Theirs was a whirlwind romance of laughter, lyrics and the unabashed sappiness of unexpected true love.
Wyatt Kent and Daniel Aston’s friends at Club Q watched that love blossom over the months after the two met while working at the Colorado Springs LGBTQ+ venue — Aston behind the bar, and Kent as a drag performer. Their courtship was the stuff of eye-rolls and amiable envy.
“I would drop flowers at his door, with poems. It was like the most truly Hallmark movie, over-romantic, trash love,” said Kent, recalling the moment earlier this year when it became clear to both that they needed to leave their current partners and be together. “He showed me a couple poems one of the first times we hung out. I said, ‘God, that’s such a beautiful poem.’ He said, ‘Really? I wrote it about you.’”
Aston’s final message of love was a handwritten birthday note, left backstage at Club Q on Nov. 19 with a cache of Kent’s favorite berries, a vase full of red roses and baby’s breath, and a directive not to open the letter until the show was over, so as to avoid the good-natured ridicule of their friends. Definite mush ahead.
Kent finally read the note last week after it was returned to him by police, days after a mass shooting at the club wounded 17 people and killed five, including 28-year-old Daniel Aston.
By then, Kent thought he’d been close to crying himself dry. He was wrong.
“I lost my mind reading it,” he said. “That letter had every single word that you would want to hear.”
Not for the last time, though.
I was going to write you a poem, but I have hardly the words, or the brain capacity. So here, I will write a letter.
Aston was a “Tulsa Oklahoma punk” and trans man who’d made his way to Colorado Springs on a whim. Here, he found a job at a bigger-on-the-inside LGBTQ+ nightclub tucked behind a block of storefronts off Academy Boulevard, and a chosen family that changed everything.
“I have a job bartending that I love. I no longer want to die. Cheers to that,” Aston wrote, in a Jan. 2, 2021, journal entry in which he extolled the effect the move west had had on his mood and outlook, but how he also still longed for more. “I feel oddly content … but I am desperate for a companion who can engage in deep conversation.”
He found that companion in Wyatt Kent.
Kent was born and raised in Colorado Springs and began performing as a drag queen in his early teens, in high school plays and in “weird parts with gay-straight alliance.”
“I’ve always been this weird little creature,” said Kent, who performs comedy and alt-drag solo, sometimes with a group, under the drag name Potted Plant.
Kent and Aston had met before socially, but the first time Aston met Potted Plant was the night that made an indelible mark on them both.
“He walked me back to the dressing room and showed me where I needed to be,” Kent said. A fellow performer later reminded Kent what was said that night, after Potted Plant parted ways with the handsome bartender with the ice-blue eyes and the smile that could melt.
“She said we were talking about Daniel and … (I) said, ‘I’m going to marry that man,’” Kent said.
Daniel wasn’t only a bartender, he was something of a community hub and resource for the trans community, Kent said.
“He was there (at the bar) probably five days a week regularly — as was I, as was really everyone else at Q, (because) that was our family, that was our second home,” Kent said. “He was gorgeous. He was funny. He was witty. That man could match me, and we could go back and forth for hours.”
The two started officially dating in late summer. The timing sometimes felt rushed, but never the emotions.
“We only had 4½, five months together as partners. And boy did it move fast,” Kent said. “They say when you know, you know.”
Meanwhile, Potted Plant’s star was on the rise, and Kent had booked a gig at a drag bar in Hopkinsville, Ky., for New Year’s Eve, 2022. When Aston learned of the job, he told Kent he was “just going to show up there … whisk you away, and we’re going to go to the White Wedding Chapel and get married.”
An engagement, on the down-low, was made.
First of all, I believe you can never have too many flowers. Especially not on your birthday, especially not from your lover. You deserve much more in fact.
As midnight ticked closer on the night of Nov. 19, 2022, the drag show had wrapped and the evening was transitioning into what had been billed as a dance party to celebrate Potted Plant’s 23rd birthday.
Kent remembers riding high on the turnout for the comedy and punk rock-themed drag and show, which played out to an “incredible” crowd and yielded unexpectedly high tips.
“That night was a spectacular show,” Kent said. “We all made incredible money.”
A group of Kent’s friends, including Atrevida Beer Co. founders Jessica and Richard Fierro and their daughter Kassy — Kent’s childhood best friend, whom he’d known since third grade — were on hand to celebrate his birthday. Also in attendance was Kassy’s longtime boyfriend, Raymond Green Vance, a fellow longtime classmate of Kent’s growing up in the Springs.
Kent bellied up to the bar, still in full Potted Plant drag, to order a beer.
“One of my favorite things is getting a Coors Banquet. "Cause I think it’s funny to see a drag queen walking around with a beer,” said Kent, who then struck up a conversation with his old friend Raymond Green Vance, who was sipping a cup of water at the bar.
Soon after, was when Kent saw Aston, who was bartending, for the last time
“I was, like, ‘Oh my gosh I’ve been looking for you,’” Kent recalled. “I gave him a hug and kiss, told him I loved him and I’d meet him out on the patio to go smoke with him.”
Kent was at the bar with a group of people, including Kelly Loving and Ed Sanders, who was sporting a jaunty velvet jacket, when a series of loud pops rang out inside the club.
At first, Kent said he thought a speaker had blown. He’d been on the smoking patio when that had happened before, and this was exactly what it sounded like.
“Ed, Kelly and I all turned our bodies to look towards the door and I could see him. This big figure holding what would appear to be an assault-style rifle,” Kent said. “It was one of those split second things. Like ‘This is happening.’
“I hit the ground.”
Also, you can never have too much attention or appreciation. Especially for a drag queen, and especially not on her birthday. So allow me to give some to you.
Kent dropped to the floor, pressing himself as far back as possible, his body against the wall and the base of the bar. Kelly Loving fell on top of him, Ed Sanders on top of her, his body bent like a lightning bolt.
Kent remembers his phone and his beer hitting the floor, the latter spewing and spilling “everywhere.”
He pried an arm free, rescued his cell from the froth and, hoping against hope that it still worked, called 911.
“All I could say (was) ‘Club Q, Club Q shooting, there’s a shooting at Club Q, Club Q shooting … active shooter at Club Q, Academy Academy Academy,” he said.
He called out to Sanders, who croaked back that he’d been hit, but was OK.
He sought out Kelly Loving’s hand.
“I said, 'keep squeezing me, baby. Keep squeezing me,’” Kent said. “She gave me a couple of good squeezes, but …”
Kent lay there, curly blond Potted Plant wig askew and half-obscuring his vision, giving updates to the 911 operator that he hoped were too quiet for the shooter to hear, as a sudden hush he had no reason to believe signaled an end to the attack fell over the club.
“I didn’t really hear the quiet because everyone in the bar was screaming,” he said. “I didn’t know if he was reloading, or if he was outside, or if he was just watching to see who was still moving.”
Eventually, Kent said he could see a pair of legs through his limited vision, and he froze. Turned out it was a patron who’d survived the attack and was making the rounds to assess who had been injured, and to what degree.
Police arrived minutes after the deadly shooting spree had begun. Kent said he kissed Loving on the cheek before EMTs whisked her away, before police told him the best thing he could do at that point was leave and let them do their work.
“I stood up and grabbed my phone and stepped over Ed, stepped over (shooting victim) Ashley (Paugh) … and walked out,” he said. “And that's when my first thought was, ‘Where is Daniel?’”
He later learned that Richard Fierro had tackled the shooter after the original burst of gunfire, and was one of a trio of people who'd kept the suspect subdued, and away from his weapons, until police could arrive.
"I hate to say it but thank God they were," Kent said. "Richard Fierro ... saved many lives."
Kent didn’t learn of Aston’s death until late morning the following day, after hours waiting and hoping he was among the injured who’d been taken to hospitals in the Springs area and simply been lost in the confusion.
He got a text at 11 o’clock from Aston's dad:
"Wyatt, I’m so sorry. He never left the scene.”
Kent originally believed that Aston had been behind the bar when the shooter entered the club and opened fire. Days after the attack, he learned Aston had been by the entry door, where he’d gone moments before the shooting began.
“I learned … from our security guard that he saved our door girl’s life,” Kent said. “And it kind of really messed me up, because I had kind of already grieved him being in a different place, and now I had to grieve him being someplace else.”
Every day I am enamored by you. I know I’ve told you a hundred times but I’ve never felt this way about anyone ever.
But that's not why he is grieving, or — now, oddly — cycling through moments of incongruous joy that are as hard to explain as they are to make sense of.
Perhaps he's still in shock. Of course, he is. They all are.
“I try and think that Wyatt is very different than Potted Plant. She’s been coming out quite a bit through me, with the jokes, but I’m much more grounded than I think she would be through all this," Kent said.
He spent Thanksgiving with Aston's family, and the time he hasn't spent with them has been spent with their Club Q chosen family:
Longtime friends Derrick Rump and Raymond Green Vance, new friend Kelly Loving; and Ashley Paugh, who'd driven up from La Junta to see his comedy show.
And the man who was his soulmate, Daniel Aston.
"Just the ability to tell stories and laugh and remember those, for me, five faces that I knew … " Kent said. "I just feel overwhelmed with joy and love and luck to have had the time that I had with him."
Since I’ve met you I’ve been short of breath, now you’re all I think about.
I love you so crazy much. I’m so happy you exist, that today is a holiday for me too.
Love always,
Daniel