“Gay bars have been a sanctuary”
The Colorado Sun gives background on Club Q:
Matthew Haynes opened Club Q 21 years ago with the goal of making sure LGBTQ people in Colorado Springs had a long-lasting place to call home.
Except that’s not exactly how Matthew Haynes words it, at least not in this story.
Haynes says Club Q has always been a community center more than anything else.
“There have been so many happy stories from Club Q,” he told The Colorado Sun on Sunday morning. “People meeting and relationships being born. So many celebrations there. We’re a family of people more than a place to have a drink and dance and leave.”
…
Haynes, who is a co-owner of Club Q, said he opened the club because Colorado Springs’ main gay bar at the time, Hide and Seek, appeared on the verge of closing. (The Colorado Springs Independent reports Hide and Seek shut down in 2005. The Gazette reported it opened in 1969.)
“It was clear that the Hide and Seek was in trouble, was failing,” Haynes said. “I bought that real estate (Club Q) intentionally because other gay clubs have come and gone in Colorado Springs. By owning that real estate and making our mark there it was intended to be long term. And it has been. It was literally: There wasn’t any place in Colorado Springs.”
When Haynes is directly quoted he calls it a gay club like other gay clubs. It appears to be the reporters who call it LGBTQ+.
Colorado Springs, which is home to Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian organization, has grown more friendly to the LGBTQ community, as has the rest of the country.
“Twenty-one years ago, we didn’t have marriage,” Haynes said. “Twenty-one years ago you got kicked out of the military if they found out you were gay. You couldn’t go sit in a restaurant next to your partner. Club Q was that safe place for people to come and feel and understand that they are normal — that the way they feel is normal and there are people just like them.”
Haynes talks about one community, the reporters talk about a different one.
(Also, though, is it true that two men or two women couldn’t go sit in a restaurant? That doesn’t sound right. I can believe they felt constrained to pretend to be Just Friends, but not able to go at all seems unlikely.)
Alycia Erickson, a pastor at Pikes Peak Metropolitan Church, which was founded in 1979 by members of the LGBTQ community, knows many people who patronize Club Q and and called it a refuge for them.
But there was no “LGBTQ community” in 1979. Nobody called it that then. There can’t have been members of a “community” that didn’t exist.
“Club Q has been an important part of this community for many years,” Erickson said. “We are not welcome in so many places, and we can’t be ourself. Gay bars have been a sanctuary of a different kind.”
Again the interviewee says gay and the reporters change it to LGBTQ.
Kelsey Fauser, pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Colorado Springs, described Club Q as a place “for safety, love and security,” and where people in the LGBTQ community could celebrate themselves and “just be.”
We can’t be confident that that bit outside the quotation marks is what Fauser said.
“It’s hard when you hear about news like this because it isn’t just some distant place or a news headline, but rather you know the color of the walls,” said Fauser, who is part of a LGBTQ league with drag queens and kings who perform at the nightclub.
Drag queens and kings. That’s not the same as trans.
The horror of what happened at Club Q is of course much bigger than the question of how Club Q is described, but all the same, the words do matter. It matters how women are described in reporting on violence against them, it matters how black people are described in reporting on violence against them, and the reporting on Club Q matters too.
Yeah, changing everything to LGBTQ is dumb.
Maybe this bar is for both men and women, but the last ones I was familiar with (granted, a long time ago) were either gay bars or lesbian bars.
And surely it’s offensive to say trans people would need a special bar, right? A transwoman is a woman in every sense, so a cis transwoman would just go pick up men at a straight bar, and a lesbian transwoman would pick up women at a lesbian bar.
Re: you couldn’t sit with your partner in a restaurant, remember that the Air Force academy is in Colorado Springs. Also Fort Collins, and two air bases. The place is teeming with military, in and out of uniform.
When it was illegal to be gay in the military, you couldn’t go out with your partner because someone could see you and report you. It’s not that you would be bashed. Just kicked out of your job. And your house.
Colorado Springs, in addition to being the location of the Air Force Academy and the various bases, is the location of the headquarters of Focus On The Family, and is one of the most conservative cities in the US.
By adding the T etc. to the LGB in stories like this, it suggests a longer history of “transness” than is actually the case. It allows trans activists to claim “these spaces have always been ours.” Just like women’s washrooms.
I don’t see why you would automatically be seen as gay if you went out with someone of the same sex; my dad went to dinner with friends for more than 20 years while he was in the Navy. When my husband and I go out for dinner, no one can be sure we’re married, though they assume we are because, well, that’s the usual assumption with an opposite sex couple. But I have throughout my life seen many couples at restaurants that were the same sex, and no one thought anything about it.
It’s only if you are overtly sexual that anyone would realize you were more than just friends. And why would you be overtly sexual in a restaurant? Even if you’re not overly modest, most of us would refrain from that in a restaurant or other public place for the comfort of other people. Sure, you might hold hands, but a lot of couples in restaurants don’t do that. Since I tend to move faster (much faster) than my husband, we don’t usually hold hands when we’re out together, because I am usually so far in front of him my hand is inaccessible.
That’s what I was thinking, but I was forgetting to take the Air Force Academy into account, though I did know it’s there. I don’t know…I wonder if it matters what kind of dining establishment it is? Two men can have a beer and play pool without being assumed to be gay, right? Can they have a cheeseburger with the beer?
I’m wondering seriously, not mocking or prodding. It’s interesting. It is true that men and boys had to be very careful in a lot of circumstances. My older brother came home from Andover with a lot of taunting about “fairies,” which he explained years later as the product of that elite school. Maybe two men could eat something manly at a bar but not sit down at a nice table to have escargots and coq au vin.
My guess is that it started as a gay bar but changed over time. Are there even any gay bars anymore? We know the lesbian bars are gone.
i think they could have a cheeseburger; I see that a lot in my small town in Nebraska, and no one blinks an eye. If they had a quiche or a souffle, I think they’d be in trouble. Steaks, okay; wraps, not okay.
Unless they are stereotypically gay, I don’t think anyone would bother them, but if they “looked gay”, not going out with their companion wouldn’t help.
Yeah, it’s tough for men, but if you are willing to play the game, it reduces the problem. At a military base, I would imagine it would be less problem in some ways, not more, since men are together with other men most of the time. My dad was on board ship; whenever he went out, he was with men. That’s the norm for military. They can even touch each other, if they do it in a ‘manly’ way, like slapping each other on the back or something else ridiculously macho.
I think it’s great they have a gay bar they can go to, but that seems to me like a great big flashing sign on their head, much more so than going out to eat with another male. If they are seen going into a gay bar with another male? Yeah, not so good.
I grew up in Colorado Springs, living there from about 1968 until 1984. Just to be clear, it wasn’t always as weird then as it is now. The hyper-religious aspect isn’t inherent to the people of the area; that aspect was a phenomenon of the change in tax codes that favored religious non-profits, circa 1990 or so, iirc. In the 70’s and 80’s it was only a gay-unfriendly city in the same way that a lot of American cities at the time were (are), but the religious weirdos screaming at thousands of people in enormous buildings weren’t yet there. The Air Force Academy isn’t in the city and never really had much influence on life and culture, because the cadets largely aren’t allowed any kind of social life; plus, it’s a federal facility on federal land, so it’s not like the city invited them out of some kind of military fetish; if anything, the state was more involved, giving money to help buy the land that established it–for the prestige, I imagine, since Coloradans have always had a weird sort of inferiority complex about their place in the nation. I attended high school on the actual AFA grounds (it’s actually called Air Force Academy High School, and our mascot was the Kadet, a weird hawk-looking baby bird), and yet we never saw cadets or uniforms, only the entryway guard who just boredly waved us through as we sped back to campus from our lunchtime McDonald’s runs. Too, Fort Collins was never known for anything but biking and hiking and some relatively poor boating + fishing at Horsetooth Reservoir; there’s no military influence there to speak of. I suspect that the original comment was meant about Fort Carson (an actual military base south of Colorado Springs) rather than Fort Collins (a university town north of Denver, liberal to its core): the one is an actual “fort” in the sense of a military complex, the other has a name that is just a vestige of 19th-century frontier life. In short, there wasn’t anything peculiar about Colorado Springs until the fundie christians moved in, which is a relatively new phenomenon of the last 30-ish years.
That being said, it’s become some place that I would never, ever considering returning to, not even to visit. The people I went to high school with all largely married each other and became conservative, religious, nouveau rednecks, if such a thing is possible, and most of them stayed right there in the area with their families of 10 kids; the rest of us moved away and never looked back.
A very wise move.