Grief is a weird feeling. It often comes in waves, waiting silently in the corner until the time is right to make its next move. At times it feels like a smart, breathing creature that wants to make you realize you have no recipient for all of this love that lives inside of you. I have a lot of love inside of me, so I write. Us Queer people have an amazing ability to turn awful circumstances into opportunities. Bigots are scared of us because we can take their shame and hatred and turn it into something beautiful. I have so much love inside of me.
I think the thing that separates Queer people from other marginalized communities is that we often grow up quite isolated. Adding the life-threatening lack of familial support to the fact that we have historically been banned from participating in public life, it makes sense that nightclubs and bars became our safe havens. We were forced into the dark, stuffy corners respectable straight suburbia didn’t want to see, so we made those corners a desirable place. It’s no coincidence we are attacked in our night clubs, where we are free and joyous. Our most notable revolution, after all, did start at a bar.
A day before trans Remembrance Day, five people at Club Q in Colorado Springs were brutally murdered. It took the police six minutes since their first call to apprehend the shooter, with the help of a veteran and a trans woman. Six minutes is all it took to turn a place of joy, love, and celebration into a morbid reminder that it will never be enough. We can create our own spaces far away from those we weren’t welcome at; our own pubs and bars and clubs and restaurants and neighborhoods and dating apps, but someone can come whenever they please and take it all away from us. The recent legislative and media attacks on Transgender and Queer people all over the country are an extension of this belief that deems our lives expendable. I refuse. The kind of enraged compassion I’ve been taught by my Queer friends and ancestors won’t let me give up. My Queer ancestors, who were thrown to the dogs to be eaten alive and put in concentration camps and hunted and electroshocked and murdered in a night club during Trans Remembrance Day, they won’t let me live my life in silence. So, I write.
The night of Nov. 19th, 2022 will forever be imprinted in my brain, because my heart was broken in five pieces. Similar to how it was broken into forty nine the afternoon of the 12th of June 12th, 2016. This seemingly never ending story is actually quite short. Some guy decides he has had enough, and walks into a Queer nightclub with a thirst for blood. When I was fourteen it was Pulse, Orlando, which I remember clearly because it was the day I had my first panic attack. Now that I’m twenty, it’s Club Q in Colorado Springs. Six years have passed, but the lingering thought is the same: Someone out there wants me to die.
Although I would rather hope against it, I know there will be some readers who may think this tragedy is not as important and life defining as I do. But, just like six years ago, there might be a 14-year-old kid somewhere out in the world who will read the news of this shooting online and remain in the closet for another two years because of it. Although 14-year-old-me didn’t know what to do with all the hate the world threw at them; adult me does. Everything tells me I should hate the bigots, because how could they be so cruel, so inhuman, so full of disdain. But you see, I believe being Queer is about defining who you are beyond what you are told to be and do.
So as another act of rebellion against this world that wants me to hate, I will love with everything that I am. Because I can be killed, but what I am will remain. I am Daniel Aston, I am Kelly Loving, I am Ashley Paugh, I am Derrick Rump, I am Raymond Green Vance; and I will rest in love.