Site of Colorado Springs massacre isn’t just a nightclub. For many, it’s a sacred space

There are two storylines flowing out of Colorado Springs this past weekend: one of tragedy involving the Saturday night murder of at least five patrons at a LGBTQ+ nightclub, and one of heroism involving clubgoers who police say attacked the 22-year-old gunman — who was wearing body armor and carrying an AR-15 rifle — beat him with his own handgun, and subdued him until police arrived, likely saving dozens of lives.

The Army veteran who first confronted the gunman was at the club with his family to dance and enjoy a drag show. His daughter’s boyfriend was shot to death. Two bartenders at Club Q also died, along with two other patrons. At least 15 others, including the fast-acting veteran’s daughter, were injured.

Tragedy and heroism. Among the heroes? A performer dressed in high heels who kicked and stomped on the gunman as he was pinned to the ground.

To these storylines, I’d like to offer a third: One involving violation of a sacred space.

Many readers will pause at the suggestion that a nightclub, let alone one catering to the LGBTQ+ community, is a sacred space. But ask anyone who came up in the time before it was safe to be out, and chances are they will have a story about the first time they entered a gay club and discovered something they had never truly known before: Acceptance. Community. Safety.

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, a midsize and fairly progressive city on the banks of the Ohio River. If it was known in the 1970s for its violent anti-busing riots, for its labor force’s tendency to strike, and its don’t-rock-the-boat political leadership, it was also home to one of the nation’s first integrated public school districts, a New Orleans-inspired tolerance for bars that stayed open till 4 a.m. (except during Kentucky Derby weekend, when they do not close) and for gay people in smaller cities throughout the Midwest, home to very large gay clubs.

But it was also home to a police force that in the 1980s, when raiding one of the leading gay clubs in an ostensible search for underage drinkers, officers made national headlines by donning rubber gloves before making any arrests — for fear of contracting AIDS. It was a place where a smaller gay club in the city’s east end could be burned down and no arrests were ever made.

It was a place where, as a student at a local Catholic high school, I could count on a single finger the number of gay people I knew. I don’t think the word gay, or homosexual, had ever been used in a classroom, other than as a put-down, despite plenty of attention to the poetry of Walt Whitman.

Being out of the closet a risk in Louisville

I simply had no role models. The reality in Louisville, as with most smaller cities across the country, was that if you ever let that secret out, then all the milestones of your anticipated future — a professional career, a family, acceptance in your church, your family and even by your oldest and closest friends — were immediately out of reach. At least that is what you were made to feel.

Imagine, then, the fear with which I stepped into a magical place called Connections — a large gay club in a dark and out-of-the-way part of town just east of downtown — and worried deeply that someone I knew would be there and ask me: What are you doing here?

I practiced all kinds of answers. I am here to party. I like the music. The drag show, can you believe it? Nevermind the gays, I am here for the dancing! All of them felt as phony as the smile on my face.

Nevertheless, for a long time, too long, I believed those answers myself. It was just a phase, I told myself. Nothing to worry about.

But of course it wasn’t a phase. And slowly, in part because of the acceptance I felt in that club and others like it, I learned to let my guard down. The 1990s were still a time to worry about violence going in and out of the club. Toughs occasionally liked to beat up the queers, and it was a good idea to walk in and out of the club with friends.

But once inside? After I learned to stop worrying about who might see me — it slowly dawned on me that they’d likely have the same fears as I did — I began to feel the sanctuary that the club offered.

Years later, as I was researching a long piece about the role such spaces had played in gay people’s survival years before the same-sex marriage movement had taken off, I interviewed lots of people who had discovered sanctuary inside the doors of club like Connections. One local activist told me he had first gone to the club after seeing “Star Wars” at the local theater with friends in the late ‘70s. After the show, he more or less got kidnapped by his buddies and escorted to the club as a lark.

It was a revelation. Entering the club, he recalled, was “like walking into a bubble.”

He said leaving was a scarier kind of experience. “Once you walked out the door, well, you looked left and you looked right,” he recalled. “It was like leaving a fantasy world, or leaving the cinemas. You leave the world of the movie behind, and you go home to your everyday life.”

For many in Louisville and places like it, that everyday life meant the closet. There were of course many braver souls who were out, just as there had been for decades before I came along. But few of them had professional careers — certainly, those who did paid steep prices for their courage — or they were fortunate enough to have supportive families, or simply made do without.

AIDS crisis added to terror

I eventually came to feel I owed a great debt to those who had come before me, who had blazed a path that included the establishment of safe places like the gay clubs I knew if my early 20s. The AIDS crisis has worsened just as I was coming of age in the 1980s. Next to nothing of its trauma had entered my closeted, privileged existence. I didn’t know, as I learned later, of the terror so many people like me had felt. Or of the heroism so many people in the past had demonstrated when they volunteered to help those who were dying of that awful disease.

So I set out to pay homage to those heroes, and to the victims of earlier times’ bigotry. I spent nearly 10 years chronicling the gay civil rights movement for Time magazine, and came to know the struggle not just as a fellow gay man, but as a chronicler of our times. I vowed to honor those who had made possible my freedom to love whom I chose, and remain part of society.

Saturday night’s massacre in Colorado Springs brings back both the horror of earlier days — and demands our attention as threats against gay and trans people proliferate throughout our political rhetoric — and the heroism. What those patrons — both gay and straight — did inside Club Q should be a lesson for all of us, everywhere.

We should honor them, just as we mourn the victims. But it is my hope that by writing this piece, a few more readers, who maybe have never set foot in a gay club, will understand just how profound the sense of violation that men and women like me felt when we read of the shooting.

Even in 2022, or maybe especially in 2022, such safe places are needed. And when they are treated with sacrilege as they were Saturday night, the violence sends a message that no one who has ever sought shelter inside the walls of a club, or sat mesmerized in front of a drag performance, will hear deep in their bones.

Michael Lindenberger is vice president and editorial page editor at The Kansas City Star. Reach him at mlindenberger@kcstar.com .