Very nice, Dan. Thank you. The quote from Richard Kim was especially touching.

I'm not familiar with what television character had his/her sexuality rewritten by the end of the first season to make them straight, and my googling fails me. Not a major point of the piece I realize, but I am curious.

As a trauma therapist, I'm going to share this everywhere. What a lovely description of what is to find safety and come home to the true self, embodiment and sexuality. As a human, I weep, and then rise again. Thank you so much for these words.

beautifully written! thank you

Beautiful piece, Dan. Sadly, even as I cheered your your last line I thought: "except, you know, Congress".

Add me to the chorus: lovely writing, Dan.

This choked me up. Thank you, Dan.

I see a community totally different from the onee Dan sees and one that has gotten more self absorbed as the years have gone by. I see a community where some older gays don't want to go to bars anymore and have no other outlets only to end up being shut ins? I see newly "married" gays and younger "professional" gays who are more self-absorbed and critical of their brothers and sisters on the street, drug and booze addled, with their hand out in need of money, food and shelter from the elements and being stepped over and walked by those on the way to those "safe places" like local bars and restaurants, what about them? I see more and more gays posting what the wonderful lives the have on Facebook and then ignoring the plagues of poverty and addiction in their own backyard. "safety" and "security" for all can only be achieved when "safety" and "security" can be had by all. This is reality, this is fact and frankly as is with all societies, if you aren't part of the "elite", whether it be the "pseudo-intellectual elite", "professional elite" or even the "gay elite" then in the long, youre just kidding yourself into delusion that "safe places" are as real a concept as unicorns.

Mr(?) Knat - I didn't watch, and don't know how long it took, but Billy Crystal's character (Jody?) on Soap rings a vague bell - first gay with a male lover, then trans or trying to be, and finally remaining male-presenting and coming into his "true" sexuality by partnering a woman for the vast majority of the series, with all the while people pointing to him as a "gay" character.

Thank you Dan.

@7 Thank you for all the work you do helping to combat poverty and addiction. Your non-stop efforts on behalf of the poor and down-trodden and your never ending stream of bitter resentment are really making the world a better place. Keep up the good work!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX_izFYk…

Beautiful and touching, Dan. I hope Pulse rises like a phoenix to be place of love and joy and connection and community again before too long.

We find what we're looking for... if you're looking for company or community, you'll find it... if you're looking to dance, you'll find it ... If you're looking to get laid or get drunk you can find it there too. We are all looking for different things at different times in our lives. A gay bar can be all of thoses things... to Omar Mateen it may have became an obsession and a resentment because he couldn't control.

dan ive trolled you via email a half dozen times over the years and you've told me to fuck off several times (in as many words). the sad thing is, i bet we agree with each other about 99% of things, i just hate how you have always felt like a bully to me. two wrongs not making a right and such.

i've attacked you to friends for never writing anything significant in the stranger (which was true the last time i looked through everything you had written for the stranger, not slog, several years ago), yet i knew from your near universal staff benevolence that you were probably a rock star employee.

all of this is to say i think this piece is slowly turning my thoughts around on you. idk if you care, but this is me telling you that.

i want to specifically stress my negative feelings towards you has nothing to do with homosexuality. although i am the most boring cis white male on the (overpriced) block, my first roommate and then-best friend is gay, blah blah blah.

Beautifully written as others have said. I just wanted to share as a straight woman of color a convo I've been having recently with a gay friend of color. He was upset that the media was too moderate about the ethnicity of most of the victims. There were two big topics he had that was upsetting. 1) the isolation of people of color in the gay scene in the USA. That often the majority of gays would say very racist things to him in catty ways. That trans people of color and their murders were often time too marginalized. 2) Islamic gays don't have support from their religion or gays. Neither of us are Islamic so I have nothing else to add to that. It's been an interesting convo so I thought I'd mention it. Also your pic of a white gay bar reinforced the topics of our convo. I thought it ironic.

Beautifully said Daniel.

remember my own “Pulse”. A place where as young gay man working through my own coming out process I found friends, a sense of community and camaraderie. It is a club on Halsted Street in Chicago’s “boystown” neighbourhood called “Sidetrack” It is a large brightly lit bar that shows music videos on a giant screen. Each night of the week has a theme. Comedy night, 80’s night, Diva night, etc,

But Sunday and Monday nights were Showtune nights. When videos from Broadway musicals played to packed crowd of mostly gay men, singing along (in harmony) at the top of our lungs. A tradition I am happy to see carries on there to this day...

I had only recently moved to Chicago (from Madison) but I soon made a group of friends and Showtune Mondays became our ritual , it was the first time in my life I felt part of any sort of LGBT Community. It was incredibly empowering.

Down the street from Sidetrack was a wonderfully dingy Piano bar called Gentry. There I would make friends with some of the most amazing people I have ever known.. The glorious Honey West, the amazing Khris Francis, the late, great and fabulous Rudy De la Mor and the late and dearly missed Michael James. All of them, powerful LGBT role models. Who each in their own way, showed a terrified young gay man that living authentically and honestly was not only the better choice, it was in fact, the only choice

Yet never once during all that time in those “safe spaces” did I think that my life might be at risk. That some conflicted, hate filled madman would seek out that space in order to rain chaos and death down on me and my friends.

I am sure none of the people at Pulse last Sunday night thought that either Yet that is exactly what happened to them. Their lives cut brutally short in place that had been a refuge and place they felt was truly theirs.

It is crucial we not lose sight of what really happened in Orlando last Sunday. It was not "radical Islam" or whatever dog whistle Trump is sounding. It was an act of homophobic terror.

The gunman didn’t target Pulse and the people there because they were American, (so was he) or because they were Non-muslims or even because they were in a nightclub He targeted them because they were Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender.

This was about killing Gay people The right wing in America desperately is trying to spin the reasons away from that basic truth, because it is their rhetoric and actions that send clear messages to people like this disturbed gunman that LGBT people are “less than” and therefore killing them isn’t wrong.

The voices of the American Taliban; The Tony Perkins’, the Bryan Fischers, the Brian Browns, did not pull the trigger last Sunday night. Yet their fingerprints are clearly all over the gun.

@7, thank you. Marriage equality was a huge step forward but as soon as that happened many of the better of gays here in Seattle immediately turned their backs on the other problems that the community still faces. Maybe the tragedy in Orlando will get some of these "rich fags" who work at places ...well we know where they work, to pay attention to more than just the new Audi they have been eyeing. We are lucky to live in a pretty safe part of the country but there's still a lot of pain out there and if we are a community we do have an obligation to help.

@1 The gay character on Dynasty was de-gayed in the 80s (and then "gayed" again years later on a reunion movie!), and (as a poster points out above) Billy Crystal's character on Soap was also de-gayed.

Now, LGBT characters aren't de-gayed so much. TV showrunners have a different solution: instead of de-gaying them, they simply kill them.

The fact that something like 17 recurring lesbian characters have been killed off tv shows in the last five months alone (when there were only a little more than twice that number on tv last season in the first place) is so fucking infuriating at this point. It's like we're back to the pre-Vito Russo era. Russo was clear in "The Celluloid Closet" all those years ago about the de-sensitizing effect that constantly killing LGBT characters had in the bad old days, and though there's obviously no direct connection, the fact that after five fucking months of tv show after tv show killing off gay characters we get maybe the worst real-life LGBT bloodbath in American history makes me want Vito Russo's zombified corpse to come back from the dead and kick some Hollywood ass.

♡♡♡ this and your podcast rant this week are fabulous ♡♡♡

@1, @8, @19 - This might also be a reference to Jim J. Bullock's character, Monroe, on Too Close For Comfort. He was presumably gay in the first season, and then they foisted a girlfriend on him in the second season.

Wonderful piece. Thank you Dan. (a straight guy, whose mind was blown the first time I set foot in a gay club [hello I-Beam, Haight St]...and who found a sanctuary and a respite from hetero culture)

Steven Carrington went back and forth a bit, but always got re-gayed, usually within the same season.

Individually, I'd much prefer a good death scene as a performer. Now, if the proportion of lesbian characters being killed off is abnormally high, that's certainly grounds for concern, but the protests I've seen have come across as embarrassing appeals for lesbians to be exempt from death rather than fact-laden manifestations of unequal treatment.