New Jersey LGBT Advocates: Orlando Shooting Won’t Stop Our Pride Celebration

You can’t stop a celebration of life and love with hate.

That’s the message that the organizers of a LGBT pride dance slated for Thursday in Essex County want to tell the public.

In light of a deadly mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the Maplewood-based LGBT advocacy nonprofit North Jersey Pride “considered all the options” about whether to go on with their annual pride dance on June 16 at the 4Sixty6 club in West Orange, Executive Director C.J. Prince said.

But ultimately, a consensus was formed… to go on with the event as planned, Prince said.

• See related article: LATEST: Officials Begin Identifying 50 Killed in Orlando Mass Shooting

“We are coordinating additional security resources from the West Orange police department as well as the club’s own security,” Prince told Patch. “There will be thorough bag checks at the entrance and security on site monitoring for the duration of the event.”

Prince provided a statement from North Jersey Pride about the tragic shooting and Thursday’s event:

“North Jersey Pride continues to mourn the devastating loss of 49 precious lives at the Pulse club in Orlando early Sunday morning. This act of hatred and violence - the worst mass shooting on U.S. soil, which left an additional 53 wounded - has left us, like so many others in our community, brokenhearted, outraged, helpless, hopeless.”

The statement continues:

“We are, however, going forward with our planned Pride dance on Thursday, June 16 at Club 4Sixty6 in West Orange. We know that the goal of those who hate us is to terrorize us, to force us into hiding, to stop us from dancing, to silence us with shame and fear. To that, we say: not now, not ever. This Thursday night, we will answer violence with kindness, shame with pride, and hate with love. We will show our solidarity and our refusal to cower in the face of terrorism by coming together as a community, celebrating all we have accomplished and reminding ourselves - and everyone else - that we will not be terrorized into silence and hiding. We will honor the memories of those lost by continuing to live out loud, proud of who we are and of who they were… North Jersey Pride will be donating 100% of the proceeds from this fundraiser to the families of the Orlando victims.”

The dance is being billed as a “celebration of love and of life, a show of solidarity, and a symbolic refusal to be silenced or go into hiding, as those who hate us would have us do.”

For more information about Thursday’s event in West Orange or to purchase tickets, click here.

• See related article: Orlando Shooting: One World Trade Center Displays Rainbow Colors In Mourning
• See related article: 'We Cannot Let Them Win': N.J. Leaders React To Orlando Shooting

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File Photo: Guillaume Paumier, Flickr Commons