The gunman who allegedly massacred 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was a familiar face there and had accounts on several gay dating apps, according to various news reports in the aftermath of the attack.
At least four regular customers told the Orlando Sentinel on Monday that they’d previously seen 29-year-old Omar Mateen at Pulse, the club where the shootings occurred.
“Sometimes he would go over in the corner and sit and drink by himself, and other times he would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent,” Ty Smith told the newspaper, saying he’d seen Mateen at Pulse at least a dozen times.
“We didn’t really talk to him a lot, but I remember him saying things about his dad at times,” Smith told the newspaper. “He told us he had a wife and child.”
Cord Cedeno and several other regular Pulse customers said in interviews with the Sentinel that Mateen had profiles on Grindr, Jack’d and Adam4Adam, popular chat sites for gay men.
A former classmate of Mateen’s from his 2006 police academy class said that he believed Mateen was gay, telling The Palm Beach Post that Mateen had once asked him out on a date.
“We went to a few gay bars with him, and I was not out at the time, so I declined his offer,” the former classmate, who chose to remain anonymous, said.
Mateen’s father Siddique Mateen, who has condemned his son’s attack, emphatically denied that his son might be gay in an interview with the Post.
“If he was gay, why would he do something like this?” he said.
A former co-worker at G4S security told Florida Today that Mateen often made homophobic, violent remarks.
The perpetrator was divorced from his first wife, Sitora Yusifuy, and had a young son with his second wife Noor Zahi Salman.
Mateen’s wife (I think?) reported he consumed steroids. Co-workers report he had phases of intense body building, professing he wanted to get “buff”. Everyone with a degree of intimate contact reported him as prone to emotional swings, fits of rage and anger, bouts of domestic violence. Combine all that with possible closeted homosexuality and the self loathing it must take to keep that secret and deny accepting your sexuality. Add to that a desire to be a policeman, only to settle for the lesser job of security guard. Failed marriage. Failed vocational desires. Failed ability to approach people you have an interest in being romantic and intimate with. Mateen was likely a toxic stew of several pathologies and psychological problems. Labeling his actions as domestic terrorism I guess is apt, but the genesis of his mayhem is probably far off what the politicians are currently claiming. I say they were far more personal than political.
This is what I suspected, and stated the other day. He was a severely messed up closet-case. Who, because he was a Muslim with a some-what-fucked in the head dad who was overtly a anti-gay bigot, had deep issues. This manifested itself in social awkwardness, violence towards his ex-wife, and susptible to using his religion as a channel for eliminationist desires and justification as his final excuse and cover story for his murderous rampage.
In short, homophobia kills (figuratively and literally).
I further posit that most of the pathology in middle-eastern culture stems from sexual repression via religion and it’s intersection with authoritarian rule.
That’s pretty much what I think based on what is reported thus far. This man seems to have taken so too many selfies – and pledged allegiance to Daesh, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah? That’s so awfully jumbled – nearly as clueless as Trump when he can’t tell the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah – it doesn’t seem he seriously cared about religious/political ideologies per se.
Anyone want to rethink the very conclusive conclusion yesterday that the RWNJ conspiracy nut they arrested in LA with assault weapons and a bucket of Tannerite couldn’t possibly have been planning on doing anything bad at the Gay Pride parade because he identified as bisexual now?
“If he was gay, why would he do something like this?”
lets start with internal conflicts, self loathing, unresolved mega-issues, being brought up & adhering to a culture that ultimately dictates that he violently hate himself …internal psychological civil war … and on and on