Like a Broken Record

At the Tony Awards, Lin-Manuel Miranda read a sonnet he wrote about creation and his wife and the mass murder in Orlando. I’ve been listening to it on repeat since yesterday, and tonight I finally bookmarked it so that I could play it whenever I needed to hear it, which is about every quarter hour.

Most people are quoting love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love but my favorite part is When senseless acts of tragedy remind us / that nothing here is promised.  Not one day. Delivering a beautiful speech while fighting back tears might be Lin-Manuel Miranda’s superpower.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time on facebook, mostly yelling at people, mostly about how they didn’t give a shit before what happened, so they don’t get to suddenly pretend to give a shit now. Most of my replies start with, Hey, remember when some violent extremist blew up a bathroom in a Target in hopes that the blast would vaporize some trans woman trying to take a leak? Remember the outpouring of concern and anger from y’all? Neither do I! 

This morning I got to have an argument with someone who insisted that there was no proof that the killer targeted LGBTQ people – that the gay nightclub was simply a “soft target,” a contained crowd, no reason to assume homophobic bias at all.

Yesterday I got into a fight with a man who commented, “Pro tip: Don’t shoot anybody. And why wasn’t the club a gun-free zone?”

love is love is love is love is love is love….

I’ve also seen kind and well-intentioned straight cisgender people feeling very upset when LGBTQ people talk about the tradition of silence in the wake of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes. On the one hand, you’ve got people who react badly to statements like, “Straight friends, especially you Christians, please know: we hear your silence so hard.”  They take that as a personal attack on their empathy.

Some of my straight cisgender friends seem to be think that we’ll be mad at them if they don’t post some brilliant thinkpiece about the massacre in Orlando right away.  They’re starting to preface their status updates with stuff like, “I’m seeing a lot of people on Facebook angry about not seeing enough friends making clear statements in reaction to the tragedy in Orlando. I’ve avoided saying anything specific because I just don’t know what I can offer!” and then usually something about how overwhelming it all is, all this pain.

I know that tragedies that this can leave people at a loss for how to respond. I have the strong sense that many of my straight cisgender friends are just sort of shocked speechless by this. I can understand that. I’ve seen many LGBTQ people go silent since that Sunday morning, too.

But I have also had to spend quite a lot of time managing the hurt feelings of allies, like I’m some kind of mass gay murder funeral usher, and I’m getting tired of it. One of my facebook friends posted that he knew someone among the dead. If I have energy to devote to anyone, it’s reserved for people like him.

And respectfully, pointing out that you have a certain level of distance from this tragedy and the repression it represents is not accusing you of any lack of concern. It’s just pointing out the truth: this killing was highly specific, it was iterative rather than singular, and it targeted a group of people who have been victimized as much by silence as by violence.

This was a hate crime that took place in a climate of backlash, when LGBTQ people are being demonized as pedophiles and rapists – and when QTPOC are, as always, most vulnerable to state-sanctioned and state-authored homophobic and transphobic violence.

You don’t have to feel implicated by that assertion of context, but nor should you take it as a personal insult.

That having been said: of course nobody should feel obligated to find the right words for something like this. Of course you shouldn’t feel compelled to make a really memorable statement about the deaths of fifty people. Our voices are breaking. Our hearts have broken. We all struggle to find the words.

Eloquence can be a trap when you’re fighting invisibility. You think, if I can frame this in exactly the right way, if I can find just the right balance between my grief and my fury, if I can calibrate these words just so, then somehow I won’t have to explain anymore.

But people don’t empathize with us because we’re articulate about our suffering. They don’t mourn with us because we’re crying out in just the right pitch. They don’t stand up for us because we demand solidarity with just the right amount of outrage and hope.

And I don’t need my friends to prove that they mourn with me by putting up some three-paragraph lament on Facebook. I don’t need any more three-paragraph laments. I don’t need to watch anyone else – family or friends – struggling to speak in perfect eloquence about this slaughter. I’m not grateful to Lin-Manuel Miranda because he wrote us a poem. It’s okay to just be heartbroken. It’s okay to stumble over the words.

Love, as they say, is love.

Disclaimer: This post was written by a Feministing Community user and does not necessarily reflect the views of any Feministing columnist, editor, or executive director.

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