A Gay Bar Opens its Doors After a Massacre

“It was our safe place. It still is. We’re not going to fucking let them take that from us.”

The bartender in a black T-shirt opened the heavy gray steel door just after 4 p.m., stood in the threshold and said, “We’re open.”

About a dozen people were standing in the sharp afternoon sunshine, waiting to get in.

It was Wednesday, just two days after a deadly shooting at Tucson’s midtown gay bar, Venture-N. Two longtime patrons, Cameron Capara and Vincent Siqueiros, were killed early Monday morning, and the community was reeling. Now, the beer was flowing again, and friends and family were coming together to grieve and honor the lives lost.

The mood inside the small, neighborhood gay bar swung between somber and sweet as many of the regulars filtered in. Tears poured out along with the drinks, and people held each other, remembering the men and what they meant to the community. The bright light of the afternoon flashed consistently into the dark bar as more and more people filtered in. Many of them were greeted by name. Most of them almost immediately found someone to hug.

From wall portraits hanging between neon beer signs, hunks in leather or underwear — or almost nothing at all — peered down at what used to be an exclusively men’s club. That exclusivity changed decades ago, and now the place is known as a refuge, a place where a stranger can’t walk in without quickly making a new friend.

Seventy-two-year-old Charles Marshall sat at one end of the U-shaped bar drinking a beer. His button-down shirt was slightly glowing under the black light. Behind him, on the corner TV, men’s gymnastics was playing.

Marshall took a pause when asked about the recent shooting. “It’s the shits,” he said. “It just sucks.” He said he didn’t know how to respond, but was thinking that maybe he should start carrying a gun.

“We can’t let them take this from us,” Marshall said, echoing a frequently expressed sentiment on the day of the reopening.

Joseph Howell, another longtime patron and close friend of Siqueiros, was smoking on the back patio. The patio space is enclosed by oleanders, one wall in peach adobe, another in faded blue. A second outdoor bar sits under a metal roof. A Pride flag hangs from a pergola, offering a spot of shade.

Howell, along with a roving cast of friends who offered hugs and added details, walked LOOKOUT step by step through the night of the shooting.

“Tell our story,” Howell said, with a look on his face at once fierce and pained. “Tell them all that we’re not going anywhere.”

He wasn’t just referring to the bar, but also the memory of his two friends, and to Tucson’s queer community.

A typical Sunday — and then “pandemonium”

Sweating and smoking Marlboro Blacks, Howell frequently paused during his retelling of the night to recompose himself, wipe away tears or stand up to greet another arriving friend.

“I didn’t give him a hug,” Howell said of first seeing Siqueiros at the bar that night, about 10 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 30.

Howell cried at the memory. “I just gave him a smile and a half wave when I first saw him.”

Siqueiros was at first sitting inside that night, wearing an orange-striped shirt. “Shots?!” Siqueiros had said — referring to the drinks. “We doing shots?”

Siqueiros liked green tea shots — made from whiskey, schnapps, sweet and sour mix and soda — as Howell and a couple of other friends remembered.

Shortly after midnight, now Aug. 31, Siqueiros went out to the patio, taking a mimosa he had been drinking with him. Another friend, Roger, was sitting close to Siqueiros when he told him to watch his mimosa and headed to the bar’s front parking lot.

Howell was in the bathroom when he heard the first gunshots ring out, sometime before 12:30 a.m.

“I walked out of the bathroom and I was like, ‘Those were gunshots, right?’” Howell said. Roger and some of the other patrons who were out on the patio rushed inside for safety.

It was hectic, Howell said. He saw Capara stumble inside. Another person present that night said that after Capara came back in, he said, “I’ve been shot.”

Someone started shouting for towels, Howell said, and that they needed to staunch the blood flowing from Capara. Capara made it to the back of the bar, and people helped him to the floor near the pool table.

“It was pandemonium,” Howell said. He and others didn’t know that anyone else, besides Capara, had been shot at first, nor did they know if they were still under attack. Howell said he yelled to the bartender to get a key to lock the front door. After scrambling with the key, Howell locked the door and stood in front of it.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said, explaining that he thought he could be another line of protection. But he was also terrified. “Can they shoot through this door?” he remembers thinking.

The bartender was on the phone with police dispatch, and Howell said he remembers hearing him shout to the people providing aid to Capara, questioning if he was still breathing.

“I didn’t hear what the answer was. I was just so scared,” Howell said. He wondered if they should start trying to barricade the door, if the shooter was going to try to come inside.

A few minutes later, with Capara surrounded in the back by people desperately trying to provide lifesaving aid, Howell remembers hearing the police sirens. Eventually he opened the door and said there were what looked like dozens of police vehicles outside.

“That was when I saw Vincent on the ground. I could see cops running around him, someone was doing chest compressions. I don’t know if I could speak at that point, but I was either shouting or trying to shout that we needed help inside as well, that Cameron was on the floor bleeding.”

Howell said that a little later, police officers started directing people out of the bar.

“I remember wanting to tiptoe over the blood,” Howell recalled. “But I couldn’t avoid it. The blood was everywhere.”

Howell, Roger and a couple dozen or so people who had been inside the bar were ushered outside by the police. “I saw the officer who had been leaning over Vincent stand up. Someone asked, ‘Is he dead?’ The officer said yes.”

Remembering the moment shocked Howell. After a few heavy breaths, holding his hands — with chipped yellow nail polish — tightly to his face, Howell said, “I don’t want these moments, I don’t want to remember Vinny like that.”

After the shooting, the patrons inside were interviewed by police officers. They waited for hours as the investigation continued, until the first drizzles of a storm blew in and dawn started breaking. Their two friends were dead. The shooter had been rushed to the hospital where, according to a Tucson Police statement, he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Past 5 a.m., Howell and the others went home just as the early morning monsoon began to drench Tucson.

“Our Safe Place”

At a table on the patio, five Venture-N regulars, including Howell, sat around the table talking about what the bar means to them. “This is Tucson gay,” one of them said.

“It was our safe place. It still is,” Howell said. “We’re not going to fucking let them take that from us.”

Francisco, another regular, said, “This is home. I was so scared they were going to leave it closed.”

The men at the table said Siqueiros was a member of the Bears of the Old Pueblo, described as “a social organization in Tucson for bearish, gay and bi men, and admirers.” The club would hold frequent beer parties at the bar, donating proceeds to local charities.

As the men kept reminiscing on the patio, inside, Amy Denison, who has been tending bar at Venture-N for 11 years, said that she felt proud to be back open.

“Just love, that’s what I feel,” Denison said. “I’m glad to be here taking care of my family.”

An hour and a half after Venture-N reopened its doors, the bar was slammed, and the patio was filling up. People drank from their pitchers, paid their respects to a memorial on one wall, cried and hugged each other. Someone had donated pizza, which was being distributed at a table in the back.

Many of the patrons were purchasing or were already wearing Venture-N T-shirts.

Ray, another patron, was drinking from a small pitcher of beer at the bar. He offered a cheers to Denison.

“This place holds so many of us together in unseen ways,” Ray said. The comment sparked responses from the men on either side of him. “It’s been our place,” chimed in David, another former bartender of the space.

“We all love each other here. We’re one big family.”