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The lone gay bar in Colorado Springs was the target of a gunman’s opening salvo on Saturday night, leaving five people dead and a number of others hurt. According to numerous reports, Club Q was a special location where members of the LGBTQ community and its allies congregated to socialize, dance, and drink.
Before the shooter could reach the backyard, where scores of patrons had fled, clubgoers rapidly intervened, including army veteran Richard Fierro and a trans woman. This shooting feels particularly personal if you identify as gay. An attack of this size seemed inevitable at a time in history when the GOP has depicted trans persons as predators and drag queens as child molesters.
Perhaps that threat will continue unless something significant changes. However, I repress the need to consider the motives of those who use violence. I do, however, want to inform people about what takes place in places that are created and frequented by queer people, especially if they haven’t heard about them from those who have an interest in our demise.
I first encountered unconditional love in a dimly lit homosexual dive bar in Manhattan called the Boiler Room, where a jukebox was playing Mariah and shoddy remixes of Ariana Grande songs. It was a bar I frequented frequently, and it was there that I first encountered some form of a queer community.
There were always some loud elderly queens, some pals arguing over the pool table, and a bartender who called me “sweetie.” No matter what tune was playing in this area, people would dance, once even to a Mozart song.
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For the first time, I heard from someone that I shared this significant experience known as queerness. I was shivering from fear as I made my queer confession to a random group of older homosexual males there. They gave me a bear embrace and told me they loved me.
For the first time, I heard from someone that I shared this significant experience known as queerness. It was also the first time I realized I wasn’t alone in the world just because I was queer. It had entirely the opposite meaning in this location.
I am still here now because I was able to develop my identity in queer havens. The previous year, I confided in my closest friends that I wished to host a gathering where gay and trans people of color might experience true liberation.
For me, the privilege of ignoring the weight of our existence, even for a little while, is what freedom is all about. That gathering eventually developed into the community known as Whorechata, which is much bigger than any single individual.
For myself and many of the people I care about, it resembles the first genuine home. I wish it were a place where there was always the potential for unrestricted love, especially for gay people of color. At least two of the victims of the shooting were transgender, and Club Q shared a similar dedication to being a radically inclusive venue.
These kinds of establishments offer a new kind of queer space that differs from the ones I frequented when I was younger and which frequently focused on gay men’s need for sex. Conservatives may be terrified by this altered, porous queerness, which has an unlimited number of potential outcomes.
We are now daring to conceive lives where we are fully seen rather than merely looking for someone to hook up with behind closed doors. We are developing new ways of being and liberating ourselves at the same time.
Straight folks didn’t want to look at us, thus gay bars emerged. After the incident, journalist and activist Dan Savage tweeted, “An attack like this says ‘not even here.'” For “them,” being behind closed doors is insufficient.
They don’t want us to be invisible, though. They are against our very existence. Making ourselves visible everywhere is the answer, he claims, invoking the Stonewall movement’s catchphrase, “Out of the bars and into the streets.”
After the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, I decided to come out to my parents because I believed that if so many people were going to hate me, they would do it regardless of whether I was closeted or not. It is depressing to consider that this shooting will continue to affect other queer youth six years from now.
I wish I could embrace them and comfort them, reassuring them that if these folks truly understood how beautiful being LGBT is, they would be showering us with flowers rather than guns. The shooting at Club Q served as a stark reminder that Whorechata, which has consumed so much of my life, is ultimately a bubble—one that was made possible by a small group of idealistic gay and trans people.
It also strengthened my belief that this bubble will continue to grow because so many more individuals are coming to understand the liberating nature of being gay. Maybe one day when enough people realize the potential of queerness, that bubble will eventually pop, allowing in everyone who wants to rethink how we may live in community with one another.
The shooter rekindled a rage that has always existed inside us, but he failed to realize that a community whose whole life depends on defiance cannot be terrorized. A saying that perfectly expresses how I feel right now is: “To be outwardly gay is to choose our pleasure before our safety.”
There are people who will keep giving us the impression that our safety is in danger. They must not have spent much time in a gay bar because if they had, they would have seen us dancing together and singing till we were purple and realized that we have always chosen joy despite the challenges we have faced.
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