I know exactly where I was when a shooter entered Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others. I was in the second bedroom of my Lower East Side apartment, a room that had been outfitted into a combo office for me and care and feeding room for my cat. I was curled into the teal blue cushion of a rattan papasan I’d gotten from Pier One Imports, and I was texting a friend. More specifically, I was sexting him.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and for several years after, that knowledge filled me with shame. Even now, I feel a little gross about it: members of my community were being slaughtered for nothing more than simply seeking joy, simply living their queer lives proudly, and I was slutting it up for a straight man. In the days after the Pulse massacre, so many of my friends talked about how much queer venues, queer spaces, had meant to them; how this shooting cut them to the core, how they saw their friends, their partners, themselves, in the victims.
And I — I just felt numb.
In many ways, this was not a new experience for me. My entire life has been lived on the periphery of tragedy, somehow managing to be deeply affected by unspeakable trauma while simultaneously remaining at a safe distance. I came into this world as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, as a teenager I was suddenly both the sister and the daughter of women who’d witnessed the fall of the World Trade Center towers firsthand, mere blocks away from the collapse — a tragedy I not only slept through, but managed to be miles away from, in the cocoon of the Upper West Side. I cannot separate myself from these tragedies, and yet I simultaneously cannot claim to be the victim: I am too aware of how much I have experienced by proxy, how distant I am from the real heart of the pain.
This weekend, there was another mass shooting at another queer nightclub, and though the death count was lower the grief is no less intense. And once again, I do not know what to say. To some degree it feels gross to even write this newsletter, to act like I have some essential take worth sharing — and yet to not acknowledge it, to slink away from it as I wanted to do with the Pulse shooting, feels so much worse. Because of course the patrons and the staff of Club Q — the people who showed up to recognize Trans Day of Remembrance at a nightclub in Colorado Springs — are relevant to the mission of this newsletter, of course the 5 people who died that night are people I want to honor, and yet: who am I to even talk about their lives, their deaths? Who am I to have anything to say?
What I know, in my heart, is that every single one of the people at Club Q on Saturday night deserved better, the same way everyone at Pulse deserved better. What I know is that this is the obvious and unavoidable feeling end result of a nasty strain of anti-LGBTQ and specifically anti-trans hatred that has become ever louder, ever more violent, in this country in recent years. What I know is that this is also about America’s sick addiction to guns, and its willingness to literally sacrifice children on the altar of the right to bear arms. What I know is that I feel so much that it blots out everything, that my sadness obliterates itself and that — far more than disinterest or lack of concern — is why I feel so numb, why I cannot find the words, why I have nothing to say.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry for them, I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry for all of us. I’m sorry that it’s still bad.
I hope tomorrow will be better, at least a little.