No, Totally!

The eighth of a ten part series looking at the aftermath of the Pulse shooting in Orlando, solely through the voices of members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Following the shooting, I began seeing members of the community openly worrying on social media, understandably for their lives, but also about the packaging of the attack both by major news outlets and elected officials. It seemed like coverage of the shooting was overwhelmingly formatted as cisgender, heterosexual people talking about members of the queer and Latinx community rather than talking to them. After frustrating hours of fruitlessly searching for perspective from the actual communities affected, I remembered that, in this modern world, I didn’t have to wait for any other outlet to have these conversations for me; I could do it myself. As I started thinking about the project, something else became painfully obvious to me: I couldn’t wrap my head around the weight of 49 lives lost. I heard about a news anchor reading all 49 names on air, and was s