After the Orlando Shooting, the Changed Lives of Gay Latinos

The Orlando shooting suddenly exposed the fragile lives of a community whose members often battle with their multiple identities.PHOTOGRAPH BY DENIS DARZAEQ / AGENCE VU / REDUX

It is a grim kind of luck that the deadliest shooting in American history should have happened two blocks from a Level 1 trauma center. In the very early morning on Sunday, June 12th, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old Afghan-American, killed forty-nine people during Latin Night at Pulse, a gay night club in downtown Orlando. Most of the victims died at the scene, and nine almost immediately after arriving at Orlando Regional Medical Center, where the majority of the fifty-three wounded were treated. “I think we will see the death toll rise,” Michael Cheatham, the hospital’s chief surgical-quality officer, warned the press at 11 A.M. It did not, owing in part to the efforts of ordinary Orlandoans, who waited for up to eight hours in order to donate blood, and of doctors at Orlando Regional who, by Monday afternoon, had performed more than thirty surgeries. Within a few days, all but a few patients had been released.

Elmer, a twenty-seven-year-old Salvadoran injured in the massacre, had been at Orlando Regional for a week when I visited him there, in his room in a tall building of undulating glass on the redeveloped western edge of downtown. He came to the United States three years ago, crossing through Mexico and the border at Hidalgo, Texas, to reach Orlando, where he found work as a housekeeper at a hotel near the airport. He had gone to Pulse on the night of the shooting with his best friend of two years, Jake, a young Cuban-American from South Florida who also works at an airport hotel.

They had met on the sidewalk in the downtown neighborhood of Crystal Lake, where they live, when Jake was cooling down from a run. Soon they started working out at L.A. Fitness and going to reggaeton concerts together. Jake liked to cook Cuban dishes like ropa vieja for Elmer. They had something more in common: Jake was out to his mother and sister, but not to anyone else from his home town; Elmer had never told anyone in El Salvador that he was gay, including his parents. Both asked me not to use their surnames.

Before my visit to the hospital, Jake, who had escaped the shooting unharmed, told me over the phone about that night. He and Elmer did a quick circuit upon entering the club, where Biggie was playing in the lounge. They decided to stick to the main room, with the salsa and the bachata. Jake remembers the two of them dancing without pause, except to watch the midnight drag performance.

At 2 A.M., when Mateen started firing near the entrance to the main room, Jake and Elmer were standing some fifty feet away, at the bar, with two Guatemalan friends. The group dove to the floor and crawled behind the counter, then into a prep room. In the corner, a ladder extended into a hatch. Along with two strangers, they climbed up into a dark hallway and found an office. They locked the door and sat huddled on the floor. A large patch was missing from Elmer’s khaki pants; a section of his calf had been blasted from the bone. Someone made him a tourniquet.

The group waited, listening to the shots and screams coming from below. Occasionally, one of them would dial 911 and whisper reports to the dispatcher. Police had entered the club within five minutes of the first shots, but the dimness and the chaos meant that it was only at 2:30 A.M., once Mateen had withdrawn into the women’s rest room, taking eight hostages with him, that they were able to corner him. At this point, most of the wounded were removed from the club. Around three, police shouted through the office door that those inside should emerge with their hands up. The group descended the ladder and made its way to the exit, across the dance floor crowded with bodies. Jake was asked to wait in a tent in the parking lot for questioning. Elmer was taken to Orlando Health in the back of a cop’s pickup.

On the afternoon I visited, Elmer was seated in a recliner next to his bed, looking out a window at the concrete strip malls and green lakes of Orlando. His right leg was bandaged and propped up; the hem of his nightgown met a deep-blue line of stitches on his thigh, where a skin graft had been taken to heal the wound on his calf. He had a birdlike beauty, with a sharply angled face and a gently curved nose.

Elmer patted his bed, offering me a seat next to him. Two female volunteers and a male music therapist, who played pop songs on his guitar, had already been keeping Elmer company. The therapist asked what he wanted to hear next, and one of the women translated the question into Spanish, Elmer’s only language. “Anything you want,” he responded, the gentlest way of saying that he didn’t care.

Elmer grew up in a small village outside San Miguel, the third-largest city in El Salvador. Despite having never come out or been in a relationship with another man, it seemed to him that he could not walk down the street without getting beaten up or being insulted. After earning an accounting degree from a public university, he decided that the job prospects in the U.S. were worth the dangers of the journey. Three weeks after setting out, Elmer arrived in Orlando, where his aunt lives, and eventually secured his job through a subcontractor. He has no health insurance but has been told that he will not have to pay his medical bills; he is eligible for a grant from the Equality Florida fund, intended for the bereaved families and injured survivors of the shooting.

A quarter of Orlando’s two hundred and fifty thousand residents are Hispanic. Many have come from Puerto Rico and other corners of the Latin-American world, drawn by low-wage work at Disney World and Universal Studios and the industries that have grown around the theme parks: call centers, hotels, hospitals. Patty Sheehan, Orlando’s first openly gay city commissioner, told me that it had taken three days to finalize the list of victims at Pulse, who were ninety per cent Hispanic and mostly gay men under thirty-five, because several were not carrying verifiable identification.

For many of the survivors, the massacre seemed to deliver multiple blows: first the violence of the attacks, and then the intrusions, however well-meaning, of neighbors, police officers, federal investigators, journalists. In Hispanic countries and Latin-American communities, where conservative family values still prevail, gay lives are often lived at least partially under the radar. Pedro Julio Serrano, a Puerto Rican gay-rights activist, told me that immigrants who have left their families behind often battle with their “multiple identities.” “They think, I’m an immigrant and I have no English and I come from Puerto Rico—and also I’m going to come out? It’s just another reason to be mistreated. It’s easier to hide your sexual identity than your accent.” Isabel Sousa, a Colombian-born sociologist who was raised in Miami and Tampa, said, “They have a sense of carrying the legacy of their family: ‘I’m a representative of their dreams and hopes and aspirations, and I’m expected to succeed.' When your identity doesn’t conform, and the people that you trust and need to speak to are other queer folk or trans folk, there’s a sense of fear and guilt.”

I asked Elmer what he liked about Orlando. “You meet people like you,” he said, referring to both his ethnicity and to his sexual orientation. He had only started going out—to Pulse, and also to Parliament House, the city’s oldest gay bar, and Southern Nights, a small discotheque—a few months before. But he hadn’t become a regular at any of them, and now he told me that he would not ever go to one again. When I mentioned that I had visited Parliament House a couple of nights earlier, he looked shocked. “You weren’t scared?” he asked.

Elmer’s parents, whom he had not seen for three years, were trying to find a way to visit him from El Salvador. Elmer assumed that he had been outed by the shooting, if his parents hadn’t already known the truth. Still, he did not expect them, even now, to want to discuss his sexuality. When I asked if he could imagine introducing a boyfriend to his parents, he frowned. “It wouldn’t be good for me, and it wouldn’t be good for them.” His aunt had visited him twice in the hospital, and Elmer sensed that she disdained his life style.

Tired, Elmer unmuted a telenovela that was playing on the television. A woman in a wedding dress was sobbing in a church, makeup running down her face. “Her husband didn’t show,” Elmer said. Then a nurse wheeled in a cart, telling Elmer that it was time to draw blood, and he reluctantly offered up his arm.

At Parliament House two nights earlier, groups of young men and women sat at plastic tables along the edges of a concrete-floored courtyard. I spoke to several people who told a version of the same story. Luis Alfredo Colon, a Puerto Rican computer programmer, would have been at Pulse the night of the attack, he said, but he had instead extended his stay at New Smyrna Beach, an hour east. After the shooting, his younger brother, who still lives in Puerto Rico and who is also gay, had called him anxiously; neither has come out to his parents, but recently, he said, his brother had started letting himself “act more gay” around their mother—going shopping with her, for example—and they had become closer as a result.

On the far side of the courtyard, a middle-aged drag performer mouthed the words to Bette Midler’s “Friends.” Jacob Torres, a bald man with a voluminous goatee, told me, matter-of-factly, “Our parents don’t agree with us. Some of the victims’ families—they think their kids went to Hell.” Torres had planned to meet some friends at Pulse on the Saturday of the shooting, but had gone to bed early after a day in the sun. He was at Parliament House now, he said, as a “pit stop,” following his shift at a local hospital.

Torres grew up in western Pennsylvania. He wore a diamond ring on a gold chain around his neck, and I asked him about it. “My mom’s,” he said. “She upgraded. This is her sweetheart, just-met-my-father ring.” His mother, who is white, used to take him and his siblings three times a week to a Methodist church with a virulently homophobic preacher. In the past two decades, her dogmatism has relaxed into mysticism, and Torres said that she now accepts him fully. But his father, a Mexican-born farmer, has refused to acknowledge his sexuality, even after Torres started bringing his long-term partner to large family gatherings in Pennsylvania. “For eight of the eleven years we were together, my dad refused to speak to him,” Torres said. “He finally said hi, but that’s all he ever said—‘Hi.’ ” (Because he was not ready to confront his father, who is dying of cancer, Torres asked me not to use his real name.)

Torres first came to Orlando four years ago, to visit his aunt. He was living in Cleveland at the time, but the gay scene there always seemed to him overly reserved and lacking in diversity. When he went to Pulse’s Latin Night, he was transfixed by “the Hispanics loving each other, listening to our music.” He told me, “I went home, sold all my belongings, and flew right back.” Torres met two of his closest friends at the clubs, and they had got into the habit of going out three times a week. He also liked to go to Pulse alone, for a drink and to talk to Kate, who helmed the main bar and who survived the shooting by hiding beneath it. “I literally love her,” he said. It later struck me, thinking of Elmer, that if not for the attack and his withdrawal from Orlando’s gay scene, his life might have come to resemble Torres’s.

Most gay Hispanics have questions like these, Torres said. He told me that he recognized one of the Pulse victims from having seen his photo on Grindr, and was saddened by the man’s obituary: his Mexican family seemed to imply that their son was straight, and had gone to Pulse for the salsa music. Torres understood that double lives are sometimes necessary, and felt that the man had been brave in simply going to the club. “Let me die before I say that I’m not something that I am,” Torres said.

Since the nineteen-nineties, when the F.B.I. began publishing statistics on hate crimes, gay people have consistently been the most targeted group in America relative to their size in the population, according to Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2011, Potok found that gays and lesbians were eight times more likely than straight Americans to be violently attacked. There are certainly more cases than we know about, because hate crimes are widely underreported; Potok told me that this is especially true in smaller jurisdictions with fewer police resources. At Parliament House, a former Iowan, who had lived in Orlando for thirty years, told me, “This is still redneck-ville, no matter how progressive you think you are. You go five miles outside of the city and you see big old four-wheel drives with shotguns on the rack.”

Among gay Hispanics in Orlando, I noticed a particular awareness of ambient violence, which seems to have predated the shooting. Christian Toral, a twenty-five-year-old man of Costa Rican and Jamaican descent, told me that Orlando’s inclusivity hides an undercurrent of danger. “Florida’s such a hotbed for diversity that you never know where someone’s coming from, culturally or morally,” he said. “It’s very beautiful, but I think it makes people more disconnected.”

In bigger cities, there is often a disconnect between between the gay and lesbian communities. The two groups banded together during the AIDS crisis, in the eighties and nineties, but, in the absence of emergency, they have tended to disaffiliate: lesbians like to stay in, the stereotype goes, and gay men like to go out. There is some truth to these tropes, and, perhaps because of them, gay men are targeted vastly more than lesbians by the straight men who overwhelmingly perpetrate violent hate crimes. And yet many lesbians are also subject to daily misogyny, which is also classified as a hate crime when it manifests in violence. In Orlando, where Latino lesbians and gay men have often experienced the same prejudices, and the same guilt, in their family lives, the communities find common ground in the bars that they share as a function of the city’s moderate size.

On an early evening, at the funeral of Oscar Aracena-Montero, one of the Pulse victims, I spoke to a group of gay women who had worked with Aracena-Montero at the call center Teleperformance, before the Orlando branch closed, in 2011. The hall of the Funeraria Porto Coeli, a large Mission-style building in the Latino suburb of Kissimmee, was packed, so they sat together on an oversized white couch in the waiting room. Aracena-Montero, a twenty-six-year-old Dominican, had recently bought a small house in the neighborhood with his partner of three years, Simon Carillo, who was also killed at Pulse.

Maria Aponte, a former police officer wearing a plaid shirt, recalled having sneaked Aracena-Montero into Pulse for his first shots of tequila when he was only twenty. Aracena-Montero adopted the place as his own and, the weekend of the shooting, had returned with Carillo from a vacation in Niagara Falls in time for Latin Night.

“Every time I went to Pulse, Oscar was there with Simon,” Grecia Rodriguez, a twenty-eight-year-old with long, wavy hair, said.

Aponte noted that the undertakers had placed a bowler hat on Aracena-Montero’s head. “He must have hurt his head, because he never wore hats,” she said, adding, almost hopefully, “Maybe he fell.” The group considered this in silence.

The women decided to get coffee in the funeral home’s kitchen. Waiting in line, they reminisced about how they had come to live in Orlando—many, it seemed, had arrived after escaping from failed and abusive relationships with men. Crystal Sandi was still in the process of divorcing the father of her three children. She had met Aponte online the previous July, and by September she had moved with her kids from Tampa to Orlando, where Aponte has lived since the late nineties. Now they own a townhouse together. “So it was two dates and a U-Haul,” Rodriguez said, teasing them for fulfilling a lesbian cliché.

Rodriguez, who came to Orlando with her Puerto Rican military family when she was in sixth grade, said that it had taken her a long time to learn how to protect herself. She dated a boy in high school for three years, mostly to please her parents, and after she ended the relationship he would trail her in his car, and once broke into her parents’ home. She finally took out a restraining order, in 2008. Two years later, she suffered a brutal attack after a man kept trying to touch her at Backstage, an Orlando billiards hall. “I said, ‘I’m not into men,’ and he started calling me a bitch and a slut.” She left the club, and the man, who was also Latino, followed her in his Ford Explorer. When she stopped for gas, he got out and began yelling at her, then returned to his car and attempted to run her over. The fender of his S.U.V. hit her leg, and she was thrown to the ground, sustaining a concussion. The man was never caught. “Now, with people who don’t know me, instead of saying that I’m gay, I’ll say, ‘I’m in a relationship,’ or ‘No, thank you.’ ”

Queer advocates sometimes argue that official tolerance creates a new kind of conformity: gay marriage or the closet. The reality for gay Latinos is more complicated. After the shooting at Pulse, Isabel Sousa, the Colombian-born sociologist, went to Orlando to advise a new group called QLatinx, meant to help queer Latinos transform what he called the city’s “rainbow-flag-waving” into more permanent kinds of progress. Gay clubbing in Orlando will certainly survive the horror inflicted by Mateen; the owners of Pulse have even pledged to reopen. But, Sousa said, “We need so much more than just the club. If we go back to that, we’ve failed.”

Those, like Elmer, whose social lives have been indefinitely suspended may already have internalized this lesson. When I visited him in the hospital, he was focussed on his application for a U visa, meant for victims of violent crimes who have helped the authorities with their investigations, and which can lead to permanent residency. “Everything happens for a reason,” he said.

A week later, Elmer was released from the hospital. An airline had donated tickets for his parents to visit him, and a local gay couple had offered to put up the whole family in their home. Jake told me that he had been with Elmer when his parents arrived: the reunion was tearful, and Elmer’s mother had thanked Jake and her hosts for their help. Elmer’s father, who has kidney problems that require him to receive dialysis three times a week, stayed for only three days, but his mother would remain for three months.

She was sitting by Elmer’s bed when I called him a few days later, and I found that he was more guarded than ever in his responses to my questions. As expected, they hadn’t spoken about Pulse, or his homosexuality. She had been cooking him pupusas, he said, and helping him with everything, including going to the rest room. “She just wants to make sure I get better,” Elmer said, adding that he was happy to have her there. “I’m just here in this box.”