It’s important to understand that dozens of gay and lesbian bars have been singled out over the past half-century, in places like Atlanta and New Orleans and New York and Minneapolis and Seattle. Several media accounts have mentioned a “handful” of other gay bars that have been targeted across the U.S. That isn’t accurate either. history. It’s important to understand that other atrocities have been committed in the nation’s past, like the targeted killing of emigrants, Native Americans and African Americans in places like Mountain Meadows and Wounded Knee and Tulsa. The Associated Press recently corrected itself and other media outlets in clarifying that the attack on Pulse was the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. In the aftermath of the horrific attack on Orlando’s Pulse bar, I’ve been dealing with intense emotions and have seen many of my friends living in fear. I’ve seen easily debunked statements about the gunman and guns and gay bars and the history of violence aimed at LGBT establishments go uncorrected, and it makes my heart hurt. As a science writer, I deal in facts all the time, and live in fear of making a big mistake. During an ensuing protest by the group Queer Nation, one man held a placard that read: “Hate Kills.”įacts matter. Four months later, I was back in Moorhead, Minn., for my senior year in college when a 24-year-old gay man named Phillip Smith was gunned down after leaving the same Houston gay bar. He reportedly enraged his attacker, who had planned to rob him, by smiling at him. I couldn’t tell anyone else about my terror, but I avoided the entire Montrose neighborhood for the rest of the summer. I remember gasping in horror at the story in the Houston Chronicle. Outnumbered and surrounded, he was stabbed and pummeled to death with steel-toed boots, a Buck knife and a 2-by-4 spiked with nails at one end. Broussard wasn’t as lucky, and ran into a dead end.
Broussard’s friends escaped by running down a busy street.
On July 5th, at two o’clock in the morning, a 26-year-old gay man named Paul Broussard was walking home from Heaven with two friends when they were confronted by a group of 10 intoxicated young men, some of whom had also taken marijuana and LSD. As several members of the group later admitted, they were specifically targeting gay men that night. When a new friend asked me to go to Heaven with her for a night of dancing over the July 4th weekend, I felt a shiver of excitement and fear. I wasn’t yet out, but had heard about a popular gay bar called Heaven in the city’s Montrose neighborhood. In the summer of 1991, when I was 21 years old, I worked in a genetics lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.