This fucking week.

Sunday morning, like a lot of Americans, I woke to the news that 49 people in Orlando, Florida, had been gunned down in what has since been named the largest mass fatality from a single shooter in US History.

Sunday morning and every day since, also like a lot of Americans, I’ve been angry. Enraged to the point of tears, really. And sadder than I think I have been in years — to more tears.

I’m crying tears of rage. Tears of sadness. Tears of fear. Helplessness. Indignance. Disbelief.

Yes, I’ve been crying a lot this week.

And certainly, I cry for the 49 queer men and women who died in a queer bar — a “safe space” — for no other reason than one man couldn’t stand the sight of two other men kissing. They’re dead. We’re still here and they’ll never be again.

But the events that unfolded early Sunday morning and in the week since are going to haunt me and so many other queer Americans for a long time to come.

This is difficult for many outside the LGBT community to understand. Did I know these people personally? We all get scared by gun violence. We all have a right to own the fear of these particular deaths and move on. Maybe never forget, but live for the living. And they were human beings first, right? We’re all the same underneath.

No.

Just fucking no.

This brutal massacre wasn’t a product of coordinated “Islamic” terrorism. Nor was it a random act of a disturbed individual. It wasn’t an isolated incident and it wasn’t an aberration of our society.

What happened in that gay bar in Orlando was the next, natural step to a culture and environment that is proactively constructed every single day by people that hate queer people. Period.

Media outlets and Republican commenters have done their damnedest to make the queerness of this tragedy vanish, like they do every other day of the year. Make it seem more universal, more palatable — if such a thing can even be said — so that hatemongers can publicly grieve while still supporting the conditions that caused it to happen in the first place.

I’m angry — so angry — that anyone non-military in our country can purchase an assault rifle, much less use it to mow down 49 people they just don’t find acceptable. There is no conceivable reason, outside of corporate greed, that such a weapon should be available for civilian use. It’s a position many gun-owners and NRA members themselves have come out to say in the past few days. An assault weapon ban is the BARE MINIMUM of what everyone in this country other than those profiting from its sale should be asking for.

But that anger, that will fade. It will morph into an intellectual argument as the sting of fear and disbelief about the actual tragedy that occurred fades to a necessary numbness.

What isn’t going to fade — the rage that boils my blood and continues to provoke crying and outbursts and incendiary panic — is the effect it has on me to watch evil men and women offering “thoughts and prayers.” Women and men who turn around two days later to hate me even more. The GOP and its supporters have doubled down on oppression in the wake of this attack on my people, and it makes every word and thought and prayer that much more painful and violently hollow.

get you a man who can do both pic.twitter.com/oa8QRTJWpm — BuckyWithTheGoodHair (@brownlashon) June 18, 2016

Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and a whole host of Republican leaders have used the death of 49 queer individuals to look like compassionate human beings might when faced with tragedy. They have expressed their sympathies, acknowledging to varying degree the queerphobia that motivated these crimes, although never that such hatred came from somewhere.

Some, like John McCain, used this opportunity to implicate the President directly as the cause of the shooting, taking one step further than even Trump, who merely intimated the POTUS as actively assisting terrorist planning. McCain, it should be noted, has taken nearly 8 million dollars from the National Rifle Association. It’s not unclear what his motivation for the accusation is.

Others, like Trump and intellectual comrade Sarah Palin, have shifted the narrative away from queerphobia — a tactic of forced invisibility the GOP are old hands at — toward Islamophobia. They, and many more, have recited Sharia law and Islamic extremism to implicate the religion they just happen to hate just as much as queer people as the sole cause of the murder of 49 people at a “nightclub.”

Besides scapegoating an entire massive and worldwide religion for the beliefs and actions of a statistically indescribable number of extremists — and encouraging the hatred, incarceration, exile, and violence toward all Muslims in our country’s borders and without — these leaders have played a shell game with their own complicity that is morally repugnant, although politically expedient.

49 people didn’t die at the hands of Muslim belief. They died because of distinctly American values of hating and seeking to eliminate (visually or completely) people that aren’t white, cisgender, straight, or Christian. They died at the foot of legislation against equal treatment, laws that allow business and medical services to discriminate against us, and regulations that prevent those who identify as a gender not listed on their birth certificate from urinating.

They died because men like Paul Ryan and John McCain and so many more propel systemic queerphobia on a daily basis, at breakneck speed, infecting American culture with a range of hatred, ignorance, and contempt that could only ever have had this result.

And they’re not alone.

Mass media, entertainment, Hollywood, and the comics industry all fuel a coordinated system of queerphobia in America (and beyond) to the degree that if you’re not part of the solution, you are actively complicit in manufacturing the problem. This is a tough pill to swallow, particularly in the comics community where I’d argue most think of themselves as above, or at the least outside, that systemic abuse of their queer colleagues, fans, and the culture of hate in general.

It’s a lie.

Of course, we’ve seen messages of support from comic publishers this week similar to those flashed everywhere from the Whole Foods checkout line to the scroll on CNN, that include varying degrees of acknowledgement of queer pain. For instance, Archie Comics, one of the earliest publishers to feature a solo gay male lead title in its smaller line, shared a simple message putting Kevin Keller front and center.

DC Comics, with a bit less grace, posted an image of Superman from the 1950s, standing in front of a rainbow flag. I understand the desire to put your foremost representative of “truth, justice, and the American way” out to show your support. It most certainly subsumes actual LGBT people (who could be more accurately and compassionately represented by actual queer characters like Catwoman, Batwoman, Harley Quinn, Midnighter, Bunker, or the Earth One Wonder Woman) to an ally designed to be “for everyone.”

But DC Comics has receipts for their compassion. They have come off of a year of publishing 5 out of 47 DC Universe titles with confirmed, out LGBT leads. And despite many of those titles falling by the wayside with Rebirth in 2016, still publish 3 (Harley Quinn, Hellblazer, Detective Comics) of 33 DC Universe titles, with insiders reporting more are on the way in wave 2. They have three times promoted series with nearly all-queer casts from writer Gail Simone, The Movement and Secret Six (twice), and held the line on a book like Midnighter long after it appeared below the dreaded cancellation line.

DC Comics has receipts. That doesn’t demand less of them on an ongoing basis. Nor does it absolve them from criticism. But it gives me some good faith that they are actively working to combat queerphobia, not always flawlessly, but consistently.

Marvel Comics is not.

In the gif equivalent of “thoughts and prayers,” Marvel Comics tweeted its consolations to the victims of the Orlando shooting — and presumably to the entire queer community — with an image of the Avengers, ostensibly the film cast, graced with a new rainbow colored background.

Let’s set aside the fact that Marvel distinctly chose not to use the cast of its last queer-focused book, Young Avengers, which included prominently an actual queer Latina woman in Miss America Chavez, to send their sympathies. As the book hasn’t been published in several years, I can see the same rationale DC took with Superman. In fact, when pushed on the issue, one of Marvel’s senior managers, Joe Taraborrelli, responded that “all our heroes are allies.”

Except that they’re not. The one in front just proclaimed his lifelong service to a terrorist organization analogue to a group that castrated and murdered homosexuals by the thousands in World War II-era Germany. Captain America isn’t even an ally in the sense of the Allies vs. the Axis. He is literally the Axis, a Hydra agent.

And for any of the others, how would we ever know any of these heroes were allies if Marvel has a publishing mandate prohibiting LGBT heroes in major roles. When was the last time Thor hung out with his gay best friend? Or talked to anyone gay? Or even acknowledged a gay person exists in the world?

You cannot pretend your characters are allies when your own senior management most distinctly is not.

You cannot mock queer fans on social media, as Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso and Chris D’Lando did in the wake of denying Hercules’ bisexuality (previously publicly confirmed by writer Greg Pak) and pretend to be an ally.

You cannot pretend to be an ally and proclaim, as Editor Tom Brevoort has, that Captain America “always has been and will continue to be a” Nazi — and that it’s not a gimmick — but then demand any depiction of the life of an LGBT character “feel legitimate” before it could be considered.

You can’t be Marvel’s most prominent writer, Amazing Spider-Man‘s Dan Slott, and pretend to care about queer people, but then repeatedly deride the concerns of queer critics and fans. And you most certainly cannot consider yourself an ally if you and other prominent creators (like Captain America‘s Nick Spencer) drive over 100,000 twitter followers to harass a queer journalist (and fellow creator) who had the audacity to publicly criticize a comic story without ever tagging the team in question.

And you cannot pretend to be an ally when you publish a comic featuring — finally — a queer lead in Angela: Queen of Hel, but refuse to acknowledge her queer identity. The characters Angela and Sera shared a full-page kiss, and Axel Alonso’s public response to congratulations was “We’re not looking to put labels on the character or the series.”

This is not being an ally. This is not writing characters that are allies. This is making queerness invisible, something politicians and media outlets have spent all week trying desperately to do with the events in Orlando. This is wanting us to go away. To shut up. And not infrequently, to just die.

This is the culture we live in. Queerphobia is not something those bad people over there suffer from and inflict upon the LGBT community. It’s the social condition we live in as lesbian and gay people, bisexual and asexual individuals, and transgender folk from the time we hear our first news item in the morning to when we turn our phones over at night.

Queerphobia is reinforced, recreated, built and rebuilt every single day. And Marvel Comics is culpable. As culpable as Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, or Rush Limbaugh. If you treat queer people with disdain and render our representations invisible or meaningless through public proclamation, you are no ally.

That image of the Avengers, exploding out of a rainbow to give their “thoughts and prayers” is a lie. As much a lie as the GOP’s “thoughts and prayers” were two days before they voted down protections against LGBT discrimination in federal contracts.

You cannot render us invisible and then pull us out of the drawer when you need to appear compassionate to the consumer public. You cannot question the legitimacy of our stories and then mourn our deaths with a single ounce of genuineness. You cannot harass our thinkers and creators and then pretend you represent our interests as an ally.

I respect allies. I give them a lot more credit than many of my queer peers. We need allies as all oppressed communities have in the modern era.

But Marvel Comics is no ally. Not today anyway.

I can’t accept insincerity in light of what we face every day as queer people. It’s crushing, more so some days that the terrible things that happen to us themselves. 49 queer people died, and that terrifies me.

Because it could happen to me, my loves, or my friends at any time. To believe the parents of the shooter, 49 people died because of a kiss.

And the only thing that could make that worse is knowing that the some of the very same people expressing condolences have pulled the trigger in their imaginations long before last Sunday. That single man did half of the American government a favor by doing quickly what they continue to do slowly, every day through legislation, support of neo-Nazi and Christian extremist organizations, and masked or unmasked hate speech.

This was not a random act. In fact, to the developing queer mind, it is an inevitability that boxes us into the closet, and which we may forget — until weeks like this one — once coming out into adulthood. It’s a fact that many, many of the trans members of our community have never had the luxury of putting into the back of their minds. Their journey hasn’t become any safer than it was twenty, thirty, forty years ago.

But the reality is, neither has ours as gay men, lesbians, and bisexual people. We’ve just convinced ourselves it has.

The condition of this fear is two-pronged, of course. There is a shame and self-hatred that politicians, preachers, and those who would make us culturally invisible actively promote in us. Some of us are able to let it go. Some of us never do. And the vast majority of queer people I know, myself included, meet somewhere in the middle.

For as out and proud as I am, coming up on twenty years since being open about my homosexuality in public, I still struggle with depression and self-doubt. About my value as a human being. About my worthiness to be loved. About whether I deserve to live.

And that’s fucked up.

But it’s real and it’s part of what living queer is for hundreds of thousands of us. And seeing that there are those in positions of respect and power that so brazenly want to reinforce those messages in my brain — that’s far more crushing than the idea of being shot dead for my pride.

For those who are not out of the closet — those who cannot do so safely because of their age, economic situation, geography, or lack of emotional support — there’s a double bind. The fear of death (or put another way, the fear of having one’s own lack of value legitimized by an outside force) is compounded by fear of exposure. Constant fear of exposure.

And truly, even those out of the closet never are free from this second reality. Because the closet is not a thing which we as queer people are ever completely in or out of. It is an insidious condition of our relationship with a culture that wants us to be invisible, but is always looking to point us out if it suits them.

To wit, others have spoken quite elegantly about this week in response to the events in Orlando. Brett White, Sebastian Deken, Brandon T. Snider, and Dave Holmes have all written pieces that touched me beyond measure. You should read those, too.

But the common thread in them — the part that chills my bones to read every single time — is that we are, from the youngest age, afraid of being exposed and vulnerable to attack by those who would punish our queerness with violence. And we carry that fear into adulthood, warranted or not, in every interaction we have in public.

If you aren’t queer, I’m not sure there’s an analogy that describes that feeling of needing to look over your shoulder every time you reach for your boyfriend’s hand on the train or that momentary sweat drop caused by feeling a group of (seemingly) straight men walking three paces behind you, just in your blindspot.

What will finally be the thing that provokes a perfect stranger to hit me over the head with a baseball bat unprevoked? Will my last thought be the Sh’ma prayer, as I’m told other Jews grow up wanting to have on their lips at the moment of death, or will it be asking myself what microexpression of my queerness was the one that killed me?

There’s not a very good analogy that I can think of to show how this social pathology takes over the queer brain. The closest I’ve seen in very many years was coincidentally a scene in this week’s Superman #1, the first post-Rebirth issue written by Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason. These creators fashioned a profound moment that I’m afraid a lot of readers may write off as exploitative or inconsequential. I don’t believe it is either. And while I don’t believe it was meant as any particular insight on queer childhood, it had that resonance for me.

Jon Kent is probably eight years old, a little older than I was when I first consciously understood I had an attraction to boys and not girls, and that it was something I needed to keep hidden at all costs. In a split second of lack of self-control, we see Jon slip up and make a mistake. His cat ends up dead by his heat vision, a power he may not have ever exhibited until that moment.

And the look on his face.

I recognize that look. I feel that look deep in the pit of my stomach. I am tearing up just typing these words because of how closely I understand that look. And how much I wish I didn’t.

Now Jon has a secret inside him, and he may or may not wonder whether he is a monster, someone worthy of his parents’ love. Someone that deserves to be punished for the accident of his birth and genes.

And someone else saw.

Someone saw what he is, inside. And it’s not a relief and it’s not a comfort. It’s danger and the scariest thing that has ever happened to this eight year-old boy.

Now imagine that on a daily basis.

This is what so many of us carry into every interaction every single day. This is what we need to have the strength to fight against, in addition to fighting to change the culture that made us this way. That made that shooter in Orlando the way he was. American culture. American values.

This is why I believe representation matters. This is why I believe visibility matters. From the comics we read to the words our politicians speak in the chambers of the Senate and House of Representatives, it all shapes what we believe about each other and ourselves. And it all makes our lives easier or harder, depending on how supportive or hateful those words and ideas are.

The more we see ourselves in comic books, the more we’ll know we matter. And the more we hear stories about us aren’t legitimate or shouldn’t be labeled, the more we become invisible and vulnerable.

And it’s not just us as queer people that need our stories told. Everyone benefits when we live in public, safely and confidently. Everyone. And everyone has a role in making that happen — queer people, allies, those with more power and those with substantially less.

Jeremy Whitley, writer of both the Princeless series from Action Lab Entertainment and its spin-off ongoing title Raven, the Pirate Princess, isn’t queer. But he writes the latter character, a young, lesbian woman of color, in an all-ages comic book, and with both conviction and noticeable compassion.

In the latest issue of Princeless (issue #3 of volume #4: Make Yourself), Whitley and the art team of Emily Martin and Brett Grunig hit upon one of the key questions many non-queer people ask, from a genuine or disingenuous place, namely: What about the children?

“I have a five year-old with whom my wife and I have made a concerted effort to discuss and help her understand things like sexual and romantic preference,” Whitley shared in a recent press release. “And in a lot of ways, this issue is sort of my attempt to translate that conversation into something that is hopefully useful to other parents.”

Had I had the benefit of even just these two pages at the age of a Jon Kent — years and years before I would be ready for the struggle of coming out, what would my life have been like? And what if my parents had these pages, too?

It would have mattered. It would have made a difference. And not just for me, but for other kids who weren’t queer. For other people to be that much more aware of the problem. Because if you aren’t actively working against queerphobia — big picture politics or just in every day interactions — you’re helping it grow stronger. Your silence, to your children and the queer people around you, is hurting us.

It’s legitimately hurting us.

And we all need to do more to stop it.

This column, entitled LGBT Visibility, was founded at Comicosity by one of my dear friends and inspirations, trans activist J. Skyler. To this day, the writing she did under this banner is some of the most popular and well regarded in all the years I’ve been with the site. Skyler had to step away, as most of us do, for life, for self-care, for other responsibilities and honors.

But it’s time someone took up the mantle full-time again. I don’t want to stand by and watch things get worse and people get hurt and say nothing. I don’t want to let the GOP or Marvel Comics or anyone render me invisible. And I want everyone to know what we stand for, from my staff to other fans, creators to publishers. And I want to know I did everything I could to make a difference.

Because I may cry tears of rage. Tears of sadness. Tears of fear. Helplessness. Indignance. Disbelief. For many years to come.

But I will not be made invisible.

And I’m thankfully not alone.

If you haven’t gotten enough in the preceding 4,000 words, I’d like to end on a more joyous note. This week, a hashtag was launched on Twitter called #QueerSelfLove. It was designed for those who identify openly as queer (understanding that there are those for whom doing so online can be dangerous or potentially lethal) to post selfies and a brief description of themselves.

I participated, as did many women and men I consider my heroes. Bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, asexual, and genderqueer individuals came forward, many comic creators among them, and shared their pride, their identities, and their greatness with us. Some even took it as an opportunity to come out, which, in a week of many tears, drove me to a few more born of joy.

If someone made #QueerSelfLove trading cards, this would be my motherfucking masterdeck.

The most pic of myself I found. Bisexual. Writes kick ass queer heroes. At @FLAMECON last year. #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/jrHhjGw2w8 — Steve Orlando (@thesteveorlando) June 16, 2016

40-something Irish-Mexican halfbreed LA/NYer who draws super-lady women and is gay as fuck.#queerselflove pic.twitter.com/7YLUFWnhTc — Phil Jimenez (@Philjimeneznyc) June 15, 2016

#queerselflove #RiseUp Im a gay trans woman who wants to write comics and make people feel good about themselves. pic.twitter.com/JC0ooKndrK — Mags HEROES AA1810 (@MagsVisaggs) June 15, 2016

Asexual comics inker and writer here. Everything about that makes me happy. #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/HX00yMQJBJ — Ted Brandt (@ten_bandits) June 15, 2016

I’m a gay 34-year-old with the music taste of a gay 54-year-old. I make Batman comics. #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/mLGX50LQGt — Chris Conroy (@dyfl) June 15, 2016

I’m an emotional queer lady with great hair who makes comics about feelings and loves musicals. #queerselflove https://t.co/OBlmbfKgwO — Kate Leth (@kateleth) June 15, 2016

I’m a writer who thought it a good idea to do this in a 14,000 word essay: #queerselflove https://t.co/nzuBCEp5b2 pic.twitter.com/4bfyy6ouMh — Kieron Gillen (@kierongillen) June 15, 2016

Gay little impish Illustrator. Often hangry, mostly harmless. #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/kGIVYjwkFJ — Kevin Wada AA1002 (@kevinwada) June 15, 2016

I’m queer comic writer, failed Southern belle, and evil witch queen. High femme doesn’t change that. #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/BQxiO0sCSS — Marguerite Bennett (@EvilMarguerite) June 15, 2016

I’m a queer writer who loves sex, magic, hunting down gender & sinking my teeth in. Feelin’ myself. #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/fxWXKPK9aP — Tini Howard (@TiniHoward) June 17, 2016

Always been label-resistant, but if it helps anyone: I’ve felt gender ambiguous since age 3. #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/vnFAQYptH8 — Dean Trippe (@deantrippe) June 16, 2016

Pan/Queer comic artist in LA, trying to change the world. Nice to meet u. 🙂 #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/FrImEkwizB — Tess Fowler (@TessFowler) June 15, 2016

I’m a gay writer of stuff who loves his dog and is saving himself for Henry Cavill:) #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/mBe4aSzpQI — Marc Andreyko (@marcandreyko) June 15, 2016

I’m queer. Being gay is everyday. I work hard to make it effortless. I’ll fight for you. I love you. #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/zVnNyvUJRJ — Clark Can’t (@drinkpinkink) June 15, 2016

I’m a Bisexual Writer of Batman comics. I can sing Poor Unfortunate Souls better than you at karaoke. #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/fYi3vujAcS — James Tynion IV (@JamesTheFourth) June 15, 2016

A bisexual who likes drawing sick abs on men and women #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/AqonbBcFo8 — Krismas at Hogwarts (@kristaferanka) June 15, 2016

Hi guys I’m p gay and I know a lot about mountains and boats and I don’t remember taking this photo #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/ANVyjBScj5 — Noelle Stevenson (@Gingerhazing) June 15, 2016

I’m a queer comics publisher with a pretty rad life, overall. #queerselflove pic.twitter.com/v2t9FTxChS — Janelle Asselin (@gimpnelly) June 15, 2016