Three weeks after setting out, Elmer arrived in Orlando, where his aunt lives, and eventually secured his job through a subcontractor. After earning an accounting degree from a public university, he decided that the job prospects in the U.S. Despite having never come out or been in a relationship with another man, it seemed to him that he could not walk down the street without getting beaten up or being insulted. “Anything you want,” he responded, the gentlest way of saying that he didn’t care.Įlmer grew up in a small village outside San Miguel, the third-largest city in El Salvador. The therapist asked what he wanted to hear next, and one of the women translated the question into Spanish, Elmer’s only language. Two female volunteers and a male music therapist, who played pop songs on his guitar, had already been keeping Elmer company. He had a birdlike beauty, with a sharply angled face and a gently curved nose.Įlmer patted his bed, offering me a seat next to him.
#The gay bar shooting skin#
His right leg was bandaged and propped up the hem of his nightgown met a deep-blue line of stitches on his thigh, where a skin graft had been taken to heal the wound on his calf. On the afternoon I visited, Elmer was seated in a recliner next to his bed, looking out a window at the concrete strip malls and green lakes of Orlando. Elmer was taken to Orlando Health in the back of a cop’s pickup. Jake was asked to wait in a tent in the parking lot for questioning. The group descended the ladder and made its way to the exit, across the dance floor crowded with bodies. Around three, police shouted through the office door that those inside should emerge with their hands up. At this point, most of the wounded were removed from the club.
![the gay bar shooting the gay bar shooting](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/06/20/ap_16169610051569_custom-0fb82610858f18126a635767357675653b1c0a33-s800-c85.jpg)
Police had entered the club within five minutes of the first shots, but the dimness and the chaos meant that it was only at 2:30 A.M., once Mateen had withdrawn into the women’s rest room, taking eight hostages with him, that they were able to corner him. Occasionally, one of them would dial 911 and whisper reports to the dispatcher. The group waited, listening to the shots and screams coming from below.
#The gay bar shooting Patch#
A large patch was missing from Elmer’s khaki pants a section of his calf had been blasted from the bone. They locked the door and sat huddled on the floor. Along with two strangers, they climbed up into a dark hallway and found an office. In the corner, a ladder extended into a hatch.
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The group dove to the floor and crawled behind the counter, then into a prep room. Jake remembers the two of them dancing without pause, except to watch the midnight drag performance.Īt 2 A.M., when Mateen started firing near the entrance to the main room, Jake and Elmer were standing some fifty feet away, at the bar, with two Guatemalan friends. They decided to stick to the main room, with the salsa and the bachata. He and Elmer did a quick circuit upon entering the club, where Biggie was playing in the lounge.
![the gay bar shooting the gay bar shooting](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/97/7e/22/977e22dccce034ba1e07c31b66ea676a.jpg)
Both asked me not to use their surnames.īefore my visit to the hospital, Jake, who had escaped the shooting unharmed, told me over the phone about that night. They had something more in common: Jake was out to his mother and sister, but not to anyone else from his home town Elmer had never told anyone in El Salvador that he was gay, including his parents. Jake liked to cook Cuban dishes like ropa vieja for Elmer. Fitness and going to reggaeton concerts together. They had met on the sidewalk in the downtown neighborhood of Crystal Lake, where they live, when Jake was cooling down from a run. He had gone to Pulse on the night of the shooting with his best friend of two years, Jake, a young Cuban-American from South Florida who also works at an airport hotel. He came to the United States three years ago, crossing through Mexico and the border at Hidalgo, Texas, to reach Orlando, where he found work as a housekeeper at a hotel near the airport. PHOTOGRAPH BY DENIS DARZAEQ / AGENCE VU / REDUXĮlmer, a twenty-seven-year-old Salvadoran injured in the massacre, had been at Orlando Regional for a week when I visited him there, in his room in a tall building of undulating glass on the redeveloped western edge of downtown.
![the gay bar shooting the gay bar shooting](https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/orlando-hate.jpg)
The Orlando shooting suddenly exposed the fragile lives of a community whose members often battle with their multiple identities.