After Pulse: Joe Saunders

Posted on by Thor

Advisory: Please note that this post is about the Pulse nightclub massacre on June 12, 2016. It contains sensitive and difficult to read content.

Joe Saunders is a former State Representative and a senior political director at Equality Florida and formerly staff at the Human Rights Campaign. He is an Orlando LGBT activist. Pulse opened while Joe was a student at UCF. The club anchored it’s outreach around college students. His roommate became a bartender at Pulse. His first apartment was just a few blocks from Pulse.

Joe was in North Carolina doing political response work. He had worked crazy hours like 15 hours a day. At 2AM his phone lit up with a text chat thread from a group of friends in Orlando. He was till working at 2AM. People were saying something is happening at Pulse. One friend was in an apartment within view of the club.  He kept hearing bangs which could be multiple gun shots.

The text thread search began, who was out and where they safe. After waking the next morning by 10AM he had to return home to Orlando. After a quick plane flight be got to the gay and lesbian center for a press conference held there. The Center is not a huge space. A huge bouncer was a the door directing people. The windows had fogged up. You had to carve your way through all the reporters and cameras that were packed into the room. The space was full to capacity. Equality Florida announced at the press conference that they wanted to do a vigil at Lake Eola.

Plans began for the vigil began right away. The city of Orlando was concerned about security. Could a copycat shooter show up at the vigil? The city ultimately decided the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts would be a safer option and easier for police to defend. Police snipers were on the roof of the Methodist Church and City hall just in case anything went down. Joe was the MC for the vigil. The vigil became one of the most important visual moments of the Orlando community response to Pulse and it came together in 6 hours.

After Pulse: Jennifer Foster

Posted on by Thor

Jennifer Foster is the owner of a company called Foster Productions which creates digital content. She is involved with the One Orlando Alliance. She had been active in the LGBTQ community since he moved to Orlando in 2001.

She started an Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in Orlando in 2004. She was on the local board for 10 years and on the national board for 8 years. It was a full time volunteer job. Once a month community members would meet at Pulse. Any time they needed to have an event they would ask Barbara Poma if they could have it at Pulse. There was room for socializing in one room, conversation in another and someone on a microphone in another. They always said yes. HRC Connect was a monthly LGBT community event. It got bigger an bigger.

Jennifer’s phone woke her up at about 4:30AM On June 12, 2016. She heard it vibrating. She started reading her text messages. A friend was asking if is she was OK. He had also left a voice mail in which he was sobbing. He needed to be sure she and her partner were not at Pulse. At 5AM she was still scrolling through messages and realized they needed to turn on the TV. Something was wrong. They sat in the living room trying to make sense of everything. It felt like a personal attack on her life, on her marriage, on the LGBT community, everything she had been fighting for. It was obvious that this was targeted at Pulse. It was Latin Night. What friends might have been there? She started texting and calling to check to be sure people were OK. Nothing made sense.

She called her tight knit group of friends that morning. Blood was needed so they went to One Blood on Michigan. They stood in line with thousands of other people. Cases of water were unloaded, they were given bananas and cookies, and sun block. She took pictures with her phone of the humanity, the beautiful outpouring our community, the response. There were brown people, and white people and gay people and straight people and old people and young people it was our community. This happened to all of us. The cities and the community’s response bears this out. They could not donate blood. They were sent home.

Back at home they drank wine and cried and ranted. They couldn’t stop watching the news. She realized that the community wasn’t ready for something like this. She called a community leader and they met the next day putting together lists of organizations and figuring out who ran what, and who knew, who and how everybody was working together, and what they were doing. That list didn’t exist. Everyone was out there doing their own thing. They started calling people and asking what they needed. Vigils were being planned and every organization called the mayor but all these organizations began overtaxing City Hall with all their separate  requests and demands. They were trying to create a funnel for information so the city could make an announcement once. Everyone’s fears and misconceptions were addressed. They got all the organizations in a room so they could ask questions. That was the first meeting of what is now the One Orlando Alliance on the Thursday after, the 16th of June. People met to communicate, collaborate. and help solve problems, to share information. to avoid duplication of things that were happening. It was a way to manage the chaos.

There were 18 organizations to start. 33 people showed up. People were there from the City, the County, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Seminole County Emergency Response Team, a team from Edelman. The goal was to create an equal hierarchy. At that meeting they were able to connect leaders with each other. By the end they all decided they have to work together. There was pre-Pulse but this was a post Pulse world. They set up a closed Facebook group to stay connected. All this was to happen behind the scenes. They were a coalition of community leaders. The strength and resolve created that day continues.