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Cruel reminder to LGBT: Private lives still a public issue

For many LGBT people of my generation, the dance floor was the place we realized we were far from alone and in fact belonged to a tribe.

After a vigil in Collingswood, people write notes for Orlando victims and families on a poster.
After a vigil in Collingswood, people write notes for Orlando victims and families on a poster.Read moreELIZABETH ROBERTSON / Staff Photographer

For many LGBT people of my generation, the dance floor was the place we realized we were far from alone and in fact belonged to a tribe.

That sort of awakening is unlike any other, and I bet the young men and women dancing at Pulse in Orlando last weekend knew that feeling too.

What they felt as their place of sanctuary and celebration became a killing field I prefer not to imagine.

I'd rather look at their faces in the photos. The youthfulness is heartbreaking, but the exuberant, unabashed gay fabulousness makes me smile. Our selfies, if we'd had such things in the 1970s and '80s, would look a lot like theirs.

So while I never met a single one of the victims, I feel as if I know them all. Most of the dead are Latino, and I speak only English, but we share a common language. And there are things that need to be said.

The massacre is a reminder that while coming out may look like a breeze in 2016 as compared with, say, 1975, our private lives remain a public issue. The simple fact of our existence troubles, enrages, even unhinges some people, and a few yearn to do us evil.

Hatred of such a magnitude can breed in a cult, a sect, or even in the sick solitude of the closet. The Orlando killer was married to a woman and allegedly was infuriated by the sight of two dudes smooching on the street, but he also may have trolled gay hookup sites and cruised Pulse itself for months or years before his last weekend on earth.

Conflicts about sexuality, as much as twisted religious or political beliefs, may have been part of the toxic stew in his head. Who knows? We do know that when he carried a semiautomatic rifle and a semiautomatic pistol into the popular Orlando nightclub, he made young LGBT people and their friends his targets. For several hours.

The kids he killed or wounded went to Pulse for community, for the communion I remember experiencing somewhere between the lightning of Donna Summer's voice and the thunder of Giorgio Moroder's synths.

Good times indeed, although being queer could be much more complicated when the music stopped. And after AIDS hit in the early 1980s, gay life, long a risky endeavor in all sorts of ways, turned downright dangerous.

Those of us lucky enough to have survived can remember how abruptly our growing comfort with being tolerated, if not accepted, was shattered.

There was serious talk in certain conservative circles about a "need" to tattoo AIDS-infected people; I recall reading an icy letter to the editor whose writer mused that an unchecked epidemic of the then-universally fatal disease would provide an accurate population count of gay American men. "At last," his missive grandly concluded, "we will have our answer."

Despite the pride marches and the Newsweek covers and even the post-disco-is-dead resurgence of dance music, the plague - and four years of deafening silence about it from the Reagan White House - reminded LGBT people how fragile and provisional our little victories, and our lives, really were.

But the losses made our community stronger, and the crisis made countless straight people into our allies. Media coverage of this awful disease also introduced mainstream America to the reality that gay people have loving relationships that can endure through sickness, and until death.

Surely that fact as well as the coming out of hundreds of thousands of people, along with years of activism and political organizing, are reasons we now serve openly in the military, marry our partners, and pursue the life, liberty, and happiness that are our birthright.

This is not to put a smiley face on AIDS, an epidemic that is far from over, or to search for redemption in the blood on the floor at Pulse.

The gun lobby's death grip on our politics, unflinching as it was even after all those little bodies were recovered from inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, is unlikely to yield a millimeter just because a bunch of LGBT club kids of color got mowed down at some Florida disco.

On Tuesday evening, people gathered in the center of Collingswood to remember Orlando.

The event was organized by borough business owners Michael Snyder and Kevin Gatto, and drew several hundred people.

There were many familiar LGBT faces in the crowd; old friends and I embraced, which I realized I needed more than I knew. But this was not an event only for or about us. Straight people, many with their children, were everywhere, holding hands, singing along, and lighting candles.

And as 49 pearly balloons - one for each of the dead - were released into a sky of the purest blue, we looked upward, in silence, together.

One tribe.

kriordan@phillynews.com

856-779-3845 @inqkriordan

www.philly.com/blinq