LGBT people of color refuse to be erased after Orlando: 'We have to elbow in'; Guardian, 6/18/16

Steven W. Thrasher, Guardian; LGBT people of color refuse to be erased after Orlando: 'We have to elbow in':

"I’ve thought a lot about how Pulse’s Latin Night was just that: an autonomous space safe for Latino queers not in getting shelter from heterosexuals, but from a white gay culture that doesn’t see them.

I thought of this again the next day, when a young sex worker saw me typing on my laptop in the Parliament House’s courtyard. I was underneath an awning as the sky opened up and poured. He plopped down and tried to pick me up for a few dollars for bus fare. I just gave him the money instead.

He then lit up a cigarette and started telling me about how he fled Pulse. He went to most Latin Nights.

“I heard gunshots and I got the hell out of there.”

I asked if he knew immediately that the sounds were gunshots, or if he’d considered hiding in the bathroom. “Hell no! If you grow up in the hood, you know what gunshots sound like and you don’t wait around. You don’t walk towards gunfire like white people do in the movies.”

There was a dark comedy in what he was saying, a protective wit; he seemed not to take it too seriously because he survived and had perhaps known violence for much of his life. It was the kind of thing he probably would never have said to a white or straight reporter."