On the morning of June 12, 2016, a Sunday, I woke up in my Manhattan apartment to see several missed calls and voice messages from my mother. “I need to know where you are,” her first message started out. “I saw on the news what happened. Please call me back.”
When I called her back, she picked up and sighed deeply. “Oh, thank god. I know you just like to pick up and leave without giving anyone notice. I thought you could have been there. In Orlando. At Pulse.”
My mother seemed to think she was breaking the news to me, but I already knew. I had still been up in the wee hours the night before, when social media accounts began to report the massacre, when concerned texts from friends started coming in. At around 2 a.m., just after last call, twenty-nine-year-old Omar Mateen had entered Pulse Nightclub on “Latin Night” with a semiautomatic rifle. He killed 49 people and wounded 53.
He shot people who had traveled to Orlando from Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and more. He shot a mother who would perish protecting her queer child with her body. He shot singers, hairdressers, nurses and photographers and literature students. He fired bullets into the flesh of people who wanted, for an evening, a few hours, a moment, to be free—to move their bodies joyously to the rhythms of Latin Night.
As the news of the massacre was breaking, I didn’t know the details of their lives. I just knew, at the deepest of levels, that many were just like me: Queer, Latinx, and fighting to survive. These were queer people composed of diasporic rhythms, queers moving across the globe, queers who have had to reckon with worlds hostile and cruel to their being. I found myself already haunted by their deaths, awestruck at how soon I felt that loss. Haunted by the body counts, the names, the stories and histories attached to those names—just like I am haunted by the many thousands of queer people, both named and unnamed, whom we have lost to AIDS.
What does it mean to be “after” loss? What does it mean to continue after the Pulse Massacre or after the AIDS Crisis? How can we heal when we are always in a cruel and devastating after? I am not alone in asking these questions.
“Yesterday we saw ourselves die again // Fifty times we died in Orlando,” mourns the narrator of Christopher Soto’s poem, “All the Dead Boys Look Like Us.” The “we” Soto describes in its plural subaltern voice is of young, queer people of color hailing from colonized countries. Many of the Pulse shooting victims were in their twenties, some in their late teens, just babies.
Richard Blanco, in his own tribute to the Pulse victims, “One Pulse—One Poem,” writes: “picture the choir of their invisible spirits / rising with the smoke toward disco lights, imagine / ourselves dancing with them until the very end.” Forty-nine people were killed at Pulse. They were friends, lovers, mothers, siblings, partners and so much more.
“Restored Mural for Orlando” by Roy G. Guzmán focuses on the importance of a city like Orlando for queer community. Yet, he writes,“I am afraid of attending places / that celebrate our bodies because that’s also where our bodies // have been cancelled / when you’re brown and gay you’re always dying / twice.”
The 49 people who were killed at Pulse each had a name: Darryl Roman Burt II, Deonka Deidra Drayton, Antonio Davon Brown, Mercedez Marisol Flores…
Their names of the 49 lives lost go on, as do the details of their lives. Jerry Wright worked at Disney World, one of Orlando’s biggest employers. Juan Ramon Guerrero and Christopher “Drew” Leinonen were boyfriends, and took their final breaths together. Jonathan Camuy worked as a producer at the popular Spanish broadcasting company Telemundo.
Names do not necessarily tell the story of a life, and neither does a number. Yet, when brought together, compiled, and compacted, they speak to vast contexts and histories. Forty-nine people were killed at Pulse. Seven hundred thousand dead—disproportionately poor, unhoused, and people of color—from HIV/AIDS. Sadly, there remain many other queer names we may never know because history did not record them. Yet, despite their incompleteness, we need these names and numbers in order to have a sense of who we have lost, to feel the weight of the tally—not as a burden but as part of our fight for a different past, present, and future.
My mother called me after the Pulse Nightclub shooting because she knew something of tragedy, mourning, and fear. But in truth, she was scared for me long before that terrible morning, ever since I elected to move to New York City when I was eighteen. For years, she experienced the cocktail of emotions that comes with loving a queer child—fear of our early passing from some disease, some mental illness, some lover’s quarrel, some brutal attack by a stranger on a street.
I want Pulse not to be solely a tragedy, a massacre, a mass shooting. I want it to signify more than pain, suffering, and unending mourning. I want after Pulse to be about the patchwork of joys, contradictions, mundanities, hopes, differences, and freedom projects that define queer life. The many ways of reaching out with all of our senses to other bodies, other places, other histories. Our after should include shaking a**, gossiping with friends, drinking cocktails, lip-syncing to a favorite song—staring into the strobe lights, feeling alive, fully bodied, transcendent.
After Pulse is where I want to be.
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