Gay Muslims sprang into action after a Muslim man murdered at least 49 people at a gay club in Florida on Sunday, issuing statements of mourning that raised awareness that the two identities sometime overlap and are not necessarily at odds. But among socially tolerant Muslims, there’s also rage and indignation at the current state of their religion.

“I’m not going to tolerate, at least in public, people making statements like ‘Islam is a religion of peace,’ because it is not,” says documentary filmmaker Parvez Sharma, a gay Muslim born in India and living in New York.

“I am ashamed of being a Muslim today,” says Sharma, who interviewed gay Muslims around the world for the 2007 film “A Jihad for Love” and recorded himself inside Saudi Arabia for the 2015 documentary “A Sinner in Mecca.”

Socially repressive Muslims in the Middle East -- some sitting on U.S.-defended thrones -- have for years beheaded or hanged gay people, and gay-embracing American Muslims see their hand behind the spread of Wahhabi ideology from central Arabia to jihadis who toss gay men from rooftops in Iraq and Syria and to the crime scene Sunday in Orlando, Florida.

Mass Shooting at Orlando Nightclub View All 31 Images

Sharma says he’s spoken with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of gay Muslims and that “as far as gay Muslims go, I can’t speak for everyone, but [we should] not be defensive about our religion. Stand up and speak out against the violent aspects of the religion, because they really exist and this time it has affected you, us, personally.”

The filmmaker expects a backlash against Muslims generally, but also says “it’s not going to be surprising at all: there’s going to be a backlash within gay communities against people who identify themselves as gay and Muslim.” Will Muslim-American parade floats be booed at upcoming gay pride parades? He says he doesn’t know.

As with other major religions, there’s debate among socially tolerant Muslims about whether there’s a scriptural basis for violence against sexual minorities. Sharma says as with Christianity and Judaism, there’s some textual basis, but others disagree.

“This is not coming out of nowhere -- I’m not an Islamophobe, I’m a devout Muslim, and yet I know if hatred is to be found and sanctioned within Islam’s vast canon, it can be found,” he says.

“We forget, of the 1.6 billion Muslims, a large number would be happy with what happened in Orlando.”

In America, too, he says, some Muslims hostile to homosexuality may quietly approve of the massacre. He plans to visit a mosque in Manhattan on Friday, he says, and would expect “hate and confrontation” if he were to wear a shirt identifying himself as gay. He says Muslim cab drivers are infamous for their homophobia, and he points out footage an imam in Orlando advocating the death penalty for gays is circulating online. (There is at least one gay imam in the U.S. who would disagree.)

Unlike Sharma, Ani Zonneveld, the founder and president of the socially tolerant Muslims for Progressive Values, says she does not believe there’s a textual basis for homophobia in Islam, adding MPV works to offer a counter-narrative that stresses the influence of colonialism and Wahhabism.

Though much smaller, Zonneveld isn’t averse to comparisons of the organization she leads to the Episcopal Church, a socially tolerant denomination within American Christianity.

Zonneveld, who is straight and lives in Los Angeles, says MPV’s chapters in cities across the country -- including Atlanta, Chicago and Columbus -- allow anyone to lead sermons and pray “Mecca style,” meaning without gender segregation.

“Transgender people don’t have to make a choice on where they stand,” she says. “Sometimes a gay person will do the sermon.”

Zonneveld, born in Malaysia, says she like Sharma dislikes the term “religion of peace” being used to describe Islam today.

“I say the same things. How is it a religion of peace when you see the mayhem in the Islamic world? It’s such a joke. I completely agree with him, but it’s not about Islam, it’s about the Muslims. It’s about how Wahhabism has bastardized Islam,” she says, adding: “The traditional Muslim imams have blood on their hands.”

Zonneveld says there is indeed an undercurrent of homophobia among American Muslims. She says she’s spoken with gay people threatened with violence by members of the families, though points out she doesn’t know of any actual attacks that followed.

On a more optimistic note, however, she points to the results of a 2014 poll that found 42 percent of American Muslims approve of the Supreme Court’s decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the country.

“The problem is none of the mosque leadership has come out against homophobia,” she says. "There are still a lot of professional Muslims who live a double life, they marry with their lesbian friend with an agreement… you can have your partner, I can have my partner.”

Though many gay Muslim-Americans live in fear, she says that unlike in Muslim-majority countries “in America you can actually leave home and run away.”

“At the end of the day it’s going to take us Muslims who advocate for LGBT rights to diffuse the angst, the anger, the leering against Muslims,” she says, including from fellow gay Americans suspicious of religions generally but particularly Islam. “It’s going to take some time to chisel it back to where it was before the shooting in Orlando.”

When he attends prayers Friday, Sharma says he will listen carefully for a message on the Florida slaughter, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. He doubts it will come up, though both he and Zonneveld say there may be a silver lining from the massacre if it pushes Muslim-American leaders to publicly embrace gay members.

“The big Muslim organizations in the country are definitely going to pay lip service to the idea of Islam not tolerating stuff like this," Sharma says, pessimistically, "but that’s just lip service.”

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the largest organizations representing American Muslims, says the group doesn’t take a position on whether Islam should embrace gay Muslims, but condemns discrimination against all minority groups.