Orlando and the Militancy of Queer Mourning

Like so many others, in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in the early hours of June 12, 2016, I took to social media as a means of connecting to my queer kin. In an attempt to transcend the homonationalist¹ discourse that I knew would soon follow the incident in the age of the so-called war on terror, I wrote these words, both in my capacity as the director of the LGBTQ studies minor at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and as a concerned queer citizen:

Today is a time to gather, mourn, and develop QUEER perspectives and solutions to what happened in Orlando. This is NOT the time to foist what happened on other marginalized groups; this is NOT the time to ignore the intersectionality of the incident—that a nightclub where queer and trans youth of color were largely gathering was targeted; this is NOT the time to let non-queer gays and lesbians and straight and cisgendered folk off the hook because they have not kept up with queer cultural formations in the twenty-first global world; this is NOT the time to suggest or promote the idea that more law enforcement will solve the problem but rather as Dean Spade has taught us “Their laws will never make us safer.”² Now is the time to push back against normative discourses and structures of all kinds. If you are capable of politicizing and publicizing your grief, do so. If you are capable of speaking back to those who want to erase LGBTQ experience from this incident, erase race and ethnicity from this incident, or who seek to blame other oppressed groups for this incident, do so. But above all, reach out to your queer kin, be present and listen as much as you speak, and love, fiercely, boldly, queerly.

Much like the progressive response to the murders of black and trans people in the United States, I wanted to position myself, a queer white woman, as an ally and to put my privilege and my position as the director of a queer university program to work by speaking out against racist, and especially Islamophobic, speech. To do so, I needed to actively negotiate the awkward closeness and distance between myself and those for whom I mourned. Indeed, the Pulse massacre demanded that I reflect on the intersection of my positionality and my role as director under these circumstances and to solidify my stance as a social justice mobilizer but more importantly as an ally that engages with practices of listening deeply to the voices of the diverse and multiple communities that make up “GLBTQ.” I also felt a personal need to heal with my queer and trans siblings, across all kinds of identity categories, as we collectively navigated locally, nationally, and transnationally a mainstream media news cycle that claimed “We are all Orlando” but that nevertheless evacuated the event of its queer, black, brown, trans, and Boricua significance. Here and elsewhere in the twenty-first century these calls for empathy by the neoliberal media often render invisible the very people who were most profoundly affected by this incident, when in fact these details comprise the incident itself.

By harnessing technology platforms that were never meant to be queer for the purpose of performing a collective queer mourning, I connected with countless others—many of whom are also included in this forum. We reached out to heal and to support each other in defiance of the backlash from voices across the political spectrum who held tightly to overly simplistic discourses of what happened and why and in the face of a deeply felt and excruciatingly painful silence from families and friends who did not think to reach out to those in their lives who felt most threatened and saddened by what happened at Pulse (“We are all Orlando,” right? So why the need?). We formed virtual kinships to send love and peace and words of encouragement as we endeavored to slice through a hegemonic discourse that many, even some vocal gays and lesbians, seemed to embrace...