It’s 6:30 a.m., and my wife already has the news silently scrolling in the dark. “Colorado Springs,” she says. My bleary eyes focus on the carnage — again. It’s been six years since she woke me up early on a Sunday whispering “something terrible happened in Orlando.”
In 2016, in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in which a man killed 49 people, I was a lawyer at the Human Rights Campaign. I spent the day on conference calls and drafting letters to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and other federal officials pleading for swift investigations and additional protection for the Orlando LGBTQ community.
At the end of that day, I just held my toddler and cried, replaying the names of the victims and remembering my own coming out in Oklahoma City’s small, joyful lesbian bars. I understood the relief these spaces carve out of an otherwise hostile horizon.
