LGBTQ+ communities of color saw progress
But even with increased acceptance, advocates say more work needed
Before June 12, 2016, Pulse Nightclub was a safe haven and sanctuary for LGBTQ+ communities of color, a place where people could freely express all facets of their identities and feel not just tolerated, but celebrated.
People would visit Pulse from all over the country. For locals, it was a place where many met their partners or took family members to show them the beauty and diversity of Orlando’s queer and trans community.
Pulse was the first nightclub Marco Antonio Quiroga, executive director of the Contigo Fund, visited — with a fake ID when he was 17, he said. It was the place he took his sister after coming out to her.
“Pulse was kind of known as the family club, like you would feel comfortable taking your sibling or someone that you’re close to, to have some type of interaction with your community and a better understanding of who you are and where you feel like you belong,” he said.
Black and brown Orlandoans were drawn to Pulse because it was a place they could consistently hear music from their cultures and see others who looked like them.
June 11 was Latin Night, and a lone gunman opened fire in the nightclub around 2 a.m. the next morning. As authorities released the names of the victims, it became apparent the majority of those killed were Black and Latinx people, primarily of Puerto Rican descent, with dozens more injured.
The 49 victims left indelible legacies and immense voids within queer and trans communities of color and Orlando as a whole.
In the five years since Pulse, members of Orlando’s Black and brown LGBTQ+ communities have seen great strides in acceptance and representation as the tragedy made the struggles and erasure of these communities apparent to a wider public. But advocates say true equality is still distant as state legislators pass laws that actively harm LGBTQ+ people of color and Black and brown queer and trans people continue to fight for representation, even within the larger LGBTQ+ community.
“The way that we can honor those individuals affected, impacted [by, and] who lost their lives at Pulse is by making sure that we are every single day, individually and collectively, trying to create a more affirming, more welcoming, inclusive, diverse and equitable Central Florida community,” said Daniel J. Downer, executive director of The Bros in Convo Initiative.
Greater acceptance after Pulse, but representation lacking
Through the heartache and sorrow of the Pulse nightclub massacre grew a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ people from the Black and Latinx communities, many advocates shared.
“Pulse, for the most part, really made the broader Black community understand, in some ways, the struggles of what it means to be a Black and brown LGBTQ+ person,” Downer said.
Ricardo Negrón Almodovar, a Pulse survivor and co-founder of Puerto Rican LGBTQ+ organization Del Ambiente, said the abruptness and scope of the tragedy humanized LGBTQ+ people to the larger Latinx community.
“It happened on Latin Night, and we cannot erase that because we were the target. But I think people felt that it could have happened anywhere else, too,” he said.
Prior to the mass shooting, Quiroga was not out to his older brother as gay. When he was young, his brother told him if Quiroga were gay, he would cut him off from his nieces and nephews because it wasn’t “morally right,” Quiroga said.
But those beliefs changed after Pulse when Quiroga said his brother saw the LGBTQ+ community in a new light. Quiroga came out to him, and his brother became an advocate for LGBTQ+ people, celebrating Pride month and promoting inclusive practices through his construction business, Quiroga said.
“That’s something that wasn’t possible, I would think, for us to have had that moment of breaching each other’s understanding if it wasn’t for Pulse and the conversation that was necessary to be had and started because of that tragedy,” he said.
In the immediate aftermath
of the Pulse shooting, diverse support organizations emerged as LGBTQ+ leaders of color worked to cultivate places to tend to the pain and needs of their communities, said Christopher Cuevas, co-founder and former executive director of QLatinx.
“There was, and is, still such a strong coalescing of people from broader Latinx communities, from broader LGBTQ communities, who want to hold space for queer and trans people that live at the intersection of these identities and work curating spaces to the needs of these communities,” Cuevas, who uses they/them pronouns, said.
Several local advocates said before the tragedy, there were zero Black and brownled LGBTQ+ organizations, but many emerged out of the longstanding need that became even more apparent after the Pulse shooting.
“Pulse shined a spotlight and shared a mirror image of what our community was lacking in terms of inclusiveness — and not only just inclusion [but] of true, authentic representation,” Quiroga said. “And today there’s much more authentic representation and authentic partnership.”
But even as Orlando’s LGBTQ+ community has taken steps toward greater diversity and inclusion, Black queer and trans people and organizations still feel left out of many spaces.
There are few Black LGBTQ+ groups locally, and many queer and trans Black people still feel othered within their communities and cisgender, heterosexual society as a whole. Outside Black communities, queer and trans BIPOC — Black, indigenous and people of color — also face racism and oppression.
“You’re a marginalized community within a marginalized community that belongs to other communities that don’t fully accept you,” said Angel Nelson, senior program manager of The Bros in Convo Initiative. Nelson identifies as nonbinary transfeminine and uses they/them pronouns.
Some members of the Black LGBTQ+ community feel they have been left out of conversations surrounding the Pulse tragedy, even five years later.
“An undertone in the Pulse story is thinking about how there were victims of Pulse that were Black LGBTQ+ folk, and how their stories became invisible and how it was almost like they were never there,” Downer said.
Charlotte “Cha-Cha” Davis, who worked at Pulse and serves as an advocate and mother figure for the Black queer and trans community, said the Black and Caribbean LGBTQ+ community has struggled to attract the same support that the Latinx community received after the tragedy.
Nine Black people died in the attack, Davis said, and she has seen little recognition of their stories.
“They did not get the same treatment nor did they get the same acknowledgment as those of the Latino community,” she said. “I don’t believe [the oversight] was intentional; I believe maybe that’s just the way that it happened.”
Demetrice Naulings, a Black man who survived the shooting but lost his best friend Eddie Justice, said he has similarly felt left out of initiatives to remember and memorialize Pulse for the past five years.
“They left me out of the loop,” he said.
Davis has dedicated herself to raising awareness of the experiences of Black and Caribbean victims and survivors of Pulse in the wake of the tragedy, creating the #WeExist movement to memorialize them and share information on issues affecting the Black LGBTQ+ community.
The movements for racial justice over the past year have echoed the need for progress and acceptance of Black members of the LGBTQ+ community, Downer and Davis said. To support them, local leaders and individuals should work to create environments where BIPOC feel safe and affirmed, and leaders of color should have access to resources to grow their support networks.
“We have to start not only having these conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion, but we have to move from just having the conversation to taking action,” Downer said.
Recent legislation actively harming community
Orlando is generally seen as an inclusive safe haven for people of all LGBTQ+ identities, advocates say, due in part to the city’s reckoning with the Pulse shooting’s targeted violence against the community.
But the city’s safe and welcoming environment does not extend to other parts of Florida, and state legislation has recently made Florida a more difficult place to live for members of the LGBTQ+ community, particularly Black and brown transgender people who experience higher rates of violence nationwide.
“As much as we can celebrate five years down the road all the accomplishments that we’ve been making, and particularly those led by and for LGBTQ people of color who have put their lives on the line to make those changes possible, we have to recognize that we need a lot more support because we’re also losing ground in many other areas,” Quiroga said.
In the past two weeks, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law banning transgender girls and women from competing in women’s sports and vetoed $900,000 in state funds for counseling for Pulse survivors and housing for homeless LGBTQ+ youth.
Advocates say the legislation banning trans athletes is rooted in transphobic and racist beliefs and point to statistics showing LGBTQ+ youth comprise a large proportion of the nation’s homeless youth and are at elevated risk for suicide, substance abuse issues and unemployment.
“It’s hard to imagine that five years after the worst hate crime against LGBTQ people in our country’s history that we would be under attack yet again in a different way,” said State Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, the first openly gay Latinx member of the Florida House. “... We can see that we have a lot of work to do, and that we need to continue to see even more marginalized communities join us in this work.”
Smith, D-Orlando, said his Democratic colleagues in Florida’s House and Senate united in opposition to the legislation banning female trans athletes in a show of solidarity that he believes would not have been possible before Florida’s reckoning with the Pulse shooting.
“To see it this year was really affirming of our work to build bridges and find support and advocacy outside of the LGBTQ community for our most vulnerable,” he said.
On a local and state level, advocates for Black and brown LGBTQ+ communities say they would like to see additional pipelines and support for Black and brown people to take leadership positions in the community, increased language access to LGBTQ+ health and social services for non-English speakers and improved resources for undocumented members of the community.
But Orlando’s LGBTQ+ communities of color are still healing from the impact of the Pulse tragedy even as they work toward a more inclusive future.
Healing does not come on a timeline, Cuevas said, and the trauma of the attack persists for survivors, victims’ families and those who responded to the tragedy immediately afterward and in the longer term.
“The long-term mental health care, the spiritual care, the hard work — heart work — that is needed to quell that pain is just that, it is lifelong,” they said. ”And it will take a lot of time, it will take a lot of patience and tenderness and also it’s going to take a tremendous amount of resources. And if the state is unwilling to be able to facilitate the provision of those resources, then it will have to fall on our community to do that and hope that our community is willing and able to step in where the DeSantis administration has failed.”