Dancing With Defiance in Orlando, but Gay Clubs and Bars Feel ‘Eerie’

[steve2470]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/us/dancing-with-defiance-in-orlando-but-gay-clubs-and-bars-feel-eerie.html?_r=0

ORLANDO, Fla. — They came for the flashing neon lights, hip-swiveling tunes, cocktails and glitzy drag queens. Some arrived with a sense of purpose and defiance, to show that everything is going to be all right, to remember the loved ones they lost. Others just wanted to move on.

This city of fun and fantasy is gingerly plodding back into its night life scene this weekend, the first since 49 people were killed on Latin night at Pulse a week ago. The mass shooting rocked the gay and Latino communities here, and has left the entire city grappling with the odd emotion of doing the exact thing that the victims were doing before the carnage began in the early hours of last Sunday.

But they did not come in their usual numbers, and many of those who did turned out with a newfound wariness. Where are the emergency exits? Who is that coming through the door? What is in that backpack?

“Eerie,” Jonathan Arroyo said Friday night as neon lights bounced off his face next to the white banquettes at Southern Nights, a popular gay club.

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