Meet Your Arizona Superhero: Gabrielle Giffords’ Gay Latino Intern

Most modern-day interns spend a lot of time listening to hip-hop music on their iPods and refusing to perform any tasks that require actual intellectual or (gasp!) physical effort. How startling, then, that during Saturday’s awful massacre in Tuscon, one of these entitled Mileybots conclusively proved himself to be the Awesomest Intern In The History Of Ever. And in addition to being a brown, he is a gay.

This University of Arizona junior, Daniel Hernandez, was only five days into his internship in the office of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) when Jared Lee Loughner allegedly opened fire at Giffords’ “Congress On Your Corner” meet-and-greet at a Tucson Safeway. The kid ran TOWARD the gunshots. Here’s one account of wha happa next:

Hernandez, a member of the City of Tucson Commission on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, applied pressure to Giffords’ entry wound to stop her bleeding after checking the life signs of other victims of the shooting in Tuscon, according to the Arizona Republic.

“First the neck, then the wrist,” he told the Republic. “I don’t even know if the gunfire had stopped.”

Hernandez said he made sure Giffords breathed property by holding her head in his lap before he taught a bystander how to use the same technique on the wounds of his boss, Ron Barber.

This big brown baby bear lives in a state ruled by a bloodstained harpie who stole domestic partner coverage for state workers with same-sex partners, essentially signing a death warrant for uninsured partners with life-threatening illnesses. He lives in a country where he is surrounded on all sides by people who hate his skin color, his genetic profile, his natural human desires, and the inner workings of what we, for lack of a better word, call a heart or a soul.

You can imagine a kid like this in high school — smart, gay (though maybe closeted at the time), interested in politics, maybe a bit of a nerd. You think nobody ever called him a fag behind his back? You think nobody ever called him a fag to his face? You think that as popular and likable as he may have been, he didn’t know in the core of his being that someone, somewhere was always quietly judging him and boys like him as perverted, evil, an abomination?

On Saturday, this “fag” did something bigger and better than any of the cowards who hate him and people like him have ever done or will ever do. We as Americans spend a lot of time fawning over people who signed up for a paying job that requires one to kill others and to risk being killed, all while clad in a uniform. We give them shiny medals and weep over their service when the truth is that they were just doing what their job required. True heroes risk their lives not because their contract requires it of them, but because their heart demands it of them.

Now read what the kid told his school newspaper today:

“I don’t think I’m a hero. I think doing something one off is not something heroic,” Hernandez said. “I think the heroes are people like Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Ron Barber, Dave Zimmerman, and Pam Simon. They are people who have dedicated their lives to public service so for them it wasn’t just a one time thing, it’s spending their entire lives trying to help others.”

If this kid doesn’t earn an automatic A+ in his internship course, there is no justice in this world.

Go ahead and tell him that you love him, maybe, over at this Facebook fan page. You did it for Rihanna and Drake, so you have no excuse not to do it for Daniel.