I had wanted to go to pride for years but could never manage to travel to a city since I still spent my summers in my small town, first in high school and then throughout college. Towards the end of my college tenure, I was finally able to go to my first pride. And it was the day of the Pulse massacre. We heard rumblings through pride and thought the shooting had happened at ours. The mixture of relief it wasn't here and the grief about what had happened shaped the rest of the day.
Selfishly, I was so angry that the one day we had been fighting for years to have, my friends and I, was soured by the bitter reminder that people wanted us dead for this. I was reminded by counter-protesters. I was reminded on my way back to my hometown. I was upset we couldn't have a few hours to pretend that things were safe.
In the following days, I was devastated how the conversation shifted from that moment. When a Muslim could be pointed to as responsible, all the white supremacists who cheered on queer death suddenly made grand speeches about needing to "hold the monster who did this accountable." I was angry that people took the bait and accepted allyship from people who never gave a fuck about queer people. Just hated Muslims.
I'm thinking of that a lot as the playbook repeats itself in Berlin. First, the utter delight from queerphobes that some of us are dead, then, the stoic sense of "justice" and the determined hunt to "find the monster who did this."
Berlin is a very international city. It has a lot of migrants. It has a vibrant multicultural community. There is little doubt that many Muslims were marching in the very pride that was attacked. A good number of my European queer friends are Muslim. And this attack is being framed as two opposing sides. Muslim vs Queer. As if we aren't both attacked by the same people.
Whatever continues to come out about the driver, we are not opposed communities. I am devastated for the people who were hurt, the person who was killed, and their loved ones. I am also devastated for every Muslim queer person, who in grieving this attack are once again treated as suspect, often also by non-Muslim white queers.
My heart is with all of you.
I hope that Islamophobia one day stops being an easy-to-reach for tool to weaponize in grief. I hope that people will unlearn their racist impulse to point to an other as the cause of their suffering, when the circumstances that allow for atrocities like these are enabled in plain sight by the fascist governments that coddle bigots and stoke the flames of hatred among similarly-oppressed people.
