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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 22 people, five fatally, at the Colorado Springs LGBTQ club.
“Sometimes it feels like three years, sometimes it feels like three minutes,” Haynes told The Daily Beast. “Yes, it’s grief, and it’s also been such a large process from that night when we were dealing with what had happened, then all the police, all the investigation pieces going on in that first week—identifying the victims, who their families were. The last funeral was on Wednesday. Daniel (Aston, bartender). It was a lovely funeral.”
Haynes paused. “But can you imagine… I have two adoptive children myself, and it was so hard to watch a slideshow of such a young man’s life. Daniel’s parents had to pick those slides out. No parent should ever have to do that—certainly not at the hands of hate, certainly not at the hands of that sort of weapon.”