As a therapist, I must pose a question to members of the LGBT community: How will you respond to the Orlando shootings?
Generally speaking, there are two directions in which you can go. The first, and most common, is to retreat, to become fearful, to sublimate one's identity and try to disappear. This is the quiet voice inside of us that pleads, "Don't make waves, don't make others uncomfortable with our displays of affection. Don't confront them with who we really are."
Along these lines is another culturally induced tendency: to ignore Orlando ("It didn't happen to me"), and the other thousand cuts, the micro-aggressions, slurs, and hatred we endure from the time we are children. In our society and around the world, we all are living in a heterosexual trance, the cultural state of mind in which LGBT people are either loathed, met with violence, or whose reality is invisible to the majority culture around them.
Heterosexual Privilege
Heterosexuality is a privileged position that is unaware of its privilege, much like the majority culture is unaware of its own racism. When a black man walks down the street and is blindly assumed by whites to be a dangerous criminal, or when he is wearing a hoodie and assumed to be a thug, or a Jewish person is assumed to be a money grubber--this is the trance of the white majority culture. It is a trance of cultural tyranny that consciously or unconsciously wants to erase evidence of its own shortcomings, anything that would reveal it to be less prejudiced, less compassionate or wonderful than it considers itself to be.
Heterosexual Trance
LGBT people, it seems, are the most recent of the dispossessed to present such a threat to the cultural majority and its comfortable trance.
Here's a great example of the heterosexual trance in action. On a recent Sky News program, a gay journalist stormed off the set after the two co-hosts refused to acknowledge the homophobic nature of the Orlando attack. Instead, they insisted, that it was something "carried out against human beings." They questioned why he would think he as a gay man has "ownership of the horror of this crime," essentially accusing him of promoting a "gay agenda."
This despite the fact that the killer:
* Expressed his loathing of homosexuality to coworkers on numerous occasions
* Frequented Pulse, the popular gathering place for gays, many times before his rage became murderous,
* Was found to be using gay dating apps.
* "Saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid, and he got very angry," as his Muslim father told NBC News.
His father also posted on Facebook that he was sorry his son had done this, and that "Only God has the right and responsibility to punish homosexuality." Under Islamic law, men who are actively gay are to be condemned to death, a view shared by Old Testament Christianity, and apparently some present-day preachers, as you'll see below.
To most gays, and many others, the homophobic nature of the killer's motives are clear, and yet there are those who refuse to see it. They call this, "straightwashing." This is the tyranny of the heterosexual trance, and the razor cuts of homophobic culture. Internalized, they eventually bleed us, literally, to death (too often by suicide), or to the death of our sense of self and value as a human being.
Consider, for instance, Roger Jimenez, the Texas pastor whose recent rant has gone viral, in which he calls homosexuals "the scum of the earth," and that the tragedy or Orlando is that more of the victims didn't die. He said he is ardently praying for the deaths of those only wounded in the Orlando attack. Even I find the place in myself that wants to dismiss such viciousness as inconsequential, the hateful rhetoric of an idiot or madman that doesn't affect me.
Internalized Homophobia
But the truth is, it does. And I think about the LGBT children and teens listening to his hateful words and how that adds to their own self-loathing.
This is just one of the innumerable cultural messages that slash away at our soul, cut by cut, until we quietly succumb to a learned helplessness or worse, until we internalize the hatred and allow it to erode our sense of self. It is the same message sent by those who refuse to bake a cake or perform weddings for gay couples, or rent them a home, or who fire them from their job.
The message is: you don't deserve to live, or to go about your life in a way that makes me uncomfortable. If, on the other hand, you as a gay person are uncomfortable naturally expressing affection, then you are more likely to internalize such rejection and ask, "What's wrong with me?" or think, "I don't matter."
Seeing and hearing these constant messages and not acknowledging them for the danger they pose to yourself and others leads to depression, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and a whole range of other psychological and social problems. Doing nothing adds to your own vicarious trauma and anxiety.
It is not the right answer.
A Better Response
Alternatively, there are better ways to respond.
The first is to simply recognize where and when you are being made to feel "othered." It is to become conscious of the myriad ways you are being made to feel rejected, vilified, ignored, erased and victimized. All too often we simply let these go by unacknowledged, where they slip into our subconscious to do their dirty work.
Imagine if the above mentioned pastor had said about blacks or Jews what he said about gays: "I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put a firing squad in front of them, and blow their brains out." Can you imagine how the black or Jewish community would be responding?
The next step, then, is to stop being passive. That is not to say one should become violent, but find ways to safely activate yourself--whether by speaking out on social media, writing letters and blogs, standing up for oneself when a slight comes your way, joining a support group, or doing something positive for yourself and others.
I'm not suggesting that you put yourself in immediate danger. However, being in a crowd demonstrating against such hate and violent rhetoric may offer some safety. But one can experience healing and empowerment by simply becoming active and standing tall for one's nature and one's beliefs. We should realize, however, that there are consequences to poking a beast that is not used to being challenged.
We are beginning to see demonstrations by gays and straights alike in support of the Orlando victims and their loved ones. On Twitter, there is a growing movement named #TwoMenKissing, photos meant to interrupt the heterosexual trance, and be an expression both of love and of activism.
The time for passivity is gone along with those murdered in Orlando. If you are thinking, "Well, things have gotten better. We are well along the road to cultural acceptance," then you likely are deluding yourself. Now, more than ever, is the time to stand for what is right. As radio show host and author, Michelangelo Signorale, makes clear in his new book's title: It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality.
And as an elegant and heartfelt example of speaking out, I'll conclude with a recent Facebook post by a friend, Brian McNaught, a diversity trainer, writer and sexuality educator:
Openly gay men are generally the most non-violent men in the world. We are an army of lovers, who since the earliest times, have been most likely to be the world's poets, dancers, children's authors and illustrators, shamans, teachers, healers, prophets, and diplomats.
Gay men have a sensibility and sensitivity that allows them to create, see, and appreciate beautiful expressions of the real and unreal. Most gay men are genuinely funny, romantic, graceful, resilient, and communal.
In Spanish, we're referred to as butterflies. In English, we're fairies. Despite our extraordinary gifts, we are bullied and beaten and shot down. We're labeled sick and sinful. We're imprisoned, thrown from buildings, and hanged from cranes. In this country, and elsewhere, we were experimented upon and tortured with electric shocks to our genitals, freezing water, and lobotomies. We've been castrated by knives and by drugs.
Why? Don't you realize that you're killing your angels? Why pull out the wings of your butterflies? Why bludgeon your fairies? We work tirelessly to make the world a more beautiful, loving, healthy home, and you try to convert us to being straight. We just want to dance.
Unclench your fists. Put down your assault rifle. Applaud instead, and gladly receive our gifts.