The Orlando I know best was shot through the heart Sunday morning. This may sound like a cliché, but I believe it is true.
I lived there for nine years, mostly in the gay neighborhoods near downtown. If I could pull the city close and lay my ear on its chest, the streets near the scene of the massacre at Pulse nightclub are where I would hear its beating heart.
It is hard to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender in America, and Orlando is no different. But if your parents turned their backs on you because you are gay, if you felt that you had nowhere to go, you could find a home in these sleepy streets, 20 miles north of the fantasy worlds of Walt Disney.
This solidarity is not strictly the kind that brings together any embattled group. It is a choice of the city’s political and civic leadership. Downtown Orlando was revived in the 1990s and early 2000s by gay homeowners and transformed by gay developers, many of them drawn to the city for jobs as Disney artists and entertainers. These neighborhoods elected Central Florida’s first openly gay official—a city councilwoman who was voted into office 16 years ago and still serves to this day.
In the years before gay marriage became legal, they fought for and won a gay rights ordinance, domestic partner benefits for city employees, and a domestic partner registry. Even when Central Florida politics was dominated by forces that were lukewarm to gay rights, Orlando supported it.
Now gayness is celebrated and protected by the city’s Democratic political elite. When the editor of Watermark, the region’s gay newspaper, got married last year, a U.S. Congressman, the city’s mayor, the county’s elected tax collector, a former police chief and a host of other politicos crowded into rows of folding chairs alongside chronic club goers, artists and liberal activists.
I was a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel from 2001 to 2010, mostly covering crime and criminal justice. For five of those years, I lived within walking distance of Pulse. As a straight married homebody, exhausted from long hours as a police reporter, I never went dancing there and never knew the gay club scene.
Instead, I came to know and love Orlando best through two of my neighbors who were gay and lived in cramped apartments behind a house I used to rent with my husband. When one was too broke to buy HIV medication, they would share it.
One was Brian, an Orlando native whose family lived less than two miles away but never visited. He manned the counter at a gay-owned optometrist office a mile or so north of Pulse on the same street.
Brian felt shunned by his family, of course. But also by the gay elite who he felt treated those with HIV as outcasts. When he was feeling mischievous, he’d shout at our wealthier gay neighbors through their fence: “Arrogant fags.”
I was driving home from an assignment when one of his friends called to tell me that Brian had died of a heart attack. The service was at a storefront funeral home that did services for cheap. Rumor was that his family planned to show up out of spite, just to peer into the windows to see how lonely they had made him.
But Brian was never abandoned by Orlando. Latecomers to the service had to stand, and the crowd spilled out the door into the heat. Programs that featured a faded picture of him dressed as a court jester ran out.
Midway through the service, I saw a relative peak her head in the door and stomp away. Brian won.
I thought of Brian’s funeral early Sunday when I watched Orlando police on television, piling the wounded into the back of a pickup truck they used as a makeshift ambulance. Hours later, when footage showed at least hundreds of people, if not more than a thousand, lining up to give blood, I thought of him again.
The Orlando I love best was shot through the heart early Sunday, yet somehow, it is still alive. I like to think that it, like Brian, will win.
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