Staying resilient amid the sadness
ORLANDO, Fla. — Jaysean Alexander left his Jacksonville, Fla., home Sunday morning and sped south on Interstate 95.
He needed to get to Orlando. He knew he’d have friends’ funerals to attend and, really, he didn’t want to be alone, not after learning one of his favorite gay bars, Pulse, had become the scene of the worst massacre in modern American history.
So he checked into room 207 at Parliament House, Orlando’s biggest gay club and hotel, and has spent much of the rest of the week partying with friends at another gay bar in town.
Alexander, 30, said it was their way of sending a message to Omar Mateen, the man who had turned one of the city’s most popular gay nightspots into a killing zone.
“We’re still dancing,” Alexander said. “We won’t let him win.”
Across Orlando, mem-
bers of the LGBT community gathered in homes and clubs and community centers to mourn and swap stories of suffering. One man recalled the time a customer spit on him for being gay, and several sighed as they remembered high school. Some spoke of the historical predecessors of Sunday’s attacks, mainly the police raid at New York’s Stonewall Inn in 1969 that touched off a major riot — and the modern gay rights movement.
Most of all, they spoke about resilience — about moving beyond hate.
Rainbow flags flapped from lampposts across town and signs appeared proclaiming, “We are gay and here to stay!” Semitrucks full of donated water and clothes arrived at an LGBT center in Orlando.
Inside the center, past armed guards searching purses and asking for ID, stacks of dried flowers lined windows. Taped to one window was a picture of a heart drawn in purple crayon by a 3-year-old that read, “Love is love is love is love is love.”
As he helped organize donations Thursday morning, Corey Lyons’ mind raced with images of the 49 victims who died. Lyons, who leads Impulse, an HIV/AIDS prevention organization, said he didn’t know any of the victims personally, but recognized many of them from nights he’d spent at Pulse.
“The faces,” he said, wincing. “That’s the really haunting part.”
In conversations since the shooting, Lyons said he’s tried to nudge other members of the gay community toward activism. Despite recent advances, like the Supreme Court’s decision last year to grant gays and lesbians an equal right to marriage nationwide, Lyons said people should focus on what still needs to be done, especially in rural America.
“Stop the celebration and integrate back into the communities where people don’t have these rights,” Lyons said. “If you’re a lawyer who could be helping out a victim of discrimination in Mississippi, go there.”
He peeked down at his phone, which buzzed with emails, and rubbed his eyes, exhausted. He couldn’t stop thinking about a call he’d gotten earlier in the week. It came in broken English from a victim’s mother. She wanted to bury her son in something nice, she told him, but couldn’t afford a suit. She wondered if someone could help.
Back at Parliament House on Thursday morning, janitors wearing rainbow ribbons scrubbed down the tables and cleaned out rooms. The club was preparing to host an event called Unidos, using the Spanish word for united, to promote a Latin Night fundraiser for employees of Pulse.
Beneath glitter letters reading “GAY DAYS,” a small sign directed people in need of grief counseling to rooms 101 and 103. The club’s longtime dishwasher sat at a table near the pool staring blankly. He said he’d had the word “terrible” stuck in his head since Sunday.
Ian Miller, a bartender who lives part time in Orlando, dropped off his room key and headed to his car. He’d spent the last few days at the hotel — he picked it, he said, because it’s a gay-owned business — catching up with friends who escaped from Pulse after being held hostage.
“It was a hate crime, definitely,” he said. “Terror, just terror.”
Down the hallway, Alexander, the patron staying in room 207, and his friend, Lucas Cochlin, 21, considered what-if scenarios.
Alexander thought about what he would’ve liked to have said to two of his friends, Juan Ramon Guerrero and Luis Daniel WilsonLeon, who both died in the shooting.
He thought, too, of himself and how he had planned to go to the Latin Night that Pulse had been hosting on the evening of the attack, but decided against it at the last minute. He fidgeted nervously with the hoop ring in his septum as he explained that he now feels conflicted about skipping the party. He has a concealed-carry permit, he said, and often takes his 9-millimeter handgun with him.
“Maybe I could’ve …” he said, trailing off and shifting his thought. “Pulse was our haven — our safe space. Where else do we have? What is the world coming to?”
Cochlin shifted the conversation — he wanted to talk about happy memories of Pulse, especially Latin Night. The DJ blared salsa music, and many of the patrons — like the victims — were immigrants from Puerto Rico and Mexico. Still, Cochlin said, everyone felt welcome.
“Every time I went,” he said, “someone would drag me to the dance floor and teach a white boy like me to move like Shakira.”
He shimmied his hips a bit to the memory and smiled sadly.