The Terror of Orlando Followed Me to Mexico

Less than a week after the Orlando shooting, a man threatened this Advocate editor and her friends on the beach.

"Do you think the man said that because we were holding hands?" I asked my friend when we got back to the house from the beach.

"I don't know," she said, looking up at the ceiling. "I was thinking the same thing."

I hadn't stopped asking myself that question since a stranger on the beach threatened to harm me and my friends in the same way that, just days earlier, a gunman had killed 49 people and injured 53 more at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Latin night.

I wasn't sure if we somehow "sparked" this man's rage by making ourselves visibly queer through our body language.

I had my suspicisions, of course. The man on the beach brought up Orlando because he assumed at least two of us were queer, I thought. It must have been the hand-holding that gave us away. But why should I even be questioning whether holding the hand of someone I'm dating is going to incite a stranger to react negatively?

My friends and I had been planning a weekend trip to Rosarito, Mexico, from Los Angeles for two weeks. But in the wake of the horrific news of the Pulse shooting in Orlando that Sunday, going on the trip the following Friday took on a new meaning for me. I couldn't wait to get on the road, to step away from the internet and from news about the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history — at least for a weekend.

The Saturday that we chose to make our way to the beach started out wonderfully. We ate some amazing fish tacos and tostadas, and then drove south to Ensenada to explore a different area.

My four friends and I set up a small camp, with our blankets and our books and snacks spread out on the sand. Some of us went for a swim. Some of us read our books. We were all relaxed, hanging out together, when a stranger approached us.

There were vendors everywhere, so the interruption itself wasn't surprising. Every half hour or so, someone would approach our group trying to sell us something — bracelets with embroidered names, chips, or fresh fruit.

So when this particular man came up to us, I didn't think anything of it. He interrupted two of my friends who were talking. The girl I'm dating and I were lying behind our friends. She was resting with her eyes closed. I was reading a book. We were holding hands.

We realized the man was drunk, because he couldn't stand without support. But then he fell to his knees next to my friend and started an argument with her. At first, she politely asked the guy to leave. The argument escalated, and suddenly he was upset that two of us weren't paying attention to him.

"Why are they asleep?" he asks my friends, pointing at us. I wasn't sleeping, but I had been lying on the blanket, pretending to read because I couldn't concentrate over the sound of his voice.

That's when his bloodshot eyes saw something he hadn't noticed before.

"You heard what happened in Orlando?" he says. "You know what they do to people like that? They kill them."

My heart stopped — I felt a pang in my stomach.

"I could do that," he said ominously.

It was as if the world stopped spinning. My vision narrowed, and all I could see before me was this man who might hurt me and my friends because something about us reminded him of the queer people who were killed in Orlando only days before.

The girl I am seeing and I refused to respond to him. We looked at each other, wordless.

The man kept arguing and talking over my friends. When he finally went on his way, I watched him stumble through the sand, barely able to stand. But I was terrified he would come back and make good on his threat. There was nothing stopping him from carrying a gun back to our little camp to seek "revenge" for whatever offense our queer existence had caused him.

I sat up, looked around the beach, and considered what would really happen if this man chose to leave and return with a firearm. How can anyone prepare for that?

I’ll never get an answer to that question, but that’s not the point. Maybe this aggressive stranger wasn’t addressing me directly or the girl I’m seeing or our interlaced fingers. Maybe he was just upset that we refused to give him the attention he so desperately wanted. But in that moment, I felt targeted for who I am, threatened because I was daring to enjoy a Saturday at the beach with other people like me.

Maybe the antigay threat this man directed at us through his slurred speech was just the first thing that came to his booze-soaked mind. Maybe he didn't mean it to terrorize us, and maybe he didn't even know that any of us were actually queer and would take his hatred so personally. But as I reflected on the experience on my way back to Los Angeles, my mind kept returning to a Spanish proverb my mother used to say to me: "The only people who tell the truth are drunks and children."

YEZMIN VILLARREAL is The Advocate's news editor. Follow her on Twitter @YezYes.