USA TODAY International Edition
GAY AND QUIET IN ORLANDO
Now police are on our side, but they’re no match for an angry man with an assault rifle
Central Florida in the mid- 1990s wasn’t a very friendly place to be different. But it was my home. Orlando’s Thornton Park neighborhood, about a mile north of Pulse Orlando, was the locus of the gay community, such as it was. Upper- class men and women lived together with their partners as roommates. A few gay- owned novelty and book shops dotted a tiny isthmus of a strip mall nearby. While browsing for something I shouldn’t have been looking for, I once ran into a high school teacher of mine. We averted our eyes and pretended we hadn’t seen each other.
I remember how gays who worked as performers at Walt Disney World would dress in red a few Saturdays every June. They’d invite their friends to the park for a day of music and dancing and Mickey. When “Gay Days” caught on, though, they became the subject of an intense controversy. I can actually remember, as a teenager, watching news reports where local moralists unctuously upbraided Disney for failing to warn “normal” parents that their children might see something unusual. And God forbid, what would happen to them if they accidentally wore red themselves?
SEPARATE AND SAFE
I’d hear reports about regular police sting operations targeting gay men who cruised Lake Eola and its surrounding park downtown. The neighboring Orange County Sheriff’s Office had a particularly disreputable set of practices. As time went on, more liberal politicians began to pay lip service to gay- rights causes, and some decent law enforcement officials tried to build bridges between the police and the gay community. Florida’s iconic gay ‘ burbs — Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale — were exceptions. Orlando is in the middle of the state, halfway between its cosmopolitan Northern South and its quite anterograde Southern North, but the Christian Coalition and local adjuncts exerted powerful influences over civic institutions. You could be gay and safe in Orlando, but you had to be separate and quiet.
My first job during high school allowed me some breathing space. I worked as an intern and then as an associate producer for WFTV Channel 9, the local ABC affiliate. I wasn’t out at school, but I decided to be out at work. I think my colleagues found it amusing. After helping to write the 6 p. m. newscast every Saturday night, I’d make a run to a Sub- way sandwich stop up the street. It’s a few blocks away from where Pulse Orlando was built. I had left the city for my adult life by the time the nightclub opened in 2004. The Orlando I knew wasn’t ready for such a vibrant expression of exuberant gay life, I guess. EMPATHY EXPANSION A legion of police officers stood sentry Sunday at the Los Angeles gay pride parade. Relations between “us” and “them” aren’t perfect, but police departments by and large have experienced the same degree of empathy expansion that catalyzed the acceptance of gay rights nationwide. These changes aren’t cosmetic. They’re essential. Gay people are targeted for violence because they are gay — frequently, even in big cities, even today. I can think of three violent assaults against gay men in West Hollywood this year alone. These crimes remain underreported.
In Orlando, the city that I knew is not the city that gays there know now. The police department appointed its first full- time gay liaison a few years ago. The mayor aggressively courts gay voters and, in 2014, the city council made it harder for businesses to discriminate against people based on gender identity. And I was struck when Orlando Police Department Chief John Mina proudly noted how one of his officers had been pulling an off- duty security shift at Pulse. When I was growing up there, officers could moonlight at the clubs, but they’d keep that a secret from their bosses. Now, the police proactively protect a community they once were indifferent to, at best. That is a sign of progress. It is a reason to be grateful.
But an officer with a 9 mm handgun cannot single- handedly fend off a human massacre machine, a deadly kluge of one man’s AR- 15 assault rifle and inchoate rage.