“Y’all better quiet down! … You all tell me to go and hide my tail between my legs. I will no longer put up with this shit. I have been beaten, I have had my nose broken, I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job, I have lost my apartment, for gay liberation, and you all treat me this way? What the fuck’s wrong with you all? Think about that! The people [at STAR] are trying to do something for ALL of us, and not men and women that belong to a white middle-class white [sic] club!”

In 1973, Latina trans activist Sylvia Rivera told a crowd of Gay Pride celebrators to shut up. For years, she had helped build the Gay Liberation movement, even participating in the Stonewall riots. As Gay Liberation gained prominence and claimed victories, however, she began to realize that white, middle class gay people in her midst had no intention of fighting for the most vulnerable members of their communities: the gender non-conforming, the criminalized, the poor, and queers affected by racism.

Rivera’s fight against the de-radicalization and whitewashing of the LGBTQ movement is one we continue today. The recent massacre of 49 people who had come to attend Latino night at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida is the most acute, but not the only, example of the ways in which LGBTQ people— particularly trans people and people of color— remain vulnerable to anti-queer prejudice and violence. And like Stonewall before it, the Pulse shooting is being co-opted by people and institutions with social privilege.

Here in Buffalo, this was made clear at the vigil for the victims of the Pulse shooting that took place in Niagara Square on Monday, June 13. Instead of creating space for members of the local LGBTQ community to mourn and reflect on ongoing barriers to their safety, the vigil was a pageant, cynically used by state and local politicians outside of our community as a political rally. Public figures spoke at us, at the very moment when they should have been quieting down and listening.

Perhaps the clearest example of movement co-optation came during Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul’s speech, when she attempted to draw parallels between the Pulse shooting and the advent of the gay rights movement: A moment in which, she claimed, “gay people tried to gather in bars in New York City—Stonewall Inn, forty-seven years ago—and they were attacked and beaten in the streets for simply wanting to gather in a bar.” In order to make this analogy and paint the state as an ally to LGBTQ people, Hochul carefully omitted a key fact from her historical account: In the case of Stonewall, the perpetrators of violence were police officers—agents of the state, just like Hochul.

It should surprise no one that a group of public officials unwilling to acknowledge the historical complicity of the institutions they represent in anti-LGBTQ violence would also fail to offer any concrete strategies to prevent future instances of violence. Most of the politicians who spoke at the event chose, in order to buy community goodwill for the election season, to claim that they were already doing everything necessary to ensure that what happened in Orlando could never happen in Buffalo.

Many of these claims were almost comically inadequate. For instance, Mayor Byron Brown assured the public that his administration is hard at work, not preventing violence or promoting the value of LGBTQ life, but providing community members with active shooter seminars, so that they can evacuate properly when, presumably inevitably, someone shoots at them.

The most prominent theme running through the vigil was the nonsensical claim that because New York State was an early adopter of same-sex marriage, Buffalonians are somehow safe from anti-queer violence. Hochul went so far as to interrupt her remarks at the vigil in order to demand that the assembled mourners applaud Governor Andrew Cuomo for his role in legalizing same-sex marriage. Instead of offering the mourning community the reassurance of future steps to affirm the value of queer lives, politicians presented marriage equality legislation as the ultimate legacy of everything they could ever do to protect us and ensure our social equality.

But does marriage make our bodies impervious to bullets? Does it shield us from employment discrimination or poverty? By focusing on the two issues of marriage equality and a so-called “madman” shooting LGBTQ people in Florida, these officials failed to make the most important connection of all: that we live in a homophobic and transphobic culture whose institutions daily send myriad small toxic messages devaluing LGBTQ lives, and cultivating tragic explosions of hate such as the one we witnessed in Orlando.

If our officials were to make this connection, they would realize that there is still a lot to be done in order to dismantle heterosexist and cissexist cultural norms. Mayor Brown, for example, could actually uphold the laws prohibiting housing discrimination against LGBTQ Buffalonians, and stop misrepresenting information to the Human Rights Campaign’s Municipal Equality Index about his Commission on Citizens’ Rights ability to enforce rulings on antidiscrimination cases. Superintendent Kriner Cash could use his position to craft a district-wide gender identity policy that affirms the inherent worth of trans youth in Buffalo’s schools. Erie County Executive Marc Poloncarz could direct county funds toward programs that actually support LGBTQ life, such as affirming doctors at ECMC or an LGBTQ homeless shelter; and away from institutions that are sources of violence against LGBTQ people, such as the Erie County Holding Center. Attorney William Hochul could investigate Erie County Sheriff Timothy Howard— a man who has yet to answer for the many civil rights violations and deaths at Erie County Holding Center that have happened on his watch.

And Lieutenant Governor Hochul, instead of erasing the lives of the Pulse victims by declaring, “But that attack that occurred in Orlando is not an attack on the LGBT community. It was an attack on all of us,” could set an example for her fellow politicians by acknowledging what went unacknowledged by all the public officials: that the victims were not just LGBTQ, but primarily members of the Latinx community as well. When we minimize the specific identities of the victims through the rhetoric of national unity, the very victims of the massacre, their families, and their daily experience at the intersections of racism, anti-immigrant sentiments and policies, homophobia, transphobia, sexism and socio-economic discrimination, are rendered invisible. We know, for example, that at least three of the victims of the Pulse shooting were undocumented immigrants— denied access to basic rights by the same politicians who, as they claim to mourn lives violated, are either pushing for anti-LGBTQ and racist laws, or are reluctant to implement anti-discriminatory policies. In the face of such concerns, invocations of national unity which also advance sentiments of American exceptionalism, Islamophobia and indirectly racism, sound duplicitous and hollow.

These are just some of many ways in which public officials could disrupt the culture of violence that leads to massacres just like the one that happened in Orlando by actively affirming the value of LGBTQ life. There are others. But in order to learn what they are, public officials need to stop assuming that their responsibility to listen to the community ended when same-sex marriage became legal. They need, in other words, to quiet down.

In addition, organization that deem themselves gatekeepers for the LGBTQ community, such as the Pride Center and Stonewall Democrats, need to stop being dazzled by politicians giving us the time of day. They need to demand on our behalf that public officials listen, and when they plan events like this vigil, they need to make sure that it is first and foremost a place for queer people to process their feelings. Public officials, if they are worthy of their office, will listen.