Good Evening,
The last time we gathered together it was for Oxford’s Pride Parade, we were celebrating our love, our community, our strength, and our allies. We stood in the face of our state and nation’s adversity, hate, and misunderstanding and realized that, through our march, Oxford welcomed us in droves. Cheers, music, dancing, and happiness permeated our town. We discovered that we were surely not as alone as we thought–despite the deafening and nonsensical noises of anxiety and anger delivered through legislation.
And, yet today, this is a very different day, friends. We stand stunned, gut punched, sad beyond tears, struck silent by our immense grief, numb from the pain of rage. We feel the tremendous void left by our sisters and brothers, our sons and daughters, who on a joyful night celebrating Latin gay culture had their lights and lives extinguished by a man so moved by fear, anxiety, and hate as to allow him to commit an unspeakable act which will surely cause convulsions reverberating across generations.
I wish I could stand up here and say to you “How did this happen?” But I know how and why this happened and so do you. Given what is going on in this country, the more honest and nauseating question is, “How could this not happen?”
In our nation, we refuse to deal with the consequences of unchecked narratives of fear, hate, and exclusion screaming across our internet and airwaves, our news outlets and our own national psyche will rush to individualize this incident. Yes, we can reduce our comprehension of this event to the actions of a disturbed, fragile, and toxic individual who fed off these narratives to develop and carry out his devastatingly murderous act. But we know that this event does not begin nor end with the madness of one. To understand it as such is to disrespect the lives lost and injured. To do so means to shirk our responsibilities to our country, to love, and to freedom.
Together, we must understand that this event, targeting our LGBTQ Americans, is the logical next step in a country that, through apathy or action, regularly exalts difference is worthy of hatred and violence. In a strange but not unexpected turn of events, the murderer braided global and national narratives of hate to firm up his ideas and justify his actions. How could this not have happened when the majority of our citizens base their understandings of the world from demagogues and divisive individuals who preach fear and hate mongering and who twist our sacred and secular words to satisfy their own narcissistic needs for power?
In a nation and a world that, with devastating consequences, organizes, categorizes, and reduces holy and wonderful beings to good and evil, normal and aberrant, welcoming and threatening, how could this not happen? When a nation and a world have historically dealt with difference through execution instead of embrace, how could this not happen? When we define human rights as currency, power, finite, and to be determined and doled out by the few, how could this not happen? When we continue to define love through the lens of hate, how could this not happen?
And so we must ask individually and collectively, is this the world that we want for ourselves and our future generations? Do we want to continue to regularly gather to mourn or to celebrate? It is our choice and we have the power to change it.
How do we honor the beautiful and unfulfilled lives lost? We know. We will do what our elders and leaders have done when found in this exact space. We must understand where we are now and where we want to be.
And so reflecting in both tragedy, looking towards triumph, and to honor and memorialize the young lives lost at Pulse, as difficult as it may seem, we must continue the strategies that we have always relied upon. The ones that have worked and will always work. In concert with grieving, we must commit ourselves again to peace and to love. And as we awaken and recover from this vulgar and living nightmare, we must continue to render ourselves visible. We must continue to use our words and actions to challenge those who hate. We must educate the uninformed and misinformed. We must embrace the fear out of those who do not know us. In memory of those magnificent lives who will not have the opportunity to live out the LGBTQ dreams of freedom, love, and equity that we have fought so hard for, we must take responsibility and work tirelessly until we have achieved equity, equality, and value for all members of the LGBTQ community. As members and Allies we must continue to teach our children the power of love over hate. We must demand from our politicians and judges, that we will stand for nothing less than full equality, equity, and recognition. We must work together across this neighborhood and nation to stop this god forsaken violence. Through our fatigue and fear, we can and we must filter out hate and fear poisoning our minds, bodies, and spirits. For our own sanity and safety, we must demand that we stop believing the myth that we can only strike violence down with more violence. This is difficult work and it is our most crucial work. It is the debt we owe to our society and our fallen LGBTQ community members. And finally, we must continue to draw from our absolutely endless reservoirs of strength—each other. For generations and tonight, violence and misunderstanding from outside forces have called upon us to rise after being struck down. And we will rise again and again and again and again until we have won. And so, let us raise our candles in solidarity and with reverence and let us say to each one of those people whose lives were brutally cut short, we will not forget you—no, each and everyone of us will honor your lives and memories by continuing the fight to love who we love, without fear but with pride.