Seven years after surviving the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, and dealing with the guilt of losing his best friend there, Brandon Wolf is living life to the fullest. He belongs to an energized generation of young Democrats. He is a prominent gun safety and LGBTQ+ civil rights activist and, at just 34, is a newly published author.
But in Governor Ron DeSantis’s Florida, he does not always feel safe.
“I have not looked over my shoulder this much since the days after Pulse,” Wolf says via Zoom from a neatly furnished apartment in Orlando. “It’s because you never know if the person who’s calling you a paedophile in the Twitter mentions is now wandering the aisles of Publix with a gun they learned how to use on YouTube. You never know if the people hopped up on that transphobic hysteria that the governor keeps pumping out are the same ones that are going to show up to an event that you’re at.”
Wolf had sought refuge in Florida 15 years ago when he was done with rural Oregon, the childhood home where he suffered embedded racism and homophobia on a daily basis. As he writes in a recently published memoir, A Place for Us, his biological father, a Black man, abandoned him before learning his name and his mother, who was white, died from cancer when he was a boy. He was then raised by white parents. His siblings, classmates and neighbours were white.
The young Wolf never got “the talk” about how to engage with police as a Black man or the chance to talk openly about his recurring nightmares of burning crosses and mutilated Black bodies hanging from trees. Nor could he publicly come out in Oregon despite the whispers and rumours he’d shrugged off for years. Among his motivations for writing the book was to reclaim intersectionality from DeSantis and others on the right who seek to hijack it.
He explains: “I wanted to give a human flavour to what intersectionality actually looks and feels like and what it feels like to experience racism and homophobia at the same time. Growing up in a conservative majority white town was difficult because the same kid who would call me the N-word on one day would call me a homophobic slur on another day and I was constantly navigating the intersections of those two things.
“At the same time, I was sitting around a dinner table with my family, who was also conservative and white, and there were just moments where we were never going to understand each other.
“Although I had a roof over my head, a warm place to lay my head every night, it just didn’t ever feel like home and that can be isolating for a young person and ultimately that’s what drove me to move 3,000 miles from home.”
Wolf’s book has been praised for its raw honesty and vulnerability. He describes in harrowing detail surviving a sexual assault that he has never told his family about before (“That was probably the hardest story in the book to write”). He recalls the palpable fear when his car was pulled over by police who falsely accused him of disrespect and ended with a callous epithet: “Fucking faggot.”
Then there is the Pulse nightclub shooting on 12 June 2016. By chance, Wolf had stepped into the bathroom when the gunman Omar Mateen entered the club and opened fire, killing 49 people in the deadliest attack affecting the LGBTQ+ community in American history.
Among them were Wolf’s best friend, Drew Leinonen, to whom the book is dedicated, and Leinonen’s boyfriend, Juan Guerrero. Some of Wolf’s memories of the event are foggy; others remain vivid, from the painted faces of familiar drag queens on a poster to a clear plastic cup resting on the rim of the sink and containing ice chips and mutilated slices of lime.
When President Barack Obama came to pay his respects, Wolf lost his composure. He writes: “I buried my face in the shoulder of his pressed navy suit, blubbering into the soft, brushed fabric. His hug was firm and consoling. His shirt smelled faintly of cologne. Someone joked that he could be my father, and I chuckled, the first time I can remember laughing that week.”
Wolf still revisits the Pulse site from time to time. He explains: “It comes with so much pain and grief, so many memories. I still do like to go there late at night when no one else is there when it’s quiet, because it’s almost as if I can feel like I’m in the presence of my best friends, if for just a moment.”
It was the deadliest US mass shooting by a single gunman until, just over a year later, 60 people perished at a music festival in Las Vegas. There has since been more bloodshed at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a school in Parkland, Florida, a school in Uvalde, Texas, and other cradles of lost innocence too long to list.
Wolf says he is unsurprised because it has become all too clear that the current generation of political leaders is uninterested in solving the problem. “At the end of the day, the stealing of human life weighs less on their scale than access to wealth, power and fame. The situation is maybe in their mind too hard to solve, too complicated to solve. It comes with too much political cost if they speak out and so they do nothing and it will continue.
“The number of communities touched by gun violence, the number of people’s home towns that trend on social media, will escalate until, unfortunately, we get a new generation of leadership who doesn’t know any different than active shooter drills and their best friends’ names on concrete walls somewhere etched forever.”
Does there need to be systemic change? “I hope that we look back on this day with that same level of disdain for the way in which we allowed those [tobacco] companies and that lobbying industry to have a death grip on our children, because ultimately what tipped the scale in the fight against the tobacco industry was the way in which they were marketing their product to children and it was stealing the lives of young people across the country. You had an uprising.”
Wolf, who was a national surrogate for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign in 2019, has been pleasantly surprised by Joe Biden’s efforts on gun safety and LGBTQ+ rights. But as a resident of Florida, he has witnessed up close a Republican backlash in the form of book bans, attacks on Black people’s voting rights and a law allowing Floridians to carry concealed guns without a permit.
DeSantis’s efforts to out-Trump Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary are further turning up the heat. In May the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida, highlighting hostility toward Black, ethnic and queer communities. Last month DeSantis’s campaign released an anti-LGBTQ+ video assailing Trump for his past support of gay and transgender people.
Wolf comments: “It is a scary time to be not just LGBTQ but LGBTQ and Black in this state and ultimately that’s the intent. So many of these laws, so much of the rhetoric is about fear, intimidation, bullying a majority of the population into submission so the minority can impose their values on everyone else.
“I have to think, as a pretty privileged person to live in downtown Orlando and be a cisgender man in America, if I’m looking over my shoulder, I know that young people are looking over their shoulders. I know that other Black and brown folks are looking over their shoulders. I know that other queer people are looking over their shoulders.
“And quite frankly it is a disgrace to have a governor like Ron DeSantis that makes people look over their shoulders to win political points. It is a disgrace to have someone like that turning his own residents into refugees fleeing to the north-east so they can get access to healthcare, send their kids to a school that’s going to treat them with respect.”
DeSantis has been clear about his ambition to use Florida as blueprint for the nation. Wolf believes he knows exactly what that would look like. “That looks like the US Department of Education banning books about people across the country, not just in Florida, but in New York City, in Los Angeles and in Seattle too.
“It looks like the US Department of Health and Human Services banning healthcare for trans kids, restricting access to healthcare for trans adults. It looks like trying to ram a near-total abortion ban through Congress so that he can sign it into law. It looks like probably using the US Department of Treasury as a weapon against any business that speaks out in dissent to his policies like he did with Disney.
“It looks like using the IRS as a tool against the Bud Lights of the world for daring to hire a trans person to put something on their Instagram profile. That is the vision for America that Ron DeSantis has.”
Wolf, who is press secretary for the LGBTQ+ civil rights organisation Equality Florida, lives in a progressive community in downtown Orlando where rainbow flags and drag shows are still commonplace. He says it is still the same Orlando that he fell in love with – but he recognises that this is a different Florida.
“I’m honoured to be in Orlando, which I see as the seat of the resistance to Ron DeSantis’s rightwing brand of politics. I’m honoured to be able to lift the stories of LGBTQ people every single day, and Florida is my home. I chose this place 15 years ago because I wanted somewhere to belong and I fell in love with Orlando. I fell in love with my friends, my community. I fell in love with the state of Florida.”
He adds: “No matter what kind of response that elicits, I did fall in love with Florida. It is my home and it’s my Florida too so I’m not just going to hand it over to Ron DeSantis and his rightwing allies. They’re going to have to pry the white sandy beaches from my hands. They belong to me too.”
• This article was amended on 14 July 2023. An earlier subheading said that the Pulse nightclub attack took place in 2018 instead of 2016.
