Pulse survivor Brandon Wolf has returned only a few times to the Orlando gay club where he suffered the most terrifying moments of his life. Visiting the now-shuttered bar means reliving the nightmarish minutes after 2 a.m. on June 12, 2016, when a gunman opened fire on the dance floor, killing 49 people and injuring 53 more. For Wolf, the site of one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history remains shrouded in that shrieking darkness. But he says it’s important for him to go back from time to time — so he can feel connected to those who did not make it out.
“It’s the last place I saw my best friends. I need to feel their energy. I need to feel their presence,” Wolf tells me. “It feels like a family place, but one that’s been robbed.”
Over the past two years, Wolf has found his voice as an LGBTQ+ rights and anti-gun-violence activist. It’s how he keeps the spirit of his friends alive, he says. Only a month after the shooting, Wolf appeared onstage at the 2016 Democratic National Conventionalongside the mother of his best friend, Christopher “Drew” Leinonen, who died at Pulse, to call for reasonable gun reforms. And since then, Wolf has served as vice president of The Dru Project, an organization founded in Drew’s memory, which offers scholarships and promotes gay-straight alliances in schools. Today, speaking engagements, rallies and marches cram his calendar.
Wherever he travels, one thing continues to amaze him: how deeply and widely the tragedy he lived through resonates within the LGBTQ+ community.
“It’s still hard for me to wrap my head around how so many people are so personally affected by it,” he says. “But I think it’s because Pulse represents what queer people are most afraid of — that all the hateful rhetoric, underhanded comments, and bullying eventually leads up to violence.”
That acute awareness of brutality and bigotry, as well as a long history of relentless activism in spite of immense political opposition, has recently propelled the queer community to the forefront of the gun violence prevention movement. It’s a movement that activists say is more intersectional and more energized in 2018 than ever before. Read more via them.