title:  Regulars At Pulse Nightclub Say Shooter Was There Often And Used Gay Dating App
text: Everyone has their own idea about what made Omar Mateen murder 50 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. He was supposedly driven to commit this sick and disgusting act after seeing two men kissing, and he d allegedly pledged allegiance to ISIS less than an hour before opening fire. There may be an even darker side to this, though, and it s one that permeates our entire society, whether we want to admit it or not.Witnesses say that Mateen had been a regular at Pulse for at least three years. Ty Smith and Chris Callen, who both performed in a drag show at Pulse, remember him being escorted from the club on numerous occasions, drunk off his gourd. When they saw his picture on TV in connection with the massacre, they were floored: Both professed shock at seeing his face on TV:  It s the same guy,  said Callen, who performs under the name Kristina McLaughlin.  He s been going to this bar for at least three years. They expressed incredulity at the story being told by Mateen s father in the wake of the shooting, that the gunman had once been scandalized during a visit to Miami by the sight of men kissing each other.They say Mateen saw plenty of men kiss   and far closer to home than Miami. That s bullcrap, right there. No offence. That s straight-up crap. He s been around us,  Smith said Monday in an interview at the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida. Some of those people did a little more than (kiss) outside the bar . He was partying with the people who supposedly drove him to do this?' Another regular at Pulse, Kevin West, told the Los Angeles Times that he and Mateen messaged off and on for a year on a gay chat app. MSNBC s Chris Hayes reported on this, too:Here s what reporting we know: several people on the record saying shooter was on several gay dating apps and messaged with them  Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 14, 2016 several regulars at Pulse who recognized the shooter. One saying he d been coming regularly for the past 3 years.  Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 14, 2016And a gay classmate of the shooter in the police academy who says he used to go to gay bars w the shooter, who asked him out once.  Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 14, 2016It s terrifyingly possible that Mateen himself was gay, which is a very tough and painful pill to swallow in light of what he did. The idea that a gay man could sink to such evil, and perpetrate such a horrific massacre against the very community to which he should have belonged hurts. However, he was Muslim and possibly an extreme Muslim. They have values that mirror the right-wing Christian values that allow for hatred of the LGBTQ community in what s supposedly the  freest nation in the world. Eric Biesterfeld, who is a gay man himself, explained this in a Facebook post:  [I]f you wondered why we need Gay Pride, it s because Pride is the opposite of shame. If this is true, Shame over an unchangeable, harmless facet of our humanity caused so much pain that he brought 49 lives down with his own.And yes, I blame those who would use religion to cause shame in another for this act. Louis Alemayehu, who wrote the post that Biesterfeld shared, said something similar:  Some of us suspected this. Internalized oppression is deadly in so many ways. We must be nurturing and accepting of one another from an early age. Self hatred and/or denial has implications way beyond the individual, the family, the community and ultimately the world. Our interconnections are profound and immediate. They have a point. Not all hateful, bigoted homophobes are straight, cisgender people who think being LGBTQ is so gross it has no place in our society. Some are LGBTQ people who have internalized that bigotry because we have so many hate-filled homophobes who have very loud, influential mouthpieces, and who are trying to enshrine oppression of the LGBTQ community in the laws that govern our land in the name of  religious freedom. Despite that, Chris Hayes tweeted that this doesn t excuse Mateen for anything, and he s bang-on right with that. Make no mistake, there is no calling Mateen anything but what he was   a murderer: None of this would exculpate the sheer hatred, rage and evil of this murderer. Or even *explain* it in any sense. But it complicates  Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 14, 2016But Hayes is right that it does complicate this, because now it s a tragedy with its roots in a societal ill, and that ill is this vile idea that the LGBTQ community is wrong and dirty, that their very identities are wrong and disgusting, and that the only true way to practice a religion is to force it on others through oppression, or worse, violence.There s no way to know what was really going on in Mateen s head. His hate, whatever drove it, was so evident that it made his co-workers uncomfortable:One of Mateen s ex-coworkers at G4S security told me he complained about the man s frequent slurs attacking gays and blacks.  David Ovalle (@DavidOvalle305) June 12, 2016  He would never have more than 3 or 4 sentences without using the word n****r or queer or dike. It was always about violence.  he told me.  David Ovalle (@DavidOvalle305) June 12, 2016Mateen also dalliances at PGA Village neighborhood.  All he wanted to do was cheat on his wife. He had very little respect for women.  David Ovalle (@DavidOvalle305) June 12, 2016Whether he was driven exclusively by an extreme religious ideology that made him a bigot consumed with hate, or he was filled a self-loathing that was so powerful, and so all-consuming that it came out in a horribly violent pyroclastic eruption, the tragic result is the same.Right-wing Christians need to look in the mirror if they want to discover all the possible causes of this massacre, because when it comes to the LGBTQ community, their values are identical the values of Islam. They re just as guilty as Mateen for all those senseless deaths.Featured image via screen capture