‘More Than You Think’: A Small Journal Entry

June 12, 2026 — Remembering my life 10 years ago on the day of the 2016 Pulse massacre

I took this photo and put it on Pixabay

Ten years ago, I was in a learning program with a cohort of gay men. We had two weeklong retreats in April and October 2016 in New York.

At the April retreat, I had been single, but the following month, I met my future husband online.

On June 12, the Pulse massacre made the news. There have been other violent incidents with higher body counts, of course — Wounded Knee, Tulsa, just to stay within the United States — but Pulse was the deadliest among those we think of as mass shootings. It was “Latin night” at a gay bar. Most victims were Latino. Half were Puerto Rican, and some were Dominican and Mexican nationals.

I texted the man I was getting to know: “Just learned 15 minutes ago there is a vigil for the mass shooting in Florida. Off I go to vigil. On the bus…Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence will sing tribute.” He could not possibly have joined me. He was too far away, and we had not met in person yet.

The vigil must have been in Copley Square, as recorded by Boston Spirit Magazine. (The calendar archive of the Boston Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence reflects the one-year vigil but not the day-of vigil.)

When I next spoke to one of the men in my program, I asked him if he knew the affected community in Orlando. No, he said. He organized gay community events in a different city in Florida; Orlando was a few hours from him, and he hadn’t been active there.

A few days later, El Espectador in Colombia would print an interview with a Pulse patron; she hadn’t been at the club that night but lived in the neighborhood. The interview is in Spanish, and I couldn’t have read it easily then, but I can now.

I guess I assumed, at the time, that the national political climate would somehow improve over the long run, though I don’t suppose I tried to envision exactly what the country would be like 10 years in the future. In June 2016, Donald Trump hadn’t been elected yet. Soon, he would be, but not quite yet.

Over the next 10 years, many things would happen.

I wrote a novel in which a trans man goes to Copley Square. He’s worried about mass shootings. There’s a gap in the narrative through June 2016. The story resumes in July.

Elon Musk would spend $44 billion to buy Twitter to destroy it because he hates trans people. Today, on the 10th anniversary of the Pulse massacre, he officially became the world’s first trillionaire. “How much, exactly, is $1 trillion?” Sara Boboltz writes for HuffPost. “It’s almost certainly more than you think.”

I started a newsletter for which today I drew a teddy bear. You may receive protection from this bear or you may be the bear who gives protection. Either is valid. You have to show up, however. You have to be something. It matters more than you think.

I drew this today, as I said