Orlando Nightclub Shooting Was a Hate Crime

*This was home-grown, homophobic, terrorism. It was hate. VL

By Sabrina Vourvoulais, Philadelphia Magazine (4 minute read)

“We find community and sanctuary on the dance floor. As Latino gay men, we teach ourselves to break tradition so that we can take the hand of another man and dance. We do this to keep traditional. This alone continues to provide us space, even if the spaces are borrowed, for us to be and feel safe. This massacre was another reminder that we can be robbed of these spaces, robbed of our humanity and our lives.”

— Louie A. Ortiz-Fonseca, founder of The Gran Varones, a storytelling project that shines a light on the stories of Latino & Afro-Latino Gay, Queer and Trans men.

I’m writing this column Sunday night. I’ve spent all day online, tracking what is happening in Orlando, Fla., where in the early hours of the day, a gunman shot and killed at least 53 people at a popular gay dance club where folks had gathered for a night of reggaeton, bachata and salsa.

You don’t need me to tell you the details of the Orlando nightclub shooting — every news story out there has them — and after a while they serve more as distraction than revelation. That last is what we crave, not only an answer to an unfathomable “why” but also what it means for us (and about us) as a nation.

It’s valid to point to guns as part of the answer to that why: the ease with which people can lay their hands on assault rifles like Omar Marteen used, for example, or the sheer number of guns in private hands in our nation.

But it is a very partial answer, and one that ignores the particulars of the hate expressed through the crime. This was a slaughter of LGBTQIA folks, many of them Latinxs and people of color, during Pride month. We cannot, and should not, hide from these facts. READ MORE 

Sabrina Vourvoulias is an award-winning columnist with bylines at The Guardian US,AL DÍA News, Tor.com and Strange Horizons. Her novel, Ink, was named one of Latinidad’s Best Books of 2012. Follow her on Twitter @followthelede.