A mass shooting at a popular gay club in Colorado Springs has resurfaced questions about the city’s past and future among its residents.
By SAM METZ and STEPHEN GROVES
For some, merely seeing police being careful to refer to the victims using their correct pronouns this week signaled a seismic change. For others, the shocking act of violence in a space considered an LGBTQ refuge shattered a sense of optimism pervading everywhere from the city’s revitalized downtown to the sprawling subdivisions on its outskirts.
Counselors Katie Tousley, left, Austin Wilmarth, center; and John Shamy, right, sit inside a mobile outreach center near Club Q on Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2022. The center, which is run by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, offered services to veterans, service members and the community following a shooting at the gay night club that killed five people Saturday night.
The steeple of a Mormon church rises above a neighborhood in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2022. The city is a place full of art shops and breweries; megachurches and military bases; a liberal arts college and the Air Force Academy. For years it’s marketed itself as an outdoorsy boomtown with a population set to top Denver’s by 2050.
A freight train carrying airplane fuselages passes through the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2022. A cross for one of the five victims of a mass shooting at Club Q, a gay nightclub, stands amid a makeshift memorial on Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022, in Colorado Springs, Colo. With a growing and diversifying population, the city nestled at the foothills of the Rockies is a patchwork of disparate social and cultural fabrics.
Five people were killed in the attack last weekend. Eight victims remained hospitalized Friday, officials said.In recent decades the population has almost doubled to 480,000 people. More than one-third of residents are nonwhite — twice as many as in 1980. The median age is 35. Politics here lean more conservative than in comparable-size cities. City council debates revolve around issues familiar throughout the Mountain West, such as water, housing and the threat of wildfires.
Two friends, Derrick Rump and Daniel Aston, helped him land the job at Club Q and find his “queer family” in his new hometown. It was more welcoming than the rural part of Florida where he grew up. Those who have been around long enough are remembering this week how in the 1990s, at the height of the religious right’s influence, the Colorado Springs-based group Colorado for Family Values spearheaded a statewide push to pass Amendment 2 and make it illegal for communities to pass ordinances protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination.
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