COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Haylea Turner meandered along the makeshift memorial of flower bouquets and handwritten notes outside Club Q late Monday morning with her black Lab mix, Olive, in tow. The sidewalk teeming with mourners and news crews, Turner recalled the fun she used to have there.
Club Q boasted theme nights that made each night different and, no matter who was on stage or who you were dancing with, Club Q was a safe place to be, she said.
“The one constant was that overwhelming sense of love,” she said. “Everybody was just so welcoming.”
Turner, 24, has been going to the LGBTQ+ nightclub — a rarity in conservative Colorado Springs — since she was 18. Although the bar served alcohol, it was open to anyone 18 or older.
“It’s one of the only places that was 18+ and that was so important to young people,” she said. “You can’t find where you belong in high school, but you could go to Club Q and discover who you are and where you fit in the world.”
Then, the shooting happened.
Just before midnight Saturday, authorities say a gunman opened fire on Club Q employees and patrons, shooting 22 people and killing five. Two of Turner’s friends were at Club Q when the shooting broke out, she said.
“It used to feel like we were making great strides toward progress. And now we keep taking strides back,” Turner said. “So more than ever, it was important to get together there and show that we mattered, that we were a community.”
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Before Saturday’s tragedy, Alex Gallagher considered Club Q “a home away from home,” she said Monday, standing outside the club’s growing memorial.
A regular patron of Club Q who was set to make her performance debut there Dec. 4, Gallagher was at the club Saturday night and left roughly 20 minutes before the shooting occurred, she told USA TODAY. In a frantic call from her friend later that night, she learned of the club’s fate — going from being packed with patrons and drag performers to cordoned off with police tape.
While Colorado Springs’ population has exploded in recent decades and its LGBTQ+ community has followed suit, queer spaces have struggled to keep pace.
In 2005, after 36 years in business, the city’s Hide n’ Seek LGBTQ+ nightclub shuttered over fire code violations and the threat of eviction, according to the Colorado Springs Gazette.
In 2015, the Colorado Springs Pride Center, a fixture in the community that provided resources for LGBTQ+ residents for 37 years, closed over financial woes.
Three years later, the Underground Pub, a sprawling LGBTQ+ bar in downtown Colorado Springs, also shuttered.
But after 21 years, Club Q remained, becoming not only one of a couple dedicated LGBTQ+ venues in a conservative Colorado stronghold, but also one of its most steadfast.
Now even its fate is uncertain as it reckons with Saturday’s tragedy.
“To be honest, I don’t think we’re ever going to get over this,” Gallagher said.
LGBTQ+ community works to change perceptions of Colorado Springs
After growing up in Colorado Springs, moving away to become a Broadway performer and coming back, Josh Franklin said he was surprised by his hometown when he and his now-husband John Wolfe moved there for a change of pace a few years ago.
“… I was equally surprised by the size of the gay community and the lack of queer spaces, especially downtown,” Franklin wrote in an email to USA TODAY.
Franklin and Wolfe ultimately landed on their second act: a swanky gay piano bar called ICONS, which they opened in the community in 2020.
“Essentially, we opened because the community needed us to,” Franklin wrote, noting that while there are several LGBTQ-friendly establishments in the city, ICONS and Club Q are its only official LGBTQ+ bars. Club Q is known as the city’s sole LGBTQ+ nightclub.
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When Franklin and Wolfe first announced their plans for ICONS, they said many people expressed concerns given the city’s history of anti-gay sentiments.
Most notably, in 1992, religious fundamentalists from Colorado Springs wrote Amendment 2, a measure seeking to amend Colorado’s constitution by making it illegal to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. The measure was approved by Colorado voters that November, earning Colorado the nickname of the “Hate State,” according to the Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum. Amendment 2 was ultimately struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996.
The city is also the headquarters of Focus on the Family, a fundamentalist Protestant organization whose founder James Dobson is known for his stances against gay and trans rights.
And while it was able to operate for 37 years in the city, the Colorado Springs Pride Center was no stranger to insults and even death threats, former board president Jack Danielsen said.
In the years before its 2015 closure, Danielsen remembers walking to the center with his husband only to find all of its front windows had been shattered. Another day, staff came to work to find the center had been broken into and robbed.
“For a LGTBQ organization in a heavily conservative area, it was a pretty uphill battle,” Danielsen said.
When opening ICONS, Wolfe and Franklin said people told them, “’You can’t call it a gay bar.’ … We were determined to change the narrative,” Franklin said.
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Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers acknowledged both Amendment 2 and Focus on the Family during a Monday news conference but said despite the Club Q shooting, a “huge change has already taken place in this community,” with respect to the political climate and how members of the LGBTQ+ community are treated.
“That perception has changed. We are a city of 500,000 people with a lot of diversity, and the fact of the matter is things have changed,” Suthers said.
Local businessman Richard Skorman has long been an ardent supporter of the LGBTQ+ community, though not personally a member. As a four-time City Council member, he pushed for city recognition of same-sex domestic partnerships in the early 2000s and was among the slim 5-4 majority that ushered in that change. About a year later, after seven new council members had been elected to the board, he was the lone dissenter in an 8-1 vote that reversed the decision.
Poor Richard’s, Skorman’s interconnecting bookstore, cafe, toy store and pizzeria in downtown Colorado Springs, has long been LGBTQ-friendly. The building, he said, still houses several organizations that sprung up during the fight against Colorado’s Amendment 2.
That the measure had passed at all came as a surprise, but as a result, Skorman said, Colorado Springs became a hotbed of conservative and anti-gay activity, with threats made to his employees and bricks thrown through store windows.
“We became a real haven for the LGBT community during that time,” he said. “We had many LGBT employees then and still do. I have six trans employees.”
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While a 2014 study published in American Political Science Review ranked Colorado Springs as the country’s fourth most conservative city, Skorman said anti-LGBTQ+ forces have largely been a vocal minority, overshadowing Colorado Springs’ long history as an accommodating community for both LGBTQ+ personnel and interracial couples assigned to the area’s numerous military bases.
“This is where they would assign interracial military couples, a live-and-let-live kind of place,” Skorman said. “We were one of the places where LGBTQ military personnel felt comfortable coming. We were not in the South. We weren’t Texas or Florida.”
The city has largely become more open minded, he said. In 2018, a Brookings Institution report indicated Colorado Springs had the nation’s highest rate of young adult population growth.
“Until this incident, people really felt the city was getting better and better,” said Skorman, who nonetheless displays his rainbow flag inside his store window rather than outside to dissuade vandals. While Colorado Springs has had its share of harassment and hate crimes, “I don’t know that it’s unusual compared to what’s happened in other cities.”
Still, to some, the long-held perception of Colorado Springs persists.
Michael Morales, a 23-year-old who moved to Colorado Springs before ultimately settling in Denver, said he thinks many people move to the city thinking it’s not that conservative.
On Monday, he was paying his respects at the club’s memorial.
“A lot of people come here thinking, you know, it’s Colorado,” said Morales, who visited Club Q a few times when he lived in Colorado Springs.
Morales initially moved to the city from a small, conservative town in south Texas, noting that, “it’s very similar (to here).”
“Obviously, the view is different,” he said, pointing to the mountain range in the distance offset by a clear blue sky. Just not the views.
‘Is this really happening again?’
After years of living in Orlando, Tiara Kelley said moving to Denver in 2019 was a complete change of pace.
“I love Colorado altogether. It was — or at least I thought it was — a complete opposite (from Orlando),” she said. “A night and day difference from some of the experiences that I had as a Black transgender woman in Florida.”
Kelley, 41, found a footing at the state’s LGBTQ+ bars and clubs, including Club Q where she started performing and producing drag shows roughly six months ago. Most recently, she had been hosting T-Spot, a weekly drag show at the club on Friday nights.
While Kelley wasn’t scheduled to perform at Club Q Saturday, she was planning to go there in support of her friend — another drag performer — as she solo-produced her first drag show.
Kelley ultimately got sick, however, and went to bed early. She awoke to a flurry of text messages and missed calls making sure she was OK Sunday morning.
“You haven’t heard?” her friend asked on the other side of the phone.
Kelley hurriedly called her friends who were performing there Saturday night to see if they were alright.
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“Honestly, at first I thought it was a dream. I thought that I was dreaming or that it was a nightmare because it was so similar to how I found out I had lost friends at Pulse,” she said.
On June 12, 2016, when a gunman attacked the gay nightclub in Orlando and killed 49 people, Kelley said she was living just two blocks away from the club. She lost several friends in the shooting.
“Getting that phone call (Sunday), it was almost like déjà vu,” Kelley added. “It was like, ‘Wait a minute. Is this really happening again?’”
When asked how a community can possibly move on after a tragic shooting like Pulse’s or Club Q’s, Kelley said, “it’s going to take everyone … everyone working together and not against one another.”
While Mayor Suthers said the shooting had “all the trappings of a hate crime,” and the suspected shooter — identified as 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich — has been arrested on suspicion of murder and committing a bias-motivated hate crime, Suthers said the police’s ongoing investigation will determine a motive. The district attorney’s office has not filed formal charges as of Tuesday morning, according to online court records.
Meanwhile, details are sprinkling out about the shooting’s victims. On Monday, the city released the names of those killed: Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, Ashley Paugh and Raymond Green Vance. The statement also named Thomas James and Richard Fierro as the two patrons who heroically subdued the gunman.
In an unorthodox move that might be a signal of changing attitudes, authorities released the names and pronouns used by the victims, not merely relying on legal names the coroner’s office provides.
“Right now, there are so many people that are hurting all over the world — not just here in Colorado Springs but everywhere because this is the second time in our lifetime that we’ve had to live through this,” Kelley said, referring to the 2016 Pulse shooting.
“I know with Pulse … it got politicized a lot. Everything became about politics. And that’s understandable, but in the same sense, I don’t want the victims to get forgotten in all of this.”
Contributing: Trevor Hughes, Tracy Harmon and Terry Collins
www.usatoday.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism