Nine years later, famed Pulse survivor searches for closure
As the sun set behind a cloudy sky Wednesday, a small group of people set up flags, lit candles and strummed a guitar while the Lake Eola fountain splashed behind them.
At the center of the group was Chris Hansen, a man with a near-constant smile on his face, but whose eyes occasionally flash signs of a deeper pain.
Hansen became well known during the night of the 2016 mass shooting as being one of the first to escape Pulse nightclub, and who went back in to help pull others out.
Now he works across the country to give victims and allies of violence spaces to be together.
'I woke up from a dream, and I thought I was in a crowd of people in my dream, and I was wondering what it was about,' Hansen said. 'I don't remember, except for the fact that I brought a lot of people together.'
Hansen spoke of his struggle to move on from that night, describing the process as glacial. His project, called the Rainbow Remembrance, centers on affirmation, love and hope.
It's also personal for him. He pointed to one lantern in honor of a 17-year-old from his hometown who was shot by a police officer.
Hansen will take his own turn going through Pulse Friday morning, where he said he will be focused on the wall that saved his life.
'I want to touch that bullet hole. I want to see the that I saved my own life, or that my life was saved for some reason,' he said. 'Through every storm as a rainbow. Who knows why I'm still here or what message I'm supposed to perceive, but I know that I'm here for a reason, and I'm not going to be quiet.'
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I found myself already haunted by their deaths, awestruck at how soon I felt that loss. Haunted by the body counts, the names, the stories and histories attached to those names—just like I am haunted by the many thousands of queer people, both named and unnamed, whom we have lost to AIDS. What does it mean to be "after' loss? What does it mean to continue after the Pulse Massacre or after the AIDS Crisis? How can we heal when we are always in a cruel and devastating after? I am not alone in asking these questions. 'Yesterday we saw ourselves die again // Fifty times we died in Orlando,' mourns the narrator of Christopher Soto's poem, 'All the Dead Boys Look Like Us.' The 'we' Soto describes in its plural subaltern voice is of young, queer people of color hailing from colonized countries. Many of the Pulse shooting victims were in their twenties, some in their late teens, just babies. Richard Blanco, in his own tribute to the Pulse victims, 'One Pulse—One Poem,' writes: 'picture the choir of their invisible spirits / rising with the smoke toward disco lights, imagine / ourselves dancing with them until the very end.' Forty-nine people were killed at Pulse. They were friends, lovers, mothers, siblings, partners and so much more. 'Restored Mural for Orlando' by Roy G. Guzmán focuses on the importance of a city like Orlando for queer community. Yet, he writes,'I am afraid of attending places / that celebrate our bodies because that's also where our bodies // have been cancelled / when you're brown and gay you're always dying / twice.' The 49 people who were killed at Pulse each had a name: Darryl Roman Burt II, Deonka Deidra Drayton, Antonio Davon Brown, Mercedez Marisol Flores... Their names of the 49 lives lost go on, as do the details of their lives. Jerry Wright worked at Disney World, one of Orlando's biggest employers. Juan Ramon Guerrero and Christopher 'Drew' Leinonen were boyfriends, and took their final breaths together. Jonathan Camuy worked as a producer at the popular Spanish broadcasting company Telemundo. Names do not necessarily tell the story of a life, and neither does a number. Yet, when brought together, compiled, and compacted, they speak to vast contexts and histories. Forty-nine people were killed at Pulse. Seven hundred thousand dead—disproportionately poor, unhoused, and people of color—from HIV/AIDS. Sadly, there remain many other queer names we may never know because history did not record them. Yet, despite their incompleteness, we need these names and numbers in order to have a sense of who we have lost, to feel the weight of the tally—not as a burden but as part of our fight for a different past, present, and future. My mother called me after the Pulse Nightclub shooting because she knew something of tragedy, mourning, and fear. But in truth, she was scared for me long before that terrible morning, ever since I elected to move to New York City when I was eighteen. For years, she experienced the cocktail of emotions that comes with loving a queer child—fear of our early passing from some disease, some mental illness, some lover's quarrel, some brutal attack by a stranger on a street. I want Pulse not to be solely a tragedy, a massacre, a mass shooting. I want it to signify more than pain, suffering, and unending mourning. I want after Pulse to be about the patchwork of joys, contradictions, mundanities, hopes, differences, and freedom projects that define queer life. The many ways of reaching out with all of our senses to other bodies, other places, other histories. Our after should include shaking a**, gossiping with friends, drinking cocktails, lip-syncing to a favorite song—staring into the strobe lights, feeling alive, fully bodied, transcendent. After Pulse is where I want to be. Contact us at letters@
