“We are here suffering, knowing nothing,” said Baron Serrano, whose brother, Juan Rivera, 36, had been celebrating a friend’s birthday with his husband and was now unaccounted for. They were told that so many were gunned down that victims would be tagged as anonymous until the hospital was able to identify them. More than 12 hours after the attack, anguished relatives paced between Orlando Regional Medical Center and a nearby hotel as they waited for word. Hundreds of people gathered in the glare of flashing red lights on the fringes of the law enforcement cordon around the nightclub, and later at area hospitals, hoping desperately for some word on the fates of their relatives and friends. The club posted a stark message on its Facebook page: “Everyone get out of pulse and keep running.” Some people who were trapped inside hid where they could, calling 911 or posting messages to social media, pleading for help. The shooting began around 2 a.m., and some patrons thought at first that the booming reports they heard were firecrackers or part of the loud, thumping dance music. Pulse, which calls itself “Orlando’s Latin Hotspot,” was holding its weekly “Upscale Latin Saturdays” party. “Nobody cared about us.Joel Figueroa and his friends “were dancing by the hip-hop area when I heard shots, bam, bam, bam,” he said, adding, “Everybody was screaming and running toward the front door.” "In Orlando, those poor people know at least that the whole world is behind them,” he said. Moreau, the outpouring of support for the victims in Orlando has been an “uplifting” sign of progress, he said. “People now feel more of a sense of their own history,” he said.įor Mr. Johnny Townsend, who interviewed survivors in the late ’80s and finally published their accounts in 2014, said the 40th anniversary commemoration gave it a kind of public attention it had not had before. As time passed, the tragedy became “a rumor” to new generations of L.G.B.T. Rey said people who lived through that period did not talk about it for decades. Survivors had to deny any connection to the fire, including the loss of loved ones, because they could lose their jobs or apartments if bosses and landlords suspected they were gay. “There was never any sense of justice,” said Sebastian Rey, the president of the L.G.B.T. He committed suicide a year after the blaze.
No one was charged with the attack, and a man viewed by many as the primary suspect was never arrested.
The fire was an open wound for the gay community in New Orleans for years. people have a place at the table now that they did not have then,” said Clayton Delery-Edwards, who wrote a book about the arson that was published in 2014. Forty years later, a son of his, the current mayor, Mitch Landrieu, declared a day of public mourning for the fire’s victims on its anniversary. The mayor, Moon Landrieu, did not cancel his vacation. “They dug a hole in the ground and put a bag in it and covered it back up,” Mr. Those three were buried in unmarked graves in a potter’s field along with a fourth person, Ferris LeBlanc, whose family did not know his fate until last year, Mr. There are three people who were never identified at all. “His mother refused to collect his ashes because she was too embarrassed that she had a gay son,” Mr. Camina, who directed a documentary, UpStairs Inferno, about the blaze. He was one of many who died without ever coming out to their families, and his mother would not deal with his remains, said Robert L.
His charred body was left slumped against the window bars in full view of passers-by for hours. When firefighters extinguished the blaze, they found a pile of charred bodies, some embracing and others pressed against the windows.Ĭongregants from the New Orleans chapter of the Metropolitan Community Church, an L.G.B.T.-affirming group, were meeting there after services.
One group of patrons fled out a back exit, but another was trapped across the room, caught between the flames and floor-to-ceiling windows fitted with metal bars.