Pulse as a Sanctuary

If Pulse were a chapel, its dancers would be its faithful flock.

If Orlando’s popular gay bar, now the blood-bathed site of the nation’s worst mass shooting, was a sanctuary, its walls sheltered its congregation from the outside world.

The attack there was not only terror. It was not only hatred. It was sacrilege.

Some may scoff. A gay bar, drenched with alcohol and sweat, some may think, can’t be holy.

But those disbelievers have perhaps never found themselves meticulously studying the minutiae of how to eat, dress, walk, or talk to conform to some overly perfected gender stereotype just so no one beats them nearly to death. Those naysayers, perhaps, have never rehearsed their gait or needed to adjust their intonation to fit in. A gay bar is a refuge to people whom lawmakers have actively legislated against, at whom relatives and peers have spewed vitriol and hatred.

College towns across the country have a Pulse. And students go there to feel safe and free. That’s why the massacre early Sunday that left 49 people dead and 27 still under a hospital’s care — many of them students, out being themselves — was especially traumatic for fellow students. Their sanctuary had come under attack.

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For many gay and lesbian teenagers, college changes everything. It’s often the first time young people, free from parental supervision, feel comfortable coming out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, and find peers like them.

“When you go to college, you finally start meeting new people, bonding with people because you’ve never had these types of friends in your life for 18 years,” says Misha Romanoff, who attended the University of Central Florida several years ago.

Campus life at UCF was fine, Mr. Romanoff said. But it was missing something. It wasn’t Pulse. Pulse was the first gay club he ever went to, and he went most Wednesday and Saturday evenings for the mix of top-40 music and hip-hop Pulse played those evenings. “It’s the most iconic, quintessential place that I have ever identified with,” he said. “If I would go to straight bars, I can’t fully be myself there. I can’t talk to a guy there without feeling judged. It’s gonna upset people.”

To Sam Miller, a UCF alumna, Pulse was special. It was a place that finally accepted her, a place to call home.

“It was magical,” says Ms. Miller, who is now a technical director in the theater department at the University of Miami. “I met so many friends there. I only knew them because we’d go to Pulse together. I wouldn’t have found these people in class, but I found them at Pulse.”

Gay bars, specifically in college towns, play a role that even campus clubs like a gay-straight alliance or a pride student union never could. At a gay bar, sometimes the lone one in town, students who may not be out to classmates or professors can feel totally unencumbered, free.

“You can wander into a gay bar, but you wouldn’t necessarily wander into your campus LGBTQ club,” Ms. Miller said. “And in gay bars, you can watch other people be themselves.”

What Ms. Miller means is that at a gay bar like Pulse, students can still maintain a bit of anonymity if they don’t yet feel completely comfortable with who they are. The lights are dim there, and no one’s sitting around a table in the student union, asking for your name and major.

As a gay college student several years ago at the University of Florida — only about an hour and a half away from Orlando — I was overwhelmed with the immediate sense that I was not the only gay person in sight when I arrived on the campus, which had been very much the case during high school. I relished the refuge hidden within Gainesville’s lone gay bar, University Club, surrounded by people who, like me, had to suffer through teaching themselves how to sit like a man, how to eat like a man, how to talk like a man. Never before had I been presented with so many similarly aged people who identified as I did, and who might be romantically inclined to talk to me.

In a way my experience was similar to Ms. Miller’s. UF’s Pride Student Union was, indeed, a wonderful place to generate ideas, but it could never match University Club. It was the sanctuary inside this dive on University Avenue that brought me home, gave me comfort, wrapped me in safety.

I spent many nights at Gainesville’s dingy and cramped University Club, singing along with my newfound band of gay friends to the late Lady Pearl, the vulgar 6-foot-4, 50-something drag queen who welcomed everyone with her signature “Hellerrrrr!” There, students like me, like Mr. Romanoff, like Ms. Miller, could finally throw glitter to the wind and dance as if no one was watching.

Because, truly, no one who would judge you for being gay was there. We were free to be us. We could take our shirts off — not because it was Florida, but because you can do that in gay bars.

On the quad or in a restaurant, wandering eyes might have widened if you held hands with your boyfriend. Not at a gay bar.

Even a hole-in-the-wall place like University Club was a sanctuary. The attack on Pulse, then, is to many college students a desecration of the first place they could ever really simply be, an affront to hallowed ground.

“Your safe place,” Mr. Romanoff said, “was annihilated.”

Jared Misner, a former reporting intern at The Chronicle, is a writer at Charlotte magazine.