United States: the massacre of Club Q, consequence of anti-LGBTQI + hate speech

Five dead and 25 wounded. This is the account of the killing that took place on Saturday, November 19, just before midnight, in an LGBTQI+ club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, club Q.

Before the police intervention, several witnesses said so it was people present in the room who intervened to try to control the attacker.

“We are no longer safe and our community is destroyed”, summarizes Joshua Thurman, a witness to the attack still in shock, who responded to many media in the early morning. He had come to celebrate his birthday at this unique place in Colorado Springs.

The date of this attack is not negligible: the attack on this LGBTQI+ venue took place on the eve of TDoR, trans day of remembrance, even though Club Q would have hosted several events on this occasion, a brunch and a drag queen show.

The suspected killer, Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, was arrested. The Colorado governor announced that the flags would be at half-mast until November 26, in tribute to the five people killed. Among them, two bartenders from Club Q, Daniel Aston and Derrick Rump :

Political reactions were not long in coming, in this country sadly accustomed to mass killings, even by homophobic personalities. It was notably Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who responded to one of them:

“You played a major role in the rise of anti-LGBT+ rhetoric and anti-trans lies while spending your time in Congress blocking the most sensible gun control laws. You won’t get away with “thoughts and prayers.” Examine your conscience and evolve. »

The consequences of uninhibited homophobic and transphobic speech?

The alarming sign of a harmful climate, but above all of a step backwards? Targeting LGBTQI+ party venues is no small feat: these attacks sow violence and death in venues built to be places where all LGBTQI+ people can find refuge and be themselves, be protected and form a community with their own. These places where they left outbursts of resistance in the 1960s against police repression, in San Francisco at Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966, then in New York with the Stonewall riots in 1969.

The killing obviously echoes that of the Orlando Pulp of June 12, 2016, one of the deadliest attacks since September 11, 2001 in the United States, which killed almost fifty people and shocked the whole world, but also that of Oslo on 25 June or Bratislava on 13 October.

If the motives of the alleged killer are still unknown, many American activists point to the responsibility of those who foment and maintain hatred against LGBTQI+ people, whether they are columnists or elected officials. Without forgetting that this hate speech takes place in a context of legislative setbacks: several states in the United States have made particularly worrying reversals, in particular with the Don’t Say Gay law in Florida, but also numerous laws that prevent access to health care trans people or limit them in their sports practice.

Photo credit: 9NEWS (capture)