West Hollywood residents rally to support Orlando shooting victims

West Hollywood>> When West Hollywood Mayor Lauren Meister heard about Sunday’s deadly shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, she felt compelled to act.

On Monday moing, Meister started organizing a vigil at Micky’s, an LGBT nightclub and bar on busy Santa Monica Boulevard. By the time the event started around 7 p.m., the popular bar was filled to capacity and throngs of people spilled out onto the boulevard, she said.

“The community really needed this and wanted it to be in West Hollywood,” Meister said Tuesday in her light Brooklyn accent. “People were not going to go downtown. Their home is West Hollywood. West Hollywood is the center of the LGBT community.”

With some 40 percent of its population reportedly identifying as LGBT, this small Los Angeles County city of about 36,000 was particularly hard hit by the attack that left 49 people dead and at least 53 others injured at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Florida.

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At the West Hollywood vigil, there was a moment of silence followed by a couple of speeches from dignitaries before the microphone was passed around. A donation jar was also on hand at Micky’s to help the victims of the mass shooting, Meister said.

“I think people really needed to get out of their homes, to show that they were not afraid, to feel the pain with others who were feeling the pain, and to be... in a club like Micky’s, where typically you can be who you are and have no fear,” Meister explained.

At the adult store Chi Chi LaRue’s next to Micky’s, a poster with the words Pulse and a memorial ribbon have been taped to the front entrance since Sunday.

The store, located in an area informally known as Boystown, also kept a memorial candle at its front window during Monday’s vigil, said Coco LaChine, a manager at the store who identifies as transgender.

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Because the Orlando shooting happened at a nightclub and bar, many people felt it was important that the vigil be held at a bar too, he said.

“We’re claiming our space,” LaChine, who sits on the city’s Transgender Advisory Board, said Tuesday. “For many LGBT people, there are not many safe spaces in many cities so the bar is a gathering place.”

LaChine said they put up the Pulse poster to make the point that all lives should be validated — and that no one should be singled out for being different, as some political parties tend to do.

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“These are real people,” LaChine said.

At Block Party, a clothing and novelty store that bills itself as “the gayest store on earth,” manager Jim Hieronymus said many people have come in to buy rainbow bracelets and nylon rainbow flags to pay tribute to the shooting victims. Two young men visiting from Orlando came into the store on Monday, saying they had lost eight of their friends in the devastating attack, he said.

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For 72-year-old Hieronymus, news of the shooting was “like a sucker punch to the gut.”

“These were young people having a good time,” said Hieronymus, a member of the LGBT community. “There were several couples in there. There was a mother who went to join her (child). It was like a family affair in that small community in Orlando.”

Hieronymus said all he could think of after the shooting was how “hate speech” in general from politicians such as Donald Trump “fans the flames of violence.”

For Don “Cowboy” Leach, a regular at the Gold Coast Bar down the street, his anger was directed at gunman Omar Mateen — whatever his motive was.

“I’m glad he’s dead,” said Leach, wearing a black Stetson hat and cowboy boots, at the bar on Tuesday. And if he had not been killed by a SWAT team, Leach said, “no trial... just take him out and shoot him.”