Mourning Orlando and calling out its message: “This was hate”
Hundreds gather in Baltimore after a gunman shot up a gay nightclub in Florida, killing at least 49 people
Above: In Baltimore, a vigil to remember the 49 people cut down by a gunnman at a gay night club in Orlando. (Fern Shen)
Some embraced. Others stood alone, tears rolling down their cheeks.
A few struck a note of bitter humor and defiance. “Queers bash back!” read one sign.
But as speakers at a vigil on a Baltimore street-corner last night began to address the Sunday morning slaughter by lone gunman Omar Mateen of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Florida, one person’s remarks seemed to bring it all together.
“Let’s be real about what’s going on. We have these newscasters trying to blame this on Islam. Omar was a child of America,” said Bryanna A. Jenkins, executive director of the Baltimore Transgender Alliance.
“It was not Islam that killed my brothers and sisters. It was the hate that is the foundation and fiber of America’s homophobia.”
That word uttered prompted a roar of approval from the crowd.
A distraught Bryanna A. Jenkins delivers a fiery call to action. (Fern Shen)
Jenkins, who had struggled to master her emotions at the outset, went on to mention a few other phenomena – transphobia, misogyny, and others – but they were nearly drowned out by the thunderous applause.
Across the country this week, law enforcement officials and average citizens are struggling to make sense of the motivations and mechanism behind Mateen’s shocking slaughter, said to be the biggest mass killing by a single person in U.S. history.
The King and Queen of Baltimore’s upcoming Pride Celebration at last night’s vigil to remember the Pulse nightclub victims. (Fern Shen)
Mateen called 911 from inside the club and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, police said. An American-born U.S. citizen, raised on video games and slumber parties, Mateen expressed anger about gay people and, recently, about the sight of two men kissing, his father said.
There was acknowledgement of that complexity in the remarks by Jabari Lyles, president and acting director of the GLCCB GLBT Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of Baltimore.
“National security is important. Terrorism is important. But this happened because of hate,” Lyles said, striking the same theme as Jenkins.
Hate Others? We Won’t do it!
The vigil drew hundreds to Ynot Lot at the intersection of Charles Street and North Avenue, a kind of geographic midpoint for what Lyles pointed out is a city riven by multiple divisions.
“Every day in Baltimore we are divided by race, by class, geographics, age. Let today not be one of those days,” Lyles said, observing that LGBT people of color “live with the threat of violence every day.”
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Del. Mary Washington wait to speak about the mass shooting in Orlando. (Fern Shen)
“So some of us are hurting in a different way because we see our family and our friends and our people being slaughtered like this routinely,” he said. “Let this community, the LGBT community, be that platform where we can serve as an example of what unity in Baltimore looks like. Today we are all LGBTQ people. Black, white – it doesn’t matter.”
The everyday bloodshed in Baltimore was brought home with the mention by several speakers of another vigil taking place almost simultaneously – for 13-year-old DiAndre Barnes, shot to death Saturday less than half a mile from his West Baltimore middle school.
On a backpack at the vigil. (Fern Shen)
Like other speakers, Del. Mary L. Washington (43rd District) warned against reacting to the mass-killing by demonizing any group.
“Respond by hating our Arab-American brothers? We won’t do it! We won’t hate immigrants or refugees. We won’t do it! ” Washington said, to cheers. “We won’t resort to jingoism and hatred toward those drawn here by freedom and opportunities we cherish. We won’t do it!”
Washington spoke in solidarity with the crowd. Recalling her coming out to her parents in 1982, she declared that the victims at The Pulse nightclub “were massacred simply for who they are.”
But Washington and other speakers also used the occasion to decry the easy access to high-capacity, rapid firing guns in the U.S.
“The Orlando shooter used a military-style rifle to kill so many souls,” she said, noting that it was the same kind of weapon in the Newtown, San Bernardino and other recent mass murderers.
“As long as the federal government allows this military weapon to be sold easily over the counter then it is too easy to kill for anger, for them to kill us.”
What happened in Orlando is frightening, said Kyle Wilson said at a vigil in Baltimore. (Fern Shen)
That danger is very real to people like Kyle Wilson, 24, who, when asked if the Orlando shooting makes him fearful, said “very much so.”
A make-up artist who goes by the performing name of Kotic Couture, Wilson notes that he doesn’t “fit in the role of gender stereotypes.”
“So it’s very scary for me,” he said, “to think, like, ‘What would someone do to me who doesn’t agree with who I am?’ “