You wouldn’t think that an old married woman writer like me would have anything in common with K.J. Morris, a 37 year old security guard and drag king in Orlando. For one thing, I’m alive, and she was murdered. She was 30 years younger, and chose a much more visible lifestyle than mine to put it mildly. I can pass as “normal,” but not K.J. , who had just moved form Hawaii to Orlando to take care of her mother and grandmother. I almost never go to a nightclub, but it was her livelihood and also a joy to her. I abhor physical violence, any bouncer has to engage in it sometimes. We couldn’t be more different, right?

And yet an attack on her and the others who were killed that night is an attack on me, and my freedom. In case I’d missed that point, it was only hours before the inevitable happened on Facebook: I learned that K.J. and I have a friend in common. A real friend, not just an electronic one: a brilliant activist writer and writing teacher, Chivas Sandage, with whom I studied at Vermont College of Fine Arts. So I am only one step away from someone who was killed because of what she and I have in common: being outside the heterosexual mainstream.

Right wing extremists in our time may well be only one step away from a queer person, or a woman who has had an abortion, or someone who believes in gun control.  And it works the other way around, too. People like me are only a step or two away from people who say they hate us. Some of them even want to kill us, and some believe that God is telling them we are wicked. Unfortunately, “radical Islam” is far from alone among the world religions in this respect.

Since we are so close to people on the other side of many divides, we have to be braver. We have to come out more – not just to the people we are comfortable with, but to the others. And we have to stand beside our sisters and brothers who are “queerer” than we are, whether our point of departure is straight or gay or somewhere else. We have to engage with those who oppose us, and show that we care about at least some of the same things as they do. As hard as it may be, we have to find commonalities with them. We are all human. We want to love and be loved. Unless we get beyond divisiveness and finger-pointing, our country may sink to its lowest level ever, and endanger the whole planet.

I often think of the people in the Netherlands under the Nazis and the dilemmas they confronted every day, because those are at the heart of my novel, An Address in Amsterdam. Given how assimilated the Jewish population was, I wonder how many of the Gentile neighbors were only one step away from someone who was in danger of deportation – Jewish, Roma, Sinti, queer, resister, people with disabilities. Only a few of the neighbors were as brave as we have to be now. We still honor them. What will the next generations say of us? They too are only one step away.