#- started a supporter's group for lgbt+ fans. and also tried to light the man's place of business on fire

[bo0bydrake]

i have got to emphasise on the fact that this is huge actually- gay rights in football is something that's just barely discussed. during the world cup in qatar, captains were banned from wearing a one love captain's band because it was too political (it was just a band with a rainbow heart on it), homophobia and racism is practically rooted in the songs sung during matches and there are no out players in the premier league, or more generally, there is only one (1) out player in the top leagues. having a character simply just,, be with another man and also a footballer in the premier league is a huge statement and will hopefully aid in trying to make football a better space.

#i listened to a podcast about why there are no out players in sports last year #and the conclusion was that it had to do with a lot of different factors #among them: the fans #take for example in the netherlands there's a hooligan group that roots for feyenoord. they threatened a fellow supporter who - #- started a supporter's group for lgbt+ fans. and also tried to light the man's place of business on fire #and in an away game to (albania i wanna say??) they brought banners that said they wanted him to die of hiv #mind you this is a FELLOW SUPPORTER #for the same club #and the songs supporters sing are a hell of a lot less tame than in ted lasso #homophobic racist antisemetic or islamophobic chants are just regular business in football matches #and in addition to that: locker room culture! #locker room culture in football and many other sports (with the men mostly) is toxic as hell! #there have been some efforts to try and nip this in the bud with trainings and seminars on diversity being given at youth clubs #but it's an issue in society as a whole that a lot of young men are just homophobic as FUCK #and i mean having a character on an acclaimed and popular show on tv/streaming right now could have a huge impact #esp on all the young ppl who'll see this thru fk tiktok and whatnot #im just really excited for what this will bring. and i hope it might do some good in football as a whole #ted lasso #colin hughes #ted lasso season 3

[gpsoftun]

And now, for a rant years in the making....

The longest thing I've ever written began because X-Men First Class was such a well-acted breath of fresh air. The dynamic between Charles, Raven, and Erik really captivated and inspired me. Enough to create an ongoing series that has had more good years than bad.

Unfortunately, starting with Days of Future Past, FC's legacy was sacrificed to the creatively bankrupt egos of the very production team that ruined the X-Men film series in the first place. This, along with the misandry/racism disguised as empowerment/diversity plaguing modern media, torpedoed what could have been an amazing series. James McAvoy pulled off the impossible by cementing himself as an iconic Charles Xavier on par with Patrick Stewart. After years of Ian McKellen's hammy one-dimensional villainy, the God's gift to acting that is Michael Fassbender emerged as the definitive Erik Lehnsherr. In Jennifer Lawrence's casting as Raven, the producers took an asinine, fanfic-esque concept like making Mystique Charles' adopted little sister and pulled it off so unbelievably beautifully. Despite their limited screentime, Alex, Hank, and Sean displayed more personality and likeability than any depiction of Jean and Storm across multiple films. However, moronic Brian Singer and Simon Kinberg could not wait to destroy all of FC's good will for their own agendas.

James McAvoy portrayed Charles as spirited and slightly mischievous yet highly intelligent, altruistic, nurturing, and self-sacrificing. Then the sequels tried in forced desperation to paint him as an overbearing, elitist misogynist and the one responsible for Raven and Jean's destructive abuse of power. Even though all he did was give them a home, make difficult choices in order to protect them and others, and brought both of them onto his team due to his personal relationships and trust in them. Because women are so strong and capable except when it comes to taking responsibility for their horrible choices. No, human flaws are strictly of the Y chromosome. Charles has been abandoned his entire life, received no real support, had his body and mind mangled because of his 'best friend', yet puts everyone before himself and always forgives the undeserving. Still, the producers and equally idiotic fandom reduces him to a spoiled white male with no concept of pain or hardship.

Through extensive research and dedication, Michael Fassbender put more into portraying Erik than, quite possibly, any actor taking on a comic book role. Erik is so worldly intelligent, handsome, sauve, and masculine to alpha levels, but with a pained vulnerability about him. FC is the ONLY film to paint him in this light. According to the sequels, Erik completely abandoned the friend/brother he crippled, couldn't hold his own team together for even a year, got captured by regular humans- the strategic nazi hunter got captured by REGULAR humans for ten years, betrayed his friends who freed him at the first opportunity, took no responsibility for the unforgivable things he did to Charles, abandoned his pregnant lover, almost ruined the lives of mutants everywhere by attempting a terrorist attack on TV, then ran off with his tail between his legs once thwarted. And that was only DoFP. In the next movies, he gave up his mutant identity completely, married a regular woman two seconds after declaring war on regular humans, was a pitiful excuse for a father who couldn't train his ONE mutant child to control her powers, got his family killed by his own past actions, then went on a murder spree with a lunatic that resulted in Charles' torture, Alex's death, and the destruction of the school- with the students being saved only by Peter's coincidental presence. I'm not even going to talk about that stupid phoenix movie. My blood pressure is already to the ceiling. No wonder Michael Fassbender grew to hate his character.

Speaking of hating their own character, even Jennifer Lawrence doesn't like how the warm, familial relationship between Raven and Charles deteriorated into something so cold and bitter. Raven abandoning her devoted brother is not only never properly addressed but the sequels want to pretend like it's Charles' fault they're estranged. Raven spends their every scene being a hostile, rude ingrate towards him right up until she's killed by that monotone wet rag they call Jean. Charles is willing to sacrifice his own life multiple times for Raven but she shows more regard for her attempted murderer Erik. So, I suppose the feminist message is that a protective, peace seeking, reasonable man is too controlling and toxic but a violent, unhinged, homicidal man is worthy to be praised. That phoenix movie sure thought so, considering they completely demolished Hank McCoy.

These movies also have no care or concern for life itself. The hellfire club slaughtered an entire facility full of people and killed Darwin yet Erik and Raven jumped to join them. Then, we're supposed to care that those monsters are dead by DoFP. Meanwhile, Sean and Alex's deaths are glossed over but Raven's is supposed to be tragic and meaningful.

That brings up yet another problem with this cursed series. Mutation is supposed to be an allegory for various prosecuted groups. The producers really wanted the live action mutants to be lgbt stand-ins. I can't even begin with how insulting that is. So, Magneto's the face of the gays, huh? Meaning if other people do anything but pledge absolute loyalty to that  lifestyle, gays will react with violence and destruction, willing to kill anyone- even their own-, who gets in their way. Also, those who believe the lgbt lifestyle will lead to inevitable chaos are proven right by X-Men execs. Mutants have caused massacres of government officials, killed their own family members during uncontrolled rages, and nearly doomed the planet too many times to count. This is what gays relate to? This?! This infantilized depiction as sadistic megalomaniacs?!

Overall, FC- as engaging as it was- is a mere anomaly in the grand scheme of the X-Movies. A dour, joyless, soulless catastrophe of unforgivable discontinuity, underdeveloped characters, multiple horrid actors, outrageous missed opportunities, and nonexistence ethics with a transparent, hypocritical agenda.

I started my fic in 2011 as a way of addressing the growing racial upheaval going on in the US at the time. Ten years later and things are infinitely worse than anything I could have predicted back then. There are no intelligent conversations to be had nor heroes to look up to. The entire entertainment industry has become a battleground for the war of identity politics. Not even just fandoms arguing amongst themselves but also Hollywood creators taking the time to be aggressively insulting and dismissive of their own fans. The flames of hatred are being fanned and everyone seems so blind to it.

#x men movies #x men first class #xmen days of future past #xmen apocalypse #dark phoenix #james mcavoy #Charles Xavier #charles xavier protection squad #charles xavier deserved better #michael fassbender #erik lehnsherr #jennifer lawrence #raven xavier #anti magneto #anti mystique #anti misandry #anti woke #anti brian singer #anti simon kinberg #anti dofp #i love charles xavier #pro man #professor x #pro dad #Charles Xavier love #found family feels

[yeonchi]

Thinking about the future of EDGN

I’ve never asked a lot out of my fans over the years, but to some of my close fans (you know who you are), I’d really appreciate some helpful advice because this is an important decision I’m making that will affect both you, the fans, and myself.

To cut a long story short for a tl;dr, I no longer enjoy posting about the voice languages in localised Japanese games because of some recent events and realisations and I want to retire from the English Dubbed Game News page altogether.

It’s been about five years since I started all this with the Koei Warriors Rant Series and since then, everything I’ve done that’s related to English dub has brought me nothing but hate. I know it’s a bit of an exaggeration and some of my close fans may have something to say to the contrary, but I’ve been feeling quite negative lately and because of that, I think it’s a brutally honest summary.

After ending the Dub Logistics series, I thought the one thing I could do to repay my fans for their support over the years was to continue posting on EDGN. Personally, I think I’ve done enough already and also, as I said in a post back in August, I’ve been having doubts about the future of the page and what I want to do with it given my current interests. There are several factors that led to me having these doubts, which I’ll be outlining after the break. (I can’t even put horizontal lines in my posts with the rich text editor now, thanks Tumblr)

1. I was never interested in any game outside of the Koei Warriors series or any game I played in the past (eg. Dissidia Final Fantasy).

This really shouldn’t be a surprise to my fans because in the past, I’ve rarely posted anything outside of the series I was interested in, including the aforementioned series. If I came across something by chance and liked it, then I would do some investigation into it, but these days, the spark just doesn’t want to light up anymore.

I’ve never really taken the chance to buy new games because my family doesn’t believe in buying things that aren’t important and as such, I took that mantra to heart. While I never brought a PS3, I did get a Nintendo Wii, but I traded it in later for a Wii U and not a PS4, which I still regret to this day. I pirated my PSP, DS and PC games (let’s face it, who doesn’t) and played with emulators on my computer. I only got a Steam account to play Team Fortress 2 (laggy though it was on my shitty computer) and I never brought anything from it, which made it difficult for me to add friends on there (not that they really cared in the end).

By extension, this applies to anime as well, which is the reason why I never post anything outside of the same few animes on the Waifu Network or on my Facebook pages. My belief on sexism in anime has also contributed to this disinterest; the only reason why I’m still posting the same few animes is because I’m still somewhat interested in them and I’m grateful for how they inspired some personal projects of mine.

2. Various factors have led me to lose interest in video games, including the Koei Warriors Series.

The reason why I started my dub crusade in the first place was because of Warriors Orochi 3 (Ultimate) and Samurai Warriors 4 not being dubbed. The reason why I decided to jump ship was because of Dynasty Warriors 9 being dubbed, just not with the same cast I had grown to love. I know that there were extenuating circumstances for the latter, but given everything that happened between that time, my hope that the old English voice cast (since Dynasty Warriors 4-6/Warriors Orochi 1-2) would return to voice that game (and other future games) was gone.

In addition to the previous factor, I started to find myself with more commitments than I had in past years, along with some different interests that I picked up along the way. At first, I didn’t feel like playing games because of my commitments, but eventually, it got to the point where I didn’t want to play most video games again because of the disappointment I’ve experienced from Koei Tecmo. Learning about all the things that AAA gaming companies do to reduce expenditure and increase revenue turned me off from video games as well. In my opinion, it wasn’t so much a boycott (per se) than it was a loss of interest.

3. The original group of people who inspired me to start writing these rants are now gone.

I know I’ve had other fans since the start of all this, but the original group had a special place in all this because of it. There were four people in the original group, who I met on Koei’s original Facebook page, and they were as follows:

The first one did comment on my older stuff, but he left quite early, possibly since DW8E’s release. I saw that he deactivated his account some time in 2017.

The second one had a YouTube channel and he was an admin on one of my Facebook pages for some time, but then he left after a period of inactivity without any explanation.

The third one was the more prominent because of his LGBT status and mental health issues. In the middle of 2015, he announced to everyone that he was deactivating his Facebook account because it was a burden on his mental health. He reactivated his account some time later, but he deactivated it again in September 2017 and hasn’t come back since. During that time, I saw a post from him stating that he was going to take a lot of pills and commit suicide. I reported it to Facebook in the hope that it might encourage him to find some help, even though I remember him stating that nothing works for him anymore. When I noticed that he hadn’t come back to Facebook months after he deactivated his account the second time, I assumed the worst.

The fourth one, also known as the family man or “the last one standing”, deactivated his account in June this year. We never really talked much, but as I said in this post, I’m still grateful to him for helping me find the new weapon and Musou information in DW8E when the Koei Wiki didn’t have it yet (because the game was just released at the time).

4. The impact of the feud’s aftermath still haunts me to this day.

When I agreed to end the feud on a mutual understanding a couple of years back, I promised myself that I would quickly move on from the troll behind it and not keep reminding myself of everything that happened. However, I’m a person that’s prone to anxiety when I think of worst-case-scenarios and at times, I found myself thinking about what would have happened had my Facebook account been deleted just because a troll couldn’t take the L when he got owned by someone half his age (compare that to Leafy who made terrible criticisms of people who are older than him, then claimed that he can hide behind the fact that he is younger than them). Him coming back out of nowhere earlier this year didn’t do any favours for anyone either. Regardless of that, I’ve got my bottom ground and I’ll continue to live on it regardless of what anyone else thinks of me.

I’d like to take a moment to digress and talk about cancel culture and political censorship. Because both parties in the feud weren’t exactly that popular (we had our own little fanbases, but that’s it), me and the other party “cancelling” each other (admittedly) didn’t seem to have as much an effect as we had hoped. Other factors that contributed to this could be that cancel culture (an extension to call-out culture) wasn’t that much of a thing two years ago and when the other party tried to cancel me, he made no attempt to spread the word to his fans. It was likely that he was trying to show mercy, but that doesn’t explain why he kept reporting my posts relating to him and current events in Hong Kong, knowing that I would eventually get banned if I didn’t call him out on it. I was as much a victim than I admittedly was an offender of cancel culture.

Following the feud, I’ve become wary of social media censorship because I experienced what it was like for someone to get petty and get people deplatformed by mass reporting them. Other pages like meme pages have suffered the same fate in the past (mostly because people take certain jokes too seriously), but despite my hopes, it didn’t seem like Facebook was going to do anything about the petty mass-reporting of those pages. Recently, however, I’ve been seeing news on tech companies being grilled over the censorship of conservatives and President Trump criticising them for the same thing. I’m not saying that I’m supporting Trump backing the pages that are being censored (conservative, far-right, alt-right, you name it), but I hope that this can hopefully extend to random meme pages being reported for petty reasons.

5. Ever since I decided to stop being toxic, I found myself conflicted when confronted with more toxic comments to the point that I’ve started to become paranoid over negative criticism.

When I decided to change the #NoDubNoBuy page to EDGN, I hoped that the hate towards my page would be reduced somewhat, but I never expected that it would be gone entirely. Since then, three people have made negative comments on the page; one was a girl who saw one of my posts being shared on a private group, misunderstood the (new) purpose of the page and despite her attitude, was still somewhat respectful, one was a Europoor dub hater from Spain (from what I’ve seen and learnt, Europeans tend to be sub fans and/or dub haters because of their English comprehension and ability to read subtitles) and one was an Americuck soyboy dub hater who pointed out about “crybaby fans” (”fans” as in the gatekeeping term “fake fans”, never mind my theory that people, especially men, who call other people, especially other men, “crybabies” are actually spreading toxic masculinity) who liked stuff to be Americanised but didn’t acknowledge the Japanese origins.

I’m gonna go off on a tangent and do a bit of an ad-homimem here (but it’s alright because I’m going to rebut his point next) and point out that I called the Americuck a soyboy because he had quite a long beard, but to be honest, if I called everyone who had beards “soyboys”, that would make people like Count Dankula and Sargon of Akkad “soyboys” as well, so it’d be a pretty slippery slope if I didn’t clarify who I was talking about.

Now, I’m going to move back on another tangent and rebut the soyboy’s point, because I think this is a pretty important point to address. No one is saying outright that they want Japanese games to be Americanised in terms of cultural references (if 4Kids has taught us anything). Saying that Americanisation is responsible for bad dubbing is a bit like blaming video games for causing violence. If someone says that they would like a game to be dubbed into English in localisation, then it is presumed that they want the dialogue to be dubbed in addition to the text being translated (or “dublated”). Any cultural changes made to the game or the dialogue are entirely the responsibility of those who made those changes, like the gaming companies who censor stuff for Western audiences, so if you’re complaining about a Japanese game being too “Americanised”, don’t take it out on dub fans because chances are that they didn’t want the dub to be too “Americanised” either.

Completing the square and going back to the original tangent, I didn’t post any of their comments to the dub hater comments album because I had deleted it after the feud in the hope that I wouldn’t be as toxic as I had been before. You can probably already see how toxic I would probably be if the above responses were posted on the page and directed back at them, which would mean that I’m not upholding myself to the standards I wanted to follow.

6. I’m becoming more and more concerned about current events to worry about things like English dubbing in video games.

If you’re someone who has unironically thought that I was making a big deal over something you thought was minor, then this is going to sound very ironic for you. From all these years of learning and research, I’ve attained an expansive world view and while I have made jokes about current events in the past to lighten the mood or express my anger, deep down I’m actually concerned about these things, particularly in regards to Hong Kong during this politically sensitive time.

For some reason, my desire to make posts has decreased because in addition to the above factors, I’ve been getting more and more worried about current affairs. Granted, the point of things like anime and video games and the Internet is to provide an escape from reality, but in the end, I guess that you have to face it whether you like it or not.

Making the decision to stop posting on EDGN hasn’t been an easy one, but all the factors I described above have gradually made it easier. Like the Undub page did, I had considered changing the focus of my page to merely report on the voice languages of games without saying whether we approve or reject it because it isn’t dubbed in English/Japanese; that is, we report on them with an unbiased viewpoint. Not adding excessively biased pro-dub comments on our posts has made it more neutral, but in the end, it didn’t stop the dub hater cucks. I should point out that one of the reasons why I wanted to change the #NoDubNoBuy page to EDGN was so that we could reduce the amount of hate we were getting.

What was the original goal of me starting this dub crusade? If you have read my rants in the past, then you will have picked up my hopes that Japanese games would be localised to the West with full Japanese and English dubbing and that if game companies couldn’t achieve that, then they should apologise and explain why. Would I say that I achieved or failed to achieve this goal? Not really, because over the years, I learnt a lot about the video game and voiceover industries and gradually realised that it’s not as straightforward as I had initially hoped. To be honest, it was kind of stupid of me to hope that gaming companies would say anything straightforward about this, but on the other hand, I learnt that gaming companies are like politicians as well; they say the things they want to say and not the things people want to hear.

To my fans, particularly my close fans, feel free to send me your opinions about my decision, however if you’re trying to change my mind, then I’m not sure if it can be changed so easily. If you think that I haven’t lived up to what you expect from me, then I’m sorry, but in the end, I have to think of myself as well.

If I could say one thing to the dub fanbase, I want to ask why no one else has ever tried to do something like EDGN. You have your groups and pages on social media and yet, it had to take two people pissed off with the dubbing direction of gaming companies to do it. Granted, that was how the Undub page started, with the lack of Japanese voices in localised games, and yet they didn’t get as much hate as my page did.

If there is anyone out there who wants to follow in my footsteps and make a page like EDGN, let me be the first to give you my blessing because I’m not going to be like the Undub page when they discovered us and point fingers for copying their posts when in the end, games are the same to everyone. While transparency regarding voice languages has increased over the years, there was never a place where dub fans could know about what games were dubbed in English. You don’t have to be like me and make a series of rants about why some games aren’t dubbed, because I’ve already done it, but instead, I suggest going the unbiased route as I stated earlier. Of course, you don’t have to follow my advice - it’s your page, after all.

My plan is to retire from EDGN at the end of the year. I have 12 more games in the backlog, all with English voices, and I’m hoping to post them all on the page before then. I probably won’t remove myself as an admin (because I think there’ll be some petty, obsessed cuck who’ll dig out my posts and make a rant series on me or something), but I’ll probably have it so that I can forget about the page as time goes on.

With this, my dub crusade has come to an end. Once again, to the fans, I’m sorry and I thank you for your support. As always, it is your choice as to whether you wish to continue following me, whether on Facebook or Tumblr, after my retirement.

#english dub #video games #japanese games #japanese voices

[bluethepaladin]

What do you have against Bex? (Can u also provide evidence thanks 💜)

When I first got this ask, I was tempted to play it off as a joke and say “the fact she exists,” and leave it at that. But I feel like it’s important to stay informed. And if you genuinely don’t know, I’ll give you the complete rundown. It’s long, it’s messy, and it’s nasty, so bear with me.

First, and introduction. When I talk about Bex, I’m referring to the actress Bex Taylor-Klaus, who is the voice actor (or VA) of the character Pidge in the show Voltron Legendary Defender on Netflix.

It all began a while ago when Bex liked a comment of a picture. The picture involved a ship called Shei//th. I censored the name so it doesn’t show up in the tags of that on tumblr. But essentially it’s a ship between two characters, Takashi Shirogane, a 25 year old pilot who is the leader of the team, and Keith Kogane, one of the other “paladins” or fighters on the team. People like me find this ship to be distasteful, since Shiro is an adult, and the others are teens (it’s actually a bit messier than that, since an official Voltron source listed Keith as 18, but the producers of the show, Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos, said they were not consulted on the book so there’s some question as to whether it’s canon or not). Either way, the consensus by most reasonable people is that it’s probably not a healthy thing to depict in children’s media, when you consider the considerable age difference, the power imbalance (leader, senior officer with someone they are in charge of), and finally, the iconic line by the character of Keith himself when he defines their relationship as a familial one.

Nonetheless, the ship persists, as nasty things on tumblr are wont to do. There’s a lot of shipping discourse on tumblr between two distinct groups which can be labelled as “antis”–people who are not in favor of any Shiro/paladin ships, or what has become to be known as “shaladins”–people who ship any variation of Shiro with the paladins.

Here is where Bex got involved. On Instagram there was a picture of a black shoe and a red shoe together and the joke was about the shoes being a prophecy that Shei//th would be canon. A joke, mostly, considering all the evidence above. But here’s where Bex got herself in trouble. She liked a comment on the picture where someone said “Keith is a power bottom confirmed.”

Obviously, this caused a bit of an uproar within the fanbase, especially between the discourse between antis and shaladins. Shaladins were celebrating that an Official Voltron Source liked their ship, and antis were angry about that acknowledgement of the ship at all by official sources, and the sexualization of a kid’s show (more on this later.)

So of course this sparked the discourse on tumblr. One user, @lancehunks, who was receiving asks about Bex, tagged her in the replies.They were definitely unfavorable. 

and 

and a few more. 

Bex, being the big strong, adult, woman she is, decided that she could not take this obviously grievous insult to her name [sarcasm], and decided to reblog them all and respond to them. Keep in mind, that @lancehunks was just 13 years old. And Bex (22) decided that these were appropriate responses:

Yep, you read that right. Not only an adult but employed on a kid’s show! To a 13 year old! The target audience of the very show she’s a part of! (Oh, the hypocrisy). But wait, there’s more:

Just in case you’re confused, let me tell you the many, many reasons why this is unacceptable. 

 Bex is an adult. You’d think she’d be a little more mature by now just in general. It’s the internet and there are trolls.

The person she was addressing was 13!!!! Do I think it was mature to tag Bex in all those posts? No. But it’s… behavior that you can expect from 13 year old’s on the internet. If we swore at and tore down every single one of them every time they did something dumb, we would need a lot more therapists for teens in the world. Plus it’s really disingenuous to pretend that we wouldn’t have done something similar when we were younger if we were in that position.

Bex is famous. While she’s certainly not on the caliber of massive A-List stars like Tom Holland or Zendaya, she has a fanbase that exceeds the normal person’s friend group. Just because she’s been on TV before, she has groupies that will support her no matter what, who will troll for her, who uncritically and unconditionally worship her. I’m not a Bex fan, nor do I really care to know her well enough to know just exactly how many fans she has, to be certain she does have them. When she publicly reblogged those words, that “motherfucker,” those fighting words, she weaponized her fanbase. What I mean when I say that is her behavior gave her groupies permission to behave the same way. By targeting someone who didn’t like her (a thirteen year old!!!!!), she opened the gates to her fans and groupies doing the same thing, to a kid.

This lead to some terrible things happening. The 13 year old was getting death threats, sexual violence threats, and nsfw content, all because Bex just couldn’t let it go. 

What does this mean? Finish it? Finish the kid? If you’re so sick of the fighting, then why did you even respond in the first place? Bex is the one who escalated the situation. Bex is the one who caused the fighting in the first place (by that I mean the fighting between the two that night, the fighting between antis and shaladins has been going on for as long as the show).

There we go. Now he have something resembling dignity. But unfortunately the damage was done, and user @lancehunks deleted their blog. As a direct response to Bex’s actions. Bex caused a 13 year old to leave tumblr. 

When hearing this news, Bex offered a half-assed apology:

This is the most insincere apology I have ever seen. “The internet has Bad things on it and it’s YOUR fault for seeing them” is not an apology. The best part is that she’s a big fat hypocrite. “Sometimes, when it’s harmless, the best thing I can do is shake my head and keep scrolling.” So why didn’t you Bex? Why didn’t you keep scrolling instead of targeting a 13 year old?

In light of recent political events, though there’s one thing that stands out to me: 

Sound like anybody you know? The esteemed President, perhaps?

*disclaimer* I am in no way claiming that Bex is a Trump supporter. I don’t know enough about her–and I don’t want to know enough about her–to know where she leans politically. I’m just drawing the attention to the similarities in moral equivalency going on, here.*

Sure you targeted a 13 year old and weaponized your fanbase, but someone tagging you in a snarky post is just as bad, right? (Wrong.)

You’d think that would be the end. You’d think that Bex would be capable of living and learning, or maybe even just taking her own advice, and keep scrolling. But here we go again.

The next bit of drama started when the possibly canon guide book was released, stating Keith’s age as 18. There was a big celebration on the shaladin side because technically, that would make it “legal” for Keith and Shiro to have sex. Besides the fact that legal ≠ moral, again, Voltron is a kid’s show. But on tumblr this time, Bex posted this.

This time, the discourse surrounding Bex was a little different., This time, the discourse mostly focused on the fact that even if Shiro and Keith disregarded canon and morals and the fact that it’s a kid’s show ever did get in a relationship, the only thing that matters is how they like to have sex.

This is a problem for a lot of reasons. There’s a culture, pretty prominent on tumblr of women, mostly white, who are obsessed with gay sex. They write fanfiction and p*rn solely for their own personal gratification. This, of course, is a gross misinterpretation to wanting LGBT+ representation. If you aren’t a mlm (an acronym for men-loving-man, that includes many sexualities) then writing p*rn about is sexualizing them, using them as a tool to get yourself off, and not like complex human people. Mlm are more than how they like to have sex. In fact, that shouldn’t be a part of a discussion for anybody except between willing partners. This also feeds into the popular and damaging stereotype that gay men are predatory by nature.

So, as a whole, not good. 

And again, we have a whole situation escalated by Bex. The worst part is, to people who tried to explain this to her, the only response they were given was a gif:

So once again, a minor dared to express their distaste for Bex on tumblr. But this time, they didn’t tag her. This time, they censored her name. But Bex found it anyway. And she decided to do the exact same thing that led to a minor leaving the website, and to stop watching the show. 

Have no fear, this time though. This time, Bex is going after a 14 year old, at least she’s not going after kids anymore, right? [sarcasm]

Some final notes. 

Bex claims to be an LGBT+ rights activist. I’m also pretty sure she’s a lesbian herself (again, I already know too much about her, I’m not looking to get to know her better.) So, you’d think, as someone who wants equality for LGBT+ people and communities, she’d have the wherewithal to listen to specific subsets of that group when they say something about themselves, like, for example, young mlm who don’t appreciate being sexualized by a white woman. So I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when I saw this on her blog:

Now, I happen to agree with the above statement, but it’s so ironic, so hypocritical that Bex is talking about the sexualization of anything. Because kid’s shows aren’t safe from her sexualization and mlm certainly aren’t. How can one person be so incredibly oblivious? A mystery that I don’t have any interest in solving. 

I also want to address something a little more devious and a little more dark. I personally know of at least 12 different people who sent Bex asks, politely explaining some of the things I’ve talked about here, or relaying how her words hurt them personally. Bex never answered any of them. But she did answer this:

Just to be perfectly clear, I do not condone or encourage hatemail. Do not send people anything wishing them death or harm in any way. I have never sent nor do plan on sending hatemail, and you should be ashamed of yourself if you do.

However, this is incredibly nefarious. Bex doesn’t answer any of the many asks she got that were polite, but proved her wrong. She didn’t answer any of the young mlm who gave her their personal stories and who weren’t anonymous. Instead, she publishes this. And she did this on purpose, to make her look innocent, to make her look like she’s the one being attacked. I get hatemail every single day too. Things along similar lines to this. I block the user. Delete them, One, because I don’t want to expose my followers to that kind of negativity on a daily basis, two, a mature person knows that deleting them is the best kind of revenge because the user will be constantly looking for a response and they will know they had no effect on me and three, because if you do that, eventually they stop. This is intentional on Bex’s part to make the people who don’t like her look bad. I don’t like Bex at all, and I certainly do not support that message. Any reasonable person wouldn’t. Also the fact that it’s an anonymous message adds a certain air of doubt as to who sent it. 

The point is, Bex is purposely ignoring polite and well-meaning people and posted this to “prove” she’s the one on the “good” side because no good person would send that message.

This is also worth noting: 

This was posted after the lancehunks debate but before the power bottom comment she made. In this post, Bex admits that a relationship between Shiro and any of the paladins is predatory in nature. She said that. Her words. And then after that she said that Keith was a power bottom. 

The last thing I want to say, is that Voltron is a kid’s show. It’s rated US-TV-Y7. Which means for years 7 and older. Regardless of the ship, there should be no sexual content, be it fanart, of fanfiction of Voltron characters at all. We are all collectively responsible for keeping content age-appropriate for the target audience. So, stop it. All and any ships. 

For minors, this is my advice to you:Bex is a predator, a hypocrite, and a liar. Do not engage with her. Block her. Do not tag her in any of your posts. She has a history of targeting minors. Protect yourself. Do not engage.

#Unlike Bex I take my own advice and I have blocked her so she can't target me #but you never know with these ones #she can find a way #bex taylor klaus #anti bex #anti bex taylor klaus #voltron legendary defender #long post #anti shaladin #bexcourse

[repwincoml4a0a5]

For Those We Lost And Those Who Survived: The Pulse Massacre One Year Later

The pain of June 12 still pangs just as palpably today for Mayra Alvear as it did one year ago.

It’s been twelve months since Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub during Pride month 2016 and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle in a three-hour rampage that left 49 people dead – including Alvear’s youngest daughter, Amanda.

It was the worst mass shooting in modern American history, occurring on the LGBTQ club’s Latin night – a targeted attack against queer people of color that sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ community globally.

The time between then and now has held unimaginable grief for many – a daily struggle to make sense of the lives taken and the level of sheer horror and hate that permeated Pulse that morning. 

And for Alvear and countless others, that grief has now been harnessed and channeled into a resolute mission: to be a voice for those who were lost ― to ensure that their loved ones are never forgotten, and to bring awareness to the culture of violence and deep-seated bigotry towards minorities permeating the fabric of the United States.

“I have to keep fighting for her memory ― that she’s not forgotten, that her death isn’t in vain,” Alvear told HuffPost. “There is so much love out there. I want the legacy of these kids to be that. To show the world that [being LGBTQ] is more than a label – these are people that were loved, they were caring, they were human and these hate crimes are just totally uncalled for. Unnecessary. We are here because God created us and he created us all equal – and some people don’t seem to have this kind of vision. I don’t know what kind of world they want to live in.”

Those who survived.

The Pulse shooting shook multiple communities – and those who exist at their intersections – to their cores. It raised countless questions about modern-day homophobia – including internalized – transphobia, gun violence, racism, Islamophobia and the human capacity for evil.

While the country and LGBTQ people around the world mourned, attended vigils, created art, and processed their grief in their own ways, a new reality and all-encompassing landscape of heartbreak faced the city of Orlando. 

Those who survived found themselves profoundly and irreversibly changed.

“The first couple of days in the hospital was a very hard time for me,” Patience Carter, a survivor whose cousin Akyra Murray died in Pulse, told HuffPost. “I was in a really bad place. The experience initially traumatized me in a way that made me feel as if living was a privilege that I didn’t deserve. I was angry with God because I was just like, why would you leave me here in this situation knowing that all of these other people didn’t make it? I felt like I didn’t deserve the opportunity to live.”

Those who made it out of Pulse alive still grapple with intense survivor’s guilt; many saw their friends and loved ones die before their own eyes ― or held them in their arms as they took their last breaths.

A number of the survivors, like Carter, were trapped in the bathroom stalls of Pulse for hours, hearing others die around them until police eventually entered the club using explosives at 5:02 a.m., killing Mateen after a chaotic shootout.

Carter credits her survival to a man named Jason Josaphat who shielded her from gunfire while hiding in the bathroom.

“He basically covered my body with his,” she said. “The guy shot his gun and I heard [Jason] scream. Then the police busted through the wall.”

But for Carter and others who walked or were carried out of Pulse alive that morning, survival also comes with a heavy sense of responsibility.

Angel Colon, one of the survivors who received significant media visibility in the year since the tragedy, was shot six times during Mateen’s rampage. He underwent his fourth surgery less than a month ago and continues to rely on a cane as he learns to walk again.

“I started thinking to myself, you know I can’t stay in a room with the doors closed and thinking about this night over and over again and be depressed,” Colon told HuffPost. “I have to do something about it – I have to speak out about it. After seeing the love and support, I thought to myself ‘I need to do that as well for the other survivors. I need to make sure that we’re all together and do this together.’ So I decided to be a voice.”

Colon has used his new platform to speak out about common sense gun legislation and violence against LGBTQ people. His voice joins a chorus of organizations that have sprung up in the wake of Pulse at the intersection of these two issues, like Gays Against Guns, a group that uses street performance to raise awareness about flawed gun control laws and its convergence with homophobia.

Authorities discovered after Pulse that Mateen was questioned about potential ties to terrorism in 2013 and 2014 and placed on a terrorist watch list. He was eventually taken off the list ― but even if his name had been on that list in 2016, he still would have been able to buy the guns used during his rampage under current American gun laws.

The immediate aftermath of Pulse also shed light on the unfair, homophobic regulations surrounding blood donation in the United States. There was an urgent and pressing need for blood to save the lives of queer people after Pulse, but men who have sex with men must remain celibate for a year in order to be eligible for donation.

As a result, Colon now also advocates alongside fellow survivor Tony Marrero for OneBlood, a nonprofit committed to providing safe, available and affordable blood, particularly in moments of crisis. 

What spaces are truly safe?

For Marreno, witnessing continued events of large-scale violence in spaces of entertainment and amusement are particularly difficult in the wake of Pulse.

He and Carter both told HuffPost that the recent attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, U.K. hit devastatingly close to home.

“I had a breakdown,” Marrero said. “That hit me hard not just because a lot of people got hurt, but we’re talking about an Ariana Grande concert! Most of her fans and followers are kids – what are we talking about here? Now I can’t even go out and enjoy a concert?”

The conversation about “safe spaces” for vulnerable individuals and their ties to high-impact acts of violence tends to move center stage following tragedies like Pulse and Manchester.

LGBTQ people have always had to carve out space for themselves in a world not designed for them to survive and prosper and, in many situations, gay bars have served as those safe spaces. Because of this, for many LGBTQ people, the physical venue of the Pulse tragedy felt like a shooting in their own home. 

And while queer people knew that the attack on Pulse was one rooted in homophobia from the second it happened, many people and some media tried to push back and erase the targeted nature of the massacre against queer Latinx individuals. It wasn’t until Mateen’s father told media that his son was angered by the sight of two men kissing – that he wasn’t motivated by religion – that the narrative started to change on a larger scale.

“[Pulse] came down to this sort of discussion about safe space that we had been having for awhile,” queer performer and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” finalist Sasha Velour told HuffPost. “That term had been used so loosely and all of the sudden the Pulse tragedy made it feel really urgent and really tangible – like not an emotional safe space but a real physical need to have a space where queer bodies, especially the bodies of queer people of color and especially Latinos, need to be protected and centered.”

This centering of the experiences of queer Latinx people in the discussion about Pulse is crucial, as mainstream media in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy largely ignored and erased the fact that over 90% of those killed were LGBTQ people of color.

For actor Wilson Cruz, who lost a family member in the tragedy, this erasure of the targeted nature of the attack on queer people of color proved especially frustrating – and ultimately informed his decision to become part of the conversation about what happened at Pulse.

“Most of [the victims] were Puerto Ricans and were part of an exodus from the island because of the financial and economic turmoil that faced Puerto Rico, who came to Orlando in order to find a better life,” Cruz told HuffPost. “That part of the story wasn’t being told, and so I started to speak out about what happened and to pay tribute to them because I thought that was a big part of the story that was being missed.”

Starting to heal

In the days following the tragedy, local Orlando LGBTQ leaders also quickly learned how ill-prepared they were to meet the specific needs of their Latinx community members.

Queer people in Orlando and their families who were either undocumented or didn’t speak English already faced a number of challenges in day-to-day life ― things like access to resources and adequate mental health care ― and saw these disparities further exacerbated immediately following Pulse.

“Pulse happened and we realized we were missing a segment of our community – we didn’t have a Spanish-speaking person here every single day, so if somebody walked in that just spoke Spanish, we were not able to service that person or help that person with what they needed,” Terry DeCarlo, Executive Director of The LGBT Center of Central Florida, told HuffPost, adding that they’ve changed their curriculum and plan to open a new office staffed entirely by Hispanic individuals. “There were things that we learned out of this and changed, but groups like QLatinx, which is one of the main ones that came out of [Pulse], they are doing amazing things.”

Organizations like QLatinx found financial support in the immediate aftermath of Pulse from groups like Contigo Fund, a foundation that also grew out of the tragedy and funds organizations dedicated to the healing, strengthening and empowerment of LGBTQ and Latinx people in the Central Florida area.

Marco Quiroga, Contigo Fund Program Director, told HuffPost that prior to the massacre, most nonprofits have been working in silos. “There was a lot of duplication of services,” he said. “Florida is fiftieth in the country for mental health care and one of the biggest flare ups that we saw after the tragedy was the fact that there were zero LGBTQ-competent and linguistically competent mental health services available to the individuals who were impacted directly ― and the broader community who has been traumatized by the tragedy.”

In the months since, these organizations, as well as others like Hispanic Federation and Proyecto Somos Orlando, have worked to fill the gaps in access to resources and care for these communities, as well as pushing established LGBTQ centers and nonprofits to broaden their scope.

Compassion begins with education. 

Other groups and services that have emerged focus on the need for comprehensive education about LGBTQ issues and experiences in order to change hearts and minds and encourage empathy.

The Dru Project is one of these organizations, created by the friends of Drew Leinonen, a 32-year-old gay man who died in Pulse along with his boyfriend, Juan Guerrero. The group’s focus is on Gay Straight Alliances in high schools, developing a curriculum for these high school groups to adopt and also to provide scholarships.

For the founders of The Dru Project, it is crucial to provide safe spaces in schools for LGBTQ students and to encourage empathetic attitudes towards queer kids in public schools from a young age.

Leinonen’s mother, Christine, has since become a “mom mascot” of sorts for the group and has evolved into an outspoken advocate for gay rights and gun safety. She also spoke onstage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention about the loss of her son.

“One good thing that has come out of the tragedy is ― I always thought I was a loving, kind compassionate person but as a result of losing my son in this violent way, I have developed a level of compassion that is deeper than I thought was humanly possible,” Leinonen told HuffPost. “[And] I have a constant message for parents, period, to love their children exactly as they come to them.”

The fight continues.

This need to focus on education, on changing hearts and minds when it comes to LGBTQ identity and experiences ― as well as the experiences of all minority groups ― from an early age is a common thought echoed among survivors, family members and activists who experienced Pulse and its aftermath.

Horror will continue to occur and constantly be reinvented in new and unspeakable ways until the roots of the problems surrounding Pulse ― namely, socialized bigotry and prejudice from a young age and rampant gun violence ― are addressed and dismantled.

And yet, since that fateful day, we have new challenges to face, including a president and administration which, at best, ignore queer people and, at worst, refuse to protect them. But one thing is certain: the fight for equality of all human beings continues and is bolstered by the memory of those who we lost on June 12.

Pulse nightclub is now in the process of becoming a memorial site. As Alvear notes, “Forty years from here, whoever visits [Pulse], they will know that it happened ― and that love will always conquer everything.”

And for Brandon Wolf, a survivor and co-founder of The Dru Project, reflecting on Pulse, the memorial site, and the twelve months since the tragedy has left him with a call to action.

“We are never in a place where we can stop demanding equality, where we can stop challenging people to be better than they were yesterday,” he told HuffPost. “We have a long way to go. And if Pulse serves as any reminder, it’s that we aren’t done fighting. We are never done fighting until every last person in this world is accepted and loved for who they are. I’m certainly not going to stop fighting and I hope you don’t either.”

What follows are the names of the 49 victims who died in the Pulse Nightclub Massacre. Rest in power.

Stanley Almodovar III, 23

Amanda L. Alvear, 25 

Oscar A. Aracena Montero, 26 

Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33

Antonio Davon Brown, 29 

Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 

Angel Candelario-Padro, 28 

Juan Chavez Martinez, 25 

Luis Daniel Conde, 39 

Cory James Connell, 21 

Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 

Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 

Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31 

Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 

Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 

Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, 22 

Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 

Paul Terrell Henry, 41 

Frank Hernandez, 27 

Miguel Angel Honorato, 30

Javier Jorge Reyes, 40 

Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 

Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30

Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25 

Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 

Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 

Brenda Marquez McCool, 49 

Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25 

Kimberly Jean Morris, 37 

Akyra Monet Murray, 18 

Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, 20 

Geraldo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25 

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 

Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 

Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 

Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 

Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, 27 

Xavier Emmanuel Serrano-Rosado, 35 

Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 

Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, 24

Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34

Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 

Martin Benitez Torres, 33

Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24 

Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37 

Luis Sergio Vielma, 22 

Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, 50 

Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37

Jerald Arthur Wright, 31 

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[chpatdoorsl3z0a1]

For Those We Lost And Those Who Survived: The Pulse Massacre One Year Later

The pain of June 12 still pangs just as palpably today for Mayra Alvear as it did one year ago.

It’s been twelve months since Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub during Pride month 2016 and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle in a three-hour rampage that left 49 people dead – including Alvear’s youngest daughter, Amanda.

It was the worst mass shooting in modern American history, occurring on the LGBTQ club’s Latin night – a targeted attack against queer people of color that sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ community globally.

The time between then and now has held unimaginable grief for many – a daily struggle to make sense of the lives taken and the level of sheer horror and hate that permeated Pulse that morning. 

And for Alvear and countless others, that grief has now been harnessed and channeled into a resolute mission: to be a voice for those who were lost ― to ensure that their loved ones are never forgotten, and to bring awareness to the culture of violence and deep-seated bigotry towards minorities permeating the fabric of the United States.

“I have to keep fighting for her memory ― that she’s not forgotten, that her death isn’t in vain,” Alvear told HuffPost. “There is so much love out there. I want the legacy of these kids to be that. To show the world that [being LGBTQ] is more than a label – these are people that were loved, they were caring, they were human and these hate crimes are just totally uncalled for. Unnecessary. We are here because God created us and he created us all equal – and some people don’t seem to have this kind of vision. I don’t know what kind of world they want to live in.”

Those who survived.

The Pulse shooting shook multiple communities – and those who exist at their intersections – to their cores. It raised countless questions about modern-day homophobia – including internalized – transphobia, gun violence, racism, Islamophobia and the human capacity for evil.

While the country and LGBTQ people around the world mourned, attended vigils, created art, and processed their grief in their own ways, a new reality and all-encompassing landscape of heartbreak faced the city of Orlando. 

Those who survived found themselves profoundly and irreversibly changed.

“The first couple of days in the hospital was a very hard time for me,” Patience Carter, a survivor whose cousin Akyra Murray died in Pulse, told HuffPost. “I was in a really bad place. The experience initially traumatized me in a way that made me feel as if living was a privilege that I didn’t deserve. I was angry with God because I was just like, why would you leave me here in this situation knowing that all of these other people didn’t make it? I felt like I didn’t deserve the opportunity to live.”

Those who made it out of Pulse alive still grapple with intense survivor’s guilt; many saw their friends and loved ones die before their own eyes ― or held them in their arms as they took their last breaths.

A number of the survivors, like Carter, were trapped in the bathroom stalls of Pulse for hours, hearing others die around them until police eventually entered the club using explosives at 5:02 a.m., killing Mateen after a chaotic shootout.

Carter credits her survival to a man named Jason Josaphat who shielded her from gunfire while hiding in the bathroom.

“He basically covered my body with his,” she said. “The guy shot his gun and I heard [Jason] scream. Then the police busted through the wall.”

But for Carter and others who walked or were carried out of Pulse alive that morning, survival also comes with a heavy sense of responsibility.

Angel Colon, one of the survivors who received significant media visibility in the year since the tragedy, was shot six times during Mateen’s rampage. He underwent his fourth surgery less than a month ago and continues to rely on a cane as he learns to walk again.

“I started thinking to myself, you know I can’t stay in a room with the doors closed and thinking about this night over and over again and be depressed,” Colon told HuffPost. “I have to do something about it – I have to speak out about it. After seeing the love and support, I thought to myself ‘I need to do that as well for the other survivors. I need to make sure that we’re all together and do this together.’ So I decided to be a voice.”

Colon has used his new platform to speak out about common sense gun legislation and violence against LGBTQ people. His voice joins a chorus of organizations that have sprung up in the wake of Pulse at the intersection of these two issues, like Gays Against Guns, a group that uses street performance to raise awareness about flawed gun control laws and its convergence with homophobia.

Authorities discovered after Pulse that Mateen was questioned about potential ties to terrorism in 2013 and 2014 and placed on a terrorist watch list. He was eventually taken off the list ― but even if his name had been on that list in 2016, he still would have been able to buy the guns used during his rampage under current American gun laws.

The immediate aftermath of Pulse also shed light on the unfair, homophobic regulations surrounding blood donation in the United States. There was an urgent and pressing need for blood to save the lives of queer people after Pulse, but men who have sex with men must remain celibate for a year in order to be eligible for donation.

As a result, Colon now also advocates alongside fellow survivor Tony Marrero for OneBlood, a nonprofit committed to providing safe, available and affordable blood, particularly in moments of crisis. 

What spaces are truly safe?

For Marreno, witnessing continued events of large-scale violence in spaces of entertainment and amusement are particularly difficult in the wake of Pulse.

He and Carter both told HuffPost that the recent attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, U.K. hit devastatingly close to home.

“I had a breakdown,” Marrero said. “That hit me hard not just because a lot of people got hurt, but we’re talking about an Ariana Grande concert! Most of her fans and followers are kids – what are we talking about here? Now I can’t even go out and enjoy a concert?”

The conversation about “safe spaces” for vulnerable individuals and their ties to high-impact acts of violence tends to move center stage following tragedies like Pulse and Manchester.

LGBTQ people have always had to carve out space for themselves in a world not designed for them to survive and prosper and, in many situations, gay bars have served as those safe spaces. Because of this, for many LGBTQ people, the physical venue of the Pulse tragedy felt like a shooting in their own home. 

And while queer people knew that the attack on Pulse was one rooted in homophobia from the second it happened, many people and some media tried to push back and erase the targeted nature of the massacre against queer Latinx individuals. It wasn’t until Mateen’s father told media that his son was angered by the sight of two men kissing – that he wasn’t motivated by religion – that the narrative started to change on a larger scale.

“[Pulse] came down to this sort of discussion about safe space that we had been having for awhile,” queer performer and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” finalist Sasha Velour told HuffPost. “That term had been used so loosely and all of the sudden the Pulse tragedy made it feel really urgent and really tangible – like not an emotional safe space but a real physical need to have a space where queer bodies, especially the bodies of queer people of color and especially Latinos, need to be protected and centered.”

This centering of the experiences of queer Latinx people in the discussion about Pulse is crucial, as mainstream media in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy largely ignored and erased the fact that over 90% of those killed were LGBTQ people of color.

For actor Wilson Cruz, who lost a family member in the tragedy, this erasure of the targeted nature of the attack on queer people of color proved especially frustrating – and ultimately informed his decision to become part of the conversation about what happened at Pulse.

“Most of [the victims] were Puerto Ricans and were part of an exodus from the island because of the financial and economic turmoil that faced Puerto Rico, who came to Orlando in order to find a better life,” Cruz told HuffPost. “That part of the story wasn’t being told, and so I started to speak out about what happened and to pay tribute to them because I thought that was a big part of the story that was being missed.”

Starting to heal

In the days following the tragedy, local Orlando LGBTQ leaders also quickly learned how ill-prepared they were to meet the specific needs of their Latinx community members.

Queer people in Orlando and their families who were either undocumented or didn’t speak English already faced a number of challenges in day-to-day life ― things like access to resources and adequate mental health care ― and saw these disparities further exacerbated immediately following Pulse.

“Pulse happened and we realized we were missing a segment of our community – we didn’t have a Spanish-speaking person here every single day, so if somebody walked in that just spoke Spanish, we were not able to service that person or help that person with what they needed,” Terry DeCarlo, Executive Director of The LGBT Center of Central Florida, told HuffPost, adding that they’ve changed their curriculum and plan to open a new office staffed entirely by Hispanic individuals. “There were things that we learned out of this and changed, but groups like QLatinx, which is one of the main ones that came out of [Pulse], they are doing amazing things.”

Organizations like QLatinx found financial support in the immediate aftermath of Pulse from groups like Contigo Fund, a foundation that also grew out of the tragedy and funds organizations dedicated to the healing, strengthening and empowerment of LGBTQ and Latinx people in the Central Florida area.

Marco Quiroga, Contigo Fund Program Director, told HuffPost that prior to the massacre, most nonprofits have been working in silos. “There was a lot of duplication of services,” he said. “Florida is fiftieth in the country for mental health care and one of the biggest flare ups that we saw after the tragedy was the fact that there were zero LGBTQ-competent and linguistically competent mental health services available to the individuals who were impacted directly ― and the broader community who has been traumatized by the tragedy.”

In the months since, these organizations, as well as others like Hispanic Federation and Proyecto Somos Orlando, have worked to fill the gaps in access to resources and care for these communities, as well as pushing established LGBTQ centers and nonprofits to broaden their scope.

Compassion begins with education. 

Other groups and services that have emerged focus on the need for comprehensive education about LGBTQ issues and experiences in order to change hearts and minds and encourage empathy.

The Dru Project is one of these organizations, created by the friends of Drew Leinonen, a 32-year-old gay man who died in Pulse along with his boyfriend, Juan Guerrero. The group’s focus is on Gay Straight Alliances in high schools, developing a curriculum for these high school groups to adopt and also to provide scholarships.

For the founders of The Dru Project, it is crucial to provide safe spaces in schools for LGBTQ students and to encourage empathetic attitudes towards queer kids in public schools from a young age.

Leinonen’s mother, Christine, has since become a “mom mascot” of sorts for the group and has evolved into an outspoken advocate for gay rights and gun safety. She also spoke onstage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention about the loss of her son.

“One good thing that has come out of the tragedy is ― I always thought I was a loving, kind compassionate person but as a result of losing my son in this violent way, I have developed a level of compassion that is deeper than I thought was humanly possible,” Leinonen told HuffPost. “[And] I have a constant message for parents, period, to love their children exactly as they come to them.”

The fight continues.

This need to focus on education, on changing hearts and minds when it comes to LGBTQ identity and experiences ― as well as the experiences of all minority groups ― from an early age is a common thought echoed among survivors, family members and activists who experienced Pulse and its aftermath.

Horror will continue to occur and constantly be reinvented in new and unspeakable ways until the roots of the problems surrounding Pulse ― namely, socialized bigotry and prejudice from a young age and rampant gun violence ― are addressed and dismantled.

And yet, since that fateful day, we have new challenges to face, including a president and administration which, at best, ignore queer people and, at worst, refuse to protect them. But one thing is certain: the fight for equality of all human beings continues and is bolstered by the memory of those who we lost on June 12.

Pulse nightclub is now in the process of becoming a memorial site. As Alvear notes, “Forty years from here, whoever visits [Pulse], they will know that it happened ― and that love will always conquer everything.”

And for Brandon Wolf, a survivor and co-founder of The Dru Project, reflecting on Pulse, the memorial site, and the twelve months since the tragedy has left him with a call to action.

“We are never in a place where we can stop demanding equality, where we can stop challenging people to be better than they were yesterday,” he told HuffPost. “We have a long way to go. And if Pulse serves as any reminder, it’s that we aren’t done fighting. We are never done fighting until every last person in this world is accepted and loved for who they are. I’m certainly not going to stop fighting and I hope you don’t either.”

What follows are the names of the 49 victims who died in the Pulse Nightclub Massacre. Rest in power.

Stanley Almodovar III, 23

Amanda L. Alvear, 25 

Oscar A. Aracena Montero, 26 

Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33

Antonio Davon Brown, 29 

Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 

Angel Candelario-Padro, 28 

Juan Chavez Martinez, 25 

Luis Daniel Conde, 39 

Cory James Connell, 21 

Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 

Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 

Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31 

Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 

Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 

Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, 22 

Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 

Paul Terrell Henry, 41 

Frank Hernandez, 27 

Miguel Angel Honorato, 30

Javier Jorge Reyes, 40 

Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 

Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30

Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25 

Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 

Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 

Brenda Marquez McCool, 49 

Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25 

Kimberly Jean Morris, 37 

Akyra Monet Murray, 18 

Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, 20 

Geraldo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25 

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 

Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 

Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 

Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 

Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, 27 

Xavier Emmanuel Serrano-Rosado, 35 

Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 

Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, 24

Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34

Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 

Martin Benitez Torres, 33

Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24 

Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37 

Luis Sergio Vielma, 22 

Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, 50 

Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37

Jerald Arthur Wright, 31 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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For Those We Lost And Those Who Survived: The Pulse Massacre One Year Later

The pain of June 12 still pangs just as palpably today for Mayra Alvear as it did one year ago.

It’s been twelve months since Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub during Pride month 2016 and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle in a three-hour rampage that left 49 people dead – including Alvear’s youngest daughter, Amanda.

It was the worst mass shooting in modern American history, occurring on the LGBTQ club’s Latin night – a targeted attack against queer people of color that sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ community globally.

The time between then and now has held unimaginable grief for many – a daily struggle to make sense of the lives taken and the level of sheer horror and hate that permeated Pulse that morning. 

And for Alvear and countless others, that grief has now been harnessed and channeled into a resolute mission: to be a voice for those who were lost ― to ensure that their loved ones are never forgotten, and to bring awareness to the culture of violence and deep-seated bigotry towards minorities permeating the fabric of the United States.

“I have to keep fighting for her memory ― that she’s not forgotten, that her death isn’t in vain,” Alvear told HuffPost. “There is so much love out there. I want the legacy of these kids to be that. To show the world that [being LGBTQ] is more than a label – these are people that were loved, they were caring, they were human and these hate crimes are just totally uncalled for. Unnecessary. We are here because God created us and he created us all equal – and some people don’t seem to have this kind of vision. I don’t know what kind of world they want to live in.”

Those who survived.

The Pulse shooting shook multiple communities – and those who exist at their intersections – to their cores. It raised countless questions about modern-day homophobia – including internalized – transphobia, gun violence, racism, Islamophobia and the human capacity for evil.

While the country and LGBTQ people around the world mourned, attended vigils, created art, and processed their grief in their own ways, a new reality and all-encompassing landscape of heartbreak faced the city of Orlando. 

Those who survived found themselves profoundly and irreversibly changed.

“The first couple of days in the hospital was a very hard time for me,” Patience Carter, a survivor whose cousin Akyra Murray died in Pulse, told HuffPost. “I was in a really bad place. The experience initially traumatized me in a way that made me feel as if living was a privilege that I didn’t deserve. I was angry with God because I was just like, why would you leave me here in this situation knowing that all of these other people didn’t make it? I felt like I didn’t deserve the opportunity to live.”

Those who made it out of Pulse alive still grapple with intense survivor’s guilt; many saw their friends and loved ones die before their own eyes ― or held them in their arms as they took their last breaths.

A number of the survivors, like Carter, were trapped in the bathroom stalls of Pulse for hours, hearing others die around them until police eventually entered the club using explosives at 5:02 a.m., killing Mateen after a chaotic shootout.

Carter credits her survival to a man named Jason Josaphat who shielded her from gunfire while hiding in the bathroom.

“He basically covered my body with his,” she said. “The guy shot his gun and I heard [Jason] scream. Then the police busted through the wall.”

But for Carter and others who walked or were carried out of Pulse alive that morning, survival also comes with a heavy sense of responsibility.

Angel Colon, one of the survivors who received significant media visibility in the year since the tragedy, was shot six times during Mateen’s rampage. He underwent his fourth surgery less than a month ago and continues to rely on a cane as he learns to walk again.

“I started thinking to myself, you know I can’t stay in a room with the doors closed and thinking about this night over and over again and be depressed,” Colon told HuffPost. “I have to do something about it – I have to speak out about it. After seeing the love and support, I thought to myself ‘I need to do that as well for the other survivors. I need to make sure that we’re all together and do this together.’ So I decided to be a voice.”

Colon has used his new platform to speak out about common sense gun legislation and violence against LGBTQ people. His voice joins a chorus of organizations that have sprung up in the wake of Pulse at the intersection of these two issues, like Gays Against Guns, a group that uses street performance to raise awareness about flawed gun control laws and its convergence with homophobia.

Authorities discovered after Pulse that Mateen was questioned about potential ties to terrorism in 2013 and 2014 and placed on a terrorist watch list. He was eventually taken off the list ― but even if his name had been on that list in 2016, he still would have been able to buy the guns used during his rampage under current American gun laws.

The immediate aftermath of Pulse also shed light on the unfair, homophobic regulations surrounding blood donation in the United States. There was an urgent and pressing need for blood to save the lives of queer people after Pulse, but men who have sex with men must remain celibate for a year in order to be eligible for donation.

As a result, Colon now also advocates alongside fellow survivor Tony Marrero for OneBlood, a nonprofit committed to providing safe, available and affordable blood, particularly in moments of crisis. 

What spaces are truly safe?

For Marreno, witnessing continued events of large-scale violence in spaces of entertainment and amusement are particularly difficult in the wake of Pulse.

He and Carter both told HuffPost that the recent attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, U.K. hit devastatingly close to home.

“I had a breakdown,” Marrero said. “That hit me hard not just because a lot of people got hurt, but we’re talking about an Ariana Grande concert! Most of her fans and followers are kids – what are we talking about here? Now I can’t even go out and enjoy a concert?”

The conversation about “safe spaces” for vulnerable individuals and their ties to high-impact acts of violence tends to move center stage following tragedies like Pulse and Manchester.

LGBTQ people have always had to carve out space for themselves in a world not designed for them to survive and prosper and, in many situations, gay bars have served as those safe spaces. Because of this, for many LGBTQ people, the physical venue of the Pulse tragedy felt like a shooting in their own home. 

And while queer people knew that the attack on Pulse was one rooted in homophobia from the second it happened, many people and some media tried to push back and erase the targeted nature of the massacre against queer Latinx individuals. It wasn’t until Mateen’s father told media that his son was angered by the sight of two men kissing – that he wasn’t motivated by religion – that the narrative started to change on a larger scale.

“[Pulse] came down to this sort of discussion about safe space that we had been having for awhile,” queer performer and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” finalist Sasha Velour told HuffPost. “That term had been used so loosely and all of the sudden the Pulse tragedy made it feel really urgent and really tangible – like not an emotional safe space but a real physical need to have a space where queer bodies, especially the bodies of queer people of color and especially Latinos, need to be protected and centered.”

This centering of the experiences of queer Latinx people in the discussion about Pulse is crucial, as mainstream media in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy largely ignored and erased the fact that over 90% of those killed were LGBTQ people of color.

For actor Wilson Cruz, who lost a family member in the tragedy, this erasure of the targeted nature of the attack on queer people of color proved especially frustrating – and ultimately informed his decision to become part of the conversation about what happened at Pulse.

“Most of [the victims] were Puerto Ricans and were part of an exodus from the island because of the financial and economic turmoil that faced Puerto Rico, who came to Orlando in order to find a better life,” Cruz told HuffPost. “That part of the story wasn’t being told, and so I started to speak out about what happened and to pay tribute to them because I thought that was a big part of the story that was being missed.”

Starting to heal

In the days following the tragedy, local Orlando LGBTQ leaders also quickly learned how ill-prepared they were to meet the specific needs of their Latinx community members.

Queer people in Orlando and their families who were either undocumented or didn’t speak English already faced a number of challenges in day-to-day life ― things like access to resources and adequate mental health care ― and saw these disparities further exacerbated immediately following Pulse.

“Pulse happened and we realized we were missing a segment of our community – we didn’t have a Spanish-speaking person here every single day, so if somebody walked in that just spoke Spanish, we were not able to service that person or help that person with what they needed,” Terry DeCarlo, Executive Director of The LGBT Center of Central Florida, told HuffPost, adding that they’ve changed their curriculum and plan to open a new office staffed entirely by Hispanic individuals. “There were things that we learned out of this and changed, but groups like QLatinx, which is one of the main ones that came out of [Pulse], they are doing amazing things.”

Organizations like QLatinx found financial support in the immediate aftermath of Pulse from groups like Contigo Fund, a foundation that also grew out of the tragedy and funds organizations dedicated to the healing, strengthening and empowerment of LGBTQ and Latinx people in the Central Florida area.

Marco Quiroga, Contigo Fund Program Director, told HuffPost that prior to the massacre, most nonprofits have been working in silos. “There was a lot of duplication of services,” he said. “Florida is fiftieth in the country for mental health care and one of the biggest flare ups that we saw after the tragedy was the fact that there were zero LGBTQ-competent and linguistically competent mental health services available to the individuals who were impacted directly ― and the broader community who has been traumatized by the tragedy.”

In the months since, these organizations, as well as others like Hispanic Federation and Proyecto Somos Orlando, have worked to fill the gaps in access to resources and care for these communities, as well as pushing established LGBTQ centers and nonprofits to broaden their scope.

Compassion begins with education. 

Other groups and services that have emerged focus on the need for comprehensive education about LGBTQ issues and experiences in order to change hearts and minds and encourage empathy.

The Dru Project is one of these organizations, created by the friends of Drew Leinonen, a 32-year-old gay man who died in Pulse along with his boyfriend, Juan Guerrero. The group’s focus is on Gay Straight Alliances in high schools, developing a curriculum for these high school groups to adopt and also to provide scholarships.

For the founders of The Dru Project, it is crucial to provide safe spaces in schools for LGBTQ students and to encourage empathetic attitudes towards queer kids in public schools from a young age.

Leinonen’s mother, Christine, has since become a “mom mascot” of sorts for the group and has evolved into an outspoken advocate for gay rights and gun safety. She also spoke onstage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention about the loss of her son.

“One good thing that has come out of the tragedy is ― I always thought I was a loving, kind compassionate person but as a result of losing my son in this violent way, I have developed a level of compassion that is deeper than I thought was humanly possible,” Leinonen told HuffPost. “[And] I have a constant message for parents, period, to love their children exactly as they come to them.”

The fight continues.

This need to focus on education, on changing hearts and minds when it comes to LGBTQ identity and experiences ― as well as the experiences of all minority groups ― from an early age is a common thought echoed among survivors, family members and activists who experienced Pulse and its aftermath.

Horror will continue to occur and constantly be reinvented in new and unspeakable ways until the roots of the problems surrounding Pulse ― namely, socialized bigotry and prejudice from a young age and rampant gun violence ― are addressed and dismantled.

And yet, since that fateful day, we have new challenges to face, including a president and administration which, at best, ignore queer people and, at worst, refuse to protect them. But one thing is certain: the fight for equality of all human beings continues and is bolstered by the memory of those who we lost on June 12.

Pulse nightclub is now in the process of becoming a memorial site. As Alvear notes, “Forty years from here, whoever visits [Pulse], they will know that it happened ― and that love will always conquer everything.”

And for Brandon Wolf, a survivor and co-founder of The Dru Project, reflecting on Pulse, the memorial site, and the twelve months since the tragedy has left him with a call to action.

“We are never in a place where we can stop demanding equality, where we can stop challenging people to be better than they were yesterday,” he told HuffPost. “We have a long way to go. And if Pulse serves as any reminder, it’s that we aren’t done fighting. We are never done fighting until every last person in this world is accepted and loved for who they are. I’m certainly not going to stop fighting and I hope you don’t either.”

What follows are the names of the 49 victims who died in the Pulse Nightclub Massacre. Rest in power.

Stanley Almodovar III, 23

Amanda L. Alvear, 25 

Oscar A. Aracena Montero, 26 

Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33

Antonio Davon Brown, 29 

Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 

Angel Candelario-Padro, 28 

Juan Chavez Martinez, 25 

Luis Daniel Conde, 39 

Cory James Connell, 21 

Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 

Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 

Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31 

Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 

Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 

Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, 22 

Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 

Paul Terrell Henry, 41 

Frank Hernandez, 27 

Miguel Angel Honorato, 30

Javier Jorge Reyes, 40 

Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 

Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30

Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25 

Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 

Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 

Brenda Marquez McCool, 49 

Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25 

Kimberly Jean Morris, 37 

Akyra Monet Murray, 18 

Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, 20 

Geraldo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25 

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 

Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 

Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 

Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 

Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, 27 

Xavier Emmanuel Serrano-Rosado, 35 

Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 

Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, 24

Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34

Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 

Martin Benitez Torres, 33

Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24 

Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37 

Luis Sergio Vielma, 22 

Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, 50 

Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37

Jerald Arthur Wright, 31 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcdi2Z

#DIYS

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For Those We Lost And Those Who Survived: The Pulse Massacre One Year Later

The pain of June 12 still pangs just as palpably today for Mayra Alvear as it did one year ago.

It’s been twelve months since Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub during Pride month 2016 and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle in a three-hour rampage that left 49 people dead – including Alvear’s youngest daughter, Amanda.

It was the worst mass shooting in modern American history, occurring on the LGBTQ club’s Latin night – a targeted attack against queer people of color that sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ community globally.

The time between then and now has held unimaginable grief for many – a daily struggle to make sense of the lives taken and the level of sheer horror and hate that permeated Pulse that morning. 

And for Alvear and countless others, that grief has now been harnessed and channeled into a resolute mission: to be a voice for those who were lost ― to ensure that their loved ones are never forgotten, and to bring awareness to the culture of violence and deep-seated bigotry towards minorities permeating the fabric of the United States.

“I have to keep fighting for her memory ― that she’s not forgotten, that her death isn’t in vain,” Alvear told HuffPost. “There is so much love out there. I want the legacy of these kids to be that. To show the world that [being LGBTQ] is more than a label – these are people that were loved, they were caring, they were human and these hate crimes are just totally uncalled for. Unnecessary. We are here because God created us and he created us all equal – and some people don’t seem to have this kind of vision. I don’t know what kind of world they want to live in.”

Those who survived.

The Pulse shooting shook multiple communities – and those who exist at their intersections – to their cores. It raised countless questions about modern-day homophobia – including internalized – transphobia, gun violence, racism, Islamophobia and the human capacity for evil.

While the country and LGBTQ people around the world mourned, attended vigils, created art, and processed their grief in their own ways, a new reality and all-encompassing landscape of heartbreak faced the city of Orlando. 

Those who survived found themselves profoundly and irreversibly changed.

“The first couple of days in the hospital was a very hard time for me,” Patience Carter, a survivor whose cousin Akyra Murray died in Pulse, told HuffPost. “I was in a really bad place. The experience initially traumatized me in a way that made me feel as if living was a privilege that I didn’t deserve. I was angry with God because I was just like, why would you leave me here in this situation knowing that all of these other people didn’t make it? I felt like I didn’t deserve the opportunity to live.”

Those who made it out of Pulse alive still grapple with intense survivor’s guilt; many saw their friends and loved ones die before their own eyes ― or held them in their arms as they took their last breaths.

A number of the survivors, like Carter, were trapped in the bathroom stalls of Pulse for hours, hearing others die around them until police eventually entered the club using explosives at 5:02 a.m., killing Mateen after a chaotic shootout.

Carter credits her survival to a man named Jason Josaphat who shielded her from gunfire while hiding in the bathroom.

“He basically covered my body with his,” she said. “The guy shot his gun and I heard [Jason] scream. Then the police busted through the wall.”

But for Carter and others who walked or were carried out of Pulse alive that morning, survival also comes with a heavy sense of responsibility.

Angel Colon, one of the survivors who received significant media visibility in the year since the tragedy, was shot six times during Mateen’s rampage. He underwent his fourth surgery less than a month ago and continues to rely on a cane as he learns to walk again.

“I started thinking to myself, you know I can’t stay in a room with the doors closed and thinking about this night over and over again and be depressed,” Colon told HuffPost. “I have to do something about it – I have to speak out about it. After seeing the love and support, I thought to myself ‘I need to do that as well for the other survivors. I need to make sure that we’re all together and do this together.’ So I decided to be a voice.”

Colon has used his new platform to speak out about common sense gun legislation and violence against LGBTQ people. His voice joins a chorus of organizations that have sprung up in the wake of Pulse at the intersection of these two issues, like Gays Against Guns, a group that uses street performance to raise awareness about flawed gun control laws and its convergence with homophobia.

Authorities discovered after Pulse that Mateen was questioned about potential ties to terrorism in 2013 and 2014 and placed on a terrorist watch list. He was eventually taken off the list ― but even if his name had been on that list in 2016, he still would have been able to buy the guns used during his rampage under current American gun laws.

The immediate aftermath of Pulse also shed light on the unfair, homophobic regulations surrounding blood donation in the United States. There was an urgent and pressing need for blood to save the lives of queer people after Pulse, but men who have sex with men must remain celibate for a year in order to be eligible for donation.

As a result, Colon now also advocates alongside fellow survivor Tony Marrero for OneBlood, a nonprofit committed to providing safe, available and affordable blood, particularly in moments of crisis. 

What spaces are truly safe?

For Marreno, witnessing continued events of large-scale violence in spaces of entertainment and amusement are particularly difficult in the wake of Pulse.

He and Carter both told HuffPost that the recent attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, U.K. hit devastatingly close to home.

“I had a breakdown,” Marrero said. “That hit me hard not just because a lot of people got hurt, but we’re talking about an Ariana Grande concert! Most of her fans and followers are kids – what are we talking about here? Now I can’t even go out and enjoy a concert?”

The conversation about “safe spaces” for vulnerable individuals and their ties to high-impact acts of violence tends to move center stage following tragedies like Pulse and Manchester.

LGBTQ people have always had to carve out space for themselves in a world not designed for them to survive and prosper and, in many situations, gay bars have served as those safe spaces. Because of this, for many LGBTQ people, the physical venue of the Pulse tragedy felt like a shooting in their own home. 

And while queer people knew that the attack on Pulse was one rooted in homophobia from the second it happened, many people and some media tried to push back and erase the targeted nature of the massacre against queer Latinx individuals. It wasn’t until Mateen’s father told media that his son was angered by the sight of two men kissing – that he wasn’t motivated by religion – that the narrative started to change on a larger scale.

“[Pulse] came down to this sort of discussion about safe space that we had been having for awhile,” queer performer and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” finalist Sasha Velour told HuffPost. “That term had been used so loosely and all of the sudden the Pulse tragedy made it feel really urgent and really tangible – like not an emotional safe space but a real physical need to have a space where queer bodies, especially the bodies of queer people of color and especially Latinos, need to be protected and centered.”

This centering of the experiences of queer Latinx people in the discussion about Pulse is crucial, as mainstream media in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy largely ignored and erased the fact that over 90% of those killed were LGBTQ people of color.

For actor Wilson Cruz, who lost a family member in the tragedy, this erasure of the targeted nature of the attack on queer people of color proved especially frustrating – and ultimately informed his decision to become part of the conversation about what happened at Pulse.

“Most of [the victims] were Puerto Ricans and were part of an exodus from the island because of the financial and economic turmoil that faced Puerto Rico, who came to Orlando in order to find a better life,” Cruz told HuffPost. “That part of the story wasn’t being told, and so I started to speak out about what happened and to pay tribute to them because I thought that was a big part of the story that was being missed.”

Starting to heal

In the days following the tragedy, local Orlando LGBTQ leaders also quickly learned how ill-prepared they were to meet the specific needs of their Latinx community members.

Queer people in Orlando and their families who were either undocumented or didn’t speak English already faced a number of challenges in day-to-day life ― things like access to resources and adequate mental health care ― and saw these disparities further exacerbated immediately following Pulse.

“Pulse happened and we realized we were missing a segment of our community – we didn’t have a Spanish-speaking person here every single day, so if somebody walked in that just spoke Spanish, we were not able to service that person or help that person with what they needed,” Terry DeCarlo, Executive Director of The LGBT Center of Central Florida, told HuffPost, adding that they’ve changed their curriculum and plan to open a new office staffed entirely by Hispanic individuals. “There were things that we learned out of this and changed, but groups like QLatinx, which is one of the main ones that came out of [Pulse], they are doing amazing things.”

Organizations like QLatinx found financial support in the immediate aftermath of Pulse from groups like Contigo Fund, a foundation that also grew out of the tragedy and funds organizations dedicated to the healing, strengthening and empowerment of LGBTQ and Latinx people in the Central Florida area.

Marco Quiroga, Contigo Fund Program Director, told HuffPost that prior to the massacre, most nonprofits have been working in silos. “There was a lot of duplication of services,” he said. “Florida is fiftieth in the country for mental health care and one of the biggest flare ups that we saw after the tragedy was the fact that there were zero LGBTQ-competent and linguistically competent mental health services available to the individuals who were impacted directly ― and the broader community who has been traumatized by the tragedy.”

In the months since, these organizations, as well as others like Hispanic Federation and Proyecto Somos Orlando, have worked to fill the gaps in access to resources and care for these communities, as well as pushing established LGBTQ centers and nonprofits to broaden their scope.

Compassion begins with education. 

Other groups and services that have emerged focus on the need for comprehensive education about LGBTQ issues and experiences in order to change hearts and minds and encourage empathy.

The Dru Project is one of these organizations, created by the friends of Drew Leinonen, a 32-year-old gay man who died in Pulse along with his boyfriend, Juan Guerrero. The group’s focus is on Gay Straight Alliances in high schools, developing a curriculum for these high school groups to adopt and also to provide scholarships.

For the founders of The Dru Project, it is crucial to provide safe spaces in schools for LGBTQ students and to encourage empathetic attitudes towards queer kids in public schools from a young age.

Leinonen’s mother, Christine, has since become a “mom mascot” of sorts for the group and has evolved into an outspoken advocate for gay rights and gun safety. She also spoke onstage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention about the loss of her son.

“One good thing that has come out of the tragedy is ― I always thought I was a loving, kind compassionate person but as a result of losing my son in this violent way, I have developed a level of compassion that is deeper than I thought was humanly possible,” Leinonen told HuffPost. “[And] I have a constant message for parents, period, to love their children exactly as they come to them.”

The fight continues.

This need to focus on education, on changing hearts and minds when it comes to LGBTQ identity and experiences ― as well as the experiences of all minority groups ― from an early age is a common thought echoed among survivors, family members and activists who experienced Pulse and its aftermath.

Horror will continue to occur and constantly be reinvented in new and unspeakable ways until the roots of the problems surrounding Pulse ― namely, socialized bigotry and prejudice from a young age and rampant gun violence ― are addressed and dismantled.

And yet, since that fateful day, we have new challenges to face, including a president and administration which, at best, ignore queer people and, at worst, refuse to protect them. But one thing is certain: the fight for equality of all human beings continues and is bolstered by the memory of those who we lost on June 12.

Pulse nightclub is now in the process of becoming a memorial site. As Alvear notes, “Forty years from here, whoever visits [Pulse], they will know that it happened ― and that love will always conquer everything.”

And for Brandon Wolf, a survivor and co-founder of The Dru Project, reflecting on Pulse, the memorial site, and the twelve months since the tragedy has left him with a call to action.

“We are never in a place where we can stop demanding equality, where we can stop challenging people to be better than they were yesterday,” he told HuffPost. “We have a long way to go. And if Pulse serves as any reminder, it’s that we aren’t done fighting. We are never done fighting until every last person in this world is accepted and loved for who they are. I’m certainly not going to stop fighting and I hope you don’t either.”

What follows are the names of the 49 victims who died in the Pulse Nightclub Massacre. Rest in power.

Stanley Almodovar III, 23

Amanda L. Alvear, 25 

Oscar A. Aracena Montero, 26 

Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33

Antonio Davon Brown, 29 

Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 

Angel Candelario-Padro, 28 

Juan Chavez Martinez, 25 

Luis Daniel Conde, 39 

Cory James Connell, 21 

Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 

Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 

Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31 

Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 

Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 

Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, 22 

Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 

Paul Terrell Henry, 41 

Frank Hernandez, 27 

Miguel Angel Honorato, 30

Javier Jorge Reyes, 40 

Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 

Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30

Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25 

Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 

Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 

Brenda Marquez McCool, 49 

Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25 

Kimberly Jean Morris, 37 

Akyra Monet Murray, 18 

Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, 20 

Geraldo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25 

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 

Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 

Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 

Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 

Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, 27 

Xavier Emmanuel Serrano-Rosado, 35 

Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 

Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, 24

Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34

Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 

Martin Benitez Torres, 33

Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24 

Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37 

Luis Sergio Vielma, 22 

Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, 50 

Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37

Jerald Arthur Wright, 31 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcdi2Z

#DIYS

[stormdoors78476]

For Those We Lost And Those Who Survived: The Pulse Massacre One Year Later

The pain of June 12 still pangs just as palpably today for Mayra Alvear as it did one year ago.

It’s been twelve months since Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub during Pride month 2016 and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle in a three-hour rampage that left 49 people dead – including Alvear’s youngest daughter, Amanda.

It was the worst mass shooting in modern American history, occurring on the LGBTQ club’s Latin night – a targeted attack against queer people of color that sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ community globally.

The time between then and now has held unimaginable grief for many – a daily struggle to make sense of the lives taken and the level of sheer horror and hate that permeated Pulse that morning. 

And for Alvear and countless others, that grief has now been harnessed and channeled into a resolute mission: to be a voice for those who were lost ― to ensure that their loved ones are never forgotten, and to bring awareness to the culture of violence and deep-seated bigotry towards minorities permeating the fabric of the United States.

“I have to keep fighting for her memory ― that she’s not forgotten, that her death isn’t in vain,” Alvear told HuffPost. “There is so much love out there. I want the legacy of these kids to be that. To show the world that [being LGBTQ] is more than a label – these are people that were loved, they were caring, they were human and these hate crimes are just totally uncalled for. Unnecessary. We are here because God created us and he created us all equal – and some people don’t seem to have this kind of vision. I don’t know what kind of world they want to live in.”

Those who survived.

The Pulse shooting shook multiple communities – and those who exist at their intersections – to their cores. It raised countless questions about modern-day homophobia – including internalized – transphobia, gun violence, racism, Islamophobia and the human capacity for evil.

While the country and LGBTQ people around the world mourned, attended vigils, created art, and processed their grief in their own ways, a new reality and all-encompassing landscape of heartbreak faced the city of Orlando. 

Those who survived found themselves profoundly and irreversibly changed.

“The first couple of days in the hospital was a very hard time for me,” Patience Carter, a survivor whose cousin Akyra Murray died in Pulse, told HuffPost. “I was in a really bad place. The experience initially traumatized me in a way that made me feel as if living was a privilege that I didn’t deserve. I was angry with God because I was just like, why would you leave me here in this situation knowing that all of these other people didn’t make it? I felt like I didn’t deserve the opportunity to live.”

Those who made it out of Pulse alive still grapple with intense survivor’s guilt; many saw their friends and loved ones die before their own eyes ― or held them in their arms as they took their last breaths.

A number of the survivors, like Carter, were trapped in the bathroom stalls of Pulse for hours, hearing others die around them until police eventually entered the club using explosives at 5:02 a.m., killing Mateen after a chaotic shootout.

Carter credits her survival to a man named Jason Josaphat who shielded her from gunfire while hiding in the bathroom.

“He basically covered my body with his,” she said. “The guy shot his gun and I heard [Jason] scream. Then the police busted through the wall.”

But for Carter and others who walked or were carried out of Pulse alive that morning, survival also comes with a heavy sense of responsibility.

Angel Colon, one of the survivors who received significant media visibility in the year since the tragedy, was shot six times during Mateen’s rampage. He underwent his fourth surgery less than a month ago and continues to rely on a cane as he learns to walk again.

“I started thinking to myself, you know I can’t stay in a room with the doors closed and thinking about this night over and over again and be depressed,” Colon told HuffPost. “I have to do something about it – I have to speak out about it. After seeing the love and support, I thought to myself ‘I need to do that as well for the other survivors. I need to make sure that we’re all together and do this together.’ So I decided to be a voice.”

Colon has used his new platform to speak out about common sense gun legislation and violence against LGBTQ people. His voice joins a chorus of organizations that have sprung up in the wake of Pulse at the intersection of these two issues, like Gays Against Guns, a group that uses street performance to raise awareness about flawed gun control laws and its convergence with homophobia.

Authorities discovered after Pulse that Mateen was questioned about potential ties to terrorism in 2013 and 2014 and placed on a terrorist watch list. He was eventually taken off the list ― but even if his name had been on that list in 2016, he still would have been able to buy the guns used during his rampage under current American gun laws.

The immediate aftermath of Pulse also shed light on the unfair, homophobic regulations surrounding blood donation in the United States. There was an urgent and pressing need for blood to save the lives of queer people after Pulse, but men who have sex with men must remain celibate for a year in order to be eligible for donation.

As a result, Colon now also advocates alongside fellow survivor Tony Marrero for OneBlood, a nonprofit committed to providing safe, available and affordable blood, particularly in moments of crisis. 

What spaces are truly safe?

For Marreno, witnessing continued events of large-scale violence in spaces of entertainment and amusement are particularly difficult in the wake of Pulse.

He and Carter both told HuffPost that the recent attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, U.K. hit devastatingly close to home.

“I had a breakdown,” Marrero said. “That hit me hard not just because a lot of people got hurt, but we’re talking about an Ariana Grande concert! Most of her fans and followers are kids – what are we talking about here? Now I can’t even go out and enjoy a concert?”

The conversation about “safe spaces” for vulnerable individuals and their ties to high-impact acts of violence tends to move center stage following tragedies like Pulse and Manchester.

LGBTQ people have always had to carve out space for themselves in a world not designed for them to survive and prosper and, in many situations, gay bars have served as those safe spaces. Because of this, for many LGBTQ people, the physical venue of the Pulse tragedy felt like a shooting in their own home. 

And while queer people knew that the attack on Pulse was one rooted in homophobia from the second it happened, many people and some media tried to push back and erase the targeted nature of the massacre against queer Latinx individuals. It wasn’t until Mateen’s father told media that his son was angered by the sight of two men kissing – that he wasn’t motivated by religion – that the narrative started to change on a larger scale.

“[Pulse] came down to this sort of discussion about safe space that we had been having for awhile,” queer performer and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” finalist Sasha Velour told HuffPost. “That term had been used so loosely and all of the sudden the Pulse tragedy made it feel really urgent and really tangible – like not an emotional safe space but a real physical need to have a space where queer bodies, especially the bodies of queer people of color and especially Latinos, need to be protected and centered.”

This centering of the experiences of queer Latinx people in the discussion about Pulse is crucial, as mainstream media in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy largely ignored and erased the fact that over 90% of those killed were LGBTQ people of color.

For actor Wilson Cruz, who lost a family member in the tragedy, this erasure of the targeted nature of the attack on queer people of color proved especially frustrating – and ultimately informed his decision to become part of the conversation about what happened at Pulse.

“Most of [the victims] were Puerto Ricans and were part of an exodus from the island because of the financial and economic turmoil that faced Puerto Rico, who came to Orlando in order to find a better life,” Cruz told HuffPost. “That part of the story wasn’t being told, and so I started to speak out about what happened and to pay tribute to them because I thought that was a big part of the story that was being missed.”

Starting to heal

In the days following the tragedy, local Orlando LGBTQ leaders also quickly learned how ill-prepared they were to meet the specific needs of their Latinx community members.

Queer people in Orlando and their families who were either undocumented or didn’t speak English already faced a number of challenges in day-to-day life ― things like access to resources and adequate mental health care ― and saw these disparities further exacerbated immediately following Pulse.

“Pulse happened and we realized we were missing a segment of our community – we didn’t have a Spanish-speaking person here every single day, so if somebody walked in that just spoke Spanish, we were not able to service that person or help that person with what they needed,” Terry DeCarlo, Executive Director of The LGBT Center of Central Florida, told HuffPost, adding that they’ve changed their curriculum and plan to open a new office staffed entirely by Hispanic individuals. “There were things that we learned out of this and changed, but groups like QLatinx, which is one of the main ones that came out of [Pulse], they are doing amazing things.”

Organizations like QLatinx found financial support in the immediate aftermath of Pulse from groups like Contigo Fund, a foundation that also grew out of the tragedy and funds organizations dedicated to the healing, strengthening and empowerment of LGBTQ and Latinx people in the Central Florida area.

Marco Quiroga, Contigo Fund Program Director, told HuffPost that prior to the massacre, most nonprofits have been working in silos. “There was a lot of duplication of services,” he said. “Florida is fiftieth in the country for mental health care and one of the biggest flare ups that we saw after the tragedy was the fact that there were zero LGBTQ-competent and linguistically competent mental health services available to the individuals who were impacted directly ― and the broader community who has been traumatized by the tragedy.”

In the months since, these organizations, as well as others like Hispanic Federation and Proyecto Somos Orlando, have worked to fill the gaps in access to resources and care for these communities, as well as pushing established LGBTQ centers and nonprofits to broaden their scope.

Compassion begins with education. 

Other groups and services that have emerged focus on the need for comprehensive education about LGBTQ issues and experiences in order to change hearts and minds and encourage empathy.

The Dru Project is one of these organizations, created by the friends of Drew Leinonen, a 32-year-old gay man who died in Pulse along with his boyfriend, Juan Guerrero. The group’s focus is on Gay Straight Alliances in high schools, developing a curriculum for these high school groups to adopt and also to provide scholarships.

For the founders of The Dru Project, it is crucial to provide safe spaces in schools for LGBTQ students and to encourage empathetic attitudes towards queer kids in public schools from a young age.

Leinonen’s mother, Christine, has since become a “mom mascot” of sorts for the group and has evolved into an outspoken advocate for gay rights and gun safety. She also spoke onstage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention about the loss of her son.

“One good thing that has come out of the tragedy is ― I always thought I was a loving, kind compassionate person but as a result of losing my son in this violent way, I have developed a level of compassion that is deeper than I thought was humanly possible,” Leinonen told HuffPost. “[And] I have a constant message for parents, period, to love their children exactly as they come to them.”

The fight continues.

This need to focus on education, on changing hearts and minds when it comes to LGBTQ identity and experiences ― as well as the experiences of all minority groups ― from an early age is a common thought echoed among survivors, family members and activists who experienced Pulse and its aftermath.

Horror will continue to occur and constantly be reinvented in new and unspeakable ways until the roots of the problems surrounding Pulse ― namely, socialized bigotry and prejudice from a young age and rampant gun violence ― are addressed and dismantled.

And yet, since that fateful day, we have new challenges to face, including a president and administration which, at best, ignore queer people and, at worst, refuse to protect them. But one thing is certain: the fight for equality of all human beings continues and is bolstered by the memory of those who we lost on June 12.

Pulse nightclub is now in the process of becoming a memorial site. As Alvear notes, “Forty years from here, whoever visits [Pulse], they will know that it happened ― and that love will always conquer everything.”

And for Brandon Wolf, a survivor and co-founder of The Dru Project, reflecting on Pulse, the memorial site, and the twelve months since the tragedy has left him with a call to action.

“We are never in a place where we can stop demanding equality, where we can stop challenging people to be better than they were yesterday,” he told HuffPost. “We have a long way to go. And if Pulse serves as any reminder, it’s that we aren’t done fighting. We are never done fighting until every last person in this world is accepted and loved for who they are. I’m certainly not going to stop fighting and I hope you don’t either.”

What follows are the names of the 49 victims who died in the Pulse Nightclub Massacre. Rest in power.

Stanley Almodovar III, 23

Amanda L. Alvear, 25 

Oscar A. Aracena Montero, 26 

Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33

Antonio Davon Brown, 29 

Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 

Angel Candelario-Padro, 28 

Juan Chavez Martinez, 25 

Luis Daniel Conde, 39 

Cory James Connell, 21 

Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 

Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 

Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31 

Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 

Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 

Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, 22 

Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 

Paul Terrell Henry, 41 

Frank Hernandez, 27 

Miguel Angel Honorato, 30

Javier Jorge Reyes, 40 

Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 

Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30

Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25 

Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 

Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 

Brenda Marquez McCool, 49 

Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25 

Kimberly Jean Morris, 37 

Akyra Monet Murray, 18 

Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, 20 

Geraldo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25 

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 

Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 

Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 

Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 

Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, 27 

Xavier Emmanuel Serrano-Rosado, 35 

Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 

Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, 24

Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34

Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 

Martin Benitez Torres, 33

Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24 

Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37 

Luis Sergio Vielma, 22 

Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, 50 

Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37

Jerald Arthur Wright, 31 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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For Those We Lost And Those Who Survived: The Pulse Massacre One Year Later

The pain of June 12 still pangs just as palpably today for Mayra Alvear as it did one year ago.

It’s been twelve months since Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub during Pride month 2016 and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle in a three-hour rampage that left 49 people dead – including Alvear’s youngest daughter, Amanda.

It was the worst mass shooting in modern American history, occurring on the LGBTQ club’s Latin night – a targeted attack against queer people of color that sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ community globally.

The time between then and now has held unimaginable grief for many – a daily struggle to make sense of the lives taken and the level of sheer horror and hate that permeated Pulse that morning. 

And for Alvear and countless others, that grief has now been harnessed and channeled into a resolute mission: to be a voice for those who were lost ― to ensure that their loved ones are never forgotten, and to bring awareness to the culture of violence and deep-seated bigotry towards minorities permeating the fabric of the United States.

“I have to keep fighting for her memory ― that she’s not forgotten, that her death isn’t in vain,” Alvear told HuffPost. “There is so much love out there. I want the legacy of these kids to be that. To show the world that [being LGBTQ] is more than a label – these are people that were loved, they were caring, they were human and these hate crimes are just totally uncalled for. Unnecessary. We are here because God created us and he created us all equal – and some people don’t seem to have this kind of vision. I don’t know what kind of world they want to live in.”

Those who survived.

The Pulse shooting shook multiple communities – and those who exist at their intersections – to their cores. It raised countless questions about modern-day homophobia – including internalized – transphobia, gun violence, racism, Islamophobia and the human capacity for evil.

While the country and LGBTQ people around the world mourned, attended vigils, created art, and processed their grief in their own ways, a new reality and all-encompassing landscape of heartbreak faced the city of Orlando. 

Those who survived found themselves profoundly and irreversibly changed.

“The first couple of days in the hospital was a very hard time for me,” Patience Carter, a survivor whose cousin Akyra Murray died in Pulse, told HuffPost. “I was in a really bad place. The experience initially traumatized me in a way that made me feel as if living was a privilege that I didn’t deserve. I was angry with God because I was just like, why would you leave me here in this situation knowing that all of these other people didn’t make it? I felt like I didn’t deserve the opportunity to live.”

Those who made it out of Pulse alive still grapple with intense survivor’s guilt; many saw their friends and loved ones die before their own eyes ― or held them in their arms as they took their last breaths.

A number of the survivors, like Carter, were trapped in the bathroom stalls of Pulse for hours, hearing others die around them until police eventually entered the club using explosives at 5:02 a.m., killing Mateen after a chaotic shootout.

Carter credits her survival to a man named Jason Josaphat who shielded her from gunfire while hiding in the bathroom.

“He basically covered my body with his,” she said. “The guy shot his gun and I heard [Jason] scream. Then the police busted through the wall.”

But for Carter and others who walked or were carried out of Pulse alive that morning, survival also comes with a heavy sense of responsibility.

Angel Colon, one of the survivors who received significant media visibility in the year since the tragedy, was shot six times during Mateen’s rampage. He underwent his fourth surgery less than a month ago and continues to rely on a cane as he learns to walk again.

“I started thinking to myself, you know I can’t stay in a room with the doors closed and thinking about this night over and over again and be depressed,” Colon told HuffPost. “I have to do something about it – I have to speak out about it. After seeing the love and support, I thought to myself ‘I need to do that as well for the other survivors. I need to make sure that we’re all together and do this together.’ So I decided to be a voice.”

Colon has used his new platform to speak out about common sense gun legislation and violence against LGBTQ people. His voice joins a chorus of organizations that have sprung up in the wake of Pulse at the intersection of these two issues, like Gays Against Guns, a group that uses street performance to raise awareness about flawed gun control laws and its convergence with homophobia.

Authorities discovered after Pulse that Mateen was questioned about potential ties to terrorism in 2013 and 2014 and placed on a terrorist watch list. He was eventually taken off the list ― but even if his name had been on that list in 2016, he still would have been able to buy the guns used during his rampage under current American gun laws.

The immediate aftermath of Pulse also shed light on the unfair, homophobic regulations surrounding blood donation in the United States. There was an urgent and pressing need for blood to save the lives of queer people after Pulse, but men who have sex with men must remain celibate for a year in order to be eligible for donation.

As a result, Colon now also advocates alongside fellow survivor Tony Marrero for OneBlood, a nonprofit committed to providing safe, available and affordable blood, particularly in moments of crisis. 

What spaces are truly safe?

For Marreno, witnessing continued events of large-scale violence in spaces of entertainment and amusement are particularly difficult in the wake of Pulse.

He and Carter both told HuffPost that the recent attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, U.K. hit devastatingly close to home.

“I had a breakdown,” Marrero said. “That hit me hard not just because a lot of people got hurt, but we’re talking about an Ariana Grande concert! Most of her fans and followers are kids – what are we talking about here? Now I can’t even go out and enjoy a concert?”

The conversation about “safe spaces” for vulnerable individuals and their ties to high-impact acts of violence tends to move center stage following tragedies like Pulse and Manchester.

LGBTQ people have always had to carve out space for themselves in a world not designed for them to survive and prosper and, in many situations, gay bars have served as those safe spaces. Because of this, for many LGBTQ people, the physical venue of the Pulse tragedy felt like a shooting in their own home. 

And while queer people knew that the attack on Pulse was one rooted in homophobia from the second it happened, many people and some media tried to push back and erase the targeted nature of the massacre against queer Latinx individuals. It wasn’t until Mateen’s father told media that his son was angered by the sight of two men kissing – that he wasn’t motivated by religion – that the narrative started to change on a larger scale.

“[Pulse] came down to this sort of discussion about safe space that we had been having for awhile,” queer performer and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” finalist Sasha Velour told HuffPost. “That term had been used so loosely and all of the sudden the Pulse tragedy made it feel really urgent and really tangible – like not an emotional safe space but a real physical need to have a space where queer bodies, especially the bodies of queer people of color and especially Latinos, need to be protected and centered.”

This centering of the experiences of queer Latinx people in the discussion about Pulse is crucial, as mainstream media in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy largely ignored and erased the fact that over 90% of those killed were LGBTQ people of color.

For actor Wilson Cruz, who lost a family member in the tragedy, this erasure of the targeted nature of the attack on queer people of color proved especially frustrating – and ultimately informed his decision to become part of the conversation about what happened at Pulse.

“Most of [the victims] were Puerto Ricans and were part of an exodus from the island because of the financial and economic turmoil that faced Puerto Rico, who came to Orlando in order to find a better life,” Cruz told HuffPost. “That part of the story wasn’t being told, and so I started to speak out about what happened and to pay tribute to them because I thought that was a big part of the story that was being missed.”

Starting to heal

In the days following the tragedy, local Orlando LGBTQ leaders also quickly learned how ill-prepared they were to meet the specific needs of their Latinx community members.

Queer people in Orlando and their families who were either undocumented or didn’t speak English already faced a number of challenges in day-to-day life ― things like access to resources and adequate mental health care ― and saw these disparities further exacerbated immediately following Pulse.

“Pulse happened and we realized we were missing a segment of our community – we didn’t have a Spanish-speaking person here every single day, so if somebody walked in that just spoke Spanish, we were not able to service that person or help that person with what they needed,” Terry DeCarlo, Executive Director of The LGBT Center of Central Florida, told HuffPost, adding that they’ve changed their curriculum and plan to open a new office staffed entirely by Hispanic individuals. “There were things that we learned out of this and changed, but groups like QLatinx, which is one of the main ones that came out of [Pulse], they are doing amazing things.”

Organizations like QLatinx found financial support in the immediate aftermath of Pulse from groups like Contigo Fund, a foundation that also grew out of the tragedy and funds organizations dedicated to the healing, strengthening and empowerment of LGBTQ and Latinx people in the Central Florida area.

Marco Quiroga, Contigo Fund Program Director, told HuffPost that prior to the massacre, most nonprofits have been working in silos. “There was a lot of duplication of services,” he said. “Florida is fiftieth in the country for mental health care and one of the biggest flare ups that we saw after the tragedy was the fact that there were zero LGBTQ-competent and linguistically competent mental health services available to the individuals who were impacted directly ― and the broader community who has been traumatized by the tragedy.”

In the months since, these organizations, as well as others like Hispanic Federation and Proyecto Somos Orlando, have worked to fill the gaps in access to resources and care for these communities, as well as pushing established LGBTQ centers and nonprofits to broaden their scope.

Compassion begins with education. 

Other groups and services that have emerged focus on the need for comprehensive education about LGBTQ issues and experiences in order to change hearts and minds and encourage empathy.

The Dru Project is one of these organizations, created by the friends of Drew Leinonen, a 32-year-old gay man who died in Pulse along with his boyfriend, Juan Guerrero. The group’s focus is on Gay Straight Alliances in high schools, developing a curriculum for these high school groups to adopt and also to provide scholarships.

For the founders of The Dru Project, it is crucial to provide safe spaces in schools for LGBTQ students and to encourage empathetic attitudes towards queer kids in public schools from a young age.

Leinonen’s mother, Christine, has since become a “mom mascot” of sorts for the group and has evolved into an outspoken advocate for gay rights and gun safety. She also spoke onstage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention about the loss of her son.

“One good thing that has come out of the tragedy is ― I always thought I was a loving, kind compassionate person but as a result of losing my son in this violent way, I have developed a level of compassion that is deeper than I thought was humanly possible,” Leinonen told HuffPost. “[And] I have a constant message for parents, period, to love their children exactly as they come to them.”

The fight continues.

This need to focus on education, on changing hearts and minds when it comes to LGBTQ identity and experiences ― as well as the experiences of all minority groups ― from an early age is a common thought echoed among survivors, family members and activists who experienced Pulse and its aftermath.

Horror will continue to occur and constantly be reinvented in new and unspeakable ways until the roots of the problems surrounding Pulse ― namely, socialized bigotry and prejudice from a young age and rampant gun violence ― are addressed and dismantled.

And yet, since that fateful day, we have new challenges to face, including a president and administration which, at best, ignore queer people and, at worst, refuse to protect them. But one thing is certain: the fight for equality of all human beings continues and is bolstered by the memory of those who we lost on June 12.

Pulse nightclub is now in the process of becoming a memorial site. As Alvear notes, “Forty years from here, whoever visits [Pulse], they will know that it happened ― and that love will always conquer everything.”

And for Brandon Wolf, a survivor and co-founder of The Dru Project, reflecting on Pulse, the memorial site, and the twelve months since the tragedy has left him with a call to action.

“We are never in a place where we can stop demanding equality, where we can stop challenging people to be better than they were yesterday,” he told HuffPost. “We have a long way to go. And if Pulse serves as any reminder, it’s that we aren’t done fighting. We are never done fighting until every last person in this world is accepted and loved for who they are. I’m certainly not going to stop fighting and I hope you don’t either.”

What follows are the names of the 49 victims who died in the Pulse Nightclub Massacre. Rest in power.

Stanley Almodovar III, 23

Amanda L. Alvear, 25 

Oscar A. Aracena Montero, 26 

Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33

Antonio Davon Brown, 29 

Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 

Angel Candelario-Padro, 28 

Juan Chavez Martinez, 25 

Luis Daniel Conde, 39 

Cory James Connell, 21 

Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 

Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 

Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31 

Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 

Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 

Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, 22 

Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 

Paul Terrell Henry, 41 

Frank Hernandez, 27 

Miguel Angel Honorato, 30

Javier Jorge Reyes, 40 

Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 

Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30

Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25 

Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 

Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 

Brenda Marquez McCool, 49 

Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25 

Kimberly Jean Morris, 37 

Akyra Monet Murray, 18 

Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, 20 

Geraldo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25 

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 

Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 

Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 

Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 

Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, 27 

Xavier Emmanuel Serrano-Rosado, 35 

Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 

Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, 24

Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34

Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 

Martin Benitez Torres, 33

Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24 

Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37 

Luis Sergio Vielma, 22 

Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, 50 

Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37

Jerald Arthur Wright, 31 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcdi2Z

#DIYS

[grgedoors02142]

For Those We Lost And Those Who Survived: The Pulse Massacre One Year Later

The pain of June 12 still pangs just as palpably today for Mayra Alvear as it did one year ago.

It’s been twelve months since Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub during Pride month 2016 and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle in a three-hour rampage that left 49 people dead – including Alvear’s youngest daughter, Amanda.

It was the worst mass shooting in modern American history, occurring on the LGBTQ club’s Latin night – a targeted attack against queer people of color that sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ community globally.

The time between then and now has held unimaginable grief for many – a daily struggle to make sense of the lives taken and the level of sheer horror and hate that permeated Pulse that morning. 

And for Alvear and countless others, that grief has now been harnessed and channeled into a resolute mission: to be a voice for those who were lost ― to ensure that their loved ones are never forgotten, and to bring awareness to the culture of violence and deep-seated bigotry towards minorities permeating the fabric of the United States.

“I have to keep fighting for her memory ― that she’s not forgotten, that her death isn’t in vain,” Alvear told HuffPost. “There is so much love out there. I want the legacy of these kids to be that. To show the world that [being LGBTQ] is more than a label – these are people that were loved, they were caring, they were human and these hate crimes are just totally uncalled for. Unnecessary. We are here because God created us and he created us all equal – and some people don’t seem to have this kind of vision. I don’t know what kind of world they want to live in.”

Those who survived.

The Pulse shooting shook multiple communities – and those who exist at their intersections – to their cores. It raised countless questions about modern-day homophobia – including internalized – transphobia, gun violence, racism, Islamophobia and the human capacity for evil.

While the country and LGBTQ people around the world mourned, attended vigils, created art, and processed their grief in their own ways, a new reality and all-encompassing landscape of heartbreak faced the city of Orlando. 

Those who survived found themselves profoundly and irreversibly changed.

“The first couple of days in the hospital was a very hard time for me,” Patience Carter, a survivor whose cousin Akyra Murray died in Pulse, told HuffPost. “I was in a really bad place. The experience initially traumatized me in a way that made me feel as if living was a privilege that I didn’t deserve. I was angry with God because I was just like, why would you leave me here in this situation knowing that all of these other people didn’t make it? I felt like I didn’t deserve the opportunity to live.”

Those who made it out of Pulse alive still grapple with intense survivor’s guilt; many saw their friends and loved ones die before their own eyes ― or held them in their arms as they took their last breaths.

A number of the survivors, like Carter, were trapped in the bathroom stalls of Pulse for hours, hearing others die around them until police eventually entered the club using explosives at 5:02 a.m., killing Mateen after a chaotic shootout.

Carter credits her survival to a man named Jason Josaphat who shielded her from gunfire while hiding in the bathroom.

“He basically covered my body with his,” she said. “The guy shot his gun and I heard [Jason] scream. Then the police busted through the wall.”

But for Carter and others who walked or were carried out of Pulse alive that morning, survival also comes with a heavy sense of responsibility.

Angel Colon, one of the survivors who received significant media visibility in the year since the tragedy, was shot six times during Mateen’s rampage. He underwent his fourth surgery less than a month ago and continues to rely on a cane as he learns to walk again.

“I started thinking to myself, you know I can’t stay in a room with the doors closed and thinking about this night over and over again and be depressed,” Colon told HuffPost. “I have to do something about it – I have to speak out about it. After seeing the love and support, I thought to myself ‘I need to do that as well for the other survivors. I need to make sure that we’re all together and do this together.’ So I decided to be a voice.”

Colon has used his new platform to speak out about common sense gun legislation and violence against LGBTQ people. His voice joins a chorus of organizations that have sprung up in the wake of Pulse at the intersection of these two issues, like Gays Against Guns, a group that uses street performance to raise awareness about flawed gun control laws and its convergence with homophobia.

Authorities discovered after Pulse that Mateen was questioned about potential ties to terrorism in 2013 and 2014 and placed on a terrorist watch list. He was eventually taken off the list ― but even if his name had been on that list in 2016, he still would have been able to buy the guns used during his rampage under current American gun laws.

The immediate aftermath of Pulse also shed light on the unfair, homophobic regulations surrounding blood donation in the United States. There was an urgent and pressing need for blood to save the lives of queer people after Pulse, but men who have sex with men must remain celibate for a year in order to be eligible for donation.

As a result, Colon now also advocates alongside fellow survivor Tony Marrero for OneBlood, a nonprofit committed to providing safe, available and affordable blood, particularly in moments of crisis. 

What spaces are truly safe?

For Marreno, witnessing continued events of large-scale violence in spaces of entertainment and amusement are particularly difficult in the wake of Pulse.

He and Carter both told HuffPost that the recent attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, U.K. hit devastatingly close to home.

“I had a breakdown,” Marrero said. “That hit me hard not just because a lot of people got hurt, but we’re talking about an Ariana Grande concert! Most of her fans and followers are kids – what are we talking about here? Now I can’t even go out and enjoy a concert?”

The conversation about “safe spaces” for vulnerable individuals and their ties to high-impact acts of violence tends to move center stage following tragedies like Pulse and Manchester.

LGBTQ people have always had to carve out space for themselves in a world not designed for them to survive and prosper and, in many situations, gay bars have served as those safe spaces. Because of this, for many LGBTQ people, the physical venue of the Pulse tragedy felt like a shooting in their own home. 

And while queer people knew that the attack on Pulse was one rooted in homophobia from the second it happened, many people and some media tried to push back and erase the targeted nature of the massacre against queer Latinx individuals. It wasn’t until Mateen’s father told media that his son was angered by the sight of two men kissing – that he wasn’t motivated by religion – that the narrative started to change on a larger scale.

“[Pulse] came down to this sort of discussion about safe space that we had been having for awhile,” queer performer and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” finalist Sasha Velour told HuffPost. “That term had been used so loosely and all of the sudden the Pulse tragedy made it feel really urgent and really tangible – like not an emotional safe space but a real physical need to have a space where queer bodies, especially the bodies of queer people of color and especially Latinos, need to be protected and centered.”

This centering of the experiences of queer Latinx people in the discussion about Pulse is crucial, as mainstream media in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy largely ignored and erased the fact that over 90% of those killed were LGBTQ people of color.

For actor Wilson Cruz, who lost a family member in the tragedy, this erasure of the targeted nature of the attack on queer people of color proved especially frustrating – and ultimately informed his decision to become part of the conversation about what happened at Pulse.

“Most of [the victims] were Puerto Ricans and were part of an exodus from the island because of the financial and economic turmoil that faced Puerto Rico, who came to Orlando in order to find a better life,” Cruz told HuffPost. “That part of the story wasn’t being told, and so I started to speak out about what happened and to pay tribute to them because I thought that was a big part of the story that was being missed.”

Starting to heal

In the days following the tragedy, local Orlando LGBTQ leaders also quickly learned how ill-prepared they were to meet the specific needs of their Latinx community members.

Queer people in Orlando and their families who were either undocumented or didn’t speak English already faced a number of challenges in day-to-day life ― things like access to resources and adequate mental health care ― and saw these disparities further exacerbated immediately following Pulse.

“Pulse happened and we realized we were missing a segment of our community – we didn’t have a Spanish-speaking person here every single day, so if somebody walked in that just spoke Spanish, we were not able to service that person or help that person with what they needed,” Terry DeCarlo, Executive Director of The LGBT Center of Central Florida, told HuffPost, adding that they’ve changed their curriculum and plan to open a new office staffed entirely by Hispanic individuals. “There were things that we learned out of this and changed, but groups like QLatinx, which is one of the main ones that came out of [Pulse], they are doing amazing things.”

Organizations like QLatinx found financial support in the immediate aftermath of Pulse from groups like Contigo Fund, a foundation that also grew out of the tragedy and funds organizations dedicated to the healing, strengthening and empowerment of LGBTQ and Latinx people in the Central Florida area.

Marco Quiroga, Contigo Fund Program Director, told HuffPost that prior to the massacre, most nonprofits have been working in silos. “There was a lot of duplication of services,” he said. “Florida is fiftieth in the country for mental health care and one of the biggest flare ups that we saw after the tragedy was the fact that there were zero LGBTQ-competent and linguistically competent mental health services available to the individuals who were impacted directly ― and the broader community who has been traumatized by the tragedy.”

In the months since, these organizations, as well as others like Hispanic Federation and Proyecto Somos Orlando, have worked to fill the gaps in access to resources and care for these communities, as well as pushing established LGBTQ centers and nonprofits to broaden their scope.

Compassion begins with education. 

Other groups and services that have emerged focus on the need for comprehensive education about LGBTQ issues and experiences in order to change hearts and minds and encourage empathy.

The Dru Project is one of these organizations, created by the friends of Drew Leinonen, a 32-year-old gay man who died in Pulse along with his boyfriend, Juan Guerrero. The group’s focus is on Gay Straight Alliances in high schools, developing a curriculum for these high school groups to adopt and also to provide scholarships.

For the founders of The Dru Project, it is crucial to provide safe spaces in schools for LGBTQ students and to encourage empathetic attitudes towards queer kids in public schools from a young age.

Leinonen’s mother, Christine, has since become a “mom mascot” of sorts for the group and has evolved into an outspoken advocate for gay rights and gun safety. She also spoke onstage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention about the loss of her son.

“One good thing that has come out of the tragedy is ― I always thought I was a loving, kind compassionate person but as a result of losing my son in this violent way, I have developed a level of compassion that is deeper than I thought was humanly possible,” Leinonen told HuffPost. “[And] I have a constant message for parents, period, to love their children exactly as they come to them.”

The fight continues.

This need to focus on education, on changing hearts and minds when it comes to LGBTQ identity and experiences ― as well as the experiences of all minority groups ― from an early age is a common thought echoed among survivors, family members and activists who experienced Pulse and its aftermath.

Horror will continue to occur and constantly be reinvented in new and unspeakable ways until the roots of the problems surrounding Pulse ― namely, socialized bigotry and prejudice from a young age and rampant gun violence ― are addressed and dismantled.

And yet, since that fateful day, we have new challenges to face, including a president and administration which, at best, ignore queer people and, at worst, refuse to protect them. But one thing is certain: the fight for equality of all human beings continues and is bolstered by the memory of those who we lost on June 12.

Pulse nightclub is now in the process of becoming a memorial site. As Alvear notes, “Forty years from here, whoever visits [Pulse], they will know that it happened ― and that love will always conquer everything.”

And for Brandon Wolf, a survivor and co-founder of The Dru Project, reflecting on Pulse, the memorial site, and the twelve months since the tragedy has left him with a call to action.

“We are never in a place where we can stop demanding equality, where we can stop challenging people to be better than they were yesterday,” he told HuffPost. “We have a long way to go. And if Pulse serves as any reminder, it’s that we aren’t done fighting. We are never done fighting until every last person in this world is accepted and loved for who they are. I’m certainly not going to stop fighting and I hope you don’t either.”

What follows are the names of the 49 victims who died in the Pulse Nightclub Massacre. Rest in power.

Stanley Almodovar III, 23

Amanda L. Alvear, 25 

Oscar A. Aracena Montero, 26 

Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33

Antonio Davon Brown, 29 

Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 

Angel Candelario-Padro, 28 

Juan Chavez Martinez, 25 

Luis Daniel Conde, 39 

Cory James Connell, 21 

Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 

Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 

Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31 

Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 

Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 

Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, 22 

Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 

Paul Terrell Henry, 41 

Frank Hernandez, 27 

Miguel Angel Honorato, 30

Javier Jorge Reyes, 40 

Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 

Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30

Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25 

Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 

Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 

Brenda Marquez McCool, 49 

Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25 

Kimberly Jean Morris, 37 

Akyra Monet Murray, 18 

Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, 20 

Geraldo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25 

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 

Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 

Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 

Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 

Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, 27 

Xavier Emmanuel Serrano-Rosado, 35 

Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 

Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, 24

Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34

Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 

Martin Benitez Torres, 33

Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24 

Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37 

Luis Sergio Vielma, 22 

Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, 50 

Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37

Jerald Arthur Wright, 31 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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For Those We Lost And Those Who Survived: The Pulse Massacre One Year Later

The pain of June 12 still pangs just as palpably today for Mayra Alvear as it did one year ago.

It’s been twelve months since Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub during Pride month 2016 and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle in a three-hour rampage that left 49 people dead – including Alvear’s youngest daughter, Amanda.

It was the worst mass shooting in modern American history, occurring on the LGBTQ club’s Latin night – a targeted attack against queer people of color that sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ community globally.

The time between then and now has held unimaginable grief for many – a daily struggle to make sense of the lives taken and the level of sheer horror and hate that permeated Pulse that morning. 

And for Alvear and countless others, that grief has now been harnessed and channeled into a resolute mission: to be a voice for those who were lost ― to ensure that their loved ones are never forgotten, and to bring awareness to the culture of violence and deep-seated bigotry towards minorities permeating the fabric of the United States.

“I have to keep fighting for her memory ― that she’s not forgotten, that her death isn’t in vain,” Alvear told HuffPost. “There is so much love out there. I want the legacy of these kids to be that. To show the world that [being LGBTQ] is more than a label – these are people that were loved, they were caring, they were human and these hate crimes are just totally uncalled for. Unnecessary. We are here because God created us and he created us all equal – and some people don’t seem to have this kind of vision. I don’t know what kind of world they want to live in.”

Those who survived.

The Pulse shooting shook multiple communities – and those who exist at their intersections – to their cores. It raised countless questions about modern-day homophobia – including internalized – transphobia, gun violence, racism, Islamophobia and the human capacity for evil.

While the country and LGBTQ people around the world mourned, attended vigils, created art, and processed their grief in their own ways, a new reality and all-encompassing landscape of heartbreak faced the city of Orlando. 

Those who survived found themselves profoundly and irreversibly changed.

“The first couple of days in the hospital was a very hard time for me,” Patience Carter, a survivor whose cousin Akyra Murray died in Pulse, told HuffPost. “I was in a really bad place. The experience initially traumatized me in a way that made me feel as if living was a privilege that I didn’t deserve. I was angry with God because I was just like, why would you leave me here in this situation knowing that all of these other people didn’t make it? I felt like I didn’t deserve the opportunity to live.”

Those who made it out of Pulse alive still grapple with intense survivor’s guilt; many saw their friends and loved ones die before their own eyes ― or held them in their arms as they took their last breaths.

A number of the survivors, like Carter, were trapped in the bathroom stalls of Pulse for hours, hearing others die around them until police eventually entered the club using explosives at 5:02 a.m., killing Mateen after a chaotic shootout.

Carter credits her survival to a man named Jason Josaphat who shielded her from gunfire while hiding in the bathroom.

“He basically covered my body with his,” she said. “The guy shot his gun and I heard [Jason] scream. Then the police busted through the wall.”

But for Carter and others who walked or were carried out of Pulse alive that morning, survival also comes with a heavy sense of responsibility.

Angel Colon, one of the survivors who received significant media visibility in the year since the tragedy, was shot six times during Mateen’s rampage. He underwent his fourth surgery less than a month ago and continues to rely on a cane as he learns to walk again.

“I started thinking to myself, you know I can’t stay in a room with the doors closed and thinking about this night over and over again and be depressed,” Colon told HuffPost. “I have to do something about it – I have to speak out about it. After seeing the love and support, I thought to myself ‘I need to do that as well for the other survivors. I need to make sure that we’re all together and do this together.’ So I decided to be a voice.”

Colon has used his new platform to speak out about common sense gun legislation and violence against LGBTQ people. His voice joins a chorus of organizations that have sprung up in the wake of Pulse at the intersection of these two issues, like Gays Against Guns, a group that uses street performance to raise awareness about flawed gun control laws and its convergence with homophobia.

Authorities discovered after Pulse that Mateen was questioned about potential ties to terrorism in 2013 and 2014 and placed on a terrorist watch list. He was eventually taken off the list ― but even if his name had been on that list in 2016, he still would have been able to buy the guns used during his rampage under current American gun laws.

The immediate aftermath of Pulse also shed light on the unfair, homophobic regulations surrounding blood donation in the United States. There was an urgent and pressing need for blood to save the lives of queer people after Pulse, but men who have sex with men must remain celibate for a year in order to be eligible for donation.

As a result, Colon now also advocates alongside fellow survivor Tony Marrero for OneBlood, a nonprofit committed to providing safe, available and affordable blood, particularly in moments of crisis. 

What spaces are truly safe?

For Marreno, witnessing continued events of large-scale violence in spaces of entertainment and amusement are particularly difficult in the wake of Pulse.

He and Carter both told HuffPost that the recent attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, U.K. hit devastatingly close to home.

“I had a breakdown,” Marrero said. “That hit me hard not just because a lot of people got hurt, but we’re talking about an Ariana Grande concert! Most of her fans and followers are kids – what are we talking about here? Now I can’t even go out and enjoy a concert?”

The conversation about “safe spaces” for vulnerable individuals and their ties to high-impact acts of violence tends to move center stage following tragedies like Pulse and Manchester.

LGBTQ people have always had to carve out space for themselves in a world not designed for them to survive and prosper and, in many situations, gay bars have served as those safe spaces. Because of this, for many LGBTQ people, the physical venue of the Pulse tragedy felt like a shooting in their own home. 

And while queer people knew that the attack on Pulse was one rooted in homophobia from the second it happened, many people and some media tried to push back and erase the targeted nature of the massacre against queer Latinx individuals. It wasn’t until Mateen’s father told media that his son was angered by the sight of two men kissing – that he wasn’t motivated by religion – that the narrative started to change on a larger scale.

“[Pulse] came down to this sort of discussion about safe space that we had been having for awhile,” queer performer and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” finalist Sasha Velour told HuffPost. “That term had been used so loosely and all of the sudden the Pulse tragedy made it feel really urgent and really tangible – like not an emotional safe space but a real physical need to have a space where queer bodies, especially the bodies of queer people of color and especially Latinos, need to be protected and centered.”

This centering of the experiences of queer Latinx people in the discussion about Pulse is crucial, as mainstream media in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy largely ignored and erased the fact that over 90% of those killed were LGBTQ people of color.

For actor Wilson Cruz, who lost a family member in the tragedy, this erasure of the targeted nature of the attack on queer people of color proved especially frustrating – and ultimately informed his decision to become part of the conversation about what happened at Pulse.

“Most of [the victims] were Puerto Ricans and were part of an exodus from the island because of the financial and economic turmoil that faced Puerto Rico, who came to Orlando in order to find a better life,” Cruz told HuffPost. “That part of the story wasn’t being told, and so I started to speak out about what happened and to pay tribute to them because I thought that was a big part of the story that was being missed.”

Starting to heal

In the days following the tragedy, local Orlando LGBTQ leaders also quickly learned how ill-prepared they were to meet the specific needs of their Latinx community members.

Queer people in Orlando and their families who were either undocumented or didn’t speak English already faced a number of challenges in day-to-day life ― things like access to resources and adequate mental health care ― and saw these disparities further exacerbated immediately following Pulse.

“Pulse happened and we realized we were missing a segment of our community – we didn’t have a Spanish-speaking person here every single day, so if somebody walked in that just spoke Spanish, we were not able to service that person or help that person with what they needed,” Terry DeCarlo, Executive Director of The LGBT Center of Central Florida, told HuffPost, adding that they’ve changed their curriculum and plan to open a new office staffed entirely by Hispanic individuals. “There were things that we learned out of this and changed, but groups like QLatinx, which is one of the main ones that came out of [Pulse], they are doing amazing things.”

Organizations like QLatinx found financial support in the immediate aftermath of Pulse from groups like Contigo Fund, a foundation that also grew out of the tragedy and funds organizations dedicated to the healing, strengthening and empowerment of LGBTQ and Latinx people in the Central Florida area.

Marco Quiroga, Contigo Fund Program Director, told HuffPost that prior to the massacre, most nonprofits have been working in silos. “There was a lot of duplication of services,” he said. “Florida is fiftieth in the country for mental health care and one of the biggest flare ups that we saw after the tragedy was the fact that there were zero LGBTQ-competent and linguistically competent mental health services available to the individuals who were impacted directly ― and the broader community who has been traumatized by the tragedy.”

In the months since, these organizations, as well as others like Hispanic Federation and Proyecto Somos Orlando, have worked to fill the gaps in access to resources and care for these communities, as well as pushing established LGBTQ centers and nonprofits to broaden their scope.

Compassion begins with education. 

Other groups and services that have emerged focus on the need for comprehensive education about LGBTQ issues and experiences in order to change hearts and minds and encourage empathy.

The Dru Project is one of these organizations, created by the friends of Drew Leinonen, a 32-year-old gay man who died in Pulse along with his boyfriend, Juan Guerrero. The group’s focus is on Gay Straight Alliances in high schools, developing a curriculum for these high school groups to adopt and also to provide scholarships.

For the founders of The Dru Project, it is crucial to provide safe spaces in schools for LGBTQ students and to encourage empathetic attitudes towards queer kids in public schools from a young age.

Leinonen’s mother, Christine, has since become a “mom mascot” of sorts for the group and has evolved into an outspoken advocate for gay rights and gun safety. She also spoke onstage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention about the loss of her son.

“One good thing that has come out of the tragedy is ― I always thought I was a loving, kind compassionate person but as a result of losing my son in this violent way, I have developed a level of compassion that is deeper than I thought was humanly possible,” Leinonen told HuffPost. “[And] I have a constant message for parents, period, to love their children exactly as they come to them.”

The fight continues.

This need to focus on education, on changing hearts and minds when it comes to LGBTQ identity and experiences ― as well as the experiences of all minority groups ― from an early age is a common thought echoed among survivors, family members and activists who experienced Pulse and its aftermath.

Horror will continue to occur and constantly be reinvented in new and unspeakable ways until the roots of the problems surrounding Pulse ― namely, socialized bigotry and prejudice from a young age and rampant gun violence ― are addressed and dismantled.

And yet, since that fateful day, we have new challenges to face, including a president and administration which, at best, ignore queer people and, at worst, refuse to protect them. But one thing is certain: the fight for equality of all human beings continues and is bolstered by the memory of those who we lost on June 12.

Pulse nightclub is now in the process of becoming a memorial site. As Alvear notes, “Forty years from here, whoever visits [Pulse], they will know that it happened ― and that love will always conquer everything.”

And for Brandon Wolf, a survivor and co-founder of The Dru Project, reflecting on Pulse, the memorial site, and the twelve months since the tragedy has left him with a call to action.

“We are never in a place where we can stop demanding equality, where we can stop challenging people to be better than they were yesterday,” he told HuffPost. “We have a long way to go. And if Pulse serves as any reminder, it’s that we aren’t done fighting. We are never done fighting until every last person in this world is accepted and loved for who they are. I’m certainly not going to stop fighting and I hope you don’t either.”

What follows are the names of the 49 victims who died in the Pulse Nightclub Massacre. Rest in power.

Stanley Almodovar III, 23

Amanda L. Alvear, 25 

Oscar A. Aracena Montero, 26 

Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33

Antonio Davon Brown, 29 

Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 

Angel Candelario-Padro, 28 

Juan Chavez Martinez, 25 

Luis Daniel Conde, 39 

Cory James Connell, 21 

Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 

Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 

Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31 

Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 

Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 

Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, 22 

Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 

Paul Terrell Henry, 41 

Frank Hernandez, 27 

Miguel Angel Honorato, 30

Javier Jorge Reyes, 40 

Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 

Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30

Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25 

Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 

Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 

Brenda Marquez McCool, 49 

Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25 

Kimberly Jean Morris, 37 

Akyra Monet Murray, 18 

Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, 20 

Geraldo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25 

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 

Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 

Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 

Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 

Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, 27 

Xavier Emmanuel Serrano-Rosado, 35 

Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 

Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, 24

Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34

Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 

Martin Benitez Torres, 33

Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24 

Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37 

Luis Sergio Vielma, 22 

Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, 50 

Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37

Jerald Arthur Wright, 31 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcdi2Z

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