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We’ll get past this.” And his father offered acceptance, too. His district human resources manager welcomed him back to the office, telling him: “I have a lot of friends who are gay. “I was very concerned about the reaction to me at work,” he said, “and, of course, my family.” It forced him to be who he was - a gay man in a straight world. “The Backstreet shooting made me a stronger person,” he said later. He stayed on the periphery of the crowd, hugging others who had come to remember the night that changed everything for him and so many others. Tucker was the only victim of the shooting to attend the vigil. (Natalee Waters/The Roanoke Times via AP) Some of the bar’s customers were outed by the shooting that occurred the night before.
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Laura Boutwell lights a candle during a vigil in front of the Backstreet Cafe on Sept. Backstreet lets me be me, and I want this for everyone.” “I’ve always wanted Backstreet to be a place where you can be anyone you want to be without fear of bigotry,” said Marcin, who discovered the bar a couple of years after the shooting, when she was exploring her identity as a woman. Marcin addressed not only the shooting’s toll and its scars, but also the efforts by Roanoke’s LGBT community and Backstreet to move forward. Each held a candle to pay tribute to Overstreet and those who were wounded: Tucker, John Collins, Linda Conyers, Susan Smith, Iris Page Webb and Kathy Caldwell, who died several years after the shooting.
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She hired a commercial photographer to document the vigil, and she held auditions to find a local musician to perform John Lennon’s “Imagine.”Īs the sun set Sept. 24, about 30 people gathered on the sidewalk in front of the bar.
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The bar still caters to outsiders in this city of nearly 100,000 in southwest Virginia, but they are mostly punk rockers and metalheads, rather than gay men and lesbians.Įven so, Marcin wanted to mark the 15th anniversary of the shooting, just as Backstreet had done on the 10th anniversary in 2010. It is managed by Deanna Marcin, who was a married man named John Marcin before divorcing and becoming a transgender woman. Wright/For The Washington Post)īack then, few could have predicted the seismic changes that were coming to the country, to Virginia and to Roanoke - on same-sex marriage, on gays serving in the military, on the emergence of openly gay athletes, chief executives and celebrities.īackstreet’s identity has shifted, too. Backstreet is not really a gay bar anymore. Tucker denied that he was gay in an interview with the Roanoke Times, insisting that he was at the bar with a girlfriend and didn’t know any of the other people there that night.ĭeanna Marcin, a transgender woman and manager of Roanoke’s Backstreet Cafe, has transformed it into a venue for punk, hardcore and metal music. I wasn’t out to anybody except my very close friends.” “When it happened, I was not out to my family,” said Tucker, who was then 40 and worked, as he still does, for United Parcel Service. He killed Overstreet, 43, and wounded six others, including Joel Tucker, who had to deal with more than just the bullet wound in his back. Its role in Roanoke was exposed Sept. 22, 2000, when Ronald Edward Gay, a former Marine who had been taunted for his name and hated it, walked in, ordered a beer, spotted two men embracing - and opened fire. It was his way of paying tribute to his Verizon co-worker Danny Overstreet, who was killed 15 years ago at a gathering spot for gay people in a closeted city.īackstreet was a gay bar at a time when the sexual orientation of its customers remained hidden - a haven for an underground culture. sent the flowers, as he did every year on this day, with a note: “Never forget. The yellow mums appeared at Backstreet Cafe’s door well before people began arriving for the vigil.