We’ve come a long way from ‘City of Hate,’ but Club Q shooting reveals anti-LGBTQ past — and present | tidings
The last time Deedle Murray attended a vigil at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, it was for the three victims of the mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado in 2015. This time, Murray, a member of the church, mourned with the community LGBTQ for the five lives taken and those injured during the November 19 Club Q shooting.
“Those five people over there — those five people are gone forever,” Murray told him Indy on Nov. 22 while visiting the sprawling roadside memorial to the victims on North Academy Boulevard with her two sons. She gestured to the flower-framed photos of Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, Ashley Paugh and Raymond Green Vance standing nearby.
“Flowers won’t bring them back,” she said. “God, it just makes me so angry. I don’t know what the answer is. But I know it can’t go on like this.”
At first, Murray said she was saddened by the shooting. But that has now turned into an outrage – “make no mistake, this is political,” she said. There are clear reasons for “why here” that come to mind for Murray, a librarian in Cheyenne Mountain School District 12. She reflected on the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric permeating El Paso County schools and efforts to remove books promoting LGBTQ inclusion from their school libraries.
Club Q is one of the few explicitly friendly spaces in a city that has deep pockets of conservatism and a long history of trying to overcome open hatred of LGBTQ people by the general public, and government and religious leaders.
“I’ve cried in here so many times,” said Alexis, 26, who frequented Club Q. They declined to give their last names.
As city officials on Nov. 23 unveiled a section of the historic 1.25-mile Sea to Sea pride flag — the same section that appeared in Orlando, Fla., after the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre — state Rep. Leslie Herod pointed out to remind the hundreds of people gathered outside Springs City Hall of the troubling history of LGBTQ hate.
“What I remember is the many times this building chose to deny the existence of LGBTQ people,” said Herod, a Harrison High School graduate who was the first queer black person elected to the Colorado General Assembly. .
“…It took generations of activists who persisted before Pride was supported in Colorado Springs,” Herod said.
The anti-LGBTQ sentiment here goes way back – and even the most striking examples are very recent history. It was 1992 when the infamous 2nd Amendment earned Colorado notoriety as the “Hate State” and Colorado Springs the “hate city” label as the birthplace of that legislation. Amendment 2, which made it legal to discriminate against LGBTQ people, was supported by influential groups in Colorado Springs. The United States Supreme Court overturned it in 1996, but it is far from forgotten.
Herod mentioned activists, some of whom fought Amendment 2 in the 90s, say they can see the city moving forward. But they also know that the shooting at Club Q has raised questions about how deep it really goes.
There are still strong and persistent forces in the community that paint LGBTQ people as the enemy, use their identities as political talking points, and often go unchallenged by “reasonable politicians” who fail to control and condemn hateful rhetoric. says Carolyn Cathey, a realtor, LGBTQ community activist of four decades, and former leader of the Pikes Peak Gay & Lesbian Community Center.
Michaela Stalnaker calls Springs “a conservative Christian, evangelical stronghold.” She was at the Club Q memorial with her partner Alyssa Parker and two young sons on November 22.
“It’s a bastion of anti-LGBTQ existence,” Stalnaker said. “…I have never felt, in any city, more nervous to be who I am.”
In recent years, there was reason to hope that Springs’ “town of hate” reputation had faded.
Downtown streets are now blocked off every year for the Pikes Peak Pride Fest, and the event is supported by local leaders, when in the past, “I’d be met by someone if I went to Pride,” said Mary Lou Makepeace, who served . as mayor from 1997 to 2003 and was executive director of the Gill Foundation’s Gay & Lesbian Fund in Springs.
Springs’ perceived openness is actually why Alexis and Ash Lowrence, 23, an LGBTQ couple, left southern Illinois to come here.
“We come from a very small town. It’s very conservative there and we’ve always felt like outcasts,” Alexis said. “That’s why we moved here – to feel more accepted – and [the shooting] it wasn’t what we had to wake up to.”
Much of the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric today, Cathey says, is focused on area school boards. Conservative politicians this year have made false claims about the LGBTQ community in Colorado schools, saying kids are identifying as “furry” and teachers are “coaching” students to come out as LGBTQ, Liss Smith adds , communications manager for Inside Out Youth Services.
of Indy recently reported on false claims by conservative board members in School District 49 that children are being “indoctrinated” with curriculum that promotes inclusion, through learning programs that promote interpersonal skills. They have attacked LGBTQ clubs in schools, and in one case, a Colorado Springs School District 11 board member posted a transphobic meme on Facebook.
And because of the city’s history and this real-time rhetoric, there’s always been a lingering fear that Springs could easily be the site of the next Pulse massacre, where in 2016 a gunman killed 49 people at the gay club in Orlando. , says Cathy Indy.
The LGBTQ community held a vigil after that shooting in the Club Q parking lot, and “we knew, by the grace of God, it wasn’t us that day,” Cathey says.
“Many of us said it could be here; many of the speeches that day said it could easily have been here,” she says. “We thought it would be in the bigger cities, because we think of it as a focused militia, behind the scenes, people making plans.
“…But the concerted effort starts openly with people like, crazy politicians saying crazy hate speech and thinking they are immune from the violence fueled by those words,” she adds. “Here we are, because the rhetoric has not stopped.”
Cathey is “not surprised, not shocked” by the evil of Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, who was arrested and preliminarily charged with five counts of murder and five counts of bias-motivated crime causing bodily harm. (On Nov. 21, 4th Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen said Aldrich has not been formally charged and those arrest charges could change when formal ones are filed.)
Of the shooting, Smith says she is “surprised, no. Shocked, shocked, horrified, yes.”
“As a queer person, you’re aware that something like this can happen, and very aware of it in many cases,” says Smith. “Given how charged the conversation about our identities has been lately, it was inevitable that it would lead to violence. It’s very difficult to face the fact that it led to violence in this community that we love so much, especially considering how far we’ve come.”
Cathey was there when advertising Pride Fest on a local AM talk radio station led to a flurry of death threats that she says almost forced the station to shut down. She remembers when there were brazen attacks on Poor Richard’s because owner and former City Councilman Richard Skorman had opened his doors to LGBTQ activists organizing against the 2nd Amendment.
Skorman says there was a time when it was “forbidden” for LGBTQ-owned businesses to be part of the local Chamber and Economic Development Council, and Makepeace recalls how the mayor fought to attract businesses to the Springs because of its reputation. of the “city of hate”.
“There was a price to pay if you have a reputation as a hateful place,” she tells him Indy.
Makepeace added, “I think it’s a battle that needs to continue to be fought.”
Makepeace, a self-described “optimist,” says she has been comforted by the outpouring of support the broader community has shown for LGBTQ people since the Nov. 19 shooting. That support must continue, but in the form of action and accountability, she says.
“It’s hitting this community hard, mostly because we thought we had worked through these things, I think,” she says. “I thought that.
“…I celebrate the people who were brave enough to stand and not cower,” says Makepeace — like Richard Fierro, the Army veteran and co-owner of Atrevida Beer Co., who has been praised for subduing his the Club Q gunmen before the police. arrived on the scene, with the help of US Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Thomas James and a trans woman. “This is what we need as a community. Let’s stand and not cower in the face of it. Because that’s not who Colorado Springs is.”