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  • Queer Puerto Ricans and the Burden of Violence
  • Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes (bio)

In the light of the Orlando massacre, where a large number of GLBTQ Puerto Ricans and Latina/os lost their lives, it becomes self-evident that to be queer and Puerto Rican or Latina/o in the United States is strange and at times profoundly dangerous. Strange because many people do not understand who we are and seem not to care, and we live lives marked by invisibility, as demonstrated in the ways that many journalists minimize the specificity of our experience, except perhaps for unusual cases such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper1 and the New York Times’s Lizette Alvarez and Nick Madigan.2 Dangerous, because we are at risk of multiple prejudices and aggressions, whether they are racism, homophobia, lesbophobia, transphobia, or a combination of the above. What’s worse, these challenges come along with the general risks of life in the United States, given the prevalence of weapons, profound social inequalities, lack of comprehensive mental health care (and in some cases, basic health care), and the rise in xenophobic, ultranationalist, and extremist discourses that we face.

Many Puerto Ricans in the archipelago of Puerto Rico and many Americans in the United States have been slow to acknowledge and accept queer persons, or in particular, to allow queer-identified ones to live openly and embrace their identities publicly, as a political act, demanding full social, political, and cultural recognition. A case in point: it was only this year that the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City recognized GLBTQ leaders, in spite of decades of activism. Another example: when I started the research for my PhD dissertation on queer Puerto Rican migration and culture, many people were bewildered [End Page 99] by the topic and asked me if there was really enough material to carry out such a project.

Common thinking has it that it is preferable to do things in silence or in secrecy, while allowing comedians, politicians, religious clergy, and others to make fun of, ridicule, or condemn our experiences. Many want us to pretend that we are just like them. In their minds, everything is alright as long as you follow social conventions that require heterosexuality, marriage, and gender compliance, including masculine behavior for men and feminine behavior for women.

Yet, more than forty years of lesbian, gay, and trans activism and radical cultural productions in Puerto Rico, the United States, and countries in Latin America have had a profound impact, and now things are decidedly better. But better does not mean ideal, particularly in Puerto Rico, a territory that has been subjected to colonial rule by the United States since 1898, where the economy has been in a recession for over a decade, the government is banned from declaring bankruptcy by the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court, and the U.S. Congress has imposed a fiscal control board that eliminated all powers from local elected officials. The U.S. colony has been profoundly affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, by drug violence and by the collapse of the social contract. The constant social, political, and economic crises in Puerto Rico throughout the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries have generated major migration to the United States, facilitated by the fact that all Puerto Ricans have held U.S. citizenship since 1917, which means that we can travel freely between the two locations. And millions of Puerto Ricans have left the island, many of them GLBTQ. Thousands have gone to Orlando, Florida, because of the poverty, violence, lack of opportunities, and in some cases the homophobia they face back home.

Orlando might have 600,000 Puerto Ricans, but as Steven Thrasher,3 Charlie Vázquez,4 and José Quiroga5 have observed, many mainstream news sources in the United States have ignored or minimized the specificity of the murder victims at Pulse nightclub in Orlando: the fact that 23 of the 49 persons who were killed by Omar Mateen on June 12 were Puerto Rican; that 90 percent of those killed were Latina/os, mostly GLBTQ Latina/os and their relatives and friends; that their faces were black...

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