Breaking down barriers was the theme of Saturday night’s event at Club Verse.
The new Salt Lake City LGBTQ+ bar had opened just weeks earlier, but it was required to have gendered restrooms based on state building code requirements. So, late Saturday, ahead of Transgender Day of Remembrance, the club hosted local transgender advocates, who gathered to demolish the wall separating its male and female restrooms — creating one large, all-gender restroom in protest.
“When it comes to like Trans Awareness Week, we never really have a lot of representation, or it’s just very quiet,” Nicole “Treasure” Linch said to the crowd at about 10:30 p.m. Saturday.
“I feel like we should be not only celebrating the lives of those who have passed on due to horrific violence in the transgender community,” she continued, “but also celebrating the lives of people that are still here fighting that fight.”
A little more than an hour after Linch and others then used sledgehammers to tear into the club’s bathroom wall, a 22-year-old gunman opened fire at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub much like Verse in Colorado Springs, Colorado — killing 5 people and injuring 18 others.
New security measures
On Saturday, Club Verse attendees were welcomed by a bouncer outside ahead of the planned event. Then, they handed their IDs to a staffer inside before they were waved with a metal-detecting wand.
Now, the club is installing a metal detector at the club’s entrance — the same device that owner Michael Repp said he once used at The Sun Trapp, the shuttered LGBTQ+ bar that he and his husband used to own.
“We thought maybe — just maybe — we had moved past anything happening in a really, really bad light to a gay bar again. We thought Pulse had kind of taught us all a few things with security and everything,” Repp said Monday. “I think now we know that we are indeed a targeted community.”
Repp said he has a responsibility to protect not only his staff, but everyone who attends the club, “whether they are queer or not.” That’s why his security staff is made up of either ex-police, or people who are currently law enforcement-certified but not vested by a local police department.
He now intends to send them to an “aggressive training” for confronting active shooters conducted by a local FBI agent, he said Monday. This, after the bar went into lockdown for Sunday night patrons following the Colorado mass shooting.
“The things within our reach, we can handle quickly — it’s going to be the 3-, to 6-, to 12-month mark where people get relaxed again. And we can’t afford that to happen,” Repp said.
A day of mourning
Repp had hoped Saturday’s event at Club Verse would help connect the transgender community and other local LGBTQ+ individuals, because there’s often a “line of demarcation and inter-community intolerance of the trans community.”
It was intentionally hosted the night before Transgender Day of Remembrance, the end-cap to a week meant to raise awareness for the transgender community.
Now, Repp will have to add more victims to a wall he had already planned at the club to honor the victims of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting, which left 49 dead and 53 more wounded.
“This is our second go-round with a gun,” Repp said, referring to Pulse, and now Club Q. “This individual certainly chose a very awful day to do his deal. ... He sidelined that day of mourning for a lot of people, which is really, really sad.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) People gather at the Utah Pride Center in Salt Lake City on Monday, Nov. 21, 2022 for a candlelight vigil for the victims of a shooting in Colorado Springs.
Linch hopes to see more celebration of transgender and non-binary individuals in the community, noting that many LGBTQ+ events are targeted toward gay cisgender women and men.
“I never put it all together as a cisgender gay male — I came to the bar, I had my drink, I went home, crawled in bed and went to sleep,” Repp said. “Where Nicole would come to the bar, look around before she got out of her car, trot to the door, go in, have a drink or two, and meet up with four or five friends — so that when they walk out, they’re in a group.”
Saturday night’s wall breakdown was a step toward a world where Linch would not have to go through all those extra steps just to feel safe, she said.
“I am a wife, and I’m a mom to the sweetest little boy. I’m a sister, I’m a friend and I’m a daughter,” Linch told the Club Verse crowd Saturday night.
“As I watch him grow,” she said of her son, “it worries me, because I think that he at any minute can witness the hate that we go through in our community and just as humans in general, because to this day, trans lives are not accepted. And we are forced with discrimination, violence and murder.”
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t walk out of my house and just have this simple thought of, ‘I could not be coming home today,’” she said.
