Any other Sunday night, the hundreds of people gathered at St. Pete City Hall might have otherwise been nerding out at trivia night, watching sunset at the beach, or picking out the right bottle of cab to go with the night’s episode of Game of Thrones.
But on that Sunday, it felt deeply inappropriate to do anything other than a) voraciously consume all details about the massacre at Pulse, the popular LGBT club in Orlando, or b) simply be around others to help mourn and process what the hell had just happened.
The air at the vigil felt heavy, even for a humid late-spring night, as the gathering sang, in unison, “Amazing Grace” and “Lean on Me.”
Even for those who didn’t know anyone harmed in the Orlando club, it hurt a lot. And it hasn’t gone away.
That’s because “We are Orlando” is much more than a hashtag to us: Orlando is just an hour away. One resident of Tampa, 24-year-old Christopher Sanfeliz, died in the massacre, and the two cities’ LGBT communities are intertwined.
Needless to say, there was a range of local reactions to Sunday’s horrific events — some generous, some not unexpected, some completely tone-deaf.
The good
Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn and St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman were quick to reiterate their staunch support for the LGBT community. Democratic politicians, from the president on down, also quickly took to the airwaves and social media to decry how easy it is for someone with obvious mental health issues or potential terrorism ties to buy a gun that enables him to kill dozens in a matter of minutes.
There’s little they can do to stop it — preemption laws at the state level make sure cities can’t even bar guns from public parks.
Congresswoman Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, lamented being stymied by the National Rifle Association’s hold on lawmakers, which makes it impossible to pass any laws that would keep civilians from buying weapons intended for war or bar those on the terrorist watch list from buying guns.
“As I go back to Washington, D.C. tonight, it’s likely that we’ll have another moment of silence,” she said Monday. “And I have to tell you that I’m pretty tired of having moments of silence without action and and without a plan to prevent these kinds of tragedies from happening again. The Congress has to act. This is simply not reasonable anymore.”
The bad
Meanwhile, in Orlando, Republican elected officials at the state level were walking a political tightrope as they tried to respond to the tragedy. Governor Rick Scott refused to admit that the attack targeted the LGBT community.
Their failure to reference the community, choosing to focus instead on what they’re calling “Islamic terror” (though details emerging about the shooter suggest he may have been driven in part by internal conflicts about his own sexuality), shows there’s still more progress that needs to be made, equality advocates say.
And even those GOP leaders who did mention the LGBT community seemed to be merely paying lip service to a group of people they’d previously condemned.
Attorney General Pam Bondi was forced to defend her treatment of gays and lesbians on CNN. Host Anderson Cooper asked her, head-on, how she could call herself a champion of the LGBT community when she’d spent so much time and taxpayer money defending the state’s gay marriage ban. She tried to argue that her crusade was all about the law — not about disliking the gays, no sir.
“When I was sworn in as attorney general, I put my hand on the Bible and swore to protect the State Constitution,” she said. “That’s not a law, that was voted into our State Constitution by the voters of Florida. That’s what I was defending… I never said I don’t like gay people. That’s ridiculous.”
The beautiful
Sleep has eluded Equality Florida Executive Director Nadine Smith in recent days.
“I’m not sure many people here have [slept], in part because of emotions, but also because there’s so much to do, there’s so much need,” Smith said in a phone interview Tuesday from Orlando. “Everyone’s feeling very, very sad.”
One of the first things she did when she heard the news — besides high-tailing it to Orlando — was set up the Pulse Victims fund on gofundme.com, 100 percent of which will go to the victims of the massacre — for hospital costs, counseling, funeral expenses.
“We knew immediately there would be a need for the families of the dead and for the medical costs of the survivors, including the mental health of those who escaped bullets but are enduring the psychological impacts of what happened,” Smith said. “We knew that was the one thing that everyone could do immediately.”
The goal? $100,000.
As of Wednesday morning, that number had exceeded $4.25 million.
The money will be distributed with help from the National Center for Victims of Crime, a nonprofit well-versed in doling out charitable contributions in the wake of violent events.
In the Tampa Bay area, the efforts to help are ongoing.
Blood drives are taking place on either side of the bay.
The Tampa Bay Rays, meanwhile, are taking advantage of their annual Pride night to raise even more money for the Pulse Victims Fund.
This article appears in Jun 16-23, 2016.