"I wanted to re-envision it through the lens of what happened post-Pulse. Pulse is a specific event that targeted the Latinx community in Orlando. Our show is completely fictional, but the trajectory of our story is inspired by the realities of what that was like — not just that night, but the aftermath and the way that the community of Orlando rebuilt in the wake of that tragedy.
The queer community is as diverse as the entire world because we are everywhere in every culture. And there’s a lot of segregation within the queer community. After Pulse, it felt the first time that the community had really felt united. It happened in Orlando, but the ripple effect was felt across the world. I remember being in Toronto at Pride and not feeling safe going out to a bar. It was terrifying and I’m sure I’m not the only person who felt that way.
I went very early on in the process to Orlando and started meeting with the survivors. This was organized by the Orlando United Assistance Center, which organized roundtables and individual meetings with me to meet with whoever was interested from the survivors community, as well as the community leaders that rose up in response to what happened. I am so grateful that they trusted me to come into this world and try to understand and make any kind of sense of what happened. We got to see a public image of these people who were regular people going to a bar, but then became political. They became media figures. But only one side of that story really gets told.
What you’ll see in Queer as Folk is the honest truth of what it is like to go through something like that and how it’s not this saintly victim tragedy story. These are real people and they’re not victims. They survived a tragedy, and they are human beings whose lives were completely turned upside down after this. And this community all responded in completely different ways.
Of the people we talked to, anyone who was interested was invited to be involved as a consultant on the show and read scripts and gave feedback to make sure that we were telling the story authentically because it became clear that that was something that we had to do."
