‘IT’S ABOUT HUMANITY’ Club Q co-owner Matthew Haynes and drag queens Autumn Quinn and Hysteria Brooks talk grief, memories, reopening the venue, and why people must stand against anti-LGBTQ bigotry. Upstairs in New York City’s storied Stonewall bar Friday evening—rainbow Christmas tree twinkling, a microphone-check underway—Matthew Haynes, co-owner of Club Q, was reflecting on the three weeks since a gunman shot dozens of people, five fatally, at the Colorado Springs LGBTQ club. (…) Haynes had come to New York with two drag queens from the club, Autumn Quinn and Hysteria Brooks, for a benefit in aid of Club Q in partnership with GLAAD and Drag Story Hour. Right-wing rhetoric and mobilizing directed at such events, and attacks online against LGBTQ people, have continued unabated since the attack at Club Q. (Suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, was this week charged with 305 criminal counts, including first-degree murder, bias-motivated crimes, assault, and attempted murder.) “We will open up the club again,” Haynes told The Daily Beast. “It’s a process. It’s very important to us and our community to have a memorial there, but we don’t want to spend years getting that memorial. Our guys wouldn’t want that. They would want something that stated what happened and memorialize it appropriately. We also want to make sure that security is harder than what it was without it becoming Fort Knox. There’s a balance: how does one do that, what does that look like?
via daily beast: Club Q Owner: We Will Reopen. The Shooter, and Anti-LGBTQ Bigotry, Will Not Win