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Pulse was one of the first places I think I ever held hands with someone that I had a crush on without looking over my shoulder first, and I think Pulse was that for so many people. I remember one of the first times I walked into Pulse, and it was like an oasis. I saw people being themselves in a way that I never would have dared in my hometown. I saw people experiencing unbridled joy. I saw people experiencing
maybe love for the first time. It captured this beautiful sense of normal that I thought, as queer people, and certainly queer people of color, we would never be afforded in the world.
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, I talked to Brandon Wolfe, a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting, about his safe space before and after Pulse for My Heart Podcasts. I'm Jordan and solve this and this is what we loved. Queer safe
spaces are maybe as old as time. Some of the first one to be documented actually date back to the seventeen hundreds. In London, queer people would gather in secret homes and taverns. Because homosexuality was a criminal offense back then, they called these spaces molly houses. Molly was a slur used to describe gay men. These places were important for queer people who otherwise felt lonely and isolated. It gave
them space to be with other people like them. I first felt that when I was twenty one years old. I'd been out for less than a year. I had just moved to San Francisco for work, and I met the most amazing group of queer friends. They were confident and secure and proud to be gay. It was honestly the opposite of who I was. I remember my friends took me to this club called bad Lands. It was in the gay district of San Francisco called the Castro.
Always packed and smelt like beer and cheap fog from this fog machine that they had, and my first night there was magical. Rihanna was blasting and vodka Sota was flowing. The feeling of hearing the music pulsating through my body and looking over at my best friends who were dancing like maniacs was indescribable. It wasn't just the club that made me feel safe, though, it was my friends. I felt so accepted by them. My next guest, Brandon Wolf, also found this gift of a safe space when he
was a young gay man in Orlando. He wrote about it in his book A Place for Us, which also details his experience surviving the Pulse nightclub shooting. But we didn't focus on the shooting in this interview. Instead, I wanted to know how he thinks of safe spaces, especially now that Pulse is gone. And grew up black and gay in a rural part of Oregon, often describing his childhood as deeply lonely. Like me, he felt isolated as
a queer child in a conservative environment. It left him desperate to find a place where he could feel free and safe to be himself. Okay, so why don't we start off with something a little broad. What was it like growing up in rural organ as a gay person?
What's funny about my journey is I went to this high school in a very small town in the middle of the woods. The probably the biggest day of the year was bring your tractor to School Day. Everybody looked forward to roll in the John Deere up in the school parking lot. Like that gives you a sense of
the community that I grew up in. When I was in high school, our student body had just shy of two thousand students, and of those two thousand students when I graduated, eleven black, and there was an even smaller number of students that were openly LGBTQ. As you can imagine, it was difficult to live in that community. It was difficult to be in a place where people don't love a lot like you, and then for me to be a queer person of color where people didn't really look
a lot like me either. It was really isolating. It was so lonely at times when I would look around and would wonder whether or not there were other people out there like me, whether or not there were spaces where we could be authentically ourselves, whether or not there were places where we could feel safe to hold hands with the people we had a crush on, or to wear our shortest short sort of skinniest pair of jeans, and in large part that search for safety and belonging
has marked much of my journey.
I also just kind of wonder just for the listeners to kind of get a picture of what you were like. Were there some queer quirks about you as a kid. I know, for me, I was gay as hell in theater. Oh I was.
So gay, very gay. I mean, so, you know, I'm thinking about a moment when we were working on the senior yearbook and it was like a badge of honor to win as many superlatives as possible, right, And I remember I won three different superlatives and one of them
was most School Spirit. And I remember showing up to my Most School Spirit day in like this was then, you know, early two thousands, and so I'm wearing like four multi colored polos over the top of each other, all popped collars, and they're all like different colors of the rainbow. I mean, it was like the gayest thing you've ever seen. I think that pretty much encapsulates it. I was definitely very queer, even if I wasn't comfortable saying that out loud, and I was like trying to
mask it. The truth is like there was no hiding it. I was just very gay.
When did you know you were gay? Was it when you were in high school? Or did Was it sort of after that?
Oh, it was actually before that. I first began to reckon with my sexual orientation. In middle school. One day I was in a history class and this boy named Andy got up, and I don't remember, he was having some conversation with his friends, and for the first time ever, I looked at Andy and realized that I also had a crush on him. I remember being just horrified by that experience. I was confused, I was upset. I knew
that my parents would be disappointed in me. I had a sense that the church that I went to would be disappointed in me. I think that probably happened in seventh or eighth grade, when I really first had a moment of I think I might be a little bit different from other kids, and I might have a word to describe what that different is.
That is so interesting. I think for me, I grew up super conservative as well, and it took me a while to actually admit it to myself. When did you admit it to yourself? Was it at that moment?
You know? I grappled with it. At first, I knew what the word was, I knew what the experience was. And it's worth noting that, you know, I gave away my age, probably just a little bit. But the time that I was coming of age, middle late middle high school was the kind of the birth of social media and engagement in that way on the Internet, and so a lot of my initial experiences with being a queer young person were on like AOL chat rooms, and then
that morphed into my space. I don't know that I really admitted to myself who I was or what I was going through, but I wanted to explore my sexuality, and so it was really the end of middle school beginning of high school that I started playing with the idea of, you know, being a gay, queer person in this country. But I don't know that I used those
words to describe myself until later. It was probably sophomore junior year of high school when I really said I think something might be different about me, and I want to use a word to describe that.
When you say that it was isolating growing up, tell me more about that.
What was that like When I was ten or eleven years old, it was sixth grade. The very beginning of sixth grade, my mom passed away of cancer. She was probably my first out. I didn't have a word for that, but I came to understand later in life that the way that she loved me unconditionally, the way that she showed compassion and respect for me, no matter how fruity I was, was the signal that she was going to
be an ally. And losing her at such a young age I think began that sense of isolation for me. There were moments where I was sitting around my own kitchen table listening to my family have conversations, and it was like I was watching a television show, like I wasn't even present spiritually in the room that I was watching a different family have a conversation. And those are
the moments that I think felt the most isolating. Even at my kitchen table, even at family reunions, even at Christmas time around the Christmas tree, I never really felt like I was part of the group. I often felt like a stranger who had overstayed his welcome. And then you get to the other places that a lot of young people find safety and belonging. You think about church, you think about school, and I didn't belong in those
places either. I struggled a lot with feeling alone because I wasn't sure that there was a place in the world for me to be authentically myself.
In the book, you actually say that at one point, after one of these dinner table conversations, you came to realize that I'm on my own. What drove you to that realization?
For folks who haven't read the book yet, I talk about the rules that were in place in our house, and one of the most strict rules was everybody has to be at the dinner table spending time with the family. And I got to be, you know, junior, senior in
high school, and I'm sitting at the dinner table. We're having these conversations about our days, about our lives, what we're going through, and I started to realize that as the only queer person at the table, that there was no way they could understand what I was going through, That there was no way they could understand all the things I was carrying, all the ways that I felt like they were failing me. And so, yeah, I write about this sort of realization that I had that I
was going to have to go it alone. I was going to have to figure out where I could belong. I was going to have to carve out safe space for myself. I was going to have to, you know, discover on my own the kind of life I wanted to live. I wasn't going to find it sitting around that table because they would simply never understand me or my lived experiences.
How old were you, Oh?
I was I guess fifteen, sixteen years old.
So a child, still a kid.
Yeah, what I really craved was human connection, A meaningful human connection that allowed me the space to be myself where someone would love me unconditionally. That's what I really really wanted. That's what I was missing at that time. That's what I could not find around that dinner table.
It's what I.
Couldn't find at school, It's what I couldn't find at church. And ultimately that's the thing that drove me to leave home and go in search of it somewhere else.
When you went to college. In the book, you write about that kind of being like a hopeful escape, but then you end up dropping out of college to go to Orlando. Why did you want to go to Orlando? Why didn't school work out? Yeah?
School didn't work out because you know, I think, like a lot of young people, I imagined this college utopia. You go to the big city and you get your own dorm room, and all of a sudden, life makes sense. And so, you know, I get to the University of Oregon, I move into my dorm and it's basically the same people that I went to high school with, doing the very same things. It's the same kind of toxic culture. There still aren't a lot of people that look like me.
There still aren't a lot of people that love like me. And at the same time, I lost the structure that home and high school provided, and so I'm just sort of drifting alone in this environment that that feels as isolating as before, without any life raft. And so, you know, I make it through my first couple of years of school, and I was working at Starbucks part time at the time, and I remember I was at work one day and
I was really struggling. My mental health was struggling. My parents had told me I wasn't welcome to come back home for the holidays just before this, and so that kind of, you know, crush my spirit. I'm truly on my own, and so I'm sitting in the back room of my Starbucks store, and I distinctly remember I was wearing an apron that smelled like rotting milk because I did not have enough money to put quarters in the
washing machine in my building. I had found this bagel at the bottom of the fridge and I was eating it because I didn't have enough money to buy lunch at work. And I was thinking, is this really the best that it gets? Is this life? Like? We just go through life exactly like this. We never really get to be happy, we never get to experience joy and love. So it was weighing on me this idea of, you know, a short lived existence on Earth that was devoid of joy.
And at that very same moment, whether you believe in fate or coincidence, I had a ship supervisor who came running into the back room and she's holding a copy of the school newspaper and she said, I saw this, and I thought of you. And on the page it said help wanted Walt Disney World, And I thought like, oh my, this is it. There were lights shining off of the page of this newspaper. If there's anywhere you can be really gay, it's probably Walt Disney World, so
you should go do that. So I auditioned for a contract, ended up getting accepted, getting a job, and packing two suitcases and moving three thousand miles away from home.
It's two thousand and eight. Fed up with college and desperately craving a place where he could express himself, Brandon Wolf got the idea to move cross country from Oregon to Orlando to work at disney World. He didn't know anyone there, and he was scared of starting over, but the excitement of potentially meeting others like him outweighed the fear. He was lonely and ready for a change. It was in Orlando where he would find refuge at a club
called Pulse. When you get there, tell me what it was like, because in the book it sort of seems like Orlando becomes this amazing place for you, But what was it like when you actually got there and started discovering that.
First of all, I was right, there is no place gay or on Earth than Walt Disney World. So I was right about that good instinct on my part, and part of what makes it so beautiful, I think is that a lot of other queer people had the same experience.
I did.
Where they sought refuge at Disney, they sought refuge in Orlando. And so I built this incredible community with other people who had never imagined the world would have space for them. And there are many times in the book where I mentioned that community has saved my life. That was one of them. I was really being hard on myself when I was thinking, I don't know that the world ever gets better than this moment, sitting in the back room
of a Starbucks. I took a chance. I moved to Orlando, and that community truly saved my life.
Well, tell me about that, so I know Pulse was a part of that.
Pulse was one of the first places I think I ever held hands with someone that I had a crush on without looking over my shoulder first. And I think Pulse was that for so many people. I remember one of the first times I walked into Pulse, and it was like an oasis. I saw people being themselves in a way that I never would have dared in my hometown. I saw people experiencing unbridled joy. I saw people experiencing
maybe love for the first time. It captured this beautiful sense of normal that I thought as queer people and certainly queer people of color. We would never be afforded in the world.
Well, paint the scene for me a little bit the first time you went in, Like, are we talking strobe lights, booty shorts? What was the vibe the first time you walked in? And how did it feel?
Yeah, well, listen, it's a nightclub in Florida, so all of the above. It's always hot, so people are always wearing booty shorts and their little tank tops. I guess the feeling would be liberated. That's the way I would describe it. People felt so liberated in that space. You know, you walk in. There was like this little lobby area with an atm off to the side and a drag queen sitting behind an old cash register that was like
angrily grab your five dollars out of your hand. And then they had these two doorways, one to the left, one to the right, and there were beaded curtains that would hang in front of them, and so you'd like part the beaded doorway to go back into the club. There was always this relentless energy. The base was always so strong that you could feel it vibrating through your whole body and It's as if it was pulling you into the building to enjoy, to dance, to find love,
to find friendship, whatever it was. I believe that building had a pulse to it, and it was the collective energy of all the people. There was something different about being an adult far from home, walking into a space like Pulse nightclub and just getting to be me without any restrictions, without any hindrances, without any worries. It was just I could be me.
A few years after moving to Orlando, Brandon would meet his best friend, Drew. Drew was confident about being gay, which felt radical to Brandon. He had never met anyone like that before. Drew was everything that Brandon had always dreamed of having a friend. They spent countless nights dancing at Pulse and were present the night of the mass shooting. Tragically, Drew was one of its many victims. In the years after Drew's death, one of his legacies would be his
impact on Brandon. Their friendship that helped Brandon really understand what a safe space could be. You and Drew both were Pulse regulars, but you didn't meet at Pulse. So tell me a little bit about Drew. How did you guys meet who was he?
Yeah, Pulse Regulars is generous of you, because I think if Drew could have lived at Pulse Nightclub, he probably would have. So, you know, I'm a millennial gay man, which means it's inevitable that I'll probably find my husband online somehow, right, And so I'm one day scrolling in my apartment. I stumbled across this person named Drew, and we had mutual friends, and so I'm, you know, going
through his feed. Of course I immediately know this is my future husband, and so I start picking out names for our children, who's going to take whose last name? All the priorities when you see your future husband on Instagram. And eventually worked up the courage to ask a mutual friend if they would set us up on a date. So we plan our It's date day. I drive to PF. Chang's at the Millennium Hall. I walk in the door and he's sitting there on a bench. He looks exactly
like his Instagram profile. So of course I'm more nervous than I was when I walked in. But it's a funny story. Meeting Drew for the first time. What struck me was that, you know, us sitting in the middle of this busy restaurant. Maybe it was a Friday or Saturday night. We talked about a lot of things, including old flings. And when Drew was talking about his old boyfriends, he never once lowered his voice to make sure that the booth behind us didn't hear us talking about boys
instead of girls. He never once stiffened his wrist deep into the gravel in his throat. He didn't try to walk any differently. He had this funny, little like lilt in his walk. He didn't try to walk any differently to the bathroom to avoid detection. He was so unapologetic in his existence. Right, all these people had told me the world is never going to be ready for someone like you. You're always going to have to be just
a little bit different in order to assimilate. And yet there was this person sitting in front of me, queer, proudly mixed race, whose very existence seemed to say the world had better get ready because we were already there. I had never experienced anything like it before. And while I regret to inform you, we did not get married
or have children, we did become best friends. Because that was the kind of energy that I wanted to surround myself with and I felt like every moment I spent in Drew's presence, I got to be a better version of myself.
So, in other words, he really taught you confidence. Is that what you're saying?
Drew taught me a lot of things. Drew taught me confidence, Drew taught me to question the things I believe. He taught me to think for myself. But I think the most important thing that Drew taught me was unconditional love. There were several moments where I tried to get rid of Drew. I tried to sabotage our relationship because I was jealous. I really wanted him to like me in a romantic way for a very long time, and that
wasn't in the cards for us. No matter how many times I tried to destroy that friendship, he kept coming back because he genuinely loved me unconditionally. That is the greatest gift that Drew could have given me. It's the greatest gift he did give me, and it's part of what has driven me to keep the best parts of him alive.
Before you met Drew, were you lacking a little bit in self confidence or in self esteem or that self love.
Oh sure, yeah, I think it was lacking in a lot of things. But the truth was I was so deeply insecure. I was so nervous in every social setting. I was afraid of rejection and always trying to prove something to people around me. And I think part of why I found Drew to be such a safe space was that I didn't have to do those things around him, and as a result, I just became more confident in
and proud of who I am. So I think a lot about how he unlocked that potential for me just by being a space where I could be my goofiest, most authentic, most awkward self.
What you're saying is when you were around him, you let go of the feeling of having to explain yourself totally.
I let go of the feeling of having to explain myself. I let go of the feeling of having to prove myself. I let go of the desperation to be enough of something for someone else, because I was enough of me for him and that was good enough.
So, Brandon, it sounds like you're finding your community, especially with Drew at this time. What is your safe space? Was it Pulse?
My safe space wasn't a physical place on Earth. It wasn't Pulse Nightclub. My safe space was Drue. It was the space we created with each other. My place to belong was with my best friend. That was the safe space that I discovered. And being able to articulate that, being able to define that for myself has fundamentally changed the way that I've approached the world.
So, in other words, what you're saying is we sometimes look at a safe space as like a physical place, but for you, you're saying, it's it's actually in community.
Well think about it. You know, Pulse Nightclub is not the only nightclub in Orlando, Florida. It's not even the only LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida. It's not the only club that tries to cater to that community. It's not the only club that says that it's friendly to that community. But what made Pulse feel so safe and welcoming for me, it was the people that I went with. It was
the people that I saw there. It was the bartender who I saw every time at the same bar, who always gave me that look when it was you know, round five, like you really should be done for the night. It was the people that helped me to create that sense of safety and belonging. And that has been true at every point in my life when I've desperately needed it, when I've needed somewhere to call home, somewhere to belong, it has been the people that surround me that have
ultimately helped me find that place. So I firmly believe that we create safe spaces through the communities that we foster. And they can be a club, they can be someone's apartment, they can be huddled around a kitchen island drinking a glass of wine, or they could be out on a beach somewhere watching the waves roll in. But the thing that really makes those places safe places of belonging is the company we keep.
On June twelfth, twenty sixteen, Brandon Wolf was at Pulse with his best friends, but he didn't know that night would change his life forever. At approximately two am, a shooter began opening fire, killing forty nine patrons in the bar. At the time, Pulse became the site of the most deadly shooting in American history. You and Drew were at Pulse the night of the shooting. Unfortunately, he was one of the forty nine victims. What was the last thing that he said to you?
So we had a spot on the patio at Pulse, and so we were out on that spot that night, just before two o'clock in the morning. I'd been through a really rough breakup just a few days before, and for whatever reason, had decided to invite my ex at the time to come out with us. So there's this awkward tension in the group because I've invited, like the person I've just been complaining about over champagne to enjoy a night of dancing with us. And Drew hated tension.
There's one thing he hated the most. It was people not getting along, and he was going to find a way to fix that. And so in his way, he was a master's degree in clinical psychology, and that means that you would be therapized whether you wanted it or not. In his way, he launched into a therapy session about love,
about humanity, about compassion. He expressed his frustration that we so often let the little things get in the way of how much we care about each other, that we're willing to see each other's flaws before we see the beautiful things about each other he said, you know, I guess what I'm saying is I just wish we said I love you more often. That was Drew to a tea and I feel really grateful that that's one of the last memories I got to have with him.
How do you feel about that looking back, that that is actually the last thing that he said to you.
I've thought about that point in time a lot over the last few years. Almost feels as if he knew what was coming, although there's no way he could have known what was coming. I don't think I'm the protagonist in my own life story. I think Drew is, and I'm just the storyteller left behind to make sure that the best parts of him get told. And so I think that moment is a beautiful moment of him displaying protagonism.
He just knew exactly what to say in that moment, despite not knowing what was coming next.
A few days after this tragic night is Drew's funeral. What was that like for you?
I tell people that Drew's funeral was the hardest day of my life. The hardest day of my life was not Paul, so though that's probably a close second. The hardest day was saying goodbye to my best friend. His mom asked me to be a pallbearer that day, and so you know, I took my place at the back of the church and helped to push the casket down the aisle, and I found myself holding on to the
side of it so tightly. There's actually a picture of me from overhead that was taken and I'm gripping the paul really tightly, and it's it's because I didn't want to let go of him until I really found the right words to say goodbye. We got to the front of the church, I looked down at his casket and I made him the promise that has shaped every moment of every month and year that has come since. I promised him that I would never stop fighting for a world that he would be proud of because he taught
me to be so proud of myself. He taught me to love myself unconditionally. He taught me to be kind to others, and I did not want that to be lost. I did not want him to be some name on a wall somewhere. I wanted his legacy to mean something. I wanted his life to mean something. And so that promise while it seemed small at the time, has really become the thing that has defined everything I've done since.
How did you live out that mission?
A month after the shooting, we were gathered in Drew's apartment, like we would be sitting around his kitchen island drinking some old, half empty bottle of wine that he liked, and we were talking about what it would look like to keep his legacy alive. He was proud of the fact that, as a junior in high school in rural Florida, not the most LGBTQ friendly part of the state, but as a junior in high school, he launched his school's
first gay Straight Alliance student club. Probably not a very safe time to do that, but he did it because he knew that people needed and that kind of space. He knew that other young people needed space to be themselves, and so he proudly launched the Gay st Right Alliance at his school and then went on to have a career of helping people find themselves of you know, helping people find their confidence, helping people find self love, and so we knew that that would be the work we
had to do. We knew that's what he would be doing if he was still here. So that summer July we launched the Drew Project, which first it helps to create and sponsor and maintain gayst Rate Alliance student clubs across the country. We've authored the country's most comprehensive GSA curriculum guide that's still used been downloaded in forty five states now and a number of different countries around the world.
And then I would say the crown jewel of the Drew Project's work is Spirit of Drew Awards, which are college scholarships that we give way once a year. I think we're approaching, if not having eclipsed, two hundred thousand dollars already granted from that scholarship fund. So I would say, as a whole, it's been about empowering young people to find themselves, to be confident, to be empowered to achieve their wildest career ambitions, and then to turn around and help other people along the way.
So Drew was your safe space, and part of living out his legacy is helping other people find their safe spaces in his name.
Yeah, we have to the very best part of Drew was his ability to create belonging and safety for those around him. That was His favorite thing to do was to create community, and it is fitting for us to continue to do the work of creating community in his honor. It's exactly what he would be doing if he was still here. And so, like I said, because we're not the protagonists he is, it's our job to carry on that work.
What is your safe space now? It's been seven and a half years since he passed away, and since the whole night club shooting. What is your safe space now?
Truthfully, I don't know that I've found one yet. I know that I've found bits of safety along the way. I know that I've found bits of community. I have an incredible group of friends that have been with me through thick and thin. Many of them were introduced to me through Drew, and so that feels really special to me. The work I do gives me a sense of purpose and passion and also has created safe space and community
for me. But I think part of the last seven and a half years, part of the thing that I've grappled with is that there will never be another safe space like Drew. And that's okay. There doesn't have to be All safe spaces don't have to look the same. But there's a void where that one used to be, and I think I'm still, in some ways in search of You know what safe space means to me these days?
Well, the title of the show is called but We Loved? What does that title? What does that phrase mean to you? Given what you've been through?
I think about it in a few ways. I think about discovering unconditional love Withdrew and my group of friends, and I think about how defiant that love really is in a world that has told us from the beginning that our love is shameful, that it's something to be hidden, that it's something we have to change if we want
to be accepted by others. Our willingness and desire to love one another unapologetically and audaciously feels like an act of defiance to me, and my decision to love unapologetically and audaciously every single day continues to be an act of defiance. So that's in part what I take away from the title, but we Loved, You know, despite the world telling us that we shouldn't, despite the world telling us that our love is shameful, we still loved unapologetically
and unashamedly. And I also think about Drew in particular, and I think about all of the baggage that I carried to that relationship, all of the things I was going through, all of the years of trying to be enough for some people, of not feeling at home in my childhood house, of growing up in a community that didn't understand me and probably could never accept me. All of the times I had my heart broken stepped on and made myself more jaded day by day. I brought
all of that to my friendship with Drew. I brought all of that to every fight we had, to every makeup conversation over Chinese food we had. I brought all of it every single day, and still he loved me unconditionally. And So when I think about what the title but We Loved really means, I think about Drew and his ability to look past all of that baggage and love anyway. I think the gift that Drew has given me of unconditional love is one that I'll carry with me for the rest of my life.
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in to tell your story, email us at butt We Loved at gmail. Dot com or send us a message on Instagram or TikTok at butt We Loved. We are a production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts, but We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers Areshino Zaki, Michael June, Emily Meronoff, and Joey patt Our.
Executive producers are Me, Maya Howard and Katrina Normal. Fact checking by Marisa Brown. Original music by Steve Bone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson and Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.