Recordamos

Forty nine people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, were murdered ten years ago today in what was at the time the deadliest mass shooting in American history. It was Latin Night at Pulse; most of the victims were gay Latino men.

The deadliest act of homophobia in my lifetime. Two weeks later I marched in the Pride parade.

The organizers of Apple’s contingent distributed pins to our marchers, each with the name of one of the victims on it. The pin I wore that day was for Cory Connell, a 21 year old college student.

He’d be 31 today. I wonder if he would have become a firefighter like he hoped to. I wonder about the lives he could have saved. I wonder what the other 48 victims had planned for their lives, and the myriad ways the world would be different, would be better, if they were still here with us.

I remember, in those two weeks between the shooting and the parade, thinking about the people killed or injured at Pulse who were outed by the attack, who had yet to find a way to live out loud, and who now never would. I thought about how fucking sad it would be to die before getting to live. You see, I may have marched in the Pride parade, but I wasn’t actually out yet. I’d been on HRT for just about a year at that point, and I’d come out to a bunch of people individually, but I didn’t publicly, socially transition until a couple of months later.