Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Francesca T. Royster 503 Francesca T. Royster Stories We Tell After Orlando We are in Laila’s backyard for a Sunday barbecue, a cool and windy Chicago June day that immediately followed one of the very hottest days so far this year. My partner Annie and I have brought our fouryear -old daughter Cece and her best friend Gilda to the barbecue, and they’ve dressed themselves in layers, with leggings and hoodies and dresses, girlie but survivalist at the same time in their sequins and metallic purple, discowear for preschoolers. We are at the end of a daylong play date, and we’ve already survived two playgrounds and several tearful standoffs, the ups and downs that come with friends so young. So Annie and I come hungry for some time with our adult friends. The closely packed, brick, three-flat apartment buildings on either side of Laila’s yard provide us with some protection from the wind for a good part of the afternoon. But as the sun goes down and the light dims, we pile on more jackets and scarves over our T-shirts and shorts. Gusts of wind randomly fan the flames until they’re visible over the lid of the grill as Laila cooks. I look out for Laila at the grill while Annie plays catch with the little girls. But I have to do so in stealth, because Laila is as stubborn as she is glamorous. She has insisted on wearing a jacket with green flowing sleeves as she tends the fire, and while she has put her long, graying blond hair up in a chop-sticked bun, she has also pulled out long wispy strands to achieve high femme style. It flies around her face in the wind, flirting with the flames. 504 Francesca T. Royster We are all getting together because later this week Laila will be boarding a plane for the twelve-hour flight home to spend time with her aging mother and father for the summer. “Home” is Lebanon, and we have already experienced losing Laila for a several months in 2006 during a visit home when Israel and Lebanon’s tensions grew into a violent series of bombings that came very close to her Beirut apartment. At the nadir of that time, Laila sent us frantic group letters conveying her worry, sometimes her despair, and her flashbacks to her childhood experiences in wartime Beirut in the 1970s and also in the war of 1982. For a few agonizing weeks her letters stopped coming altogether. The afternoon of our barbecue was the same day as the early morning shootings in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where forty -nine people were killed, and at least fifty others were wounded. The victims were all killed while practicing a rite that all of us considered as sacred and necessary as going to church might be for some—dancing the night away in a gay nightclub. This morning we had woken up to this news, blinking still without our glasses, the magnitude of the news headline hard to fathom as it flashed across the screens of our phones. It’s wrong that mass shootings have become part of the fabric of our lives, and probably will be for the lives of Cece and Gilda. The story feels both shocking and sadly familiar: the apparently easy availability of weapons and a pattern of anger taken to the next outrageous step. And then there’s the gay part. Even when I first heard that the shooting took place at a gay bar, I wondered if the killer, Omar Mateen might be gay himself. “Why Orlando?” I thought. Why a mostly unknown dance club? I thought of the messy, red-hot fury of hate and desire when they get mixed up together. As Annie and I talked about the shooting in hushed voices on the playground that morning, we thought of Matthew Shepard. We thought of the recent theory that Shepard most likely knew his killers; that he hung out with them, maybe did drugs with them. Some have written that the narrative that Mateen is gay only confirms the...