On a typical night at the Club Q, a bastion for LGBTQ people in the largely conservative city of Colorado Springs, Daniel Aston could be seen letting loose and sliding across the stage on his knees tailed by his mullet to whoops and hollers.
On a typical night at the Club Q, a bastion for LGBTQ people in the largely conservative city of Colorado Springs, Daniel Aston could be seen letting loose and sliding across the stage on his knees tailed by his mullet to whoops and hollers.
The venue provided Aston, a 28-year-old transgender man and the self-proclaimed “Master of Silly Business,“ with the liberating performances he had long sought. But on Saturday it became the site of the latest mass shooting in the U.S. when a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle opened fire and killed Aston and four others. Twenty-five others were injured.
His mother, Sabrina Aston, vacillated between past and present tense as she discussed her son Sunday night in their Colorado Springs home. Aston’s father, Jeff Aston, sat nearby listening to his wife’s stories and alternating between tightly clasping his hands and cupping his forehead.
“We are in shock, we cried for a little bit, but then you go through this phase where you are just kind of numb, and I’m sure it will hit us again,” she said. “I keep thinking it’s a mistake, they made a mistake, and that he is really alive,“ she added.
Her son’s eagerness to make people laugh and cheer started as a child in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he would don elaborate costumes, including the beast from “Beauty and the Beast,” cycle through weird hats, and write plays acted out by neighborhood kids.
