(Photo by Tomás Diniz Santos)
It’s been five years since Barbara Poma, owner of Pulse, got the call that would let her know a gunman entered her nightclub on June 12 around 2 a.m. and opened fire on an unsuspecting crowd, killing 49 people. Since that moment, the lives of the victims’ families, the survivors and the community have been forever changed.
In the months to follow, Poma established the onePULSE Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated, among other projects, to creating a memorial site at Pulse. As we approach the five-year mark of one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, Poma sat down with Watermark to discuss Pulse, the foundation and her life over the last five years.
WATERMARK: We are a few weeks away from the five-year mark of the Pulse shooting. How are you feeling right now?
Barbara Poma: I think you subconsciously just know it’s coming. I think your body just knows it’s coming. I don’t know when that starts, if it’s the middle of May, but the closer you get to June you start to feel it. I don’t know if it’s the way you describe it, to wrap your brain around. I’d just say it’s coming and do your best to work through it really, every day.
With now five years worth of distance between you and the shooting, looking back what stands out the most to you from that night?
I don’t know if it’s any one thing. I can’t say it’s just the initial phone call. I wasn’t in the country, so when I turned on CNN I could see it on TV. It still plays like a reel. It’s not any one thing that I can still play literally from the phone call all the way through when I landed here.
What was the first thing you did when you landed, were you able to go to Pulse?
I wasn’t allowed to go to Pulse. I guess no one was allowed there that morning. Everything was barricaded off so I went straight home.
What stands out to you from the days and weeks after?
It was very foggy and I couldn’t tell you what day it was. I couldn’t tell you if one day had passed or two weeks had passed because it wasn’t even until like two years later that I thought the vigils we went to were like a week later. It was a day later and I had no idea. It had only been 24 hours. You have no real concept of time when you’re in that kind of space but I mean, I remember both the vigils, the one at the Dr. Phillips Center for Performing Arts and the one at the amphitheater.
I do remember all the buildings being turned in rainbow colors. I remember seeing some billboards. I remember even my staff showing me pictures from around the world and I couldn’t wrap my brain around how big it was and how global it was.
I think it is an understatement to say your life has dramatically changed in the last five years, but you went from owning Pulse and other businesses in Orlando to operating a multi-million dollar nonprofit that is building a museum, a memorial and more. In what other ways have you changed from that person you were before June 12, 2016?
Well, there are different facets to that answer. On the business side, my husband and I ran multi businesses and restaurants here in Orlando for 20 years before Pulse happened and so we have built buildings and we have done that … In my work life the schedule is completely different for me. I’m grateful that I’m not raising small babies now like I was raising small babies then. I don’t have to deal with drop-off and pick-up and homework. It’s seven days a week. It’s at least 12 hours a day. The work hasn’t stopped whether you’re talking about not just the design and construction of a massive brick-and-mortar project but you’re also talking about developing education programs, developing and funding legacy scholarships.
There’s been lots of work here at the foundation but there’s also a lot of work out there in the community and in the world to do which is talking about what we’re doing and making those trips and learning the process. Running a nonprofit is different in some ways but not others. Everyone’s like “a nonprofit is completely different.” I’m like, “Nope, still money in and money out.” That’s how that works and so I think we made the transition pretty well.
How often do you visit Pulse?
That varies. At the very beginning, it was daily. The first few years it was daily. On Saturdays and Sundays, different times a day, sometimes a couple of times a day. Since then, I think it’s just where I am in my journey that I tend to go a little less because for some reason now when I go there I’m impacted more. When I was going there before I found comfort in being there and now when I go there it’s harder.
Why is it harder?
I don’t know, I just think it’s where you are on your journey. I think for some people it’s too hard to be there in the beginning but for me, I used to have to go there and touch the walls.
Before June 12, did you visit Pulse often? Were you always in and out as far as the day-to-day running?
For the day-to-day running, I was there all the time … I was the person managing the staff during the day, the facility, deposits, payroll, invoices and so I did all the day work. I’d be at that building all the time. My kids grew up in there because I would take them there with me during the day. In the evening time, I was a mom, but I was always there for special events, especially during Gay Days or special holidays or events like that. In the nighttime, I would probably say, once a month depending on what was happening.
You mentioned you’re a mom. I don’t know how young your kids were when Pulse happened, but you had so much on your plate and so much to deal with. How did you process that with your family?
When I opened Pulse I had a one-year-old and a five-year-old but when the shooting happened I had a freshman in high school and a freshman in college and we have an older daughter who actually went to Pulse because she was old enough to. The other ones weren’t old enough but they grew up inside the building. When I look back, one of my biggest regrets is not realizing what they were going through and as a mother, your first thing is to protect your children but I was out there worried about my Pulse staff. I’m taking care of them and worrying about what was happening out there and so for some reason I compartmentalized the fact that they weren’t affected. “My husband, oh, he’s not affected. My kids, they’re not affected,” but what I realized is that they were highly affected.
Plus, I was plucked out of their lives and went from driving them to school to not making them breakfast and not making their dinner so the four years my son was in high school, I really missed all of that. He was my only child that didn’t have that mom who dropped him off and picked him up and did every event and you know, made fun banners and lunches. It really affected us at home and it really affected them because my kids knew the Pulse staff. My staff knew them.
My daughter had written an essay that I didn’t even know about that she published about how “We used to play hide and seek in there. We used to make our own little cherry Shirley Temple’s.” When mom had meetings and they were running around playing hide and seek and how years later people were hiding for their lives and you just don’t realize what they endured.
Do you find yourself, when you get lost in thought, falling back into your old routine and heading to Pulse?
The first couple years I used to because from where I lived to where my office is … I had a route. I’d hit each restaurant, hit Pulse, then stop at a certain restaurant. There were lots of times in the first couple of years where I’d just find myself sitting in parking lots. I drive up and go, “Oh no, I don’t do this anymore.”
When you do go to Pulse, with it being an open memorial, people are there all the time now. Do you stop and talk to them and do you find it is mostly local people there or people coming into Orlando?
It’s a clear mix of both but I do meet people there every single time I’m there. I’ve met people who have said, you know, “I’m going to a wedding in Daytona, but I flew into Orlando just so I could stop here first and I’m driving to Daytona.” I’ve met people who came there before they checked into their hotels at the theme parks with their families. I have also met survivors, first responders and families there who are just visiting and locals who have come for the first time because they haven’t been able to come in the last four years. It runs the gamut of people who are visiting Orlando and still make a point to come here as well as our Orlando-affected community.
COVID-19 has impacted everything. What kind of affect did it have on the process of building the memorial and museum and are you still on track to open in 2022?
That is being evaluated. I mean, we’re just having to revisit our timeline. COVID affected us, it affected the world. We did spend the year working though. We were looking to keep the project moving through what we call the schematic design phase… Our team, which we call our storytellers, had to have a series of listening sessions. They wanted to do them in person and then we couldn’t do them in person anymore so they’ve been holding them through Zoom with families, survivors, first responders and community members.
Those listening sessions still happened and that helps them guide the story we’ve been going through. It’s a kind of schematic design which is like, “Okay, how many classrooms do you really need? Where should the auditorium be and trying to place the programming of the museum,” and so we’ve gone through all that work to perform our business plan and we’ve just been doing all that work while we can because, you know, COVID. It’s all that we could do.
We’re working our way through the process and we’re working through the timeline. We would like to move to the next phase but we’re just going to keep evaluating as we go. The project will happen in phases. It was always going to happen in phases. The survivors walk, the memorial and then the museum and that will continue.
The House, led by Reps. Soto, Demings and Murphy, passed a bill that would designate Pulse a national memorial. They tried last year but it wasn’t voted on in the Senate. What were your initial thoughts when you first heard they wanted to try and push for that?
They reached out to us and we wanted to understand what that meant and we were so grateful to them. When it didn’t succeed the first time, they came back and did it again. I mean [U.S. Reps.] Darren Soto, Val Demings and Stephanie Murphy; the three of them have championed this and so we’re just grateful. I mean it’s a big deal. It’s not just a big deal for this project but it’s a really big signal, it’s almost like a bat signal to the world that the LGBTQ community matters. It’s giving something like this a national designation that’s really important.
What would your brother think about you opening a gay club in his honor and what would he think of his sister taking on this cause? What do you think he would say to you if he saw you now?
I never know how to answer that question. My involvement with Pulse is because I was lucky enough to have a gay brother. I mean, he really introduced me to this community that I love. Whether you say it’s in honor of him or it’s because of him because if I didn’t have him, I would never even have known to want to do such a thing when the opportunity came to me, right? So that opportunity came and loving John and loving this community made it something I wanted to do.
I mean, I remember when marriage equality passed, I looked up and I was like, “This is something you would have loved had you been here to experience it,” and so I think that this project and this platform would make him feel the same way.
