If you’ve even glanced at social media or opened a newspaper this weekend, you would have seen the absolutely devastating events at LGBTQ+ nightclub Pulse in Orlando, in which an armed man shot dead 50 people, and injured 53.
Shooter Omar Mateen opened fire with an automatic weapon on hundreds of LGBTQ+ people in an LGBTQ+ safe space, which was holding a night for Latinx people and was headlined by a Puerto Rican transgender woman, Kenya Michaels (who had previously appeared on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race‘). The club was busy, due to the fact that the night was in the middle of Pride.
Snippets of video and audio have surfaced, as well as many thinkpieces about homophobia in the modern Western world and the ridiculousness of the USA’s incredibly lax standpoint on gun control, which allows anyone to purchase quick-firing automatic weapons without any psychological testing.
But no thinkpiece or op-ed will hold as much gravity as this letter, written by Alejandro Francisco for xoJane. Francisco was at Pulse nightclub on the night that Mateen opened fire.
In the piece, he says that a friend he was with suggested they leave earlier than they normally would have, and they walked out of the club just before the shooting began.
“I’ve been going to the club for a few years now, and it’s a wonderful place to let loose and really be yourself in Orlando.We had been having an amazing weekend, and we were planning to stay until it closed, but as it turned out, my friend Vincent had the premonition that he wanted to head out before everyone tried to leave at once, since last call was already upon us.My friend Vincent saved my life.Across the street, moments after we left, we heard the gunshots start. They sounded like firecrackers. We were terrified. We saw people running all around us, some of them jumping fences. We had no idea the all-consuming nightmare we narrowly escaped inside.Minutes after we left, without realizing how precious those minutes were, that’s when the massacre began.”
“Omar, we are stronger than your hate. We always will be.”
To read the full open letter, head here: xojane.com/issues/alejandro-francisco-orlando-pulse-survivor-story
Source: XoJane.
Photo: Twitter.
