The attack on Club Q

On 19 November 2022, it is an ordinary Saturday night at Club Q in Colorado Springs. A drag show is on the programme, and people are laughing and ordering at the bar. For many regulars, the city's only queer bar is a kind of living room. The next day, Transgender Day of Remembrance, the day commemorating victims of transphobic violence, is also to be marked here.

Shortly before midnight, an armed man enters the entrance area and immediately opens fire. The attack lasts only a few minutes. That it does not cost even more lives is thanks to the guests. An army veteran attending the show with his family throws himself on the gunman and wrests the weapon from him. Another guest helps hold him on the ground until the police arrive.

Five people die. Among them are two bartenders and Kelly Loving, a trans woman who was visiting the city that evening. The bartender Daniel Aston was also trans. Many other guests are injured, some seriously. The crime strikes a community that already felt vulnerable after the attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando six years earlier.

The justice system responds firmly. In the summer of 2023, the perpetrator pleads guilty in a Colorado court and receives five life sentences. A year later comes the verdict in a federal court, this time expressly also for hate crimes. The authorities speak of a targeted attack on queer people.

Transgender Day of Remembrance the following day was devoted entirely to the dead. Since then, memorial events every year on the nineteenth of November remember Daniel Aston, Kelly Loving, Ashley Paugh, Derrick Rump and Raymond Green Vance. Their names stand for the bitter experience that queer safe spaces can never be taken for granted.