“By the end of the day, I was smiling,” says Keith Orr, co-owner of the Aut Bar. On the last Friday in August one or more vandals tore down and destroyed items in the bar’s courtyard on Braun Court, including strings of lights, porch trim, rainbow streamers, and the rainbow flag that sang out the bar’s identity.
“The monetary damage wasn’t that much,” Orr says. “But you have that sense of violation–the same sort of feeling you get when your car was broken into. It was a violation,” he says, of the gay community’s “safe space.”
When word got out the next day, Orr and his husband and co-owner, Martin Contreras, were flooded with sympathetic calls and emails from outraged friends, customers, and concerned strangers. State rep Yousef Rabhi set up a GoFundMe.com page with a goal of $2,000. By that evening, it had raised nearly $7,000. That’s when Orr started smiling. In mid-September, the tally had topped $13,000, with occasional contributions still trickling in. They’ll divvy up the extra funds between two other gay institutions, the Common Language Bookstore and the Jim Toy Community Center.
speaking for a whole lot of gay people, this story really bothered me. Don’t Keith and Martin own Common Language? so they donated to themselves after collecting all this money they didn’t actually need for repairs?
they had no proof of hate behind the vandalism and the damage was minimal. it could have been teenagers who walked through and pulled things down. I feel like Aut jumped on this opportunity to play victim and fundraise when people could have been donating to worthier causes.
as a gay person, and longtime Aut patron, I resented the opportunism and hysterical response. And it was annoying how everyone jumped on the bandwagon.