The Village Voice’s Raillan Brooks (who, full disclosure, is a close friend) on the Orlando shooting:
In the early morning hours of June 12, 2016, a 29-year-old man entered Pulse, an Orlando gay club hosting an “Upscale Latin Saturday” dance party, and shot 49 people to death. A few months earlier, said his father in the aftermath, the man had seen two men kissing in Miami; he believed his son’s anger at the sight might have led to the shooting, now the deadliest in American history. By mid-morning Sunday, we knew the man’s name: Omar Mateen. That was it. The narrative had its requisite Muslim.
But the narrative couldn’t find room for me. The day after the shooting, already sick of the ooga-booga headlines, I saw a tweet from Chicago-based shock jock Joe Walsh — “Islam hates #LGBT. Muslims hate gays. If you are gay, Islam wants you dead.” — and I knew I was about to out myself one more time: “As a gay muslim,” I responded, “I very much beg to differ.”
Brooks’s meditation on the tragedy is rich with colonial and personal history. I don’t know how he was able to turn it around so quickly in the last few terrible days. Go read it.
