Pitting an Attention Whore (Specifically, Re: Orlando)

The BBQ Pit
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I was tempted to make this a mini-rant, but frankly, given the context and scope, I’ll risk derision and mocking for making it a new thread. If it dies quickly, that’s fine, but that’s how pissed I am.

Seriously? 49+ innocent people died, and you make a Facebook post about how deeply you were affected by the shooting because it "directly involves [you]?"Bonus points for talking about how your boyfriend understood how pained you were because of your direct connection to being a gay man and how you feel like it puts a target on your back for violence. You, by your own admission, have no ties to FL at all, much less Orlando nightlife.

First off, you’re half-way across the country, so unless you know someone who was at Pulse on Sunday morning, no, it didn’t.

Secondly, the overwhelming majority of your Facebook friends are either gay or GLBTA-friendly, so you’re no more unique of a snowflake than the majority of your audience.

Third, as someone who has two friends in Orlando, and who sent mass texts on Sunday morning to let all of us know that, yes, they were okay (one wasn’t at the club at all, and another went but left way before 2 am), fuck you for trying to find a way to make yourself the center of attention during all of this. As of the text messages I received yesterday morning, one friend hadn’t heard from 4 of their friends who may or may not have been at the club at the time of the shooting. But, I’m glad to know that you, in a completely different time zone, are okay.

But, I’m glad that you are going to get all the Facebook “likes” and whatever other validation you need, as someone who was thousands of miles away from the actual tragedy.

It’s not all about the hundreds of people’s lives shattered by this past weekend’s events, it’s about you, as your post and your comments in other people’s calls to action acknowledgements about the tragedy, etc. have stated. I’m glad we made that clear.

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Be the first of your friends to like this.

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As a grandchild of cousins of Holocaust survivors (probably), I feel qualified to comment on this issue…

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Seriously, thank you both.

If it was just a whole “I’m gonna vent and say how I think things are fucked up” or whatnot, I’d totally be on-board.

But, it’s when he tried to tie things back to how it affected him personally, that I was completely over it.

Fuck that narcissism and fuck how you completely downgrade a horrible tragedy because you want to try and refocus attention on you because Heaven forbid you don’t get to be in the spotlight 24/7.

Sorry, this probably seems fairly irrational, but it’s the moment where a person wants to say, “This is narcissism at its most genuine.”

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Narcissistic attention whore here.

How fucking dare you dictate how I should be feeling right now? Yes, there’s a target on my back. I’ve been to countless gay bars and clubs over the last five decades, and when I think of the victims of Orlando, I can’t help feeling “That could have been me.” Or my husband. Or any one of my friends. Does that make me a “special snowflake”?

I know hundreds of LGBT people, and every one of us has been dealing with intense anger, depression, anxiety and fear. No attempt to distance ourselves from the event even comes close to helping. And many people don’t have anyone close to help them through this, so they must rely on social media to help establish an equilibrium. How dare you attack them for the only way they can deal with this horrible situation. We all cope in our own ways, and for some, that’s the only way they have.

For us, this massace was personal, much more than you apparently realize. Especially for those of us who’ve been survivors of anti-LGBT violence, those nightmares never truly leave. There’s no way to remove the target from our backs. With each new atrocity it all comes back to haunt us, and we have to relive the nightmare. How do you propose we deal with these feelings, by just going on with our lives as if nothing has happened? Although I’m not a social media person, I recognize that many people have a need to vent their feelings at a time like this. How dare you take that away from them?

I know what it’s like to be at ground zero, having been a gay man in NYC during the height of the AIDS crisis. I lost almost everyone I had known, friends and lovers alike. I held the dying, emptied bedpans, marched with ACT-UP, and lived with that nightmare 24/7. I was in a war zone, and was surrounded by hundreds of corpses. Orlando has brought all that back to me.

We will get through this, as we’ve survived so much before. But attitudes like yours aren’t helping.

So I’m sorry if you find my feelings offensive. I hope I haven’t ruined your day, you fucking narcissistic attention whore.

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OP: The point isn’t the particular shooting event, it’s the homophobia it expresses, and the attendant sadness, anger, and fear. THAT the majority of gay people have experience with.

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Yeah, and as a gay man, I understand that. I marched and attended a vigil on Sunday. I did my usual “Sunday Funday” in our “gayborhood,” fully aware that there might be someone who was “inspired” by the previous night / morning’s events and wanted to be a copycat. What pisses me off is that this person, amid a flood of people expressing their dismay, thoughts, prayers, etc., found a way to make it specifically about him, but was preaching to a choir.

This is a person who is a self-proclaimed asshole, who makes a point to alienate, berate, belittle people, but expects a pass because “that’s just who I am.” And yet, when he made reservations for 30+ people for his birthday brunch, got really upset when only 4 people showed up because frankly, people are sick and tired of his narcissistic ways.

It’s the fact that he’s speaking to the choir, but still trying to make it all about himself. As if his boyfriend, and the majority of his social media contact could never comprehend the fear that a place thought to be a safe space (as much as I hate that term) could be invaded, and how he’s a special-fucking-snowflake, and how it’s his world, and the rest of us just live in it.

He’s more than entitled to express his dismay, worries, etc., about what happened. It’s fucking horrifying. It’s when you tell everyone else, “Don’t focus on your own feelings, think about how this affects me!” that I find it appalling and extremely telling of your character.

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I was at a vigil the other night where the first speaker was a local minister who made it all about herself and the fear she lives in and yoaudfou aonfoad lajfdoaj aodijf ang. There were also a couple of hipsters there who vaped and took selfies of themselves looking distraught.

But, the self absorbed you will have with you always.

And the “that’s just how I am” personality- I’ve known several- needs to be unfriended on Facebook and in the Waking. There’s no fixing them.

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Brilliant!! A spot-on parody of the desperate attention whoring skewered by the OP. You should write for The Onion.

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I think your data transmission had some signal degradation there at the end. Or it came out in Thai.

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Or maybe Sampiro was just depicting how the speaker’s self-absorbed remarks got tuned out as worthless babble.

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“Attention whore”? “Spotlight 24/7”? Gee, I wonder if this dude might be gay?!

:: D&R ::

:: D&R ::
:: d&r ::

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I was in NYC during 9/11. I had friends in the towers that morning (they all got out). I had to listen to shitheads from bumblefuck shitsylvania talk about how horribly it affected them and how scared they were that terrorists might target them next because there is a missile silo less than 50 miles down the road. Yes, the attack on the twin towers was a symbolic attack on all of America but the reactions and statements of some people (that continues to this day) just makes me want to puke.

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If irony was your goal, congratulations, you succeeded admirably.

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It could be worse, my facebook feed is full of right wingers who only care about mass shootings because they think it’ll lead to gun control and prevent them from buying an assault rifle. The attention whores and validation flakes are less annoying by comparison.

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Really? Because, really, I haven’t been feeling much of any of that, and neither have most of the people I know. So I don’t think it’s some sort of universal thing either. Mostly, I just wish the news would stop talking about it.