Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero have been in love.
“They have been that obnoxious couple that, once they’re in a room filled with 100 individuals, it’s like they don’t even know anyone else exists,” stated Brandon Wolf, nationwide press secretary for the Human Rights Marketing campaign — and Drew’s finest buddy.
“We have been the three musketeers who traveled collectively, we cherished New 12 months’s Eve, twirling below a disco ball, making guarantees to one another.”
It was the type of life that Wolf by no means thought that folks like him — Black, homosexual, from a rural Oregon city — might expertise.
And as soon as he had it, it was a life and a love Wolf thought he would expertise without end, together with his finest buddy and his soon-to-be-fiancé. It felt like a life out of a storybook.
Then on June 12, 2016, a person opened hearth at Pulse nightclub in Orlando and murdered 49 individuals. Virtually the entire victims have been LGBTQ+ individuals of colour.
Wolf, who was washing his arms within the lavatory when the capturing started, survived. Drew and Juan, who had been in one another’s arms within the membership, have been killed.
That’s when Wolf’s storybook life become a really completely different type of story — however one he knew he needed to inform.
“I began sharing my story as a result of I needed Drew and Juan to matter,” Wolf stated to a silent, intent crowd at PR Every day’s Media Relations Convention in Washington, D.C. “Not simply due to how they died, however due to how they lived.”
As he started relating that story in speeches and thru his bestselling e-book, “A Place for Us,” he discovered that it resonated, even with individuals who didn’t seem like him or love like him.
“We’re in a pivotal second that calls for we inform daring, genuine tales, that we step out and do the brave factor,” Wolf stated. “We’ve AI algorithms which are forcing us into social media ecosystems that merely inform us, over and over, we’re the neatest individual on earth and anybody who disagrees with us is improper. We’ve mistrust in conventional media establishments at sky-high ranges, feeding disinformation behind the epidemic of loneliness, that’s driving individuals to political ruptures.”
It’s, Wolf stated, by telling tales and sharing our genuine selves that we will even start to heal the deep fissures between us — not solely as a nation and a worldwide neighborhood, however as human beings.
“We as professionals have a duty to assist others perceive that everybody has a narrative to inform, that everybody has worth that they’re bringing to the desk,” Wolf stated. “We’ve a duty to inform individuals’s tales holistically.”
Carrying Drew’s casket at his funeral, Wolf made a vow to his finest buddy that he would construct a world his finest buddy can be happy with. A world the place everybody’s life, and everybody’s story, issues.
And as a PR skilled himself, Wolf understands the distinctive position the occupation has in creating that world. It’s by the facility of storytelling that we will construct empathy as an alternative of hatred, connection as an alternative of isolation, understanding as an alternative of worry.
“The simple factor to do in society at the moment is to provide in to worry and isolation and sensationalism,” Wolf stated. “It’s to inform the identical previous regurgitated tales over and over, to pigeonhole individuals into their buckets. The brave factor to do is to inform the comeback story. The brave factor to do is to inform the entire story. The brave factor to do is to drag at individuals’s pure need for resilience and hope and optimism.”
Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Every day. Comply with her on X or LinkedIn.
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