202 Bullets

The mendacity and political maleficence of anti-gay factions was on full display the day after 49 people, most of whom were queers of color, were gunned down in a haze of 202 bullets at Pulse nightclub. Conservative lawmakers, armed with the best spin that NRA money can buy, insisted that the massacre was an attack on “all Americans” without a single mention of GLBTQ people. Queers were publicly evacuated from the now routine exercise of collective mourning that follows mass shootings, events so commonplace that they now constitute a genre of presidential address. Appropriating the shooting for nationalistic purposes, underscored by a healthy dose of racism, Governor Rick Scott declared, “This is an attack on our people. An attack on Orlando. An attack on Florida. An attack on America. An attack on all of us.” U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, himself dogged constantly by the gay press for his rumored youthful proclivities, likewise relayed, “Our prayers are with those injured and killed early this morning in horrifying act of terror in Orlando.” Rubio would go on to deliver remarks to the American Renewal Project, an anti-gay organization whose members advocate conversion therapy and warn that GLBTQ people are terrorists goaded by a perverse “militant homofascism.” Mike Huckabee, who excites his base by stigmatizing people with AIDS and championing so-called religious freedom bills, extended his noxious thoughts and prayers by telling followers, “Please join Janet and me in praying for the victims of the Orlando attack and their families.” Even lawmakers who could muster the nerve to utter the words “gay,” “lesbian,” and “trans” could not help but participate in the erasure. Former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown told one media outlet, “I classify them as Americans, and it was an attack against all Americans, not just one particular class or type of American.” A reporter for Slate noted disapprovingly that “not a single congressional Republican who tweeted about the shooting mentioned LGBTQ people.”¹ This emphasis on loss void of a queer subject did not abate. A month after the shooting anonymous sources at the FBI told media outlets there was no evidence that the shooter was actually anti-gay.² The epistemology of the closet was resurrected with fervor, speaking the experiences of GLBTQ people without the inconvenience of any actual queer voices.

Of course, GLBTQ people recognize these erasures for what they are. When an arson fire at the Upstairs Bar in New Orleans killed 29 people in 1973, both the mayor and governor refused to mention the crime in public. A persistent feature of the AIDS crisis has been the abnegation to recognize generations of queers lost to the disease. The silence holds in the resistance to acknowledge the omnipresent murder of trans people of color, which is unmistakable with even a quick glance at hate crime statistics. Even as the Stonewall Inn is declared a nation monument, it took police two decades to recognize that one of its heroes, Marsha P. Johnson, was murdered. Rehearsing these familiar scripts of trauma and political malpractice may feel redundant or insensitive. But the refusal of so many public figures to acknowledge the preponderance of these losses as GLBTQ losses is staggering in its historical echo. How does one push back against lawmakers like Florida’s Attorney General Pam Biondi, who fought for years against GLBTQ equality but stood shocked as CNN’s Anderson Cooper suggested she contributed to an atmosphere that enabled murder? How do we address politicians such as Tennessee state representative Andy Holt, who used the occasion of these queer lives lost to hold a fundraiser and offer AR-15s as door prizes? How do we respond to calls for blood donations when many of the victims would not have been able to give?

I’ve been thinking of what it would like look to create a new Names Project, one that outlines the perpetual loss of GLBTQ people, captures the anguish of life for queer people of color, and that resists the duplicity of political gradualism. I’ll not pretend to know if such a project would adopt the squishy sentimentalism of the AIDS Memorial...