You are not forgotten.
Our community will carry your memory forever.
Love always wins.
These were some of the words written on a community message board during Monday night’s Pulse memorial at the AmericanAirlines Arena in Miami.
The faces of those 49 people killed a year ago in a shooting at the popular LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando were all over: They were on smiling headshots, side by side on screens around the venue. They were on posters carried by community activists. Their names were read one by one along with their ages. "Eighteen, 27, 40, 20 ..."
The memories of that night still ring in the ears of the LGBTQ community in South Florida.
When 29-year-old Wendy Jean-Louis wakes up in the morning, he feels safe. But as soon as he steps through his front door, he feels this mask harden on his face. He calls it self-preservation.
"The moment you step outside ... guards up," he said.
Jean-Louis says he knows some people just won’t like him – for whatever reason. Some people won't like him for his colorful clothes. Or they won't like his voice. Or they just won't like how he moves through the world, a 6-foot-2 Haitian-American man who is always "glowing" with pride.
So he’s careful. He’s on watch, even when sitting in a restaurant, he says. "It's like a flight. You're looking for the nearest exit. You're looking for something," he said.
"Please watch over us." That was another phrase written on the community message board.
There were 20 police officers at the event on Monday night, with more patrol cars along Biscayne Boulevard and a metal detector at the entrance of the venue.
And when Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado took the podium, he spoke about gun control.
"We've petitioned the Congress of the United States for seven years to do one single thing: ban the sale of assault rifles. And it hasn't happened," he said.
Katherine Granados, vice president of Miami Dade College’s Pride at the Wolfson Campus, performed a spoken word piece about how Pulse affected the community.
"I hated the fact that when I close my eyes a year back, images popped in my head like rapid fire ... men and women screaming, crying, falling and running for their lives, hiding in air vents, hiding in bathroom stalls, texting their mothers, fathers, sisters, brother and/or lovers, 'I love you,' one final time," she said.
In a corner of the venue, the Out Miami Foundation laid out a canvas for attendees to paint on and create a community mural.
Twenty-one-year-old Stephanie Urbina sat on the ground, hunched over, writing “I love you” in yellow paint. Above that, an equilateral triangle, a symbol that was used to label LGBTQ people as "other" during the Holocaust but has now been reclaimed by the community. Urbina has a tattoo of a similar triangle on her ring finger to remind her to live "authentically as myself, for me and nobody else."
She’s back home from Florida State University for the summer.
After Pulse, Urbina resolved it was time to be honest about who she was. At an orientation event she was leading, she stood in front of 410 incoming students and identified herself as a "queer individual."
"Basically, being the person I wanted freshman year, especially as a queer Latina at a predominantly white institution," she said.
The Out Miami Foundation said it will be hosting another event in the coming weeks to complete the mural. Details will be announced.
