by Dakota Antelman
On Saturday, June 11, I road the train into Boston for the annual gay pride parade there. Across from me, two men held hands. Next to me, a trio of women talked boisterously about their time at a lesbian nightclub the previous evening. An hour or so later I was standing on a sidewalk near Copley Square while hundreds of people slowly sauntered down the rainy Boston streets. They were waving rainbow flags and throwing various rainbow-speckled necklaces, bracelets and frisbees into the crowd. The mood was festive. Standing in the capital of one of the most liberal states in the nation, I felt as if the minority of which I am a part was not only tolerated but celebrated.
Just over 12 hours later, members of that same minority were shot en masse while they participated in a very similar celebration. As an event, the violent killings of 49 patrons of a gay nightclub in Orlando serve as a grotesque reminder of the hatred which our society and our world has failed to eradicate. While we in Massachusetts see progress in our state’s culture, this persistent homophobia has continued to make life for LGBT Americans in other parts of the country unfair and unsafe.
This tragedy was surely not confined to the LGBT community. It broke the hearts of the city of Orlando. It served as a savage attack on the right to self expression. In identifying himself as an ISIS sympathizer, this gunman also broadened the scope of his attack to a national level. His gunshots represented all the evil of ISIS, each one attacking the democracy and freedom which ISIS condemns. Additionally, those gunshots each brought forth painful questions about guns in America. These are questions that have been asked after every mass shooting. They are, likewise, questions that go without answers or solutions. Despite repeated pleas by President Barack Obama for stronger gun control, the Orlando gunman was able to buy a semi-automatic assault rifle with a high capacity magazine that allowed him to shoot 30 times without reloading. He bought this weapon even after he was investigated twice by the FBI for suspected involvement in terrorism.
In the wake of the Orlando mass shooting, President Obama notably referred to the violence as “an act of terror and an act of hate.” His sentiment was echoed by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni who wrote on Sunday afternoon that this attack was “no more an attack just on LGBT people than the bloodshed at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris was an attack solely on satirists.”
Nevertheless, the day after LGBT people in Boston and several other cities across the US took to the streets to proclaim their pride and self confidence, 49 LGBT people were murdered. This killing also took place less than a month shy of the one year anniversary of the legalization of gay marriage nationwide. These gut wrenching parallels prove that, despite all the progress in the gay rights movement, the struggle continues.
In Massachusetts in particular, where political progress for the LGBT community has been both visible and, in the case of gay marriage in the US, pioneered, we can forget what life is like for LGBT people nationwide.
The first four months of last year corresponded with a record number of anti-LGBT killings according the Anti-Violence Project, with homicides documented by the end of April. When national statistics for 2014 were released by the FBI last November, we also learned that transgender people were suddenly victims of an increased number of homicides. Ninety eight transgender people were killed in 2014, a staggering increase compared to the 31 transgender homicides in 2013.
Massachusetts LGBT people have also avoided the state-sanctioned discrimination that other states in the US have adopted in just the past few years and months. In March of last year, Indiana signed a “religious freedom” bill that effectively legalized discrimination against LGBT people. The bill was eventually struck down after harsh criticism in the media and pop culture. Seven months later, in November of last year, voters in Houston rejected a bill that would have granted transgender people legal protection to use the bathrooms that match their gender. As we celebrated the new year, North Carolina passed a bill legalizing LGBT discrimination in their state. Around the same time, a similar bill restricting the usage of bathrooms for transgender people was passed by the state legislature in Georgia, only to be vetoed by the governor as opposition grew. LGBT discrimination is also not limited to bathrooms. When ‘sexually active’ gay men arrived at Orlando blood donation centers on Sunday following the shooting, they were all told that they could not donate blood because of a law intended to prevent the spread of HIV.
Even in Hudson, our political progress has obscured pervasive homophobia in our community. In one instance on the Monday immediately following the Orlando shooting, a student remarked that they would “feel worse [about the shooting] if the people killed were ‘normal’ people.”
If we are in some way abnormal, how are we in any way equal?
Overall, the violence in Orlando has brought the struggles of the LGBT community back into the public eye after a hiatus following last summer’s Supreme Court ruling. Yet even this fact is one that some politicians in the US have failed to acknowledge. It took House Speaker Paul Ryan two days to mention LGBT people in any of his speeches about the Orlando attack. In line with Ryan, Florida Governor Rick Scott egregiously omitted any mention of the LGBT community from his many public appearances in the hours and days after the shooting on Sunday.
Before solving the larger problems that allowed this person to carry out a hate crime, we must see that the Orlando shooter was a deeply homophobic man. Independent of his ISIS-inspired hatred of America, this man despised any member of the LGBT community. He was a man who, by his father’s admission to NBC News, became enraged when he saw two men kissing in Miami. In choosing his target, this gunman allegedly also considered attacking a different gay club before settling on Pulse. He was intent on killing gay people.
In the shadow of the Orlando shooting, as the whole United States responds to the horrors it witnessed, we must learn a key lesson — as long as discrimination is legal in any part of our country, and as long as gay people are targeted and killed by their own countrymen, we cannot rest in the push for equality. The LGBT rights movement is just as important now as it ever was. This attack only reaffirmed that.