Traffic on South Orange Avenue is at a standstill. The right-of-way is filled with news vans and bloodmobiles. Service dogs wearing rainbow bandanas circle the crowd while church groups hand out donuts and cold water.
It’s June 12, 2017, the one-year anniversary of the attacks at Pulse, a popular LGBTQ club in Orlando, Fla. Forty-nine people died when a gunman opened fire during a Latin-themed dance night. Now, at the club-turned-memorial, the names of the victims are being read aloud. Stanley Almodovar III, Amanda L. Alvear, Joel Rayon Paniagua…
It was the deadliest mass shooting in recent American history, and it happened just up the road from the “Happiest Place on Earth.” Before June 12, 2016, many associated Orlando only with fairytale endings and Super Bowl wins. But on that day and in the weeks to come, outsiders saw what lay beyond the roller coasters and hotels that line Interstate 4. Orlando, it turns out, is a place where people live and love and let go at their favorite bars. It’s a community where neighbors wait for hours to give blood in the name of those who can’t (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says men can’t donate blood if they’ve had sex with another man in the past 12 months). It’s a city with a downtown where today, exactly one year later, the Wells Fargo ATMs are being framed in a rainbow backdrop. “In many ways, what has happened since Pulse is that the rest of the world now sees us as we have always seen ourselves,” says Karen Persis, a surrogacy lawyer who lives near the nightclub. Others have a slightly different take: that the tragedy helped Orlando see itself more clearly, while also showing the world a different side of itself than just the theme parks.
The collision of fairytale and functional city is captured in the Orange County Regional History Center’s display of items collected from Pulse memorials around the world. There’s a Mickey Mouse glove inscribed with “#OrlandoStrong.” A Mickey Mouse–ear keychain states, “Love always wins.” There are drawings of Mickey and Minnie holding candles next to photos of Pulse memorials in Berlin and Brazil, Texas and Tokyo.
