Earlier in the day, Oslo Pride was like a busy garden on its way from late spring to high summer. Vibrating bodies met on the open-air dance floor, and contented little conversations murmured around the edges. I remember watching a dancer covered in sequins shoot little rays of light back to the sun, drift across the dance floor, glide between a graciously parting crowd, arrive upon a nearby lawn, and come to rest in the lap of their companion, eyes somehow closed the whole way.
That night, on June 25, 2022, a gunman opened fire outside a gay bar not far from Pride Park.
He killed two and injured 21.
I was on my way back to the hotel. It was so loud. At first, you think, surely it must be something else. I was lucky not to have been too close. Still, I ran after seeing everyone else run. I managed to hide inside another bar and then saw the shooter tackled out on the street not ten feet away.
For two years, I've come back to this story.
I've thought about that day and night one more time. All I could think of that day for a while was about the night that followed. It was months before I remembered, first of all, that Pride in Oslo was beautiful. If the night is the first side of this coin, surely the day must be the other.
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Earlier that day, my family came with me to the festival at Pride Park. I hadn't expected that. We were on a long-awaited trip from the States, staying for a few nights at a nearby hotel. Having decided to go myself, I encouraged them to come, fully expecting them to decline politely. But they came, and I felt my happy little victory on the short, sunny walk from our hotel to Pride Park.
My anxiety always shows up first in the gut. Rising from there, it gains consciousness. It wasn't until we arrived at the threshold of Pride, the bacchanal now in full view, that my sense of surprise toppled suddenly into nervousness. Eons had passed since I came out to my family, but bringing them face-to-face with all this queerness suddenly felt like a second coming out.
They were relative outsiders to the queer community. But the gulf between my straight family and queer community was so immense only in my mind.
If my mom, sister, and brother felt the same nervousness I did, they didn't show it. Over a series of little moments, the knot in my gut slowly dissolved. My mom wanted a picture with me, my sister laughing with a stranger in line, and the smiles on our faces. We danced a bit and explored all the sections, scenes, and meandering corners, and it simply felt like joy.
That evening, my mom and sister returned to our hotel; my brother stayed out later with me. As the sun lowered, my brother and I savored the hours into an uncannily long June twilight. That far north, it lasts past midnight. Several corners of the park thumped with increasingly loud music. The heat of the day kept on.
There was a colorfully lit side stage with a banner that read "Bears Scene" in Norwegian. Up there was a performer rapping in a harness. His brow sweated, and his arms flexed. He was very hot under the lights, and the crowd loved it. It was what I would expect at Pride, but my older brother may never have seen someone quite like this person before. Someone as macho as this performer but who was still very queer. His genuine manliness did not come from trying to fit himself into someone else’s box of manhood but from his queer freedom of self-creation.
My family's novel perspective renewed my experience. Old memories mixed uneasily with new encounters.
Being with my brother on that day was more authentically substantive than when we were young. Like many, we were told to act like men when we were boys. Trying to be ‘real’ men left our authentic selves suppressed because it confined our capacity for self-creation. It meant that we weren’t free. When my brother said his goodbyes and returned to the hotel, I continued alone into the night.
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It still stuns me that the shooter could see this beautiful, vital, queer celebration and only respond with violence.
If one side of this coin knew what life together is for, the other side only wanted to wipe that knowledge away. I turn the coin over in my hand again and again. When I get lost in that terrible moment, I remember the sun, the revelers, their shimmering outfits, and the smiles on my family's faces.
I remind myself that this kinship could always be how we feel in a perfect world. We could relate freely to ourselves and relate with others in a way that frees them, too. We need one another this way.
In attacking these bonds, in trying to scare us out of queer spaces, the shooter attempted to make our lives mean less. Everything people do that undermines free human kinship tries to make our lives mean less.
Our task is to make one another's lives mean more.
Braden Crooks is a writer, designer and leader within the space of community and human development. He is a founding partner at Designing the We, a for-purpose design studio supporting community, social and economic development. He is also Board Chair of The New York State Sustainable Business Council, representing over 3,000 businesses championing an equitable and sustainable economy in New York State. Braden graduated from the innovative program MS Design and Urban Ecologies at Parsons.
