It's not safe to be a queer person of color in America

The massacre in Orlando brought me back to when I was four-years-old. I have never written of the experience, I spoke it out loud once—just a few months ago—at a Latinx conference.

At four, my mother and I were separated. She had to migrate from Mexico to the U.S. after years of physical and emotional domestic abuse leading up to my younger sister’s death. I was too young to understand the violence that my mother and sister had experienced, but I knew that I was somehow safe, or at least, that’s what everyone around me kept telling me.

During the time my mother and I were separated, I lived in a household where at age four, I was expected to “act like a man,” meaning that I could not cry, I could only play outdoors, and that I wasn’t allowed to play with girls. When I got caught playing with an 8-month-old girl, my caretaker forced me into a dress for acting like “una niña.” I was beaten while wearing a dress, and forced to stand outside, alone in the open streets of Mexico City. Neighborhood boys pointed, laughed, and threw rocks at me. I don’t remember if I thought I was going to die, or thought that it was a fair punishment for being feminine, and not man enough. I was four, but now that I am older, the memories come back as if it just happened.

On Sunday, I woke up to the overwhelming vibration of my cellphone on the nightstand. What the hell could be so important?

Without putting my glasses on, I saw that I had been added to a group text with friends I’d had dinner with the night before. There had been a shooting at a gay club early Sunday in Orlando, Florida, during the club’s “Latin night.” Someone texted, “50 of our people were killed last night!! We need a space for our people to process this. I need to process this.” I couldn’t comprehend the texts, so I read them again. Then I thought about my childhood, and realized that I, too, needed to process.

I realized that even though I have been involved in social justice movements since 2010, chanting all over the U.S., “undocumented and unafraid, queer, and unashamed,” the truth is, I am still afraid. I am afraid even though I am no longer undocumented. I am afraid despite the U.S. recognizing gay marriage. I am afraid because just as homophobia and transphobia—paired with racism and anti-blackness—were root causes of the torture I survived at the age of four, they fueled the shooting in Orlando. Acts of violence are committed against queer people and people of color every day, whether they are massacres like Orlando or the Charleston church shooting, or more intimate tragedies that are rarely reported in the media.

Then there’s the fact that people quoted by mainstream media have used Orlando to criminalize people from the Muslim community, and to shame those of us that are queer, transgender, intersex, etc. for trying to live authentic lives. Let’s face it: we aren’t living in a post-race or post-gay society.

As an Afro-Latinx gender-non-conforming immigrant, I must emphasize that Sunday’s massacre cannot be isolated as a random act or purely an act of Islamic terrorism. Too many people are dismissing that the shooting took place during Pride month at a Latin night event. Even friends on social media have said that this shooting has nothing to do with race, because, after all, white gay people go clubbing, too. But Sunday’s shooting was an attack against a primarily young crowd of Latinx and Black individuals celebrating their existence in a world that has continually tried to silence them. We can’t deny that it occurred because our (American) culture devalues the lives of womyn and people of color, and has through our history.

We are not all Orlando.

When I was four, I was tortured for acting feminine—femininity, and therefore, womynhood, was weak and not to be celebrated. If I had stayed away from playing with girls, my caretaker argued, I would have never been punished. I was beaten and mocked because I was wearing a dress, but also, because I am visibly Black. As a Black body in Mexico, my worth and value as a human being has always been questioned. I cannot detach my Blackness, my femininity, my queerness, or my mental health from an analysis on what happened in Orlando.