“This wasn’t supposed to happen to you,” begins a series of tweets that have gone viral in the days since the Orlando nightclub shooting that left 49 members of the LGBTQ community dead.
Twitter account @fuzzlaw laid out the frustration and horror of realizing that despite the advances in gay rights in recent years, members of the LGBTQ community still aren’t fully safe or accepted. The series of 30 tweets references a history of tragedies and violence against the LGBTQ community, including the Upstairs Lounge arson attack that killed more than 30 people in 1973, the death of Matthew Shepard in 1998, and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and '90s that devastated the gay community.
“With every step of progress came backlash,” wrote the self-described “aging dyke.” “But we pushed. And we pushed. And there weren’t any Upstairs Lounges. No Matthew Shepards.”
She described the slow shift from news about the LGBTQ community being about tragedy to being about victories and inclusion. “We won. We won the right to marry, to have our employment rights protected, to live as fellow citizens,” she wrote. But the attack on the Pulse nightclub turned back the clock.
“Babies. Kids. The ones we fought to hard to protect from the backlash,” she wrote.
She pointed out that despite victories, the violence didn’t just come from a single man with a gun, but from a culture where it’s still socially acceptable to discriminate against LGBTQ people. “It’s the churches that won’t ordain us, won’t celebrate us,” she said. “It’s the nonsensical fight over who can use which bathrooms.”
She called on the world and the LGBTQ community to acknowledge that though the fight had seen victories, it was still ongoing. “The world is not a safe space, and it only gets safer when you fight like hell for it,” she wrote. “So get prepared.”
“We’d still take a bullet for you,” she wrote. “You were just never supposed to have to take a bullet for us.”
Read the whole series, below.
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