Vigil held in Houston, Texas for 2016 Orlando shooting.Wikicommons/Ashton Woods. Some rights reserved.Reading between words is a “precipitous” art, wrote Jean Genet in Prisoner of Love: “The space between the words contains more reality than does the time it takes to read them.” The reality buried in press articles and official statements in France in the wake of the Orlando massacre was dreadful.
From the day of the shooting until this weekend when Gay Pride was held in the streets of Paris, public discourse showed the shrinking and toxic civic imagination of a European liberal democracy engulfed in homophobia and racism.
Death is increasingly brought in our browser tab, as writer and photographer Teju Cole has pointed out. We are increasingly exposed to camera footage of homicides and massacres that suddenly plunge us “into someone else’s horror.” Occasionally though, we share some of the victims’ social identities, prompting us into digital or, more rarely, physical acts of collective mourning and protests. For gay men and women across American and European liberal democracies, whose memories are burdened by experiences of abuse, discrimination, and violence, the Orlando shooting was proof that their lives could be destroyed again, with an even greater furor.
