It’s been a hard few days. The headlines were bleak enough already before Sunday morning, when the news hit that 50 people had been slaughtered in a gay club in Orlando. That morning, I woke to the sound of my housemate sobbing.
She was frightened, and angry. At that point, nobody knew who the shooter was: we only knew that he was probably a man, and that he hated gay people enough to walk into a club with an assault rifle and start mowing people down. We found out later that he was Muslim, and a wife-beating misogynist. We found out even later that he was, in all likelihood, a man with one foot out of the closet who messaged men on dating sites and was a regular at that same night club, Pulse. Shame, bigotry, self-hatred. A culture of fear that responds to progress with intolerance. That’s where violence comes from. One of the places.
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