UNFORGETTABLE

Since the attacks on Pulse nightclub
in Orlando early Sunday morning,
I’ve had a hard time figuring out

how to get past the “anger” stage of my
grief. I am angry at the noxious concept
of masculinity that caused someone to
see two men kissing and became so
incensed by it as to want to kill. I am
angry that there are people in our
country who think owning guns to
“protect” themselves is more important
than putting an end to the tragedies that
have always been the trade-off we are
forced to shoulder. Worse still, I am
angry at a culture and government that
for decades has provoked fear and
hatred of the men and women who were
dancing at Pulse that night, people so
entirely like myself: queer, Latino,
seeking community.
This is the fact that haunts me the
most: It was Latin night at Pulse.
The first gay person I ever met was a
Puerto Rican family friend who grew up
with my parents in the projects of the
South Bronx, who lives as a teacher in
Orlando right now — and is safe,
thankfully. My mother has photos of the
two of them dressed up for Halloween
parties in the ’80s and ’90s, both decked
out in drag, serving enough face to last
a lifetime. I think about the courage with
which he’s lived his life, and about the
friends he saw die from AIDS. I think
about the cost that kind of loss has on a
soul, on a mind, and about the amount
of strength that has historically pushed
queer men and women to keep on living
after experiencing it.
Again: It was Latin night at Pulse.
I think about a Mexican family friend I
met for the first time last summer at a
dinner party in his apartment in
Washington Heights. He had black-and-
white photos on the walls: an intimate
close-up of a shirtless man, arms folded
over his chest; a hazy vision of a gay
nightclub not unlike Pulse, a go-go boy
in chaps standing atop a platform. He
gave me his worn copy of Larry
Kramer’s Faggots before I left, after he
saw me flipping through it on his
bookshelf. Simple as it seemed at the
time, that act means more to me now
than I can express. Queer people of
color often pass things down to one
another, artifacts of our endurance in
the face of a society that has
condemned us, that continues to
condemn us — a legacy of both pain and
resistance reshaped into nourishment to
help our community grow stronger still.
I think about the defiance that both of
these men — and all queer people of
color — have embodied simply by
existing, by surviving. It is a trait they
have passed on to me, one that I am
holding on to more closely now than
ever before.
And again: It was Latin night at Pulse.
Some news organizations have already
tried to paper over the fact that this
was an attack against the LGBTQ
community. And just as the context of
this atrocity being targeted at a gay club
is completely relevant to conversations
going forward about gun control,
homophobia, and how to react after acts
of violence, it is also crucial to
remember that Latinx people made up
the majority of the roughly 300 inside
Pulse on Saturday night. The names of
the victims that the city of Orlando has
released continue to break my heart,
over and over again. They were men
and women of overwhelmingly Latinx
descent who were participating in acts
of historic queer rebellion — kissing,
dancing, performing onstage, enjoying
each other’s company as a group —
without knowing it would be their last
opportunity to do so.
I’m finding that the anger I feel, that so
many of us feel, is fuel — fuel we can
use together. In a year in which the
presumptive presidential nominee of the
Republican Party has spewed hateful
rhetoric about Latinx people with
impunity, a year that began with nearly
200 anti-LGBTQ bills in statehouses, a
year that’s on track to count at least as
many anti-trans homicides as the last —
we still have each other. And for those
of us who were specifically targeted this
past weekend — brown and black and
queer — we will not forget how much
power that fact holds.