaring example of the latter. That gorgeous man, news reports told us, spent a decade planning his funeral, and the result brought just about everyone together. The memorial speakers were like the cast of a walking-into-a-bar joke: Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, black, white, Arabic, ministers, priests, comedians, politicians, activists. That was a man who could go deeply inward and still reach outward.

He was a Muslim. So, apparently, was the man who brought an assault weapon into Pulse and opened fire.

In other words, what makes people dangerous are not what group they belong to, but how they treat others they don’t consider their own. We all know pull-up-the-drawbridge types in our own lives. I don’t even have to mention Donald Trump, even though I just did, who of course is using this event to keep spewing racism and hatred and encouraging others to do so too.

In a case like this, the killer’s true motivations are typically mysterious. Maybe it was fundamentalist advocacy for a world in which one religion rules over all, as suggested by the fact that the shooter reportedly called 911 and pledged allegiance to ISIS. Maybe it was antigay revulsion, as his father suggested, which does tend to be linked with the kind of misogyny he allegedly displayed in beating his wife and holding her hostage. Maybe it was mental instability and illness. Maybe it was all of the above.

But I fear that, in order to attack Muslims generally, some voices will discover a deep passion for upholding the civil liberties of LGBT people against the threat of the most medieval and extremist strain of Islam—as if it is somehow more real than the all-of-us-together strain of Muhammad Ali. That would almost be like having Eric Rudolph or Dylann Roof or Donald Trump stand for white American manhood generally.

Two lunatic haters attacked my city three years ago as we came together as human: One’s dead, one’s in prison, and their message of death hasn’t infected the rest of us…

The real division is not between gay people and Muslims—or any two groups—but those who hate and those who embrace. Haters of all kinds are on the same side, all working to keep us apart. Embracers are on the other side, trying to open up borders and make common cause across differences. Yes, I am grieving and vulnerable today as someone who’s LGBT, an alphabet soup acronym I apologize for being part of foisting on all of you. African Americans know the sucker punch of being attacked in churches, from Birmingham to Charleston. LGBT people know again we can be attacked in our own gathering spots, the place we celebrate being together and alive.

But so can we all, for every sort of group. In seventh grade my son has been studying the Holocaust, which means we’ve been talking a lot about what it means to mark a group as so “other” that it deserves to be exterminated. When I tried to explain to him that there’s always someone who sees the world that way, as a battle between “us” and “them,” judging people by their group membership, he was stunned. “I can’t even imagine how you could think that way!” he said to me, over and over.

And yet of course some people do. They run political movements on it. They pull out automatic weapons to enforce it. People are dead and wounded and maimed, and we know that it will happen again.

But that doesn’t mean we have to give in. In September 2001, a crew of lunatic haters flew two planes out of my city, turning them into bombs that killed thousands. Two lunatic haters attacked my city three years ago as we came together as human: One’s dead, one’s in prison, and their message of death hasn’t infected the rest of us, even if one lunatic murderer this weekend reportedly cited them to authorities. The man attacked my rainbow people during the month we celebrate being proud. Hatred is an infection that’s hard to cure.

But the world around me is as horrified and grieved as I am, reaching out, giving blood and money and hope. That’s my deepest group, the group I feel most rooted in: the ones who insist that all of us are human today, grieving for those we’ve just lost.

E. J. Graff is managing editor of the Monkey Cage at the Washington Post and a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. Follow her on Facebook.