Beyonca Deleon

**Beyonca Deleon**
*Colorado Springs, CO*

Beyonca was Club Q’s general manager and not scheduled to work on November 19th, 2022 when a man entered the bar with an AR-15 style rifle, targeting the LGBTQ community.
5 people were killed
and 25 injured that night.

Beyonca needs financial support to help her cover living expenses including rent, utilities, and insurance. Please consider donating to Beyonca directly to her Venmo or via the link below.

Venmo username: @Beyonca-Perez-1

I've been performing for almost 20 years. I started when I was 17. I'm 36 now, so almost 20 years. The stage is my life. I love being on the stage. I love entertaining. Yesterday, it came up in my memories on Facebook that it was a year ago when I took over the bar [Club Q].

I had decided that I was gonna take a step back from the stage and just focus on making the bar better, getting to know the people, and starting new.

The night of the shooting, I had gone to a show [in Denver], and I was pretty antsy all night because I have a thing with big groups of people already but also because I was leaving my bar alone, and it was a Saturday night. So, I had talked to Derrick, who was my best friend. He was the first person I met when I moved here. He was like my right hand. He didn't have a lot of family here in Colorado; all his family is from Pennsylvania. So he was always here, and we'd have dinners together with my mom.

It was nice to have that, you know? It felt like home.

He was sick that day, and I told him I didn’t have to go to Denver and he's like, no, go, we'll figure it out. I told him when I get back, if you're not feeling well, you can go, and I'll bartend for the rest of the night.

It was about 10 o'clock when we got to the bar. Derrick tells me he’s just going to bartend all night. He told me to get my stuff and go home. He said, “You don't want to stay here till two [AM], and then you're not gonna be able to wake up at six to come open the bar by seven.” He gave me a drink, and I went outside on the patio. I remember I kept trying to leave and I just couldn't get myself off of that stool.

Our speakers had been giving us some issues the day before. So it sounded like all the speakers in the bar were busting and I was like, “Oh, not again, these stupid speakers.”

I stand up, and I see it. I see where he's shooting the gun.

THE SHOOTING

I froze for a second.

We have two garage doors. There's one that leads to the parking lot, and there's one that leads to our outside patio. In my head I was like, there's somebody outside waiting for us to run out of here. They're gonna shoot us as soon as we run out of this door. So I opened the door to the outside patio so we could at least jump over the fence and run towards the stores. When I stepped out, I slipped and fell on my stomach. People were stepping on me to get out. I didn't even notice that until two days later when the dress that I was wearing that night was getting put away, and there were footprints all over my back.

I remember getting everybody into the outside patio and throwing people over the fence. It's a 6-foot fence, but I thought that would be the easiest way to go. I remember grabbing the garage door and pulling it down. There's a rope tied to it so we can help pull it down.

So I'm on my knees, I'm holding the door. And I hear behind me, somebody yelling “Beyonca, I can't get over the fence. I can't get out, I can't get out.” And I'm thinking I'm not gonna be able to get out either then because I'm a big person. I ran over to him, and we started punching the fence. We made a hole big enough to where he could just start ripping the fence pieces off, and then I ran back to the door, and I pulled it down. I wrapped the rope around my arms, and I held it down.

I remember being on the ground on my knees and that I looked through this little crack in the door, and I saw his gun. I thought, this is it, this is how I die. So I put my head down, and I just remember praying. I was like God, please welcome me into your kingdom, forgive me for all my sins. And then it went still, it wasn’t quiet, nothing stopped. It was just still.

AFTERMATH

I didn't hear anything until somebody lifted me up off the floor and I'm going through this hole that we made in the fence. I ran around, and I saw the DJ who had been shot. Nobody tells you what blood looks like on snow and you can't believe it in movies because it doesn't look like that.

Photo Credit: Trey DeaBueno, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I ran towards the front door, and there was a cop there by this time, and he was like, “Are you the manager? We need you to turn the lights on.” They took me in through the exit door, and I remember having to step over something, and there were so many shells everywhere. While I'm walking towards the DJ booth on the dance floor, there was somebody lying there. Somebody was on the phone while they were putting pressure on these people.

And they're like, “he's fucking dying. He's fucking dying. Hurry up, hurry up. We just need help.” And I was like, oh my God, they can’t hear. I went and turned off the music first, then I turned on the lights, and that's when I finally saw everything. I can't explain to you the smell. The smell, what I saw, what I heard after that. It doesn't go away. And when you're trying to forget it, it just keeps coming back, and it plays over and over again.

It was just, for lack of better words, a war zone. There were shells everywhere, there were magazines thrown on the floor, there was a pistol on the ground.

And I saw him. At the time, I didn't know it was him. I saw somebody lying next to the door in front of the dressing room area, and he was grunting. For a split second, I had sympathy for this person because I didn't know who they were. I just saw that they were bloody, they were beaten up, and they kept saying, “I didn't do anything wrong.”

I thought the police were arresting the wrong people. And then it clicked, and I realized, oh my God, this is the person who did this to us.

THE WEEKS AFTER

I went home the first two weeks, everybody was with me no matter what, nobody left my side. Nobody wanted me to be alone. The third week, people started getting their interviews.

They started telling their stories, and I just felt so dumb because I couldn't tell mine and I was just in my head. I was like, their stories are more important.

The love and the admiration kept pouring in from all over the place, and we kept getting all these donations. And for some reason, people set me up as the person to receive them.

So every time I would receive them, I would just make piles for everybody. Not once did I keep any of that money. I didn't keep any of the donations because I thought no matter what I was gonna be ok. I figured that the owner was going to take care of us. I said, no, I don't need anything. I'm just gonna make sure that my people are ok.

The people who I have left are ok. And then the money started coming in, and you're just so scared that you're not gonna make it, and you don't know what tomorrow looks like. I literally have $2000 to my name. All the money that I have received, I paid bills early, and I have to do this because I don't know when I'm gonna get back to work.

MEMORIAL

[Part of the GoFundMe] went to the building fund to reopen Club Q and the memorial.

A memorial that nobody has asked for. A memorial that the families were not involved in. They're saying that the community wants it, but the families have not signed off on anything. The community doesn't care about this kind of memorial. What they want, what we want is to shut that bar down. We do not want that bar in the same place. How are you supposed to go party in the same spot where your best friend was shot and killed? You know what I mean?

Whether you design it differently and you make a whole new bar doesn't matter. The space is still the same, it's still a square that people walk through every day.

I saw where everybody was lying. I just didn't see faces, and if it wasn't for the stories that I read afterward, I wouldn't know where everybody was laid out. But now that I know it's hard, it's hard to say “Yeah, let's reopen here, let's just remodel, blah, blah, blah.” No. Sorry. No.

In my head, I had already decided I was leaving Colorado Springs. I just didn't know when. I knew that I wasn't gonna come back to that bar.

COMING OUT

I didn't move to Colorado because of me. I didn't want to be here.

The reason I'm in Colorado is because at the time my mom had cancer. She was going through COVID, and the doctor told her that there was a really big chance that she wasn't gonna make it and to get her affairs in order. She called me, and she said, “hey, this is what's going on. If I make it through, I want to move to Colorado to be closer to my mom”. She made it through, and she was given the green light to leave. Then, after selling everything that I owned, packing up my clothes, packing my mother and her things, we moved to Colorado.

I thought this was going to be my start-over. I’m not going to worry about being Beyonca, the character that I've been for all these years. I can just give Beyonca the person a chance to thrive and succeed and be at the front of it all.

I came out when I was 15 and came out as gay because I had no idea. I'm 36, so this was a completely different time to grow up as an LGBTQ person. So I came out as gay because I thought that all gay men that were feminine wanted to be women and all gay men that were masculine were men just like straight people.

If you're a girl, you're a girl, you're a boy, you're a boy. I knew that I was a girl. I knew it all my life. I just didn't know what the term was for it.

I wrote my mom this four-page letter telling her that I was so sorry and it was not her fault. This is just who I am, but I still love her, and I hope she loves me. I left it in her room and went to school. I get home from school, and I'm in my bedroom, and I'm listening to Britney Spears and, I hear my dad's truck.

He throws my door open, and he's like, “what the fuck is this?” And he throws me the letter. He's like “it says you're a f-(slur)” and I was like, “I am not, I am no such thing, sir.”

He's like “this says you're a f-(slur) and I'm not gonna have no f-(slur) in my house.” And I was like “I'm not” and I stood up, and he pushed me down, and he punched me, and then we started going at it and I managed to bring my foot up and hit him in the nose. And he just said, “you're not a f- (slur) because a f- (slur) don't fight like that.”

And I was like, (gay) or not, nobody's putting their hands on me ever. And I ran, I just took off.

LEAVING HOME AT 17

At the time when I decided I was trans and this is who I was and who I needed to be— around [age of] 17 now — I decided to leave. I tended to do what was best for me. I was selfish and went on and did my own thing, and it wasn't easy.

Then I met [my boyfriend]. We just became friends, and one thing led to another, and we ended up together. He paid for me to get my first hormones and to get my transition started.

We were living together, and I just wanted to be with him all the time. I didn't want to leave his side.

We woke up that Christmas morning and he was like, we're going to go to my mom's house.

I just wasn't feeling good. I was there for maybe 20 minutes, and I guess you could see it in my face because he was like, “Go home.”

I left. About 45 minutes down the road my phone rings. It was his mom, and she was hysterical. She told me you need to get to the hospital.

I walked into the emergency room, and his mom and dad are sitting there, and she's like, “I don't know [what happened], he was standing there and all of a sudden he fell on the floor, and I was holding him.” And then I saw the blood on her shirt.

The doctor comes out, and his parents stand, and he says, “We did everything we could. The bullet hit the temporal lobe. Your son is gone.” His mom fell to the floor, and she grabbed me on the way down, and I'm just holding her, and then he's like, “We'll give you guys a few minutes with his body to claim his things.”

They have a sheet over him, and his shirt is cut open. His pants are cut open, his freaking boots, they cut his boots open. He was wearing a ring and his necklace - they didn't cut that off. There was this bright light over him, and you could see where the bullet wound was and how it went in. It was bad, but his face was perfect. It looked like he was sleeping. And I just kept telling him to wake up, please wake up, come on, I need you to wake up. Eventually, I took off his necklace. On one side, it said Beyonca; on the other side, his name.

LOSS: THEN & NOW

I went home [that] Sunday morning, and his mom had emptied out the whole house. She hired movers, and the only thing that was left was my bed, our blankets, all our pictures, my clothes, and a couple of his things that she knew I bought him.

She left me a letter, and it said that they loved me because he loved me and that this is a family matter now and they're going to take him to where they're from to bury him. She said we would really appreciate it if you don't come to the funeral. They thanked me for being there for his daughter and for helping raise her, but as of this day forward, she would not have any contact with me. And I'm standing in the middle of this house that's empty with picture frames, just sitting on my kitchen counter and my whole life torn apart. And I'm just like, what do I do now?

There was a drive-by. A bullet ricocheted and hit him through the window. I don't know how a bullet came from one end of the fucking street to the other, went through one window in the living room, the biggest window there, and hit him only, I don't understand. I will never understand.

The amount of loss in my life right now is overwhelming. I ended up losing my aunt, who practically raised me. She was really important to me. I lost her in March. Then a few weeks later, I lost my best friend, Tress. He had a heart attack, died in his sleep. And then in April, my brother passed away.

Life is already hard enough and to have to deal with [the shooting] on top of everything else that life throws at you —it's not fair. I'm an adult, and I'm dealing with it like this, I can't even fathom what these children that go through this — what they're gonna be like as adults, you know? Are they gonna get the help they need? Because I don't even know if I have. What is help? What kind of help do you need for something like this?

WHAT IS NORMAL?

What do I need? What can get me better? I honestly don't know. There's days where I think maybe I should just check myself into some, I don't know, rehab kind of place. I don't know. I honestly have no clue. I'm so lost that I have no idea what tomorrow looks like.

Not even a glimpse of what I would like it to look like. I have no idea. The antidepressants mixed with my hormones – I've gained like, 60 to almost 80 pounds now. So, now I'm fighting with body dysmorphia all over again. It's just a lot of different things that have triggered all these emotions.

I don't know what normal is anymore. And I don't even know what kind of normal I would be looking at, you know what I mean? And then some days I beat myself up –- what are you doing? You're not the only person that's gone through these things. Look at everybody else that's gone through it: they're surviving, they're thriving, and you're just fucking here looking like a piece of dirt. Literally, that's the way I feel.

It's very lonely. I don't know, I don't wanna kill myself. I don't wanna die. I just don't want to exist for a while. I wish I could be somebody else, take control of everything, and just give me what I need to do and I'll do it. I've just never been that person, so it's so hard for me to even think that that's even a possibility because that's not who I am.

I smoke a lot more marijuana because it's easier on my mind. It doesn't keep me in a zombie state like my antidepressants do during the days where I feel like that's overbearing and I can't deal with it. That's why I take my antidepressant. My doctor has already approved it for me, so it's not like it's not the traditional way of using the medicine, and they understand that I don't want to rely on that medicine for the rest of my life.

So I only use it when I need to mellow out and bring me down to start the process of working through things. With marijuana usage I can still interact with everybody. I can still have conversations. But my mind doesn't wander, my mind doesn't go to those dark places because I'm focused on the here and now rather than just everywhere.

NOW

I'm so lost and so broken. Somebody asked me what do you like to do? And I'm like, really nothing. I don't like to do anything. I don't feel safe anywhere. I don't feel comfortable.

I think the worst of everybody now. I don't know who's doing what, I don't know why they're here. What do you want? Life is so hard now, and I don't sleep. Every time, still to this day, almost a year later, I close my eyes, I can see it.

I can see the gun going off. I can see him lying on the ground. I could see Derrick, I could still smell —there's just a smell that blood and everything mixed together makes. I'll be falling asleep, and I have a panic attack because that moment where your body starts to drift, that triggers me and I feel like I'm right back there.

I don't go to grocery stores no more. I can't. It's just too many people. It freaks me out. I don't go anywhere really. I can't leave the house. Going to Walmart hurts because it's embarrassing. Somebody dropped a can, and then people have to walk me out. It's embarrassing, and I don't want to live this life anymore.

I had a show this weekend for my sister Hysteria Brook's birthday party, and it's the first time I've performed. It's the first time I've been in a gay space since [the shooting], and that was really hard. I had a really bad dream the night before about the same thing happening at this party. It was pretty rough and then to do the show— I got through it, and then everything kind of just hit at once. I was literally just sitting there and I started looking around. I can't run out of here. Oh my God. They had to get me out of there because my anxiety started going crazy. I started shaking really bad. I haven't left the house since.

I miss me. I miss the person I used to be. I mourn her because I worked so hard my entire life to be someone that people go to for help, you know, to be that person that I never had growing up. And now I can't even look people in the eye when I talk to them.

During all this, Lady Gaga’s “Hold My Hand” came out. The lyrics just spoke so strongly to me because that's who I am as a person. That's who Beyonca was.

“Hold my hand. Everything will be OK. I heard from the heavens that clouds have been gray.” She's basically telling people you can lean on me, you can hold my hand. I will take care of you. I don't have a Beyonca if that makes sense. I have people that care, yes. I have people that love me. But with my friends, when I see people going through what I'm going through, I just lift you up. I don't need your permission. I'm gonna do what I can if I love you.