Everyone is talking about what happened in Orlando a few days ago. Some are calling for a ban on more guns and stricter gun control laws. Some politicians are taking credit for “being right on radical Islamic terrorism”. Some people are being told by their families to stay out of gay clubs for fear that the same thing will happen to them.
I will not get into my personal beliefs on gun control or gun bans or politics. What I will get into is the LGBT community as a whole and the reaction from some of my friends. My Facebook feed is full of rainbow hearts or rainbow filters over their profile picture or “we are Orlando” made into a profile picture. I read a post shared from a friend talking about why the LGBT community is being so pronounced and why they say “we are Orlando”. The post talked about what every LGBT person has encountered at one time or another and that is FEAR. We have all feared someone not liking us and being worried that it will cause us harm some day. We have feared this because we have seen friends beaten up, harassed, even killed all because they are gay. We have seen friends leave when they find out we are gay.
One other thing we have seen though is that the longer we are out the more we grow and the more we lose the fear. The more we begin to live our lives and not worry about the what ifs. We start to relax and enjoy life. We start advocating for gay rights (whether in public or private). We see our efforts pay off with several United States Supreme Court opinions, the latest one being the right to marry decided almost one year ago today.
So we stop worrying about the what ifs because it seems as though society is starting to accept us. It isn’t just gay people that get shot in a public place. It wasn’t that long ago that a school or two or a movie theater was shot up. Those were not gay attacks. They were just attacks by a person, much like Orlando. The difference with Orlando is that it affected a specific group of people who have all at one point lived that fear. So while we may not know the people in that bar in Orlando, we know what it is like to be them. To feel the fear and then to feel accepted only to have that fear come back.
Regardless of your beliefs those people at Pulse had families that loved them. They had people that cared about them. They had people that miss them terribly. Take a moment and think about how you would deal with the loss of someone you loved because some person decided to fire shots in a public space. It does not matter if they are gay or straight, it hurts just the same.