Grief and Joy: Queer Nightlife in the Wake of the Club Q Shooting
Hundreds of people gather outside the back of The Saloon, a gay bar in Minneapolis that I’m fortunate enough to call home. We’re here for a candlelight vigil in honor of the survivors of the Club Q shooting in Colorado, and to pay our respects to the deceased: Raymond Green Vance, Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, and Ashley Paugh.
The night was one of dichotomies: solemn silence punctuated with joyful greetings and hugs.
The cruel Minnesota autumn winds kept blowing out our candles, and we laughed as we relit each others' flames. These candles just wouldn’t stay ablaze. I feel like laughing and crying all at once.
We congregated on the same large concrete patio where The Saloon hosts their Pride block party. The patio where Kim Petras sang about being a throat-GOAT for Pride and the bar hosted a towering, giant parade float of Donald Trump dressed as a baby. Where strangers have made out, drunk people have thrown up, and people have escaped the loud club music for a breath of fresh air.
Memories are made here, and some of them are forgotten in the haze of a hangover the next day.
This patio has seen a lot, and now it has seen a vigil.
The hosts of the vigil were lit up in the warm, flickering candlelight from the contemplative crowd. They’re backlit from music videos of pop divas playing on the large screen TVs inside. It was dead quiet except for the clink of the pride flag against the flagpole above the bar. Ambulances screamed, interrupting the speakers. We made a joke about homophobic street cleaners whose whirring is louder than the speakers.
The speakers and attendees of the vigil had different perspectives and belong to diverse communities, but one thing unified them: we unite as a community in the face of adversity.
Queer people have learned to be resilient by nature. Resiliency is a necessity when your community has survived persecution for simply existing.
We’ll keep making memories, inside jokes, and dancing like idiots. We won’t be silenced or back down when threatened.
Cariño, a drag queen and one of the organizers of the vigil stood at the front of the crowd and gave their speech; they spoke about the resiliency of queer people in the face of trauma. They praised the bravery of the trans woman and veteran who stopped the shooter at Club Q and made history. Cariño quoted Marsha P. Johnson and reflected on what it means to make history, “History isn’t something you look back and say it was inevitable. It happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.”
Cariño promised the victims of the shooting that “...we will forever honor your lives by celebrating ours, by being louder and prouder than ever to show our love to you.”
Bobby Palmer, the manager of The Saloon, concluded the speeches for the night. He opened his speech acknowledging the reality that we likely will see no policy change after yet another mass shooting, especially one against the queer community.
Bobby recognized the diversity in the crowd and how that scares people, “Our community exists in a culture of differences. We celebrate those differences and showcase them. And people outside our community can’t understand it… [and] are afraid of it.”
Bobby is right. I look around and I saw leathermen, and mothers, drag queens and unhoused folks. I saw the bartender whose name I don’t know, but who always makes my rum and coke a little too strong (just the way I like it). I saw the employee from the feminist sex store who told me about the prostate pleasures of a vibrator. I saw a couple who recently broke up, standing next to each other, mourning the same cause. I saw anarchists with a large banner declaring “We keep us safe.” I asked if I could use their photo for this article, and they asked that I credit them as simply “The People.”
I don’t know everyone here, but these are my people.
Bobby concluded his speech. “Tonight we mourn… we will cry and scream just like I’ve wanted to for… days. We’ll also laugh, sing and dance because we have to. We owe it to everyone who came before us to celebrate what we have. We owe it to them to carry a light that they can’t anymore. We owe it to ourselves to celebrate the fact that we are still here.”
Photo courtesy of Katie Lindberg.
After the vigil, Bobby invited the crowd to escape the cold and to make its way into the warm walls of The Saloon. This is a bar that has seen proposals and breakups, fundraisers and funerals. Inside, there was a bingo game at the same time as the vigil, hosted by a man who looks like Santa Claus dressed as the Pope.
I couldn’t tell if I thought it was tacky or not that there’s a bingo game happening at the same time as the vigil, but life goes on, and bingo is an unstoppable force of nature.
I decided I wouldn’t have it any other way — we can’t stop living our lives. Something queer people and the elderly have in common is that they really love bingo. I’m positive a joke has been made about the O-69 ball getting drawn. I wondered if the nursing homes tell the same jokes.
The bar quickly became packed, and a group of my drag friends escaped to the smoking patio: the place for gossip and reprieve from the boisterous bar. We discussed what we would do if there was a shooter here. What bad dance remix of a pop diva would be playing as the sounds of gunshots pierced the air? Are the bar stools too heavy to throw? How many people could we corral backstage to safety? Would the killer follow us? If my friends got shot, would they bleed enough that I could use their blood to pretend to play dead?
This is the reality of going to a gay bar in America. Or a movie theater, or an elementary school, or a shopping mall, or a 4th of July parade, or a WalMart. You get the picture.
Everything and nothing has changed all at once.
We’ll keep going to AMC theaters where Nicole Kidman will remind us that, “somehow heartbreak feels good in a place like this.” Continuing to go to class to learn calculus that we’ll never use, and keep buying gifts that we don’t know if our family will like at the Mall of America. Extremist Christian groups will keep calling queer people groomers while ignoring the sexual abuse within their own chapels. Politicians who take money from the NRA will keep offering thoughts and prayers.
I interviewed The Saloon’s assistant head of security, Katie Lindberg, who is better known as “bar mom” to the patrons. She said that after the shooting, she’s “insanely more on edge.” While she didn’t speak at the vigil, Katie was front and center with the organizers. She said that during the vigil “I basically bit a hole through my tongue trying not to lose it. I’m ‘bar mom.’ I need to be strong and there for my people, and my bar kids… [A shooting at a gay bar] is one of my greatest fears, and looking around at my people during the vigil just about broke me to think it could happen to us.”
She mentions she does feel safe with the solidarity of her bar family. She recalls that her mom said that Katie doesn’t just have a security team behind her “... but a whole bar behind [her].”
According to Forbes, 2022 was the 2nd worst year for gun violence in America in almost a decade. Less than a month after the Club Q shooting, a man pulled a gun on a bartender at a Minneapolis gay bar while calling them homophobic slurs. Maybe I’m a jaded millennial, but I don’t see gun violence changing anytime soon and anti-queer rhetoric is on the rise. The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning about domestic terror threats toward LGBTQ+, Jewish, and migrant communities. Whether it’s about trans youth wanting to literally just use the bathroom, drag queens “corrupting the children,” or queer people in general being “groomers,” conservatives are spreading propaganda about a community who simply just wants to exist.
On paper, I should feel scared, but I just feel mad. Mad in the same way that I felt when bullies would shove me in the hallways growing up. I was never scared of bullies in my youth and I won’t be scared of shooters in my adulthood.
Looking around at my community in the bar I saw bravery, I saw vulnerability, I saw love. I saw people who would risk their lives for me — and I know I would do the same.
Photo courtesy of the author.