Rhetoric blamed for mass shooting
Anti-LGBTQ hatred fueled Colorado attack, Bay Area leaders say
Bay Area LGBTQ leaders, politicians and residents, stunned by the weekend mass shooting that killed five people at a Colorado Springs gay nightclub, said Sunday that the attack is the latest horrific consequence of hateful laws and antiLGBTQ rhetoric across the county.
“My blood just went cold” upon learning of the shooting, which left 25 people injured in addition to the five dead, said Eric Curry of San Francisco. Curry, a 29-yearold gay man, joined a growing crowd of several dozen people Sunday afternoon outside San Francisco City Hall for a rally marking the nationwide Transgender Day of Remembrance.
“I wasn’t necessarily planning on coming. That made it no longer an option,” Curry said. “I thought, I need to be with my community.”
The Colorado tragedy, which prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to tweet that “hate is taught,” occurred just before midnight
Saturday when a gunman entered Club Q and immediately began shooting, according to the Colorado Springs Police Department.
At least two “heroic” people inside the club fought and subdued the gunman, who was then arrested, Police Chief Adrian Vasquez told a news briefing Sunday. Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers told the New York Times that the attack ended when someone grabbed a handgun from the gunman and hit him with it.
Vasquez identified the suspect as 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich and said two firearms were found at the scene, including a “long rifle.” The suspect used an AR-15-style semiautomatic weapon, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Detectives were investigating a motive and whether the shooting was a hate crime, Vasquez said. Charges against the suspect “will likely include first-degree murder,” El Paso County District Attorney Michael Allen said at the briefing.
A man with the same name as the suspect was arrested in 2021 after his mother reported he threatened her with a homemade bomb and other weapons, authorities said. No explosives were found, authorities said at the time, and the Gazette in Colorado Springs reported that prosecutors did not pursue any charges and that records were sealed.
The FBI was assisting police with the Colorado Springs investigation.
While police hadn’t yet determined whether it was a hate crime, many who spoke out saw it as part of a tragic pattern.
“Today was a very hard day to get out of bed and be here,” trans rights activist Anjali Rimi told the San Francisco rally Sunday. “We can’t lose any more trans people. My voice is to challenge transphobia.” She led the crowd in chants of “Trans lives matter.” Later Sunday evening, hundreds of people gathered in the Castro’s Harvey Milk Plaza for a candlelight vigil in memory of the Colorado victims.
Jack Song, walking on Castro Street earlier in the day, said the mass shooting reminded him of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando in June 2016 and the “hateful rhetoric” toward gay people that accompanied the presidency of Donald Trump.
“A gay bar is a community space. It’s a safe space to meet people,” Song said. “All of us have lingering fear when we go to these establishments. We are in fear.”
Greg Flores, going to breakfast with Song on Castro Street, added, “It shouldn’t happen — in schools, bars. Why?”
The hatred directed toward LGBTQ spaces has shattered a sense of safety, he said: “Gay bars are where we go to discuss the trials and tribulations of gay life.”
The shooting came during Transgender Awareness Week and on the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance events held Sunday in the Bay Area and nationwide to honor trans people killed in acts of anti-trans violence.
On social media, several California and Bay Area lawmakers and LGBTQ leaders condemned the attack as they expressed condolences, and many said the shooting was a result of the antiLGBTQ sentiments spewing from right-wing spaces, including elected leaders.
“Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance — a day where we should be honoring the lives and memory of trans people lost to senseless violence. Instead, we mourn the losses of yet another hate crime against our community,” Suzanne Ford, interim executive director of San Francisco Pride, said Sunday in a statement to The Chronicle.
“Let’s address the root of antiLGBTQ+ violence,” as well as gun violence prevention, Ford added.
President Biden said that while the motive for the shootings was not yet clear, “we know that the LGBTQI+ community has been subjected to horrific hate violence in recent years.”
“Places that are supposed to be safe spaces of acceptance and celebration should never be turned into places of terror and violence,” he said. “We cannot and must not tolerate hate.”
In recent years, Republican elected officials have introduced a flurry of anti-LGBTQ laws, including the “Don’t Say Gay” bill introduced by House Republicans that would ban using federal funds for “sexually oriented” programs.
The bill is similar to a law that Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in April that prohibits public school teachers from teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, tweeted Sunday: “The murder of LGBTQ people at Club Q didn’t occur in a vacuum. The right wing is stoking hate & violence against LGBTQ people — demonizing trans ppl & drag queens, calling gay men pedophiles, etc.”
“Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric has consequences,” he added.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, the first openly gay man in the United States to be elected governor, called the weekend attack “sickening.”
Newsom wrote in a Sunday tweet: “The LGBTQ community has once again become victim to a horrifying attack,” adding, “Hate is taught. This is what happens when it goes unchecked. We have to continue to push back.”
Anti-LGBTQ attacks have been directed at family-oriented drag events and drag queens, whom agitators have tried to paint as groomers and pedophiles.
During Pride Month in the Bay Area, a group of men who police suspected were part of the far-right Proud Boys organization stormed a children’s story program hosted by a drag queen at the San Lorenzo Library. The men shouted anti-LGBTQ slurs and “attempted to escalate to violence,” according to event host Panda Dulce.
Conrad Corpus, reading Sunday on a bench outside Double Rainbow Ice Cream on Castro Street, said that when he learned from Instagram about the Colorado shooting, “I thought, ‘God, not again.’ ”
“I thought about those affected in Colorado,” he said. “They probably had plans for Thanksgiving. Now those plans are much different. I really can’t imagine the pain.”
At Sunday’s rally outside City Hall, college student Eli Cather, a San Francisco trans gay man, said the shooting underscored “how important it is” to call attention to anti-gay violence and rhetoric.
Rally speaker and Indigenous activist Miko Thomas, known as Landa Lakes, told The Chronicle, “Transgender Day of Remembrance came about because of hate. A lot of trans people are no longer with us because of hate . ... It seems like we have more work to do in our community to combat hate.”