Part memoir, part self-processing, and part call to action, and written by a survivor of the tragic Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, A Place for Us tells the story of Brandon Wolf’s journey as a young, queer, Black man in the United States.
Wolf begins his story as a child growing up in Portland, Oregon, and facing the early death of his mother due to cancer. “To her, I was perfect. With her, I was safe,” he writes. “And in an instant that had gone.”
A Place for Us: A Memoir, by Brandon J. Wolf, Little A, 222 pages. Publication date: July 1, 2023.
School, he says, was never a safe place. “To be the queer, mixed kid meant living in perpetual fear of a flying fist or a hurled slur,” he remembers. But then he and a fellow student discovered the Myspace page of a white supremacist group at their high school. The group had a “hit list” that “read like a who’s who of the traditionally excluded.” Wolf recalls, “I had known that my carefully constructed persona as a ‘model minority’ was tenuous (at best), but I earnestly believed that I had paid all the right dues to inoculate me from this kind of hatred.” But in the face of racism and homophobia, no one was immune.
The first part of the book goes on to chronicle Wolf’s youth until everything changes on what he calls “the last normal day.”
“In many ways, Pulse embodied the sense of community I had discovered after moving to Orlando,” he writes. “It was one of the first places where I held hands with someone I had a crush on without glancing over my shoulder first . . . . Pulse was a place where I could be all of myself.” That night, he and a group of friends had gone to the club to hang out. “The world outside felt more contentious than at any time I could remember. Fueled by incendiary rhetoric, Donald Trump’s inconceivable rise in the Republican Party felt like it was tugging at the seams of humanity.”
Those seams were about to burst. At 2:00 a.m. on June 12, 2016, a twenty-nine-year-old gunman killed forty-nine people and wounded fifty-three others in what was at the time the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. “It was supposed to be a safe space for us,” Wolf muses. Some of his closest friends were killed that day. It changed his life forever.
“I didn’t set out to write a book out of some bloated sense of ego or as a vanity project,” Wolf explains. “I made the decision to begin chronicling my experiences in the summer of 2020 [after the police killing of George Floyd].” He adds, “It didn’t take long for me to see how intertwined all of our struggles are. Justice is justice. And the denial of justice for any one group of people erodes justice for all people.”
The book highlights Wolf’s transformation from survivor to activist, including his countless media interviews, where he was asked to tell the story of that night again and again. And his connection to, and solidarity with, the survivors of so many mass shootings since that day, including the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, just about twenty months and two hundred miles away from that tragic night at Pulse.
Wolf sees the interconnections, reflecting, “Attacks on the rights of transgender people to access health care are tied to assaults on abortion rights, as both are grounded in a fight for sexual autonomy, a tug-of-war with the government over control of our own bodies. The fight for immigrant rights is an LGBTQ+ fight, too, because it is a collective demand for human-centered politics that treat people with a basic level of decency. And the work of dismantling systemic racism is ours as well. The queer community includes people of color. And when the state is empowered to defend white supremacy, violently and brutally, all of our lives are on the line.”
The book is both a healing process for Wolf, and also a lesson for readers about how to grow into a better society. As Wolf tells us in the book’s afterword, “I don’t have the answers, but that’s the point. No one has written a foolproof road map for how to get through life’s pitfalls . . . . Sharing our painful learning is not about proclaiming expertise but about vulnerably flashing a few of the scars that make us human, and inviting others to do the same.”