A visit to the bathroom on June 12, 2016, changed Brandon J. Wolf’s life forever. That’s because he was at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people – including his best friend Drew Leinonen and Leinonen’s boyfriend Juan Guerrero – were killed.
“For some reason, it was my surroundings in the bathroom that are so vivid to me,” Wolf says over a recent Zoom call from Orlando to discuss his new memoir, “A Place for Us” (Little A, 222 pp., out now). “And I think that’s because when you go from everything’s normal to everything is a traumatic, chaotic mess, that is what sticks with you. That moment that everything shifts, the moment the adrenaline floods your body, the moment you realize what’s happening.”
Wolf, now an activist, chatted with USA TODAY about the book, including all things grief, friendship, trauma and LGBTQ+ life.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Question: How are you doing right now with your grief? I know that with losses, it can ebb and flow.
Answer: Today is a great day, and most days are great days. But there are hard ones too, especially when we come to anniversary time every June 12, it is really difficult to continue to carry the weight of that grief. But again, I felt like being honest about that, being vulnerable about that in this journey was really important, especially to give voice to people who are perhaps at the beginning of a grief journey and are not sure where it will take them.
You talked about how when you went to college you morphed into somebody you didn’t really like because you started to bully somebody at school. I thought it was interesting that there’s almost a parallel there because that’s who you became, but then you met Drew, who was this very inclusive person.
Yes, it was intentional. And I think the storyline was really important to me, because I didn’t want to absolve myself for the role that I played in my own journey. There are points in which I’ve done things that I’m not proud of, and the path that I was on shaped me and morphed me into a person that I didn’t like or didn’t recognize. And I wanted to be honest about that, too. Because a lot of times, that’s how insecurity and internalized homophobia and other things manifests in the way we treat other people. And again, I wanted this book to be a really honest, vulnerable look at what it feels like to be a queer person of color in this country and to navigate those things as a young person.
Your relationship with Drew was so special. It started off so interesting, the way a lot of queer friendships do: A failed date becomes a friend. You also got really jealous of him, but you got through it because there was so much love there. He became a friend you could be around and say nothing with all the time. Are there similar friendships that you have now where you feel like you can be that vulnerable?
I still have chosen family to this day, and what’s interesting is many of them are connected to me through Drew, whether that was from before Pulse or even after, in the wake of the tragedy, we had a group that again, came together, and we didn’t know each other before, but we have since formed really close bonds. I would consider them chosen family. They came to my house for Thanksgiving last year. And we spent a lot of time saying nothing. Those are the most beautiful friendships for me, as an inherently introverted person, I often like to not say anything, and just (sit) in silence. So yeah, I do have really beautiful friendships today. But they’re not Drew. And that is one thing that I’ve learned to grow around over the last seven years is that they’re never going to be Drew. And that’s OK.
Your first night at Pulse was really magical. Just that feeling of dancing under a disco ball. I know it. It’s indescribable. It’s very special. Can you dance like that now in the same way? Has it taken time? What is that like?
It didn’t take me any time at all. Everybody goes on their own grief journey, their own recovery and healing journey. I know a lot of people, probably to this day, can’t go into a space like that again. But for me, being in that space has always been about defiance. It’s always been about resistance and authenticity that is courageous and unapologetic. After the shooting, there was a benefit night at another club. I went to the club a day or two later, and it was not because, I desperately needed to be at the club on a Monday or Tuesday night. But it was because being in that space was an act of defiance. That one man filled with hate, armed with an assault rifle, can’t steal that joy from me, can’t steal that feeling of euphoria, standing in the middle of a dance floor, where no one cares who you are, or (who) you love, you can just be yourself. So, again, to this day, those moments continue to be acts of defiance for me, they’re acts of protest. And I love nothing more than a moment underneath the disco ball, where you can just let go and be free.
Were you surprised having a cathartic conversation with your dad after Pulse? It was some unexpected closure. I wanted it to happen, but I wasn’t sure we were going to get it.
The conversation surprised me at the time, because my dad is so reserved. He is so closed off. He’s such a tough, hardened guy who’s been through a lot in his life. Everybody has that person in their life, the walls are high and it’s really hard to cut through. And when they let them down for a moment, and you can peer in and see the soul underneath, it is always refreshing and inspiring and surprising. And the fact that he did it in that moment, which was really vulnerable there at Pulse. And it was centered around the people that I loved the most in the world, it was so meaningful to me.
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One detail that stuck out to me that I feel like probably nobody really thinks about is that your credit card was still open at the bar and you had to go get it.
Part of the reason that I added some of those things in there is because when you look at a tragedy on TV, you think of it as larger than life. (It’s) this catastrophic event that has upended people’s lives … through the lens of Rachel Maddow, and Anderson Cooper, or whoever else you get your news from. You see it through the lens of their storytelling, but you don’t think about the mundane details that have been impacted by this particular event.
A dazzling, seemingly dimension-crossing dream that you had with Juan and Drew was so powerful. I have chills even thinking about it. Have you had dreams like that since?
The dream sequence is my favorite story in the book. It’s overwhelming. The emotion that I experienced having that dream was overwhelming. I’ve not had one since. I had maybe one before that.
If that’s the last one I ever have, it was perfect exactly as it was. It was exactly what I needed. It was what I needed to hear. There was so much warmth and beauty. The best way I can describe the sensation of having this dream with Drew and Juan was like I had been covered in honey. It was warm and enveloping and all of that it was everything that I needed and enough to sustain me for the rest of my life. If I never have one, I’ll be happy I had that one.
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