Safe Spaces: A Pulse Nightclub Survivor Remembers (with Brandon Wolf)

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Intro – 00:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to Relationscapes. We're mapping the stories and ideas that shape who we are and how we connect with each other to build a better world. I'm journalist Blair Hodges, and our guide in this episode is author and activist Brandon J. Wolf. 

BRANDON WOLF: Even in the most gut-wrenching, heartbreaking of moments, when I was grieving the loss of the people I loved more than anyone in the world, even in that dark moment, I was home because the people around me created that home for me.

BLAIR HODGES: Brandon's home was made stronger in the aftermath of unimaginable violence. In 2016, he survived the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people—mostly queer and Latinx—were killed, including two of Brandon’s closest friends. In his memoir A Place for Us, Brandon writes about that loss, about the people who helped him survive it—and about the long road he’s walked, transforming deep pain into powerful purpose. He joins us to talk about it right now.

 

High School Struggles and Internalized Racism – 01:39

 

BLAIR HODGES: Brandon Wolf, welcome to Relationscapes.

BRANDON WOLF: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: You were raised in rural Oregon, and that was challenging for you because it was a predominantly white place and you're multiracial. Your mother was white, and the man that you called dad was white, but your biological father, who was never in your life, was Black.

In the book, you talk about your high school life, and let's go there now. What it was like being one of only 11 Black kids at your high school.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, it was a difficult time to be not just a queer kid in America, but to be a multiracial queer kid in America. And what I liken it to is that sensation you get when you know you're a guest in someone's home and you've stayed just an hour too long or just a day too long, and you can tell they're itching to have their couch back or to head off to bed and shoo you out the door.

That's a bit like what my childhood felt like from the beginning. Although I had a safe place to call home every night. I had a roof over my head, I had a warm pillow. I still never really felt like I was home. And I tried so hard to assimilate to that community.

I did all the things I thought people were telling me to do. I got straight A’s throughout high school. I did every after-school activity imaginable. I ran for student body office all four years I was there. Of course, I won student body office all four years I was there. I did all of the things.

And part of it was because I thought if I was enough, if I achieved enough, if I succeeded enough, if I did enough work, that perhaps when people realized who I was, this Black queer kid living in rural white America, that they would forgive me for who I was, that when I came out, they would decide to accept me and welcome me with open arms.

Unfortunately, that's not quite how the story goes. And I think that's true for a lot of people growing up in that situation. But it was a really challenging time. And I think, first of all, it taught me a lot about resilience. It taught me a lot about strength, and it also put me on a path to try to find a sense of belonging in the world.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk more about the internalized racist ideas you had. Because as you said, you were a high achiever. So people from the outside would look at you as this go-getter, very successful, a hard worker, all the things you were trying to do to prove your worth, but at the same time, you were also internalizing some racist and homophobic ideas as well.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, I think for a lot of people who grow up in marginalized communities, it's hard, especially as a kid, not to internalize the hate that you're receiving every single day. People would tell me all the time that, yes, you're Black, but you can't be that kind of Black person. And then I would get into majority Black spaces, and people would ask me why I talk white.

And then I would get into any space, and people would question whether or not I was queer, whether I liked boys. They would make fun of me, threaten to throw me in a trash can or something, slam me up against a locker. And when you hear that kind of stuff every day, compounded with what adults are saying, adults in my life would say things like, “The world is never going to be ready for someone like you.” You're always going to have to find a way to shave down the parts of you that are offensive or uncomfortable for other people. You're going to have to blend in. You're going to have to decide whether or not you want to have a real job and a family and success, or if you want to be authentically yourself.

And again, when you hear the hate and vitriol coming from people inside your peer group, and you hear that kind of dehumanizing, degrading rhetoric coming from trusted adults, the people who say they love you the most, it's hard not to internalize it. And so while on the outside it looked like I was achieving and I was very successful—and I've had young people from my high school days say that it seemed like I had everything they wanted—it may have appeared that way on the outside, but inside, I was really struggling with whether or not the world wanted me, whether or not there was ever going to be a place where I could just be authentically, unapologetically me.

BLAIR HODGES: It was difficult to see you wrestling with people in your life who should have been your greatest supporters, who made you feel like you were an enemy of theirs. I'm thinking, for example, of your father. He could be dismissive. He liked to play devil's advocate with you. He liked to push back on some of your ideas.

So, for example, in high school, when this group of student white supremacists created this hit list and put your name on it, he was sort of dismissive. And this part was so painful to think about—a kid having their parent be dismissive about their name being put on a hit list.

Here's a quote from you. “Most kids seek refuge at home and find safety and family, but I was deep behind enemy lines. If I was going to survive, I realized I would be forced to do that on my own.”

That is so rough.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, it's hard. And I'll say, my dad—I'm sure to more of this. My dad has had a beautiful learning journey of his own. He has a beautiful story arc in the book, but it's true that unfortunately, there were people in my life that should have been my greatest advocates, that should have been my fiercest defenders who weren't ready to show up for me in that way.

And it's heartbreaking to be a kid and feel like you have to do all of this alone, to feel like the people around you will simply never understand you. What I've learned about my dad in the past, really, the past 10 years, is that he thinks a lot of the right things, he feels a lot of the right things, and he doesn't know how to communicate them.

His natural response is to be combative, to be dismissive, in part because he doesn't know how to process his own emotional reaction to the things I'm sharing or people around him are sharing. That has helped me to gain a lot of perspective about our dinner table conversations and the way that I grew up.

But at the time, it just hurt a lot. I was so angry and so sad all the time. And I talked in the very beginning of the book—it was a hard way to start—but I talked about losing my mom at a very young age. And I think the absence of her balance to him not only really caused him to struggle, you know, he was a single dad for a while. He got remarried, and he was trying to piece families together. It was really difficult to be him, and I think that only exacerbated some of the ways he responded to situations.

But I also think that the missing balance in that relationship was detrimental to me because in many ways, my mom was my first ally. She was the person who would have gone to bat for me no matter what. And without that kind of presence in our home, it really did feel like I was in it alone.

 

Beware Both-Sidesism – 08:10

 

BLAIR HODGES: And then when you were at school, you kind of lacked that presence as well. I'm thinking about the great Diversity Week battles.

BRANDON WOLF: Oh, God!

BLAIR HODGES: You were kind of in the closet here. And there were these back and forths where you and your friends would put up like a pride flag for Diversity Week. And then these other students were literally tearing the flag down and saying incredibly homophobic things and it just kind of went back and forth until the principal steps in. And this is maybe one of your earliest experiences of Both Sidesism. Talk a little bit about what that is.

BRANDON WOLF: So Both Sidesism is this false notion that in order to appear neutral or to seem like you're not giving unnecessary weight to one particular perspective, you try to create an equivalence between two things that in a lot of cases, really don't have any equivalence at all. And in this situation, it was the principal stepping in, and he was trying to seem like an arbiter of justice. I guess he was trying to seem like this neutral actor who was trying to keep school safe and welcoming for all students.

Of course, you can't ignore the fact that he was not neutral at all because his children went to our school. Of course, he was deeply invested in their relationships, and his son was on the football team, and he had a lot to think about with his son's future career. So he was already, by nature, not a neutral actor.

But we had these two factions of students, one of which my friend group were simply saying, if we have Diversity Week, we think that means diversity for all people, and we're going to make sure every single person is reflected in that celebration.

And on the other hand, you have a group of students who said we did not deserve the right to exist, deserve the right to serve in student leadership, to be in classes alongside them, to be out and proud as who we were, that we should be forced into the closet again or suffer the consequences.

And the principal, again, in his effort to both-sides us to death, essentially sat us across from each other and said, this is just a classroom disagreement. You need to hash it out. With little respect for the homophobia and bigotry that was behind the words being hurled at us. Right?

BLAIR HODGES: Like, what were you supposed to say to—if everyone needs to come to the table and admit what they did wrong or to, like, find this common ground, where would that common ground be? If that's right, one side is saying, you all shouldn't even exist.

This is where diversity can be deployed in really toxic ways. There's a diversity that celebrates difference, truly celebrates difference. And then there's a kind of diversity that's like, hey, we'll accept everybody but on these particular terms. And it's usually the terms of being white, heterosexual, cisgender. So, oh, we will be diverse and accept everybody only so far as you meet these particular requirements. There are these two different competing visions of diversity and both of them can use the word “diverse.”

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah. And I'll just say that diversity has always been only one part of the puzzle, right? That diversity, simply the presence of people who are different, does not solve the underlying issues of homophobia, transphobia, racism, general bigotry. You can't just put a whole bunch of people in a room without having honest conversations about the biases they're carrying and expect those things to go away.

And so that's why the acronym that has become so infamous in our current conversation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, are focused on all three parts of that puzzle. Because you can't just, again, put people in a room and expect for all of the societal weight, all of the stigmas, all the biases to go.

You must have honest, real conversations about the kind of room you're trying to build together. And I think that's also where the principal of my high school went wrong, that he thought by simply putting us in a room together and saying, “hash it out, find a compromise,” that we would somehow be able to overcome these biases that, by the way, were learned, not born-with.

And that's not possible. We were not going to be able to just come to a compromise sitting across from each other. We needed an adult in the room to help us go through the equity and inclusion part of that conversation.

BLAIR HODGES: That's a great description of diversity, equity, and inclusion and the importance of thinking of it kind of like a three-legged stool. You need all three of those things to be able to have a steady foundation.

 

Early Relationships and Risky Behaviors – 12:37

 

BLAIR HODGES: You also introduce us to a boy called Evan who was kind of your first relationship, and it was pretty short lived. And I wondered, how do you think that relationship would have been different if you weren't facing such widespread homophobia at school?

BRANDON WOLF: Well, I'll tell you first, I think in terms of our relationship, it might have lasted longer, it might have been more healthy, it might have been less us like secretly texting each other after school and more with an ability to have honest, open dialogue. I mean, I could have brought him to prom instead of him going with someone else in our group as sort of a secret skirt around the rules.

So I think in many ways our relationship would have looked different. But I also know—and I feel like I'm not sharing more of his story than he would appreciate me sharing today, but I think he would have come to the realization that it's okay to be who you are at a much earlier age.

He was younger than us, which meant we graduated, and he was left behind with the aftermath of what the school was grappling with. And I know in the conversations we've had in the years since that he really struggled with that. I mean, it devastated his mental health. It was detrimental to his academic success.

It took him years and years to finally come to terms with who he is as a human being. And to be proud of that. I can say now—I mean, he's a good friend of mine, and he's also just a really beautiful, lovely human being who's doing well. But I think he would have gotten there a lot quicker, he would have been proud of himself a lot faster had he not been forced to go through that homophobic gauntlet early on in his journey.

BLAIR HODGES: And I also think some of the risky behaviors and the difficulties you encountered at college, which is where we're going next, didn't have to be the case if you were able to have the same kind of just regular sort of relationship ins and outs that any kid could have, that any hetero kids could experience, because you had to live and kind of figure out what love and romance and relationships meant in the shadows.

It meant there was always a secrecy there that I think sort of restricted your relationship possibilities. What do you think about that?

BRANDON WOLF: But I think that's real for so many people in the queer community. It's part of what's so inspiring for me about a new generation of young people that feel more comfortable being themselves than ever before. Because I can imagine the possibilities they have before them, the depth they can build to their relationships, the ways they can really experience true, unconditional love without having to feel like they're jumping through hoops or hiding things all the time.

But yes, when you live in a society that has such heavy expectations and stigmas around the way you love other people, it's really hard to navigate that when you're living outside those expectations. And I'll also say just on a macro level, this is part of why there's so much work being done to rethink what our education system looks like and how it truly is more equitable and inclusive.

Because I can tell you right now, if I had had fully comprehensive, inclusive sex education, instead of having to learn about gay sex on the Internet, I would have had a lot healthier relationship with sex and with physical intimacy with people at a much earlier age. But I was forced to learn about sexual activity from chat rooms, or I could look on Yahoo. We didn't have Google at the time. On Yahoo I struggled a lot. I mean I spent probably the first 22, 23 years of my life petrified that anytime I had sex, I would contract HIV and that I would die of AIDS. That was my lived experience as a young queer person.

We are doing a disservice to queer people generally if our education doesn't set them up for success like it's supposed to set young people up for success.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Brandon Wolf, and we're talking about his memoir, A Place for Us. He's a survivor of the 2016 terror attack at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. He's also a nationally recognized public speaker and advocate for the LGBTQ civil rights and gun safety reform movements.

 

Social Hierarchy at College – 16:45

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Brandon, like I said, let's go to college. And when your dad dropped you off there, you were relieved to get away from a tough situation, but you weren't ready to leave your entire past behind, despite the homophobia and the racism you experienced at home. You say you felt a lot of things in this moment. You weren't just like, hooray, it's the next step! This is a moment of being torn. You felt so many things. Joy, sadness, and even love. And then this quote from you. You say, “I wanted to apologize to my dad for not being able to see the world from his perspective and demand to know why he refused to see it from mine.”

You're not just casting your father in the role of a villain who mistreated you here, but as a complicated person that you just wish you could have better connected with as you're going to college.

BRANDON WOLF: This is one of the most important themes for me of the book, and really, it's been one of the most important lessons for me as a human being. I think in day and age, it's so easy for us to single-story people. That is especially true when the social media algorithm feeds you only one version of anyone at a time.

And so for that reason, it's easy for us to assume about a person. It's easy for us to be consumed by one particular perspective on them, or to feel one emotion and attach it to that person. But the truth is that human beings are complex. We hold multiple competing ideas at the same time, our perspectives change. We change as people. We grow, we mature, we learn about each other, and we are, as a society, on a journey.

And so I say it's one of the most important lessons for me and one of the biggest themes of the book, because in many ways, I see in my dad the kind of conversations that we must have about other people that live alongside us every single day. If we're going to move society forward, if we're actually going to do good things together, if we're going to be better tomorrow than we are today, it's going to require us to see each other as complex. It's going to require us to open space for grace and forgiveness and love and compassion, even with those whom we disagree the most.

So I say all of that because in that moment when my dad dropped me off, I was feeling all of the emotions that I think a lot of us feel every day when we interact with people in our lives. I was feeling grief, I was feeling love, I was feeling anger, and I was feeling joy that I had an opportunity to start a new chapter in my life.

And it is very innately human to hold all of those things at the same time.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, if you expected college to be like a fresh start, you say it was more like part two of the same kind of story. There were social hierarchies that were being set up, and you got caught up in those hierarchies trying to find a place for yourself. And I think one of your biggest personal confessions in the book happens at this moment.

The way that you ended up piling on an awkward roommate you had, and that roommate ended up quitting school, likely because of depression and anxiety and social rejection. What was it like writing about that? About your participation in hurting someone else?

BRANDON WOLF: When I started writing this book, we had conversations as a publishing team. And early on, I felt like the publishing team really wanted me to focus on a book that was about my journeys and the successes that I found, right? There were questions about the people I've met or the places I've given speeches, and those things are all really interesting, and maybe that'll make for another book.

But writing this book, I was clear on what I wanted to accomplish. I wanted an honest, vulnerable, unvarnished look at what it feels like to find a place to belong in the world. And I wanted people to, just for a moment, be able to sit in the pages and reflect on the moments that they've had in that journey for themselves. The moments that they're proud of. The moments they're not proud of.

And in order to achieve that, I had to be honest about the moments that I wasn't proud of either. And telling the story of my roommate in college was so important to me because I think it is a part of the human experience that when we feel so desperately alone and we are so desperately seeking belonging, we can turn into the thing that we've been trying to avoid all along, right?

We're just so desperate to assimilate to the world around us that we will do anything to fit in. And young people are especially vulnerable to that. And so I wanted to be honest, that I succumbed to that in my life, that I had things I wasn't proud of. And that once again, as a complex human being, I can hold that alongside the things I am very proud of, that those moments with my roommate in college taught me things I needed to know about myself and the world around me.

I sure wish that I could tell him how sorry I am today, how much I wish I had connected with him when we were in school. But part of me trying to be a good person today is about rectifying of that.

BLAIR HODGES: Is there no way to find him?

BRANDON WOLF: I don't know. I've thought about it. I guess I could go, maybe go back and do some sleuthing. I'm a millennial, so anything's possible on the Internet.

BLAIR HODGES: It's just so hard to see the sort of solidarity building that can happen at other people's expense. And to see you participating in it, it's pretty heartbreaking. But you are also wrestling with a ton of stuff then. As you mentioned earlier, you were learning about sex in really unhealthy ways. You were deeply impacted by homophobia, fears of AIDS, and having to keep relationships hidden.

 

Opening Up About Sexual Violence – 22:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: And this leads you to discuss something you hadn't told other people about until you started writing this book. And at the outset of the episode, I let people know that we'd be talking about sexual violence here. And this is the moment, if people need to skip ahead, they can do that. But this is sexual violence you encountered on a New Year's Eve, going to meet with a man who ended up assaulting you.

And you say this is the first time you've really told the story, here in this book. And so I wondered, why include that now? What was that like?

BRANDON WOLF: Well, again, when I set out to write this book, I told myself, I'm gonna be vulnerable. I'm gonna be honest. I'm gonna tell the unvarnished truth. And honestly, the decision to tell this story of sexual assault came to me when I was writing about my relationship with sex when I was young. And it came to me as I was talking generally about the ways in which queer men specifically are taught to feel shame because of their sexual activity, because of being sexual beings, and the way that can spiral them into dangerous behavior, the way it can also prohibit them or block them from taking action after sexual assault.

And as I was writing about that, broadly about the relationship between queer men and sex, I felt I was not being honest if I didn't tell this part of the story, that if I wasn't totally honest about the darkest period of that journey for me, that I wasn't being unvarnished, that I wasn't being totally vulnerable.

And as a maybe selfish measure, I don't know that I had really processed it fully until I started writing about it. Obviously, it happened a long time ago. I've had a lot of time to think about it. I've had a lot of time to process it internally. But there is something so profoundly different about putting words on a page and then putting it out into the world.

I knew when I started writing it that my parents would read it. I knew that my grandparents would read it. I knew that my friends would read it. And that was a really difficult thing to go through. But it felt so cathartic when I was doing it. It felt so necessary to say the things out loud that I'm sure other survivors go through. Like, “Maybe I deserved it. I'm gonna hide it because I feel ashamed of what has happened to me.” Those things that people experience every day.

So, yeah, it was a really tough part of the book to write. It might've been the hardest part of the book to write because it was so new in terms of sharing with other people, but it was necessary.

BLAIR HODGES: And how are people responding to this vulnerability? On the surface, it might seem like it would only apply to people who match your profile, but I imagine it should have a much broader reach than that.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, what I've loved about this process is that every person takes something different away from the book, something that resonates with them. That was another of my primary goals. I didn't want it to be a book that was only relevant to queer kids of color. I wanted everyone to be able to see themselves in pieces of the story.

And so that's been probably one of the most rewarding things, is hearing how the book touched people, which parts of it really resonated with them. And I'll say that there have been people who've said that this vulnerability, this honesty, was the thing that drew them into the story, because they felt seen in those pages.

In part of my volunteer work, I sit on the advisory board for the National Organization for Victims Assistance. And one of the biggest areas of work they do is assisting victims of sexual crime. I've had the opportunity to chat with other young people, other student organizers who are doing that work with that organization. And those are some of the spaces where people, I think, have said that story touched them the most, seeing people talk openly and vulnerably about their own assaults.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, not everybody can be so open and public about being victims or survivors of sexual crime so I'm grateful you put yourself out there to raise awareness and reach people who deserve to feel seen and understood.

 

A Whole New World – 26:34

 

BLAIR HODGES: I should also mention, you didn't confine your focus to the hard stuff, right?

BRANDON WOLF: I tried not to! [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there are good times in the book as well.

BRANDON WOLF: Exactly!

BLAIR HODGES: In fact, you're going to take us all to Disney World next where you were soon to become the man inside the Tigger suit! College hadn't been working out, even though you'd been such an overachiever in high school. A friend saw you spiraling and showed you an advertisement about getting a job with Disney. And so you're like, I'm doing it. And you move to a place where suddenly you're not in so racially or sexually marginalized anymore. What was it like?

BRANDON WOLF: Oh my gosh. It was everything I could have imagined and more. I told you people who loved me very much when I was young would say, “The world is never going to be ready for someone like you,” and then I step off the plane into this world that felt like it was built for people like me.

All of a sudden people look a little bit more like me. They love a little bit more like me. I'm hearing stories more like mine for the first time. And it truly was eye-opening. It was life changing.

There were some really difficult moments then, too, right? We were, sure, broke broke. People were living on food stamps. We were working eighty hours a week to make ends meet.

BLAIR HODGES: The Tigger suit is not a very easy thing to wear, either.

BRANDON WOLF: It's not easy to wear! There's no air conditioning when you're out there. Like, the struggle was real at times, but there was this unbridled sense of joy underneath all of it. And what I share with people is that it's like I had stumbled into this slice of normal that I didn't think people like me ever got to experience.

And I think that's part of why I didn't imagine I would ever be fighting for civil rights or working in politics. Because when I was at this place of true normal, of just blissful joy, of experiencing chosen family for the first time, I thought my only job was to ride that off into retirement.

It was almost like I had stolen someone else's life and I'm driving the getaway car as fast as I can. And I'm just thinking, your only job left is to enjoy it. Right? You never thought you would get to experience this and so you just enjoy it. And I really, I mean, my entire time in Orlando was beautiful, but those early years of just living on ramen and Pop Tarts and joy, like, that was life-changing for me.

 

From Instagram Crush to Best Friend – 28:55

 

BLAIR HODGES: And your social group is expanding here. This is where you introduce us to a person who started out as an Instagram crush—

BRANDON WOLF: As all good queer relationships do—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! [laughs] Very storybook here. In fact, one of the laugh out loud moments for me was when you described yourself kind of rehearsing the small talk before your first date with Drew, because you've been a pretty big introvert. So, like, you're going through all these typical questions that you expect. You're like, okay, what's your favorite color? Okay. Blah blah blah, like, you're going through all of this rehearsal, and then when you’re with Drew he's not following the script, and you're just like—

BRANDON WOLF: I know! Totally stunned. Totally stunned. I tell people I was, like, robotic at that point. I'm like, I almost—I swear to God, I almost blurted out my favorite color when he asked me my thoughts on for-profit healthcare in America, because that's what I just repeated over and over again to myself.

But, I mean, you're right to say that Drew did not follow the script, because that was his entire being. Nothing about him was the script that I'd come to know and expect from people. And that's why I loved it so much.

BLAIR HODGES: He seemed to be unapologetic about who he was. He lived at the intersection of races. He was unashamed with his natural femininity, didn't feel like he needed to put on a particular type of front. But he also displayed a kind of silent courage. Talk about that element of it, because when we think about courage, we don't often think of a quieter kind.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah. You know, I was recently with a group of allies who formed an employee resource group at the company they're working at, and they were talking about how to be better allies, and they were saying, like, well I do all the things I like. I have the rainbow sticker on my computer. I come to all the meetings. I'm in the Pride parade. I'm with the flag waving outside my house. Is there anything else I can do to demonstrate that I am an effective ally? And I said those things are really important. Visible displays of support for the LGBTQ community are really important, and I encourage you to keep doing those things.

But I said, I also think about the greatest moments of allyship that I got out of Drew, and they were the quietest ones, the ones where I needed a shoulder to cry on and he could just tell and offered it. They were the ones where I was down and out and maybe lazy a little bit, and he would challenge me to be a better version of myself. The moments where I was uncomfortable in my own skin, and we would walk into a restaurant, and he was just chest out, head held high, being exactly who he was.

Those were the silent moments of allyship and courage that dared me to reimagine who I could be. So when I think of how people show up as allies in today's age, I think a lot about how Drew showed up for me. And even in those moments where it wasn't about me at all. It was just Drew telling an obnoxious story with kind of his high-pitched, squeaky voice at some crowded table in the middle of a restaurant. That demonstration of unapologetic, unashamed, audacious courage changed who I am, created who I am today.

 

Healthy Masculinity – 32:12

 

BLAIR HODGES: And it was also exciting romantically, too. At least at first.

BRANDON WOLF: Right?

BLAIR HODGES: Like you talk about it [laughs]—

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, for a minute.

BLAIR HODGES: He kissed—

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah—

BLAIR HODGES: He kissed you. And you're thinking, like, “whoa, the guys I like almost never like me back.” You're really excited. I thought this would be an interesting excerpt to have you read from on page 71. It’s about your thoughts on masculinity and how you were trying to navigate what masculinity could mean given your background and experiences. And now Drew is sort of challenging those. So if you can read that section, that'd be great.

BRANDON WOLF: Okay, great.

Daddy issues do a number on guys like me. We spend an entire childhood chronically overachieving and perpetually terrified of failure, desperate for affirmation that isn't coming because we don't play baseball or bring home pretty girls. An entire childhood seeing the things we can't change about ourselves, painted as less than by a world obsessed with traditional displays of masculinity, then a tireless fight to overcompensate for them.

“Man up,” fathers will say at the first sign of tears after scuffed knees, foisting their own decades-long emotional repression onto the next generation. Magazine covers and Instagram feeds silently reinforce that if we aren't blonde with blue eyes and six packs, we should be grateful for the opportunity to look on in amazement, ashamed that we're too lazy to look the same.

It's a toxic soup that leads to unhealthy expectations for interpersonal relationships with other men and an inability to appreciate the various forms they take. In short, we're so desperate to be seen as and wanted by men that their desire becomes the only aspect of a relationship we can imagine. Imagine it's a running joke inside our community that gay men can't officially call themselves friends until they've slept together.

As if no friendship can exist outside the murky confines of sexuality as defined by everyone else. I hate tropes like that because they don't leave space for the myriad lived experiences that make up our community. But if I'm being honest, I also really hate how close to home they hit. Despite what I thought was a perfect first date, Drew's romantic interests didn't extend past our passionate front seat rendezvous.

He let me down fairly easily, insisting that we'd be friends. I obliged, masking my disappointment with a few heart eye emojis, and slid into the friend zone with oft practiced ease, attending parties and joining game nights without letting on that I hadn't shaken my boyish crush. I laughed as expected, publicly shrugging off his rejection when well-meaning strangers remarked that we were a cute couple.

But it stopped. I had spent so many years relegated to the friend zone that it brought a familiar rollercoaster of emotions: frustration that I'd done everything I could and still come up short. Embarrassment that I'd allowed myself to be so vulnerable with someone who never saw me as anything more than another addition to their circle of friends. Relief that I wouldn't have to perform encores of the first date tap dance, followed immediately by a wave of sadness that I still wasn't good enough.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Brandon Wolf reading from his memoir, A Place for Us. You might have seen work Wolf has written in other places like CNN, Oprah Daily, USA Today, Newsweek, and Out Magazine. And he also worked on Senator Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign in 2019.

Thank you for reading that. That gives us a glimpse at the sort of psychological storytelling you take us through.

So good.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah. Sorry to invite you into the labyrinth that is my brain for a moment. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, it's good. This is why it was so much fun to spend time with the book. We just really get a sense for who you are and what you're going through.

Drew, as you said, is going to friend zone you. And he became pretty quickly interested in another partner. A young man named Juan. And your jealousy was, like, ready to go because you really liked him.

BRANDON WOLF: Brimming on the surface.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And if this was another story, that might have just been it. You might have just been like, well, I don't want to be here anymore. But not with Drew. What kept you close with Drew, even though Drew moved on romantically with somebody else?

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, he did. I mean, Drew collected people. He collected community. He collected other personalities. And when Drew decided you were in his life, you were in his life, and there was no way you were getting away. And so, try as I might, I tried to implode that friendship more times than I can count. I detail a couple of them in the book. But I tried my hardest to drive Drew away. And that is, unfortunately a learned defense mechanism that I've worked through over the years. But self-sabotage is real. And I tried it with Drew a number of times. But as a master in clinical psychology and a licensed therapist, he was not about to let that happen.

And he just kept coming back, and he kept leaving space for me to be angry and hurt and process all of the things that I was carrying into our relationship. And when I'd get done spewing and raging and crying, he would just be standing there with a bottle of wine saying, I'm not going anywhere. I'm still going to be your friend.

I talked really vulnerably in the book about how that might have been my first experience with truly unconditional love. Now, I have beautiful family members who, of course, love me unconditionally. But Drew's love was tested multiple times. I really tried to detonate that love, and he never let it go, no matter what.

And so I came to this realization, this chosen family realization, that I was not just a friend to Drew, that I had gained something more. I had really gained a brother.

BLAIR HODGES: And another difference was the fact that this was a gay friend. A quote from you, you said “I'd always envied, despised, or lusted after the other gay men in my life, but this was much more enjoyable.”

This is like a new kind of friendship that you discovered with Drew, that you could be friends with gay guys and just this true friend without the envy, the lust, or any of the other stuff.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, it was something I told you before. It was a normal that I did not think people like us get to experience. It was a kind of normal that I saw other people living my whole life. I saw the high school kids living it. I saw kids in college living it.

And then here I was. I had stumbled into this relationship that was so normal. And the profound joy and relief that comes with that kind of normal is really hard to describe. But when I say that Drew changed my life, the reason that the book is dedicated to him, the reason that I say time and time again that I don't think I'm actually the protagonist in my own story, I think he is, I'm just the narrator. I say that because he fundamentally changed who I am as a human being and gave me the greatest gift possible, which is unconditional love.

 

Pulse Nightclub – 39:15

 

BLAIR HODGES: With that, let's turn to Pulse. Most people probably know the basic contours of the story. This was a gay nightclub in Orlando where one night a gunman opened fire and killed 49 people. But before Pulse was this Pulse, it was just Pulse. So take us to that place and what it was like for you before it became the Pulse more people knew about.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, Pulse. I mean, it was iconic in Orlando. I still, in traveling and speaking today, every single time I share my story, someone tells me about a connection they have to Pulse, whether it's someone they know that used to go there a time they visited Orlando, and they went to Pulse nightclub.

Pulse is kind of ubiquitous with the queer community in Orlando. Pulse is one of the first gay bars I ever went to as an adult. It is one of the first places I ever held hands with someone I had a crush on without being afraid of what someone might say. It's one of the first places that I dared to change up how I dressed. I wore a sleeveless top one time, and I was so excited about that. It's the place that I learned to play with masculinity and femininity and queerness.

And I think it was that way for so many people. That's especially true because Pulse had affinity nights where it would be mostly Black folks, it would be mostly Latinos. It would bring in different parts of the community that didn't always feel welcome in queer spaces. And so one of the stories, the lighthearted stories—there are those in the book, I promise. One of the lighthearted stories that I tell in the book is about a night I met a beautiful Black man at Pulse Nightclub. I don't think I named it but it was Pulse Nightclub, that was the club where I met this beautiful Black man and danced the night away in his arms. And it was another moment of profound realization that, like I'm standing in a space where people look like me, they love like me, and they don't have to be afraid.

That was what Pulse represented, I think, for so many people.

BLAIR HODGES: And in the book, you tell us the story of what happened. You were there with Eric, your boyfriend at the time, and you had invited Drew and his partner Juan. So all four of you were there. And people who have been through traumatic, violent events like this often talk about their recollections as a mixture of extremely vivid memories, things that are just, like, burned into their brain. And then also this fog of just uncertainty. And you've told this story so many times by now. It's been about eight years or so. What's it like being asked about it now? Do you still carry that same sense of, like, really vivid stuff and also the fog?

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, there is. Yes. The memories that were vivid the days after Pulse are still vivid today. There are still things that when I close my eyes, I can see them as if it was happening right now. And then there are still other things that have been foggy from that very moment. And I tried to create that sort of visual in the Pulse chapter of the book.

So one of the things you'll see as you journey through the book from start to finish is that there's an ebb and flow in the way that chapters are constructed and written. Some chapters have very long sentences, long paragraphs. There's a lot of internal monologues. Those are periods of introspection. And I wanted them to be contrasted with the Pulse chapter, which, especially when it gets to the shooting, is very clipped. It's very short. It can feel a bit jarring to read it because it doesn't quite sound like some of the introspective or poetic elements that come before it. And that is because that's how I experience it when I think back to that time. It is jarring and clipped. And what I wanted from that construction of sentences and paragraphs—Sorry to drag you into the artistry weeds here, but—

BLAIR HODGES: I love this, no, this is awesome.

BRANDON WOLF: —part of why I constructed it in that way is because the memories themselves feel like gunshots sometimes, and I wanted the words on the page to feel like gunfire.

And so I do. I carry that sort of vivid and foggy contrast in my mind. And I've perfected, I guess, the art of sharing the parts that I'm comfortable sharing. You know, I do travel a lot and share pieces of my story, but there are moments where it's hard. There are moments where I'll accidentally slip in something that I've not talked about much before, or I'll talk about a part of the journey that I haven't talked about in a while.

And it comes flooding back. So I think, like most healing journeys, it is a journey. It's different every single day, but it still feels a lot like it did.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm glad you talked about the art of putting this together, because a lot of people were there at Pulse, but not everybody has the skill or the ability or the time or the background to be able to craft something like this. People might create art out of it or it might inform their singing, or it might. You know, everyone is going to carry it with them in certain ways. The fact that you could carry it forward as a writer and do what you said—which is kind of enact the fog of it and then the specificity of it and the vertigo of it on the page—makes your book such a powerful thing to have to sit with and experience it with you.

BRANDON WOLF: Thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: That's how it was for me reading it, so thank you.

BRANDON WOLF: I knew when I started that that would—Well, first of all, I knew that would be the section of the book that was probably the most publicized. It would be the thing that reviewers would talk about. It would be the thing that was captured about me in the Amazon profile of the book.

And so I did want to take real care with how I told it. I was also very specific not to try to tell other people's stories. There are a lot of people who are impacted at Pulse. I can only share my own story. But at the end of the day, what was most important for me was that I created not just words on a page, but a percussive feeling. I wanted you to feel it almost like music or poetry.

 

The Vigil – 45:22

 

BLAIR HODGES: I think you succeeded. And through that music and through that poetry, it's so heavy because we find out, we discover alongside you, because it took some time to discover that Drew and Juan were both killed in the shooting. And there was a vigil held within days of the shooting. I wanted to hear you read part of your description of that vigil because it kind of reminded me of your high school memory of feeling like you didn't have a safe home. And then we get to this moment of the book. This is on page 122.

BRANDON WOLF: The choir sang a sweet, vaguely familiar tune as a group of people began passing out short white candles, each with an improvised paper handle to catch the wax. I held mine close to my chest. My hands still shaking, I took in the mass of people stretching in every direction. There was a spiritual presence in that place.

I could feel the energy of everyone there, like a low thrum coursing between our bodies. I could feel Drew and Juan there, too, echoes of their tandem energies enveloping me. It struck me that this was as at home as I'd ever felt.

Sure, we didn't meet the definition of a traditional family, and its most important members had just been stolen from us. But this outpouring of unconditional love was what I'd been searching for since I had first stuffed a few pairs of underwear into a suitcase and bounded down the jetway for a one-way trip to Orlando. Eight years after the journey had begun, I realized that I couldn't imagine living anywhere else, and I was more grateful for this community than I could put into words.

BLAIR HODGES: In the margin there, I've just written the word home, and it parallels earlier, I had done the same thing when you described not feeling safe at home. And so it felt like a sort of a bookend moment of the home that you had and the home that you found.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah. The title was a whole journey on its own, A Place for Us. There was a moment when we had to change the title, and I went through a grieving process. If you're an author, you probably know what I mean. There are things you have to let go of. But when we landed on A Place for Us, it was so meaningful for me because the most crucial theme of the book, the thing that ties it all together, is this personal realization I've had that the places where we belong, the places for us in the world, our homes, are not four walls. They're not a geographical position on a map. They're the people we create them with. And that was one of the moments in the book where I had that profound realization that even in the most gut-wrenching, heartbreaking of moments, when I was grieving the loss of the people I loved more than anyone in the world, even in that dark moment, I was home because the people around me created that home for me.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Brandon Wolf, and we're talking about the book A Place for Us, his memoir. He's a survivor of the 2016 terror attack at Pulse, and in 2019, he became the first survivor of that tragedy to testify before Congress. He's worked a lot to raise awareness about LGBTQ civil rights and also gun safety reform, and he currently serves as national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign.

 

Coping With Survivor’s Guilt – 48:36

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, in the aftermath, you're going to start dealing with a lot of survivor's guilt, and you don't necessarily use that term yourself, but it seemed to creep in almost immediately for you. It was also tinged by the homophobia you'd encountered in your life. You actually wondered if maybe even you deserved to die or that you played some kind of role in making this happen.

Like, wasn't it your fault if people called you the f-slur because you seemed too effeminate or if you'd ever contracted HIV, it's because you were sexually deviant or whatever. So celebrating who you were in the club, you even had those thoughts of, like, was it our fault? These are just terrible thoughts to reckon with.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah. I mean, again I've said this a number of times, but I set out to write a vulnerable, honest book about what it means to move through this world. And I know that there are a lot of people who go through horrific and traumatic events throughout their lives, whether that is an act of violence like I went through, whether it is a domestic violence situation, whether it is sexual violence, whether it's grief and loss, like, people are going through really difficult things. And if I was going to be honest about what it felt like to heal and recover and go on that journey, I would have to talk about the hardest part. And this one is talking about survivor's guilt. This one was right alongside talking about sexual assault in terms of how difficult it was to process publicly for really, the first time.

I've not talked a lot about the survivor's guilt that I carried. But again, I wanted to write an honest, vulnerable, transparent book. And in order to do that, I had to talk about what so many survivors deal with, which is the grief that overcomes them, the guilt that overcomes them, the sense that maybe they deserved it, maybe they don't deserve to be here anymore.

And it's my hope that in being honest about that, first of all, that survivors don't feel alone, that they understand other people are processing that too, and also that they see there's a light at the end of that tunnel. It doesn't go on forever. Therapy is a great help. If you can get access to mental healthcare, I highly recommend it. But that survivor's guilt, you can get through it, and you don't have to get through it alone.

BLAIR HODGES: It was especially tricky for you, because you had invited Drew and Juan, and so you also had to process that “what if” thing. This is the thing that my mind would focus on, things that have hurt most in my life. My brain wants to go straight to the thing I did before that happened and just be like, “if only I hadn't done that.” And although you've processed that therapeutically, does that still come back sometimes? Or do you feel like you've reached a place of peace about it.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, I do think I've reached a place of peace with that. It's taken me a long time. And a lot of processing. What struck me is that other people carry that same thing. I hadn't quite considered that there are other people in my life who carry that same thing.

I have people in my life who've thought oh, if you'd had a better high school experience, oh, if you just had a better childhood, maybe you wouldn't have even moved to Orlando. You would never have been there. And so there's an element of everyone's carrying it that, I think, has helped me to process it, to understand that it's just a very natural human reaction to tragedy and trauma.

And I think the other way that I've navigated through it is to keep the best parts of Drew and Juan alive, that instead of holding onto what could have been, I hold onto what really was, and that was the beauty and the joy that they gifted to me.

 

Mass Shootings and Mass Media – 52:13

 

BLAIR HODGES: I like the phrase “turning pain into purpose,” and I see you doing that here in the book. Survivor's guilt is one of the feelings you were reckoning with in the fallout. Disappointment and anger were also a part of it. You were really disappointed and sometimes angered when you saw the stories of Drew and Juan get sucked up into a media cycle that didn't really seem true to who they were or what the situation was.

And so you were also reckoning with disappointment and anger in the wake of the violence.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, I mean, this is the reality for communities that are rocked by this kind of violence, by the way, every single day. Our tragedy was remarkable for people because of the scale of death, because of the communities that were targeted. But the truth is that people grapple with gun violence and its cost every single day in this country, and they're going through the same things I'm going through.

And what frustrated me, and I know what frustrates other communities that deal with gun violence and its impacts, is the way it gets sanitized down into some academic conversation that doesn't ever really shine a light on the people who are stolen from us. We say their names, we see their pictures flash across the screen.

In the wake of Pulse, we had journalists who did their best. Anderson Cooper did a beautiful tribute to all of the victims. But truthfully, I knew that people were never really going to tell the story of Drew and Juan unless I told the story of how they touched my life. And I was really worried that they would, like so many other people that have been stolen from us, end up on a wall somewhere, their names just etched into concrete, and that people would only think they mattered because of how they died, not because of how they lived.

And so that is so much of what has guided my work over the last eight years, has been about bringing life to their stories and making sure that they matter for so much more than what happened on one night in June.

BLAIR HODGES: And as you said, other shootings are ongoing. Mass shootings continue in the United States. Very little has been done politically to address the problems. And you describe a number of different reactions that you have. When a shooting happens, your reactions differ.

Sometimes you've talked about, like, you hear about one, and maybe you'll feel a normal sense of empathy or sadness. Other times you feel pumped up to continue the fight. And then other times you really feel discouraged and broken. And it seems like it'd be kind of hard to predict how you would feel about any particular new mass shooting.

BRANDON WOLF: It is hard. I mean, it totally depends, first of all, on the frame of mind I'm in. The shootings where people are texting me to wake me up, to alert me to something that's happened, those seem to be more traumatic than others, in part because that's how people woke up to our tragedy.

I was on the other end of those text messages. So I've learned a little bit about what the triggers are for me. But, yeah, truthfully, it changes. It just totally depends on the circumstances, the frame of mind that I'm in. And that means that my healing process, my response, my processing looks different every single time.

BLAIR HODGES: I love your perspective as an activist, too, because you introduce us to this tug of war that happens between imposter syndrome and burnout. Imposter syndrome can make you sort of wonder if you should even be doing it. And then on the flip side of that is, like, doing so much that you feel like you're just burnt out.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah. I mean, and it's especially true when you've lived as a marginalized person who's constantly been forced to struggle between imposter syndrome and burnout. The things that I was experiencing in the wake of Pulse are not much different than what I was experiencing in high school, where I was feeling like I have to do every activity, I have to hold down a job. I've got to be in music. I really want to play sports. I don't know where I'm going to find time to do that. And at the same time, constantly thinking I'm not doing enough, constantly thinking I'm not good enough, constantly being told that I'm never going to be good enough to do the things that I want to do in life.

The same kind of elements were at play after Pulse. And part of why I put that in there is because I see the same thing happening to other people who do this work all the time. And I especially see other people that are part of marginalized communities doing it. I see queer people doing it. I see Black and brown folks doing it. I see people, women, fighting for reproductive freedom doing it. I see people feeling like they have to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders and simultaneously believing that everything they do is never enough. And that is not sustainable. That is not a way to build a movement toward a better future.

So it was my hope in sharing, that I would not encourage people to live in that tension forever, but that I would encourage them to break free of it by seeing their well-being, their health, their rest, their joy as part of the fight for liberation, right? That there's no point in fighting for joy if we don't get to experience joy along the way.

There's no sense in fighting for freedom if we are chained to this idea that we're only as valuable as what we can produce nine to five every day, right? Our joy, our breaking free of that dumbing down of people's value, all of that is part of the work, too.

 

The Pace of Social Change – 58:37

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. We get to see you wrestle with becoming an activist and what it means to be politically involved and figuring out your role and figuring out how to pace yourself. And in line with all that, as you're talking about what it's like being an activist, do you ever get tired of the progress just being so slow?

I mean, it's not moving in a linear line. We're seeing some things get rolled back, we're seeing some things moving forward. And so just maybe say another word about how you deal with the rate of progress.

BRANDON WOLF:  I forget who told me this, so don't hold me to whose words these are, but I think about someone who had a conversation with Congressman John Lewis and asked, what do you think about the current fight for freedom? What do you think about the civil rights movements of our day and age?

This is before he passed, obviously. And he said, “I think y'all get too tired too quickly.” And that has always stuck with me because, sure, the temptation is to get tired. Absolutely. I'd like things to move quicker. But I also understand that what we're fighting for is worth more than my impatience, is worth more than my need for instant gratification.

And I sort of call back from movements of the past. I think about for instance, those who picked up bricks outside of Stonewall and threw them and were demanding spaces where police would stop harassing them. They probably couldn't have imagined a world where there were Pride festivals, hundreds if not thousands of Pride festivals around the country honoring what they did, but they were fighting for it anyway because they understood that that world was worth fighting for. Even if they couldn't conceptualize it yet, even if they didn't live to see it, they were going to fight for it anyway.

The same could be said about the fight against HIV and Aids. There was a time when people were just demanding a society that saw them, that understood their pain, their struggle, that would recognize that people were dying.

If you went back in time and you told those folks that there would be medication just decades later that would prevent people from contracting HIV in the first place, and by the way, because of government subsidies that that medication could be made available free of charge to people, they probably would have told you it's not possible.

That's not possible in just a few decades time. Nevertheless, they were fighting for it. They didn't really know what the future held, but they knew that the future was worth fighting for. And so, so sure, the temptation for me is to get tired when things don't move quickly enough, but I am just as quickly reminded that I am part of movements past that have always been fighting for something, understanding that even if they didn't live to see the fruits of their labor, that it was a future worth fighting for anyway.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Brandon Wolf talking about his activism. And today we're looking at his book, A Place for Us, a memoir he wrote about his experiences growing up. And also the Pulse nightclub shooting.

 

Visiting Pulse Again – 01:01:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Brandon, sometime after the attack, your dad wanted to come visit you. And he'd been mostly absent from your life at this point for a number of years, but he came out to Florida and, unexpectedly, he asked you to take him to Pulse.

Now, Pulse was closed down. It was all fenced off, but it was still there and he wanted to go see the actual place. And you can't remember your immediate reaction to that, but you did take him. And I wondered, do you think you could have been able to tell him no? It seems like if he asked, you would have just had to do it, regardless of the pain or whatever.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah. My dad is not really someone that you can tell no, generally. So when he says he wants to do something, it's going to happen. And I'm so glad you brought that up, because I'll give this away—I'm sorry. I know you're not supposed to have favorite children, but “Forgiveness” is my favorite chapter in the book. And my dad's story arc is my favorite journey in the book, I think.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you want to read from it?

BRANDON WOLF: I'd be happy to.

BLAIR HODGES: Go to 175. When you took him there, oh, his response to you is really, really moving. So yeah, let's read that.

BRANDON WOLF: “Son,” he said, his voice wavering, “I'm sorry you had to go through this, that your friends had to go through this. I know I said and did things when you were a kid that were hurtful. Truthfully, I was scared. Scared that the world wouldn't understand you. Scared that the world would hurt you. I realized now that I wasn't ever going to stop bad things from happening. I just ensured that when those bad things happened, you didn't feel like you could call me first.”

My understanding of forgiveness has evolved over time. Sitting with my father, the man I harbored the most resentment toward, I understood forgiveness to be not a dismissal of past harm, but an offer of grace and a chance to create something new. I used to hold on to toxic grudges because I wanted people to pay for what they had done and forgiving them felt like injustice. But in truth, offering them grace allowed me to lift from my shoulders the burden of what had been in order to leave space for what could be.

BLAIR HODGES: And you and your dad cried together, and you forgave your dad. He didn't say, “Will you forgive me?” But you said, I forgive you. And this is a beautiful moment of what should be a way to think about masculinity.

Like, you talked about your dad's background, you talked about his putting on this masculine strength, a sort of devil's advocate kind of guy. And it seems like the walls came down here for him.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah, I mean, it was my dad at his best. And it's not the first time I've seen him cry or be emotional. But it's rare that you get my dad in a real vulnerable, transparent moment of honesty. And especially because he's a guy who feels like he's had to be tough his whole life.

He's a guy who feels like he's always had to hold others up around him, who has always had to have thick skin and just go to work and lace up the boots and bring home food to put on the table. And for him to have just this moment of vulnerability where he could be emotional and vulnerable and let somebody else hold him up for a second, first of all, is beautiful. It was a beautiful moment for the two of us.

And again, his story is so important in this book and is so important to me because it's indicative of the stories that are happening around us all the time. There are people in our lives today that we're tempted to block on Facebook, that we're tempted to write off, never answer their phone calls again, maybe we disagree with them politically. But there's love there. And they're complicated human beings who are experiencing complicated emotions. And just like my dad, sometimes all it takes is a little bit of vulnerability and grace and you can discover the power of forgiveness.

 

Trash and Transcendence – 01:05:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: And for you, as we said, you're trying to discover the power of forgiveness for yourself as well. So you headed right into activism. You're a hard worker. You kind of get back into that earlier Brandon, you’re a real go-getter again. But you also recognize you do need to take some time for yourself. You take a trip just for you. And you went to Paris. And something happened for you in Paris that I've been thinking about ever since I read this part of the book. You found your first moment, since the shooting, of unfettered joy, just like guiltless, pure joy. And it didn't happen at the Eiffel Tower. It didn't happen eating at stuff, some, like, 5-star Michelin restaurant. It didn't happen dancing at a fun club, letting yourself feel again. This moment of joy happened on some random, quiet side street when you saw a stranger, an old woman, pick up a piece of litter and then tell you, “Bonjour.”

BRANDON WOLF:  It was one of those profound moments. There are several of them in the book that reshaped and shape who I am and my perspective on the world. But it was such a moment of innocence, of humanity, of kindness, of normalcy.

That first of all, the fact that I laughed then was surprising to me because, why would you laugh about that? It's kind of a dumb thing to laugh about. But as soon as I did, I realized it was because I was shirking the weight of so much of what I was carrying. That in this moment where someone did not know who I was, did not know what I had been through, a simple act of being a human being reminded me that I had permission to live, that I also had permission to be a human being and experience the world around me. And I really needed that.

BLAIR HODGES: I love it because that's like finding the transcendent in one of the most mundane things that can happen. Which is just encountering somebody on the street and saying hello.

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah. I can't imagine what the editing team thought when they got that story back. And they're like, this is the story you chose to put into here? You're not going to talk about, like, all of the cool people you've met or the places you've given speeches. You want to talk about a Parisian woman putting trash in a trash can. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: That's so good. I mean, I have to believe they recognized it for what it was, which is like, a brilliant moment of human connection, and that's what you needed.

 

Safe Spaces – 01:08:23

 

BLAIR HODGES: You also start the book and you end the book with some words about safe spaces. And this is a term that's kind of become a punchline to some people. The idea that, like, humans are becoming so fragile, they need little safe spaces. As though people should be ashamed of wanting to be safe or something. Or as though we can't, like, handle the real world if we also need safe spaces. But I wanted to close with your thoughts about that phrase and what it holds for you.

BRANDON WOLF: Well, I told you that changing the title was a grieving process. So the working title throughout the writing process was Safe Space. That was what I had originally intended the book to be called. And we got to this place where, as a publishing team the publisher said, “We just worry that we won't be able to sell the book if it is as charged a title as Safe Space.”

And listen, A Place for Us is perfect. The title is perfect. The cover is perfect. Everything about it is perfect. But what I wanted to get at with Safe Space or A Place for Us in the World is, again, this concept that I had been searching for a physical space to feel safe for a very long time. I didn't find it in my childhood home. I didn't find it in the halls of school. I didn't find it at college. I moved 3,000 miles away and I didn't discover it on the side of I-4 when I wrecked my car and was waiting for a cop. I didn't discover it outside Cinderella's castle at Magic Kingdom, where so many people find a safe space to experience.

It was never about those physical spaces. The moments that I discovered real safety, real belonging, the places that were meant for me in the world were in the arms of the people I love the most. It was in a conversation with Drew sitting on the couch. It was sitting in the car with my dad outside Pulse, hearing him be honest and vulnerable for the first time. It was wrapped in someone's arms outside a vigil who I'd never met before, promising me that she cared for me and loved me.

Those were my safe spaces. Those were the places of belonging that I'd been looking for all along. And my hope is that those who read the book, if they take away nothing else, take away this idea that we get to create those spaces, and that it's on every single one of us to create places of belonging for each other every single day.

It's never gonna be just waiting for us somewhere at a physical location. It's always going to be in the work we do to care for each other.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:10:57

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's beautiful.

Let's wrap things up with the segment called Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. And this is a moment when you can reflect back on the process of making this book and the afterlife of the book. Is there anything you regret about the book now that it's out? Something you would change? It could be a big deal or just something silly. What was the hardest part? The biggest challenge of writing the book. Or what surprised you most as you put this book together? And you don't have to speak to all three. You can pick and choose.

BRANDON WOLF: Sure. Well, I'll talk about regrets, because my only regret is that I'm a procrastinator and I did not do enough work early on to actually set myself up to not have to race at the end of writing. I think that's probably true for a lot of writers, but I did some work. I went to Mexico for a good portion of time. I got the book started. I wish I'd been maybe a little bit more regimented with my writing process when I got home. So maybe that's my biggest regret, is that I stressed myself out about in the last couple of months because I did not do enough.

Somebody asked me the other day, what is the hardest part, what was the hardest part of writing a book? And I said, writing a book. [laughter] I mean, everything else is fairly easy, like ideas. You got lots of thoughts about how you want other people to put a cover around it, all of that. But the hardest part about writing a book is actually sitting down and writing a book.

The challenge for me was the emotional process of, like, getting over my own imposter syndrome about writing a book, getting over my own fear of how people would perceive it, whether or not they would read it, whether it would only resonate with a particular audience. Like what would happen when I go to my first event and there's nobody there to pick up a copy of the book? All of those things were challenges for me as I went through the process. And I'm really, really grateful to everyone who helped me get over the finish line. It took a village.

BLAIR HODGES: Did you at least think of yourself as a good writer, though? Like, did you have that self-concept? Because you are a very talented writer. Did you at least have that?

BRANDON WOLF: Thank you. Yeah, I understood that I could write.

BLAIR HODGES: Ok, good!

BRANDON WOLF: I think I did. I hadn't quite thought whether or not I could write something long form like this or not, right? Get me with a hit tweet, or an essay, an op-ed. I got that.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, cool.

BRANDON WOLF: But once I sat down and I said 10,000 words, I was like, that's a lot. That's very long. I don't know if I can do this. But I can do it! I don't know if I'm ready to do it again, but I can do it. [laughter]

And honestly, the surprising part of all of it has been the way that it has resonated with so many different kinds of people. I became obsessed early on—I have let go of this—with the reviews of the book. I think you're not supposed to do that.

BLAIR HODGES: Writer beware!

BRANDON WOLF: Yeah. I was reading every Goodreads review, every Amazon review, the Good and the bad, and one of them really touched me. I'm gonna maybe get it wrong, but I'll get the gist of it for you. It was on Amazon and she said, “I don't normally read memoirs. They're just not that interesting to me. I think they're kind of boring. But I was drawn to yours. And perhaps it's because I'm the mother of a trans child that I'm struggling to understand.”

And those moments of, like, touching someone whose life is not like mine, whose lived experience is so foreign to me and how I've moved through the world, the fact that they found something in the book that resonated with them and maybe it changes the way they're able to build a relationship with their child, that has been the most surprising and beautiful part of writing a book.

BLAIR HODGES: I love that. And I love the book. It is a terrific memoir. It's A Place for Us by Brandon Wolf. He's a survivor again of the 2016 terror attack of Pulse nightclub. He's appeared on CNN, Oprah Daily, USA Today, Newsweek, and currently serves as the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign. You can check out more about his work and what he's up to online at brandonwolf.us.

All right, Brandon, do you want to say anything about The Dru Project before we go?

BRANDON WOLF: I would love to plug The Dru Project. So one of the emotions maybe that caught me by surprise after the tragedy was fear. And specifically fear of—I was really afraid that I would forget Drew. I was so afraid. I saved voicemails so I would remember what he sounded like. I was afraid that I would forget what he smelled like when he walked in the room. So I saved old T-shirts. And beyond that, I was really afraid people would never get to know him, that they would really never know the Drew that I knew and the way he changed my life. So we sat around a kitchen island a month or so after the shooting and talked about what it would be like to keep the best parts of him alive.

And it became clear to us, first of all, his Instagram handle was thedruproject. I used to make fun of him. I was like, why does your Instagram handle sound like a docuseries or something like that? [laughter] And he would say, my life is a project. I'm always growing and learning. So we co-opted his Instagram handle and created the Dru Project, which is an organization that supports queer young people, helps them form Gay/Straight Alliance student clubs in schools, and then gives them access to higher education. And what started as a passion project to keep the best parts of Drew alive really has become one of the things I’m most proud of in the eight years that has followed.

We've authored the country's most comprehensive guidebook to help support those Gay/Straight Alliance student clubs. We've given nearly $10,000 away in mini grants to those clubs for them to have supplies and resources, go on field trips, et cetera. And the pride and joy of it all. The Spirit of Drew Awards are the scholarships we give away once a year.

At the end of this year's cycle in June, we will have given away $230,000 worth of higher education funding to queer young people. And I'm very, very proud of that. I know somewhere Drew is beaming about the work we're doing.

BLAIR HODGES: That's terrific, Brandon. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us about the book and about your work. This has been great.

BRANDON WOLF: Anytime. Thanks for having me.

 

Outro – 01:17:00

 

Thanks for listening to Relationscapes. There's more to come soon. If this episode meant something to you, let me know! Leave a rating or review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Pass the episode along to a friend.

Mates of State provided our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the DPN. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and I'll see you again very soon.