{"id":3097,"date":"2016-06-17T09:38:32","date_gmt":"2016-06-17T13:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/?p=3097"},"modified":"2016-06-17T09:38:32","modified_gmt":"2016-06-17T13:38:32","slug":"queer-orlando-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/2016\/06\/17\/queer-orlando-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer-Orlando-Am\u00e9rica"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was \u201cLatino night\u201d at a gay club.<\/em> When the story finally broke, that\u2019s all I heard. Orlando\u2019s tragedy at the Pulse puts Latina\/o, Latin American, Afro-Latinos, and Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean LGBT people front and center. Otherness mounts Otherness, even in the Whitewashing of the ethno-racial background of those killed by the media, and the seemingly compassionate expressions of love by religious folk. The excess of difference\u2014to be Black or Brown (or to be both) and<\/em> to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (or queer, as some of us see ourselves) serves to shock, through difference, how news are reported. Difference \u2013 the very basis of feminist and ethnic politics in the 20th<\/sup> century \u2013 has been co-opted and ignored, sanitized even, to attempt to reach a level of a so-called \u201chumanity\u201d that is not accomplishable. We know this, but we don\u2019t talk about it.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong: empathy is essential for most social codes of order to functionally sustain any given society. To pay one\u2019s respects for others\u2019 losses, however, does not mean that we think of those lost as equals. Liberal people demanding that sexuality be less<\/em> important in the news (and thus removed from the coverage) is an inherent violence toward those who partied together because there was real love among them, in that club, for who they were – and are. Religious righters may spread hate while trying to give the illusion of compassion, but they do so in a clear hierarchical, paternalistic way \u2013that<\/em> is hypocrisy, and we must call it out every chance we get. But this goes beyond liberal notions and conservative hypocrisy \u2013 even while Anderson Cooper wept when reading the list of those killed, he knows the distance between himself and many of those at the club is enough to build a classed, raced, and social wall between them. Clearly, empathy is not enough.<\/p>\n

To be Latina\/o in the US \u2013 increasingly another Latin American country, again<\/em> \u2013 is to breathe in hate, to face retaliation, to be questioned at every turn about our allegiances, tested on our sense of citizenship, pushed in our capacity to love the nation and thus hate \u201clike the rest\u201d (a testament to the masculinity of the nation). At a minimum, to be Latina\/o guarantees one to be looked at oddly, as if one was out of place, misplaced, inappropriately placed. Simply by being, Latinas\/os rupture the logics of normalcy in USAmerica. To be Latina\/o and<\/em> LGBT is to disrupt the logics of racial formation, of racial purity, of the Black and White binary still ruling this country \u2013 all while de-gendering and performing an excess (of not only gender, but sexuality) that overflows and overwhelms \u201cAmerica.\u201d In being Latino and<\/em> queer, some of us aim to be misfits that disrupt a normalcy of regulatory ways of being.<\/p>\n

A break between queer and Am\u00e9rica erupted this past weekend \u2013 in Orlando, a city filled with many Latin Americans; a city that, like many others, depends on the backs of Brown folk to get the work done. Put another way, Orlando\u2019s tragedy created a bridge between different countries and newer readings of queerness \u2013 Orlando as in an extension of Latin Am\u00e9rica here. Queer-Orlando-Am\u00e9rica is an extension of so many Latin American cities as sites of contention, where to be LGBT is both celebrated and chastised \u2013 no more, or less, than homophobia in the US.<\/p>\n

Enough has been said about how the Pulse is a place where people of color who desired others like themselves, or are trans, go dance their fears away, and dream on hope for a better day. Too little has been said about the structural conditions faced by these Puerto Ricans, these immigrants, these mixed raced queer folks \u2013 some of whom were vacationing, many of whom lived in Florida. Many were struggling for a better (financial, social, political\u2014all of the above) life. Assumptions have also been made about their good fortune as well. Do not assume that they left their countries seeking freedom\u2014for many who might have experienced homophobia back home, still do here; though they have added racism to their everyday lived experience. Of course, there are contradictions on that side of queer-Orlando-Am\u00e9rica, too; yet same sex marriage was achieved in half a dozen countries before the US granted it a year ago. This is the world upside down, you say, since these advances \u2013 this progress \u2013 should have happened in the US first. Wake up.<\/em> Am\u00e9rica is in you and you are no longer \u201cAmerica\u201d but Am\u00e9rica.<\/p>\n

You see, this is how we become queer-Orlando-Am\u00e9rica: we make it a verb, an action. It emerges where the tongues twist, where code switching (in Spanish\/English\/Spanglish) is like a sach\u00e9-ing on the dance floor, where gender and race are blurry and yet so clear, where Whiteness isn\u2019t front and center \u2013 in fact it becomes awkward in this sea of racial, gendered, and sexual differences. This queer-Orlando-Am\u00e9rica (a place neither \u201chere,\u201d nor \u201cthere,\u201d where belonging is something you carry with you, in you, and may activate in some dance floor given the right people, even strangers, and real love \u2013 especially from strangers) was triggered \u2013 was released \u2013 by violence. But not a new violence, certainly not a Muslim-led violence. Violence accumulated over violence \u2013 historically, ethnically, specific to transgender people, to Brown people, to effeminate male-bodied people, to the power of femininity in male and<\/em> female bodies, to immigrants, to the colonized who speak up, to the Spanglish that ruptures \u201cappropriateness,\u201d to the language of the border. And in spite of this, queer-Orlando-Am\u00e9rica has erupted. It is not going down to the bottom of the earth. You see us. It was, after all, \u201cLatino night\u201d at a gay club. You can no longer ignore us.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Vidal-OrtizAs the week advanced, and fathers\u2019 day draws closer, I have already noticed the reordering of the news, a staged dismissal so common in media outlets. Those queer and Brown must continue to raise this as an issue, to not let the comfort of your organized, White hetero-lives go back to normal. You never left that comfort, you just thought about \u201cthose\u201d killed.\u00a0 But it was \u201cLatino night\u201d at a gay club. I do not have that luxury. I carry its weight with me. <\/em>Now the lives of those who are queer and Latina\/o have changed \u2013 fueled with surveillance and concerns, never taking a temporary safe space for granted. Queer-Orlando-Am\u00e9rica is thus a \u201chere and now\u201d that has changed the contours of what \u201cqueer\u201d and \u201cAmerica\u201d were and are. Queer has now become less White \u2013 in your imaginary (we were always here). Am\u00e9rica now has an accent (it always had it \u2013 you just failed to notice).\u00a0 Violence in Orlando did this. It broke your understanding of a norm and showed you there is much more than the straight and narrow, or the Black and White \u201cAmerica\u201d that is segmented into neatly organized compartments. In that, Orlando queers much more than those LGBT Latinas\/os at the club. Orlando is the rupture that bridges a queer Brown United States with a Latin America that was always already \u201cinside\u201d the US \u2013 one that never left, one which was invaded and conquered. Think Aztl\u00e1n<\/em>. Think Borinquen<\/em>. Think The Mission in San Francisco. Or Jackson Heights, in NYC. Or the DC metro area\u2019s Latino neighborhoods. That is not going away. It is multiplying.<\/p>\n

I may be a queer Latino man at home, at the University, at the store, and at the club. That does not mean that the layered account of my life gets acknowledged (nor celebrated) in many of those sites \u2013 in fact, it gets fractured in the service of others\u2019 understandings of difference (be it \u201cdiversity,\u201d \u201cmulticulturalism\u201d or \u201cinclusion\u201d). But it sure comes together on the dance floor at a club with a boom-boom<\/em> that caters to every fiber of my being. It is encompassing. It covers us. It is relational. It moves us \u2013 together. So, even if I only go out once a year, I refuse to be afraid to go out and celebrate life. Too many before me have danced and danced and danced (including those who danced to the afterlife because of AIDS, hatred and homophobia), and I will celebrate them dancing \u2013 one night at a time.<\/p>\n

We are not going away \u2013 in fact, a type of queer-Orlando-Am\u00e9rica is coming near you, if it hasn\u2019t arrived already, if it wasn\u2019t there already\u2014before you claimed that space. No words of empathy will be enough to negotiate your hypocrisy, to whitewash our heritage, or make me, and us, go away. If anything, this sort of tragedy ignites community, it forces us to have conversations long overdue, it serves as a mirror showing how little we really have in common with each other in \u201cAmerica\u201d \u2013 and the only way to make that OK is to be OK with the discomfort difference makes you experience, instead of erasing it.<\/p>\n

We must never forget that it was \u201cLatino night\u201d at a gay club<\/em>. That is how I will remember it.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

\"SalvadorSalvador Vidal-Ortiz (Ph.D.)<\/a><\/strong> is associate professor in the sociology department at American University (AU), in Washington, DC; he also teaches for their Women\u2019s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. He coedited The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men<\/a> <\/em>(NYU Press, 2009) and Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina\/o LGBT Activism<\/a><\/em> (University of Texas Press, 2015). Aside from his Fulbright-supported\u00a0research on forced migration\/internal displacement and LGBT Colombians, he is now engaged in a new project, with Juliana Mart\u00ednez, also from AU, on \u201cTransgendering Human Rights: Lessons from Latin America.\u201d He is currently writing a\u00a0manuscript on Santer\u00eda<\/em>, tentatively titled: An Instrument of the <\/em>Orishas: Racialized Sexual Minorities in <\/em>Santer\u00eda, as well as a book he is co-authoring with two of his former students: Brandon A. Robinson (UT-Austin) and Cristina Khan (U-Conn) titled Race and Sexuality<\/em> (to be published with Polity Press).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was \u201cLatino night\u201d at a gay club. When the story finally broke, that\u2019s all I heard. Orlando\u2019s tragedy at the Pulse puts Latina\/o, Latin American, Afro-Latinos, and Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean LGBT people front and center. Otherness mounts Otherness, even in the Whitewashing of the ethno-racial background of those killed by the media, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1958,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[245,30335,35058],"tags":[14,3497],"class_list":["post-3097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism","category-feminist-sociology","category-in-the-news","tag-race","tag-social-justice"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3097"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3117,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3097\/revisions\/3117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}