As most of you unfortunately know by now, a man whose name I will not dignify by writing walked into the Orlando nightclub Pulse early Sunday morning and committed a heinous act, the worst mass shooting in US history. Among those for whom this hit far too close to home was actor and DJ Ruby Rose. Ruby is a strong voice and advocate for the LGBTQ community and had just recently done a gig at Pulse.
Ruby Rose has shared an emotional social media post after the horrific Orlando mass shooting, revealing she performed in the city where 50 people were slain only last week.
“Woke up in tears to hear the news about Orlando. Devastated, heartbroken, sick,” the Aussie actor and DJ posted on Facebook and Instagram.
“I played there last Friday and last night I performed after Pride in LA. From the DJ booth you see laughter, love, dancing freedom and beautiful people living their lives not harming anyone. It’s one of the beautiful things to see from stage.”
“This horrific tragedy has me on my knees at the mercy of a greater power to ask the simple question of ‘When will this end’ … I’m praying for Orlando, I’m crying for Orlando and I am there with you in spirit sending my love and strength.”
I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like for Ruby to have been in that location, celebrating one day and waking up to find out that about a week later 49 lives were taken there. I had a loose connection to the UCLA shooting earlier this month and the chill of having proximity to tragedy is hard to shake.
The heartbreak from this tragic event is far reaching. J.K. Rowling posted the following to her Twitter Sunday to honor one of the victims, Luis Vielma. Luis worked on the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios in Orlando:
Luis Vielma worked on the Harry Potter ride at Universal. He was 22 years old. I can't stop crying. #Orlando pic.twitter.com/Nz2ZCWxNsS
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 13, 2016
Walt Disney World, which was another potential target for attack, and Universal both lost cast members. I have a friend at Disneyland, Anaheim and all cast members are devastated. Even if they had not met their East Coast counterparts, there is a real sense of family among the parks. I absolutely believe J.K. feels Luis’ loss personally. You can see a couple of general tributes posted by the cast members here and here. The Daily Beast has profiles and photos of many of the young people whose lives were cut tragically short.
I don’t know how to close this post with the proper respect. Please know my heart goes out to anyone and all affected by this. By way of concluding, I want to leave the thoughts of Michigan State Representative Jeremy Moss:
I literally never want to hear again that LGBT people in the bathroom are a threat to public safety.
— Jeremy Moss (@JeremyAllenMoss) June 12, 2016
There is nothing I can do today but cry and pray as I lay in shock after waking to the horrible senseless crime in Orlando.
— Ruby Rose (@RubyRose) June 12, 2016
I was in Orlando friday and played to a beautiful mostly LGBT crowd and I never once imagined reading this days after. These lives taken.
— Ruby Rose (@RubyRose) June 12, 2016
Photo credit: Twitter, WENN Photos and Getty Images
Amen to State Rep. Moss’s comment.
Yes.
I know we don’t want to politicize this heartbreaking tragedy but Jeremy Moss’s comment is a poignant one that should not be forgotten: fear and hate so often go hand-in-hand.
Fear breeds hate and hate spreads fear.
My heart is with Orlando and the LGBTQ community.
So sad.
It is.
Although, I’d like to point out to Hecate that as of now, it is 49 people that were slain. Fifty is the number initially reported, but it includes the gunman.
Thank you for that. I corrected it.
It’s absurd that you see politicians such as Marco Rubio coming out and condemning such attacks all while propagating the hate that validates anti gay sentiment. Each time a politician votes against equality they are condoning violence against that community. Hillary Clinton has done the same in the past. She did not support it until it was en vogue to do so. This is bigger than a lone wolf. The systemic hate caused this and they’re all to blame, tbh.
To call this an attack on America is a joke and political slant.
I understand everyone grieves differently, but somehow I always get annoyed when people make tragedies about themselves. I think we are all upset that something so horrible happened to innocent people, but for people who work on the other side of the country to be “truly devastated” about someone who they didn’t know but happens to work for the same giant corporation, is very “me me me” about something that isn’t about them.
I’m with you.
One of my friends just told me one of our most annoying coworkers is using this all as an excuse to validate how much she’s eating. This woman is in her mid-thirties and is CONSTANTLY posting on facebook about how she’s dieting one minute, then the next minute posting photos of the horrible food she’s eating. This is what my friend messaged me:
“OMF I can’t take this today! I’m so sick of hearing about her diet. She just blamed her over eating today on the shooting in orlando and shane dawson being upset about christina grimmie … literally her words, she’s sad from it all so she’s eating everything”
We’re Canadian! Like my god – it’s a horrible thing that happened but don’t try to use it as an excuse.
@Erinn I don’t want to offend and I know your comment was not meant to be funny, but it just made me laugh. Simply the absurdity of blaming a national mass shooting on the reason to eat poorly just made me chuckle. I guess, however, we all grieve and deal with tragedies, even if we are on the sidelines, our own way. So no shade to her or to you for your feelings either.
It reminds me of a wonderful joke from Arrested Development when Tobias is asked about his failing marriage and he says “Well, I don’t want to blame it all on 9/11, but it certainly didn’t help.”
I hear that you are talking about the Disney employees & I don’t think there is anything wrong with have a connection to a victim or tragedy and so feeling it more deeply then if you hadn’t. Like the author said, proximity or other things can make it ‘hit closer to home’. I am sad about the shootings but I would be having a different reaction if it happened to people I knew, in my hometown or people that reminded me of myself (hence the thought- ‘that could have been me!’)
What a weird thing to say, though. Why do you care if someone has a connection and grieves more then you do? This isn’t a competition- there is grief enough for all. It’s odd to read this article and that is your reaction.
But I think there maybe something deeper in your post & I’m calling it out…..this tragedy was a hate crime and homosexuals were targeted. I have heard some people saying that it shouldn’t be classified as a hate crime or a crime against the LGBT community, and instead a crime against America.
If this is what you were insinuating or thinking, then shame on you. An attack on Jewish people is antisemitic and an attack on a African American church is racist. This was an attack on the LGBT community, and our community & nation as a whole, but front & foremost this was a homophobic crime.
If I am wrong on the spirit of your post, then I am sorry. I was reading last night that some people don’t want to call it an attack on the LGBT community & instead call it an attack on America so they can ignore learning any lessons on hate & homophobia and spin it to further their agenda.
They did the same sh*t with the Charleston church shooting. Transparent agenda is transparent.
oh no, that is absolutely not what I’m saying. I 100% believe this was a hate crime, and so for members of the LGBT community to feel affected, I am completely on their side. My point was ONLY about the random disney employees in california. If this was an attack on Disney world then I would understand.
@ frogger- cool & sorry I jumped to that. I had just been reading about all that stuff & read your post with that on my mind. It’s a lesson that I shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
I read Erinn’s post and thought “Oh! I do know people like that!” I know some people that just crave attention and/or excuses for their behaviors so anything that happens seems to effect them more then others. I have a somebody in my life who moaned about how something that had happened directly to me had effected them & how difficult it was for them…..Why that may be true, I was not the person to come to for that.
I don’t know why but this shooting isn’t getting enough “air time”. It was the biggest mass shooting in American History and people are already on to other stories, mostly about celebs doing stupid things. WTH? I don’t live in America, but I just can’t understand why Americans aren’t more vocal about their gun laws being changed. They get mad for a minute, but then move on quickly to their stupid celeb stories.
It’s easy to say it’s a short attention span (and I don’t want to entirely dismiss that) but I also think there’s a bit of desensitization to these stories. And I hate to say this but I think you’re just not going to get as much outrage over targeting a minority group that people have mixed opinions about (no matter how young many of them were) than you are a school shooting. I suspect in some areas of the country there are, sadly, people who agree with the shooter’s dad beliefs. I’m happy I’m not on Facebook because I bet some of the comments on there are really ugly.
It’s all over the news and media here, but I agree with the person above that it’s almost routine at this point that people are growing numb. Which is a frightening statement in its own right.
You need to understand that the US is an enormous country with a very large Congress – getting federal change on constitutionally protected rights is very difficult. Even moderate conservatives often balk at those limitations. Factor in the NRA and it’s extremely powerful lobby, and it’s not that hard to see why change hasn’t occurred. This has been a fight for several decades now – it’s just very tightly interwoven with politics and blatantly manipulated into a polarized talking point in order to garner votes. Most people support moderate gun control – it’s the highly conservative base that the Republican Party fears losing if they support it.
Not American but spent several years studying undergrad there and is hoping to go back soon for grad school. I will never forget how i felt when i walked into a Bass Pro Shop in Texas and saw a gun section – walls lined up and down with rifles and glass cases full of pistols and ammunition.
Not only have people there been desensitized to the violence, but they’ve also become numb to the prevalence of these weapons in general. In my 23 years of life, i had never seen such an abundance of guns until that day. It was shocking and confusing to say the least, especially when you think about the fact that this Bass Pro Shop was considered a family attraction – it had rides and aquariums of swamp fish. There were so many families with children mulling about that day and no one batted an eyelid to the fact that these rifles were just mounted on the wall for purchase.
I know so many people want the gun culture to change and are actively mobilizing to push for it but i fear that it has become too deeply ingrained and profitable for certain factions of society for anything meaningful to happen. If 6 and 7 year olds being killed in their classrooms couldn’t move the NRA and certain lawmakers, what can?
Tafzlan: but part of the difference is that guns mean different things, especially depending on where you live.
I grew up in a rural area (one with a Bass Pro Shop and all). Almost everybody owned a rifle. You got your own at about, oh, 8-10 years old. People used them to hunt, as well as sport shooting. Nobody I knew was afraid of guns. Nobody was bothered by seeing a line of them in a store. You didn’t blink. But here’s why: none of us associated the guns with violence, or bad things, or fear. To us, they were simply tools that your family used to put meat on the table, or a sporting good that you used for fun. That was it. We knew they could hurt you if you used them wrong, but we also thought the same about the heavy farm equipment that was around too (and frankly, more people I knew lost fingers to those things). But no gun ever provoked a sense of fear in me – because I wasn’t culturally conditioned for it. (And yes, I got a rifle when I was 11 after I went through a safety course near our house that was held by our local NRA affiliate (the NRA actually holds more gun safety classes that any other single organization, but that’s neither here nor there).
My husband was raised in a large urban area, and when we first met, I noticed how deeply uncomfortable and a little afraid of the guns he was when we visited my family. He didn’t want to hold them, didn’t want to handle them, etc. It was very foreign to me the first time I saw it, but I figured it out pretty quick. He grew up conditioned to view guns as instruments of crime first and everything else was secondary – and I was the opposite. But he also understands that personal discomfort is, well, personal and that his view isn’t the correct one. But guns in America is a very cultural thing for many people, which seems to be unique, in my experience.
Sam – i completely understand. I tried my best to use language that did not completely generalize all of America into being one way or the other, so i apologize if i have failed in that respect.
You are right, of course, about the cultural aspects of guns and the different meanings they have to different parts of the country. Me personally, coming from a country where gun violence is fairly uncommon, it was indeed a shock to see people nonchalantly eating ice cream cones while looking over rifles and pondering which to get.
There are plenty of people, like you, who are responsible when it comes to handling firearms. I still think 11 is too young to be be trusted to handle guns but that’s just me. Still, i think there’s no need for military grade weapons to be so readily available to the public. I understand hunting rifles or small pistols for “self defense” but why does anyone need an AR-15 or the ability to buy one? That baffles me.
Have you actually been watching the news channels? It’s almost non-stop, wall-to-wall coverage.
I guess it depends on where you live. I don’t live in America. But I can tell you when other mass shootings have occurred in America, it got so much more coverage (outside of America). I just find it odd that this one isn’t getting the same amount of coverage (outside of America).
I get what she is saying though. There is a tentativeness to the coverage that is different than the other mass shootings in recent years. I live in Orlando and even the local outlets aren’t the same in their coverage of this tragedy. I think it is a combination of three very politicized issues that certain groups are trying to avoid too much scrutiny for. Namely the 2nd Amendment, Islamists/Islamophobia, and the LBGT community with the backdrop of a heated Presidential Election.
@ La Ti Da
I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed that.
Really? The radio station that I listen to on the way in to work (NOT talk radio, but a music station) talked about it at length, and my bosses TV has had nothing on but coverage.
CNN is now reporting that the gunman had attended the nightclub several times and may have been gay. If true, then I see someone struggling against being gay and belonging to a religion that condemns being gay .. Sick that someone could hate who they are so much that they in extension hate people who are like them. So sad ..
I wouldn’t think that just yet. It would make sense that he would go to the target beforehand. It’s totally possible he was casing the target to figure out the layout for an attack. And being on a gay dating app could signal trying to “infiltrate” or something like that. I’d let the authorities figure out what exactly he was doing before coming to any conclusions on that one.
His ex-wife has said he was gay
I’d believe that he was casing the club if he had only been a handful of times but by multiple accounts he was a regular at this place and had propositioned numerous other patrons. He would also go and get very drunk–which one wouldn’t necessarily do if they were casing the joint. Not that I’m saying anything is concrete but I’ll be intrigued to see where this possible revelation leads.
Lilacflowers: his ex-wife’s current boyfriend says that she said he had “gay tendencies” – not exactly what you’re saying.
Grant: the news now is that his current wife (not the ex) is going to be arrested because, so they say, she drove him to the club multiple times and knew that he intended to take some kind of violent action against it. That’s pretty crazy for a closeted gay man – asking your wife to drive you to the gay club? I’m with you – I’m kind of fascinated by where this leads.
He was on gay dating apps, had a history of going to gay clubs, and had asked out an old (male) classmate. He was gay.
His father is also a homophobe.
It does always seem like the ones who are so “anti-gay” tend to themselves struggle with the idea that they themselves might be gay. This is not a new phenomena.
So it seems like it’s pretty dusty in my office today. Between this and the comfort dog piece I read earlier I’m going to need a real pick-me-up. So tragic and unfair.
Comfort doggies here (you’ll like the content even if you don’t prefer the outlet) – http://www.barstoolsports.com/iowa/comfort-dogs-have-have-arrived-in-orlando/
You know what’s wild? The Comfort Dogs is a ministry run by the Luthern Synod, which is a fairly conservative Christian denomination that generally supports marriage as between a man and woman. And they can put that aside to provide assistance to the city and the LGBT community there. Maybe there is hope for us, after all.
That was my thought, too, Sam.
The comfort dogs were here in Boston after the Marathon bombing and have attended many of the commemorative events. It is amazing how calming their presence is.
CB love you guys 🙂
It’s been rough seeing so many people try to erase the hate crime nature of this. So many politicians making statements that erase LGBT people from the equation. The shooter knew it was a gay club. He’d been in it multiple times. He knew exactly what type of people frequented it. He knew that. It was targeted at LGBT people. And now you see people trying to evade that fact. You can’t talk about this without acknowledging it as a hate crime, but so many people are trying to evade that fact. The terrorism label, while true, is using as a shield to erase the real nature of this.
Heartbreaking. My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Orlando and the extended family and friends of all those who were at Pulse that night. May those injured recover from their physical wounds as quickly and fully as possible. I know they will never recover emotionally.
We must stop the hate that consumed the shooter in Orlando and the Indiana man who was arrested in Santa Monica with plans to attack the West Hollywood Pride parade. And we must deprive those who hate of the tools they use to commit such heinous attacks.
A note to those near Orlando, the comfort dogs are coming. If you are near where the comfort dogs are, go to them. It may sound silly but just a minute with those wonderful goldens brings a feeling of peace.
Drag Race alum Kenya Michaels was performing at Pulse when the shooting occurred. I can’t imagine what she must be feeling right now.
My heart has been hurting since i learnt of the shooting two days ago. 49 lives murdered so violently. These were people who had restaurants that they frequented, shoes that they wore, beds that they slept in, cars that they drove, jobs that they traveled to, children that they raised, mothers that they kissed, partners that they loved and lives that they lived.
I pray for the survivors as well as family and friends of those slain will heal and recover from this heinous attack.
And in light of the recent reports regarding the life led by the shooter, i hope that everyone around the world finds the acceptance and love that they seek.
Me personally, i will continue to be to the best of my ability an ally to the LGBTQ+ community, especially in my country and community where homo/transphobia urgently needs to be dealt with. We have seen, over and over again, how destructive unchecked (self) hatred can be and I never want anyone to come to this point again.
Beautifully stated
@Hecate, just so you know, you closed it beautifully with that tweet from Jeremy Moss which so perfectly encapsulates every right thinking person’s bewilderment, heartbreak, weariness and righteous rage.
I’m so angry.
And yes, it changes things a little when that street behind the reporter is one you’ve walked and those names scrolling across the screen belong to the friends and coworkers of your own friends. I was actually at Latin Night at Pulse in 2005… my first club outing after my 18th birthday, my first experience in an inclusive setting after my rural FL high school wouldn’t let us start a gay straight alliance…
this homophobia was bred in the U.S., and our lawmakers participated.
Those guns were purchased in the U.S., and our lawmakers allow it.
I am sick with anger and so is everyone I know. Our lives are worth more than this. Samantha Bee got it right.
+1 -Sam Bee’s commentary was amazing. Fucking furious!
His father is a complete narcissist with crazed delusions of grandeur. It’s no wonder his son was mentally ill.
I live right across the street from Pulse. Went to the candle light vigil yesterday. I personally didn’t know anyone who was murdered, but my boyfriend and i have friends who did . This has hit me so hard, it’s so devastating. To think this happened in my backyard. I pray for all the families. This was truly an unfair hate crime &that’s what makes me sick to my stomach.
Hugs and prayers
Thank you ❤️
Some of the people killed worked at Disney World. I’ve been there a few times and wondering if I met any of them. That is just so sad. I can’t believe the evil that lives on this earth. So disgusting.
As the mother of a gay son, I love and respect my son unconditionally. What worries me as a mother are the intolerant and ignorant people who commit these crimes not thinking that the people they kill have mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters and brothers. They are people who pose no threat or harm to anyone. I have no words to properly express my condolences to the parents and friends of the people killed. My heart goes out to them.