Why We Forget the Pulse Nightclub Murders: Bodies That (Never) Matter and a Call for Coalitional Models of Queer and Trans Social Justice

Like many articles that explore the Pulse nightclub shooting, I begin here with outlining the "bare life" (Agamben 1998) of events of what has been described as the deadliest attack on LGBT persons in US history (Swanson 2016). Shortly after 2 a.m. on Sunday, June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old, US-born security guard in Florida, entered the Orlando Pulse nightclub on "Latin Night," an evening catering to LGBT Latinx communities. Mateen was heavily armed with an assault-style rifle and a handgun. He opened fire on the patrons in the club. It was not until three hours later, around roughly 5:15 a.m., that police reported that Mateen was dead. In those three hours, Mateen shot 102 people, forty-nine of whom would die (Zambelich and Hurt 2016). Nearly nine months later, the violence and murders of the Pulse nightclub shooting have all but disappeared from mainstream public discussions about LGBT violence. Importantly, those who were murdered by Mateen share something in common with other queer and trans murders that seem to drift from public memory: they were young, poor or working class, queer, Latinx, black, and/or gender nonconforming (City of Orlando 2016). In this piece I explore how the "forgetting" of the Pulse nightclub murders reflects a core structural flaw of the LGBT paradigm: these are bodies that never mattered. Positioning the Pulse nightclub murders in a broader sociopolitical context, I explore in this piece why, as evidenced in the amnesia of the Pulse murders, we must discard the "LGBT" paradigm of "community" when attempting to refer to sexually liminal subjects and invest, instead, in coalitional models of queer and trans social justice.

I argue here that the disconnections between the dead bodies produced at the Pulse nightclub and the values of mainstream LGBT activism reflect a larger structural lapse of meaningful and productive inclusion. In the LGBT model, the material and lived differences between sexual subjectivity and gender identity are collapsed into a single "community" that is made to signify a singularity of needs or desires. This kind of erasure is particularly problematic when discussing socially or politically liminal sexualities and genders that may fall outside hegemonic or normative demands. Indeed, if mainstream LGBT structures include the capacity to "forget" the largest LGBT-focused attack in US history, we, as queer and trans scholars, activists, and community members, should be deeply concerned about whom we are encouraged to value and what happens when we are complicit in that valuation.

The question of how queer "otherness" articulates meaningfully with main-streamed sexual subjectivities is not a new concern. Reactions to the inclusion of gender liminal subjects in lesbian and gay spaces have long been marked by vehement pushback, whether from the viciously transphobic radical lesbian feminists of the 1970s and 1980s or the homonormative desires of the Human Rights Campaign. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the push to include the "T" in acronyms emerged simultaneous to larger structural critiques of gay and lesbian rights and feminist projects; while at one time these projects relied on a politics of difference to succeed, the inherent exclusivity of such politics failed to reach the goals of its members (Armstrong 2002: 3; Marotta 1981; Califia 2003; Meyerowitz 2004). As exclusion and a politics of difference shifted to include queer of color critiques and responded to third-wave feminisms, the addition of a "T" to "LGB" functioned to express the inclusivity of the movement (Green 2004). This "post identity" politics maintained that exclusion was negative, understood as "both illegitimate and politically problematic—coupled with the assumption that any exclusion is equivalent to any other kind of exclusion" (Park 2002: 754). As a result, "difference" was erased from LGBT mainstream discourses so as to avoid the anxieties of addressing complicated and structurally exclusionary practices. Many formerly LGB organizations began to "add the T" to their organizational name and mission statement (Devor and Matte 2004: 180; Minter 2006). This tradition led to what would become an...