But tolerance and acceptance are hardly the same. Read more: LGBT Groups Declare Solidarity With Orlando Shooting Victimsīy now, of course, the number of spaces in which gay people in much of America can feel basically safe has expanded. Being gay is not a religion, but a place in which people come together to celebrate who they are in the face of life’s obstacles could be compared to a church. Gay bars are where gay people have, historically, found one another to learn that language and those traditions - and to invent them. There is, at first, no mother tongue to describe their experience of life, no traditions to bind themselves to the world. Unlike members of other marginalized groups defined by ethnicity or religion, gay people do not grow up in families comprised of people who share their demographic profile. Equality also means the right to a space of one’s own, and gay bars represent a sort of separateness, or freedom from scrutiny, that’s available nowhere else in the culture. What’s noticeable about gay bars in the main is not their status as centers for public political organization but their anonymity. Gay people have fought, through recent history, for incremental steps towards equality, and that fight began at the community center.īut that fight can too often seem, for younger gay people, very much of the last century. In an incident so famous that Barack Obama mentioned it almost offhandedly in his second Inaugural Address, the police raid on the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 helped crystallize exactly what the gay movement was up against-and truly made it a movement.
That violence, like the burning of New Orleans’s Upstairs Lounge, killing 32, in June 1973, only served to emphasize the importance of strongholds where gay people could, yes, drink, but also socialize among themselves and develop their own social mores. Gay bars have occupied their function for decades ( a Bourbon Street establishment claims to be America’s oldest, having operated since the end of Prohibition), and have been the object of scorn and occasional violence throughout that time. Read more: What to Know About the Pulse Nightclub Shooting in Orlando What does one do when the place meant as a haven from the world’s attacks is, instead, a target? Sunday morning’s attack didn’t just cut short dozens of lives it also tore a hole in the very fragile sense of security for gay people in America. They are - or were until Sunday morning perceived as - the ultimate “safe space” for queer people. For decades, gay bars have functioned not merely as watering holes but as gathering places and de facto community centers. But the detail of it having happened not just to gay people (by a gunman whose father has spoken out about his son’s dislike of gay men) but at a gay bar cuts to the very heart of a marginalized group’s fears. The worst mass shooting in American history is almost unfathomable in all of its particulars.
If the gunman who shot and killed 50 people in an attack on the Orlando gay nightclub Pulse sought not merely to end life but to sow terror in the LGBT community, he couldn’t have chosen a more apt target.