Is it getting better?

A few years ago there was the “It Gets Better” campaign, a video series featuring people urging at-risk gay youth to sort of hang in there because they can actually come out the other side live full, happy lives in the future. It was helpful to have older people tell these young people that their lives do have value.

There has been so much positive change for LGBT people in the past few years. Just a year ago we got the right to marry our beloved in all 50 states. Then something horrible like the massacre of gay people, many of whom were Latino, in Orlando and you have to ask, is it getting better?

“It could have been us” is one of the first things I thought. My club days are pretty much over but years ago, how much time did I spend with gay and straight friends at places like Woody’s, 12^th Air, Blue Moon or Cloud 9, dancing and drinking and having fun? The thought of a 25-year-old texting his parents his last words while the gunshots get closer is obscene and hard to imagine.

Years ago, I don’t remember considering going to a gay bar to be dangerous. The danger was always there but maybe you don’t see things like that until you’re older and wiser. Still, it was always in my mind to avoid holding hands with anyone on the street. I was also lucky enough to have supportive family and friends, who never would have turned their backs on me, so I didn’t need the bar scene quite as much as young, at-risk people might.

Those bars are places where gay people can feel safe to express some very human affection with their partners. One of the tragic dimensions to this massacre is how many young people will go to these bars now, once a refuge from getting beaten up just for holding hands on the street, and always have an eye on the exit, just in case.

There has been so much despair since the horror at Pulse but there have been some signs of hope. On Facebook and at vigils you see people expressing their support and empathy. In Orlando, people can’t give blood fast enough. The Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower are lit up in rainbows. The pope offered his condolences. President Obama cut right to the heart of the issue that these gay bars are supposed to be a sanctuary.

These are signs of empathy we might not have seen years ago. In the ‘70s, some nut burned down a gay bar and killed a bunch of people and the public shrugged and joked. There are probably still shrugging and jokes today but if you zoom out, you see a lot of support.

I don’t have a hot take here; this is just a rough draft of trying to process this insanity. I certainly can’t definitively answer whether or not it’s gotten better because weighing all the hate of humanity against all the love is too complicated an equation for some blog post. I think things have improved in a lot of ways for gay people but that doesn’t erase those 49 dead people. There is still danger out there and everyone certainly isn’t skipping through fields of wildflowers. One of the sad things about Orlando is that it makes it harder to make the argument to gay people who are just starting out that things will get better for them.