‘Our grief, instead of having to be hidden, can be shared with the world’
‘Our grief, instead of having to be hidden, can be shared with the world’
Gay rights advocate reflects on Orlando shooting
Senior Editor
Outgoing Bar President Ramón Abadin said he had known since his first day leading the Bar that Orlando attorney Larry Smith would be his choice to receive the Bar’s prestigious G. Kirk Haas Humanitarian Award for Smith’s long advocacy for equal rights on behalf of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community.
What no one could know was the bestowing of the award would come five days after a gunman killed 49 people and wounded more than 50 at a gay nightclub in downtown Orlando, a few miles up the road from the convention hotel.
“Since I accept this award not for me but for my community, I hope you will forgive me if I depart from the norm, don’t just smile, be photographed, and sit down, and that you, my colleagues, will afford me the personal privilege of spending a few minutes talking about what has happened,” Smith said, addressing the June 17 General Assembly at The Florida Bar’s Annual Convention.
He noted that the General Assembly happened to mark the one-year anniversary of when a 21-year-old gunman, hoping to ignite a race war, walked into an African-American church in downtown Charleston, SC, and executed nine people at a Bible study meeting.
“The people there felt safe and secure and loved,” Smith said. “For many in the LGBT community, nightclubs like Pulse in downtown Orlando provided that kind of safe place when their churches and sometimes their own families had rejected them. Pulse was a place where people could put aside pretense, hiding, and the judgment of others, if only for a short time, and laugh and share the company of others who wanted nothing more than to be friends and to be with friends. Those who gathered asked nothing more of the outside and often judgmental world except to be left in peace in that one small, special, safe place.
“When the gunman walked into Pulse on June 12, it was not a random choice or an effort made to make some broad political statement about the government. He could have gone across the street to Wendy’s or next door to Dunkin’ Donuts. . . where anybody in the community can be found on any given Saturday night. He drove over an hour to one of the largest and busiest gay clubs in the theme park capital of the world where he knew inside hundreds of gay people would be found. He walked into their safe space and as they laughed and sang and danced, he methodically shot and killed as many of those people as he could because he thought they were gay and gay lives were somehow less than worthy.”
It was not the first time gays have been targeted. Forty-three years ago, Smith said, someone ignited a fire in the doorway of a second floor gay bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The bar that day was home for the Metropolitan Community Church, which served the gay community, and congregants were listening to a pianist and discussing a fundraiser for a local crippled children’s hospital.
“When the patrons opened the door, the smell of lighter fluid and the heat of flames engulfed the room. There were steel bars on the windows and there was no escape so 32 [of about 60 people present] died,” recalled Smith. “As hard as that is, what happened next is worse. Because what happened was nothing. Families refused to claim the bodies of their family members. A sympathetic priest at a local church ordained at a funeral service, for which he was chastised by his superiors.
“There was a half-hearted investigation, but today, 43 years later, no one has ever been charged with that horrible crime. To the world, the message was that people inside the steel bars were invisible and unimportant because they were gay.”
But what was different this time was the reaction.
“Through horror, we found humanity. In Orlando, we saw hundreds of people standing in line in the hot Florida sun to give blood to strangers they would never meet. And we witnessed an outpouring of love and support from around the world through social media and through pictures of buildings and monuments lit in bright true colors,” Smith said. “The American flag is flying at half-staff, and yesterday the president of the United States came to Orlando to offer the respect of a grieving nation.. . .
“Our grief, instead of having to be hidden, can be shared with the world.. . . The gunman in Charleston and the gunman in Orlando failed at what they hoped to do, which was divide this community and to divide us as a nation. We will not live in fear. We will bury our dead. We will heal. We will build a better America where hatred and misunderstanding is replaced with love and pride.. . . We will now return to our long, steady journey toward equality. We will show the world that we are a nation of law and equal justice under those laws. That is the legacy of and my solemn promise to these 49 men and women in my LGBT and allied community. You did not die alone. You did not die in vain. We will not forget you. Our pulse is stronger than ever.”
