When her plan to organize a Pride festival in Fountain quickly swelled into an event big enough to require permits from the city (and a wayback machine to have filed them on time), Liz Rosenbaum opted to scale the inaugural event back to a low-key afternoon meetup for the LGBTQ+ community and allies in Colorado Springs’ little sister city to the south.

The bias-motivated mass shooting at Club Q on Nov. 19, 2022, sent shockwaves throughout the southern Front Range, and beyond. Everyone suddenly was talking about the need for safe spaces where LGBTQ+ residents could gather, about what allies and the greater community could do to help, but most of those conversations didn’t extend to Fountain, geographically or in spirit, Rosenbaum said.

“I’ve seen through my work that

there’s a lot of anger and hate put on different communities that want to advocate for body autonomy, especially in smaller cities,” said Rosenbaum, a health insurance broker and supporter of body autonomy, personally and through her work with Cobalt, an organization that advocates for reproductive rights.

“I just think that we, as allies, need to do everything we can to show support considering the threats that are out there right now.”

The Fountain Pride gathering drew maybe 60 people — families, with toddlers and great-grandparents — to Olde Town Coffee Shop over the course of a Sunday afternoon in late September. They snacked, sipped iced lattes, listened to music, and tossed rainbow beach balls in the sun … while a half dozen people with protest signs and electronic bullhorns stormed up and down the sidewalk out front.

Rosenbaum said she’s thankful Fountain police were on site to keep an eye on the low-key Pride gathering, and less low-key Pride protest. The afternoon nonetheless brought what felt like near-confrontations, tense and eye-opening moments.

When Rosenbaum reported to the officers that one protester had pointed directly to her, looked her in the eye, and proclaimed “You’re going to die today,” she said she was asked if the threat had been followed up by a Bible verse.

“Which I guess makes it not a threat anymore?” Rosenbaum said. “But you know, I guess it comes down to freedom of speech, not freedom of listening … even with people still reeling from the trauma of a mass shooting literally in our backyard.”

A cruel ‘Catch-22’

And in some places, even “safe” ones, hate speech is as rampant and vile as ever, say some survivors and allies.

It’s not so much that compassion has an expiration date, but that, for a brief period, the voices of love were louder, said Club Q shooting survivor John Arcediano.

The groundswell of initial attention and support was like a “Catch-22,” providing a platform for those who wanted to help, as well as those who saw an opportunity to spread a message of judgment and hurt.

“We did see community support in so many ways, through donations, events, rainbow flags everywhere … but it opened the door for what became a lot of anger and rage,” he said.

Club Q shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich pleaded guilty in the attack that killed Ashley Paugh, Kelly Loving, Raymond Green Vance, Derrick Rump and Daniel Aston, and wounded dozens, and is in the Wyoming State Prison serving a life sentence.

As of Friday, there had been no progress in a planned civil suit against the city announced this year by the legal team representing a group of survivors and victims’ families.

When the headlines turned from breaking news to more human aspects in the wake of the killings, the angry voices ramped up, Arcediano said.

“It was, like, why are you still consistently publishing these things?” he said. “Like, we’re allowed to have this moment for you all for a few days, but beyond that we don’t want to know anything about it.”

About a month after the shooting, Arcediano remembers walking through downtown Colorado Springs and seeing more than one shop owner remove the rainbow Pride flag from their windows.

It was as though an invisible clock had ticked over, and facing a fear of retaliation, goodwill had reached a point of diminishing returns.

“Thankfully, there’s so many other good people in the community that do make up for that bigotry and that hatred,” Arcediano added. “But Colorado Springs has never been an easy place to be a queer person, and that’s as true now as it ever was.”

Parasol Patrol co-founder and director Eli Bazan said he believes the rhetoric and threats of aggression have, in fact, escalated over the past four years, and especially the last 12 months. Volunteers with the Denver-based nonprofit use rainbow-colored umbrellas to “shield children and young people” from protesters during events.

“Right after Club Q last year, I think we had 15 or when events that we worked on, and so many people were stopping and saying ‘I’m sorry this happened.’ But we also had a protester at Club Q during a vigil two days after the shooting,” Bazan said. “All I can say is we’ve been around since 2019, and this is by far the busiest year we’ve ever had.”

“Thankfully, there’s so many other good people in the community that do make up for that bigotry and that hatred. But Colorado Springs has never been an easy place to be a queer person, and that’s as true now as it ever was.” John Arcediano

A new perspective

A fantasy mural of a better world is splashed across the walls of the bathroom at Icons Bar in downtown Colorado Springs. The background is newspaper clippings from the 1990s, when conservative Springs voters led an ill-fated charge to amend the state constitution to deny protected status — and thus, anti-discrimination laws — to those who were homosexual or bisexual.

The foreground is trans icon RuPaul, whose flowing hair is depicted “sort of washing that news away,” said bar co-founder and co-owner Josh Franklin-Wolfe.

“I knew I wanted to represent that history in some way, from when Colorado was deemed the ‘ hate state,’ and I also think that sort of represents the growth and change in the city” over the past 25 or 30 years, he said. “I do think that we’ve got a ways to go, and I’m surprised that we are not further along, but this is definitely not the city that I grew up in.”

The city Franklin-Wolfe grew up in was one he couldn’t leave fast enough.

He was the same age as Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming who in 1998 was brutally beaten and left to die tied to a fence outside Laramie, a hate crime that shined a light on the fear of violence many members of the LGBTQ+ community were forced to live with on a daily basis — and, for Franklin-Wolfe, made the decision to move from a city with a history of bias an easy one.

“I came out at a really difficult time, in a difficult place. I didn’t feel safe in my home state,” Franklin-Wolfe said.

Almost 20 years later, he returned to the Springs from New York City, to gain a new point of view and affection for his hometown through the eyes of his then-boyfriend, now husband and business partner, John Wolfe.

“It was really John that was, like, ‘This place is amazing.’ I was ‘No, this isn’t for us. They don’t like us here …’” Franklin-Wolfe said. “But that’s when the shift sort of started.

John really opened my eyes to what it means to be in Colorado Springs without that baggage.”

Perspective, he realized, is really about where you chose to look.

A safer ‘safe space’

Talk of reopening Colorado Springs’ Pride Center remains just that: talk.

When the city’s new Prism Community Collective opens this winter, it will be able to fill some of the void a center once did, connecting members of the LGBTQ+ community with resources and access to local mental and physical health providers.

Until then, and after, Icons’ owners are doing what they can to make the bar the “home base” they know is needed.

The Springs’ first and only “gay piano bar” is a little less piano focused than when it opened three years ago, but its singing, dancing, accepting soul remains the same.

After the Club Q shooting, Wolfe and Franklin-Wolfe knew the need for a safe space for the community to gather, mourn, and — eventually — heal, would be even greater. They reinforced the bar’s storefront with bulletproof glass, hired permanent security for the front door and installed a locking 7-foot-high fence around the back patio.

Early discussion about possibly changing over to a speak-easy style model, where patrons must be buzzed in, never came to pass.

From the beginning, decisions arose from discussions Icons’ owners had with their staff at the Springs second, and now only, openly gay venue.

“That was the first thing we really did was just ask (our employees) what they needed — of course you can imagine they were quite shaken,” said Wolfe. “I mean, there was a 50/50 chance that could have been us … which was horrifying, terrifying, and left our staff feeling very violated and targeted as well.”

Healing the broken

In the “year of listening” since the attack, Wolfe and Franklin-Wolfe said they’ve tried to step in to fill gaps, and meet needs, wherever they see them.

“I think there are people that, even right away, didn’t want to feel fear and threatened by anybody … so they very defiantly showed up and kept going on with their lives,” Franklin-Wolfe said. “And then the other side of that. I think there’s still, a year later, some people in the community — friends of ours that we’ll see in passing and mention that we haven’t seen them in a while — and they still aren’t going out period.”

Sometimes being a business that feels more like a family means holding someone at the bar as they’re wracked with sobs, recounting the pain and horror of that night.

It’s also meant broader-stroke changes, expanding Icons’ regular calendar to reach even deeper into the overlooked aspects of their own community

“We’ve been hearing for so long that the lesbian community wanted a space, so we’ve put a lot of thought and effort into providing a night that’s specifically for certain demographics within this beautiful community that we’re a part of,” Franklin-Wolfe said.

A day when Icons’ block of Bijou Street is a commercial “gayborhood,” awash in rainbow flags, might be further away than he thought when he and Wolfe opened Icons, but he said he’s still hopeful.

The queer community in Colorado Springs is a vibrant and thriving one, but the tragedy at Club Q will forever be a part of the story.

For those who lived that chapter, fear is still new, and very real.

But Franklin-Wolfe knows how memories and fear can fade.

“We’ve met so many people, young people that have moved here that have none of that context, that history … of Colorado Springs in the 1990s, of the ‘ hate state,’” Franklin-Wolfe said. “They just love Colorado Springs, and they love being gay in Colorado Springs.”