Tiara Kelley on Escaping Two LGBTQ Nightclub Attacks
Tiara Kelley has experienced two shootings at LGBTQ+ nightclubs that she once regarded as safe spaces. In a new interview with ABC, the 42-year-old reflects on the trauma that comes from losing friends and chosen family to targeted shootings in spaces specifically aimed at serving her community.
Kelley also spoke on the heightened difficulties that come with being a Black transgender woman in a country constantly grappling with its deep-rooted racism and institutionalized transphobia.
Double Tragedy
Tiara Kelley’s first near mass shooting experience was at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. This was on July 12, 2016. That night, 49 patrons were killed, and 53 people were injured. As she told ABC News in an interview, Kelley was sleeping at a friend’s house not too far from the club when she was woken up by the sounds of ambulances and firetrucks making their way to the scene of the shooting.
Kelley had planned on being at the club before the shooting happened. She narrowly escaped due to her accidentally falling asleep at her friend’s. Nonetheless, the ordeal shook her. Kelley lost friends and colleagues to the shooting. The incident also forced her to move out of Orlando to Colorado Springs, Colorado. It was there where she encountered yet another mass shooting six years later.
On November 19, 2022, a 22-year-old gunman opened fire in Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs.
The gunman killed 5 people and left 25 others injured. Again, Kelley narrowly escaped. She told ABC News at the time she was dealing with an illness brought on by her dialysis treatment. For that reason, she decided to stay home instead of attend a fellow drag performer’s birthday which was happening that night at Club Q.
Speaking on the trauma of experiencing such devastating ordeals twice, Kelley shared that it felt like experiencing deja vu.
“You think to yourself, ‘Thank God that you made it through [Pulse], we lived through that, it’s good, that could never happen again, there’s no way that it would ever happen again. And then you move across the country, to a whole ‘nother state and out of all of the clubs in this area … it’s unbelievable,” Kelley tells ABC.
In her interview, Kelley also talked about starting her own drag family, the current legislation targeted against drag performers and trans people in the country and finding joy and healing from past trauma in her community.
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