On Sunday, June 12, 2016, I awoke in my Manhattan apartment to several missed calls and voicemails from my mother. Her first message began, “I need to know your location. I saw what happened on the news. Please call me back.”
When I returned her call, she answered and sighed deeply. “Thank God. I know you tend to leave without informing anyone. I was worried you might be there. In Orlando. At Pulse.”
My mother thought she was the one informing me of the news, but I was already aware. I had been awake late the previous night when social media began reporting the massacre and concerned texts from friends started arriving. Around 2 a.m., shortly after last call, twenty-nine-year-old Omar Mateen entered Pulse Nightclub on “Latin Night” with a semiautomatic rifle. He murdered 49 people and injured 53.
He shot individuals who had come to Orlando from places like Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. He shot a mother who died protecting her queer child with her own body. He shot singers, hairdressers, nurses, photographers, and literature students. He fired bullets into people who simply wanted a few hours, a moment, to be free—to dance joyfully to the rhythms of Latin Night.
As news of the massacre spread, I didn’t know the specifics of their lives. But I knew, deep down, that many were like me: queer, Latinx, and struggling to survive. These were queer individuals from diasporic communities, queers moving across the world, queers who have had to face hostile and cruel environments. I immediately felt haunted by their deaths, astonished by how quickly I felt the loss. Haunted by the death toll, the names, the stories and histories behind those names—just as I am haunted by the thousands of queer people, known and unknown, who have died from AIDS.
What does it mean to exist “after” loss? What does it mean to continue after the Pulse Massacre or after the AIDS Crisis? How can we heal when we are perpetually in a cruel and devastating aftermath? I am not the only one asking these questions.
“Yesterday we saw ourselves die again // Fifty times we died in Orlando,” laments the speaker in Christopher Soto’s poem, “.” The “we” Soto uses is a plural, marginalized voice representing young, queer people of color from colonized nations. Many Pulse victims were in their twenties, some still teenagers.
Richard Blanco, in his tribute to the Pulse victims, “,” writes: “picture the choir of their invisible spirits / rising with the smoke toward disco lights, imagine / ourselves dancing with them until the very end.” Forty-nine people died at Pulse. They were friends, lovers, mothers, siblings, partners, and much more.
“” by Roy G. Guzmán highlights the importance of a city like Orlando for the queer community. Yet, he writes, “I am afraid of attending places / that celebrate our bodies because that’s also where our bodies // have been cancelled / when you’re brown and gay you’re always dying / twice.”
Each of the 49 people killed at Pulse had a name: Darryl Roman Burt II, Deonka Deidra Drayton, Antonio Davon Brown, Mercedez Marisol Flores…
The list of the 49 lives lost continues, as do the details of their lives. worked at Disney World, one of Orlando’s biggest employers. were boyfriends and died together. worked as a producer at the popular Spanish broadcasting company Telemundo.
Names and numbers don’t necessarily tell the whole story of a life. Yet, when combined, compiled, and condensed, they reveal broader contexts and histories. Forty-nine people were killed at Pulse. Seven hundred thousand have died from COVID-19—disproportionately affecting the poor, unhoused, and people of color. Sadly, many other queer individuals may never be known because history didn’t record them. Despite their incompleteness, we need these names and numbers to understand who we have lost, to feel the weight of the toll—not as a burden, but as part of our fight for a different past, present, and future.
My mother called me after the Pulse Nightclub shooting because she understood something about tragedy, mourning, and fear. But she had been worried about me long before that terrible morning, ever since I chose to move to New York City at eighteen. For years, she experienced the conflicting emotions that come with loving a queer child—fear of an early death from disease, mental illness, a lover’s quarrel, or a brutal attack by a stranger.
I don’t want Pulse to be remembered only as a tragedy, a massacre, a mass shooting. I want it to represent more than just pain, suffering, and endless mourning. I want after Pulse to be about the diverse joys, contradictions, ordinary moments, hopes, differences, and liberation projects that define queer life. The various ways of connecting with others through all our senses, with other places, other histories. Our aftermath should include dancing, gossiping with friends, drinking cocktails, lip-syncing to favorite songs—staring into the strobe lights, feeling alive, fully present, transcendent.
After Pulse is where I want to be.