Page 34 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing
P. 34
Karen Mutter
Kinship and Murder
Forty-nine of my kin were killed early this morning. They were murdered in a hate
crime. A gunman entered the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida with two firearms
and began shooting. Some of the patrons on the dance floor thought that the
loud booms were part of the music until people all around them fell to the ground
wounded or killed by the barrage of bullets. One young man interviewed on the
news escaped death by dropping to the floor and then shimmying out of the club
on his belly. Another 53 wounded are at local hospitals and many of those are
fighting for their lives right now. Right now.
Right now I sit at my computer 100 miles away from the massacre site, undone.
My heart is aching for the family and friends who are waiting to find out if their
loved one is one of the bodies still yet to be identified. Right now I am thinking
about the irony of where I was last evening when the shooting occurred. Three of
my longtime friends and I attended a play about five lesbians, desperately
closeted in 1956. A nuclear explosion left them stuck in a bomb shelter. With
nobody else alive on earth left to condemn them, they were free at last to fully
express themselves. It was a comedic tragedy, a parody filled with innuendo--the
appreciative audience far more straight than gay. Though the message about
extreme repression was painfully clear, my friends and I laughed and reminisced
after the show about how far we had come, both as individuals with our own
anguishes and coming out stories and also as a society where just last year, the
U.S. Supreme Court and the state of Florida condoned our relationships through
the right of marriage. I am thinking of the false sense of security that this implies.
To awaken to the news of this massacre reminds me that being gay in this
country is still for some religious groups one of the greatest sins. I am thinking
about my brothers and sisters living in the 76 other countries where
homosexuality is illegal and in 10 of those places, punishable by death. Sadly, I
no longer find this so hard to imagine.
