10 Toxic Masculinity and the Orlando Pulse Shooting

That Sunday morning we all woke to the news of yet another tragic mass shooting in the United States. These shootings have become routine at this point – too numerous to count any more. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Santa Barbara, Seattle, Charleston, UCLA… we all know the names, the long lists of fatalities. Immediately news and social media started buzzing with reports: the biggest mass shooting in American history… an ISIS operative… a gay nightclub… 20 dead, then 50, then 49.

These shootings happen, for the most part, in institutional settings: schools and churches. What distinguished the Pulse Orlando shooting was not that it was the biggest mass shooting in American history – that dubious honor goes to Wounded Knee (1890) and Tulsa (1921). The Pulse Orlando shooting has the highest body count for a single-shooter event, we might say, but it’s also different because it was in a different kind of space: the Latin night of a gay bar.

When we react to these shootings, we express a sense of horror that a space that was supposed to be safe – a place to worship or learn – that space too has been violated by the act, and along with it, our sense of innocence or safety. The difference was that many people don’t consider a bar a sacred space – but this is what it is to queer/trans Latinx communities throughout the Americas. Our sacred space on the dance floor is not an innocent place, nor is it necessarily free of drama or violence. It’s an imperfect space, but it is beautiful for us and just as much of a violation.

In San Francisco, we’ve lost these spaces – La India Bonita, Esta Noche, even el Tin Tan. We are, like the ambiente of Orlando, relegated to one-night stands: pop-up clubs at venues that aren’t open to our communities every day. But these places create a rich social life for queer/trans Latinxs: Pan Dulce, Club Papi, Colors, Mango, Backstreet, ABLUNT, Queer Qumbia. And the DJs and club promoters who work to make these spaces come alive: the late Chantal Salikey, Diane “Chili D” Felix, Carol Hill, Rosa La Rumorosa, DJ Black, Edaj, Olga T, all the bouncers and go-go dancers. The children of the night. These are the people whose work goes unappreciated, who don’t get retirement plans or a regular paycheck, but who do it out of love for creating queer/trans of color spaces.

When I heard about Orlando, I remembered these places, tried to imagine the carnage with people and places familiar to me. Too much to bear. But then I remembered another bar.

As a young anthropology undergrad in 1991, I went to Colombia to see if I could find a trace of queerness in this place that was supposed to be home. A 20-year-old, newly-minted baby queer, I wanted to connect with my roots. It didn’t seem possible. I fell in with a squat, mohawked lesbian and a tall, skinny gay man. We went all around Bogotá, tromping about in our combat boots. We ended up in a strip mall at a place without a sign. The HIV prevention campaign that was plastered on the walls said “coca + cola = SIDA.” Coke + tail = AIDS. No signs of hope for queer life.

It was that summer I heard that no one was going to the clubs anymore. Paramilitaries, during campaigns of “social cleansing,” would raid these bars, lining everyone up and shooting them down with machine guns. In Colombia, there is a word for shooting a bunch of people down with machine guns: amatrallar. This targeting of LGBTQ communities in Colombia is long standing and well-documented – reports in the late 90s by both Amnesty International and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Committee (IGLHRC) led me to develop my ethnographic work in neighboring Venezuela. This kind of violence was happening throughout Colombian society at the time – not exclusive to LGBTQ communities – but it took a special form when it came to us. Just like labor leaders, campesinos, indigenous communities, sex workers and political dissidents, queer and trans people were seen as people in the way of achieving an ideal society – so much human garbage to be disposed of, targeted in those spaces that were supposed to be our refuge.

Colombians at the time had incredible access to arms – there were no controls on access to military weapons, or at least none that were enforceable. Private security guards and military personnel carried M16s and other assault rifles regularly at shopping malls or just on the street corner. I remember playing in the cul-de-sac where we lived in Bogotá alongside young men bearing these arms and old men bearing machetes as a child.

The countless killings of Colombian people during this time were part of a conflict about the power of the state rooted in toxic masculinity, impunity, and the wide availability (and fetishization) of weapons. We in the United States are also steeped in this culture of masculinity, militarization, and violence. I trace this back to deep patterns of colonial violence that allow and empower men to terrorize everyone. When 98% of mass shooters are men, we cannot ignore the connections between violence and masculinity.

In 1513, in a place called Quarequa, the conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa set his dogs on 40-60 people who existed in a gender category he had no name for. Later, they were called “putos” and “sodomites.” They were torn to pieces, terrifying all who heard of this act. Killings of this size have been happening for over 500 years throughout the Americas. This terror is what has created our societies.

The Orlando Pulse shooting is a manifestation of colonial terror, not the epidermal “terrorism” the US constructs as its Other. For whatever his confusion or motive, Omar Mateen worked in private security. He purchased his assault weapons legally and was licensed to carry them. He chose his target, the nightclub, apparently out of rancor for issues he himself may have been struggling with. And he unleashed his fury in the Church of the Jotería to chilling effect.
We (in the US) cannot see ourselves as exceptional in this moment. We (queer/trans people) cannot take this moment as one of martyrdom without understanding it as part of a line of events that have created the societies of the Americas. We (queer/trans Latinas and Latinos) must continue to survive and heal from this violence, and connect it to toxic masculinity all over this hemisphere, in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and yes, Orlando.

Dr. Marcia Ochoa is Associate Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz.