Tulsa Donut Shop Firebombed Over Drag Queens. Anyone Truly Shocked?
We LGBTQ folks hope our friends are paying attention.
Donut shop hosts performance art with drag queens, then this happens …
The man in the screenshots above is shattering the windows of a donut shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then hurling a Molotov cocktail. Moments before, the man can be seen taping a note filled with Bible verses and anti-gay/anti-transgender slurs to the window of a neighboring shop.
Only by a fluke of good fortune, which I’ll break down in a minute, did The Donut Hole escape going up in flames Monday. The two owners and one employee still have jobs, but barely.
This morning I spoke to one of the owners, Sarah, to ask how everyone is holding up and to get her take on a shocking event that LGBTQ advocates warn is a sign of worse to come.
She says the three of them are edgy but otherwise okay, reminding me this is the second time her shop has been vandalized over a “Queens Dirty Dozens” art event that features drag queens serving donuts and donut sculptures.
Artist Daniel Gulick staged a successful event at The Donut Hole on October 15 , after which the shop was broken into and the point-of-sale system stolen. A second event was scheduled for yesterday but had to be cancelled while the owners repaired the fire-bomb damage.
This is what the fire bomber was protesting
Gulick, a Tulsa performance artist well known for staging quirky scavenger hunts, wasn’t expecting violence. He advertised the donut event on local TV, telling Fox23, “I would love to buy a donut from a drag queen. I think that would be hilarious and they were on board for it and we shot a commercial and it’s really hyped up and everybody’s super excited for this crazy concept.”
That some were super excited but violent does not surprise LGBTQ people. For months, influential figures on the right have demonized drag art, absurdly claiming that drag queens are pedophiles who “groom” children for sexual abuse.
These figures (like Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson and Chaya Raichik as Twitter influencer “Libs of TikTok”) often confuse drag queens with transgender people, falsely claim drag art is pornographic or lewd, and use drag queens to inflame the public with negativity toward LGBTQ people in general.
(Most drag queens are gay men, and lip-synching drag shows have been an ordinary part of gay culture for over a century. Trans people also sometimes do drag art. Drag queens typically wear elaborate costumes that mimic those of the women singers they perform as. Drag art is not generally burlesque or “strip art,” though drag queens in rare cases have parodied strippers.)
This year, drag events all over the country — from quiet library story hours to flashy shows in bars and restaurants — have been targeted by white-supremacist Proud Boys protestors and others shouting profanities and slurs, even menacing audience members and performers with rifles.
The Donald Trump MAGA baseball cap seen in the header photo above is de rigueur at such protests.
This firebombing is the product of stochastic terrorism
Los Angeles Blade columnist and LGBTQ advocate Brynn Tannehill has been sounding the “stochastic terrorism” alarm for over a year, joined by Slate and Wired columnist Alejandra Caraballo.
If you’re not familiar with the term, stochastic terrorism means demonizing a person or group so much that violence becomes inevitable if not predictable in specific cases. Meaning, get enough people to call drag queens pedophiles, sooner or later somebody’s going to commit violence against drag queens.
Or against small business owners like Sarah who think drag queens serving donuts is cool.
Anti-LGBTQ violence is mounting in the U.S. in response to stochastic terrorism.
Sarah almost lost her business and livelihood to fire. The Molotov cocktail thrown through her window was sophisticated and well designed. Tulsa Fire Department spokesperson Andy Little says it was filled with a “chemical meant to spread fire quickly and cause a great potential damage.” The only reason it didn’t burn The Donut Hole down is that it hit a glass display case and then bounced onto a fire-resistant tile floor.
Little says the fire could easily have turned into a tragedy. If the bomb had bounced in a different direction, this story would probably have made front-page news early this week, and Sarah would not be making donuts today.
Little told Tulsa World that the note the perpetrator left contained Bible verses and “hateful rhetoric,” though he did not release full details.
Two days ago, I wrote about a young adult woman attacked in a public restroom because somebody mistook her for a trans girl. They thought she was a child but raised so much hell that she fled the restroom looking for security.
That’s a predictable result of stochastic terrorism.
I’ve been writing for two weeks that the latest survey by LGBTQ advocacy organization GLSEN shows physical violence against transgender and gay students spiking sharply. So is the incidence of teachers and other staff using anti-gay and anti-trans slurs against students.
That’s a predictable result of stochastic terrorism.
Random anti-LGBTQ street attacks surged this year, including during Pride Month, and have continued to mount. Since 2022 began, four of my friends or coworkers have been physically harassed in the street, at random, by strangers shouting anti-LGBTQ slurs.
That’s a predictable result of stochastic terrorism.
Sarah is as baffled and upset as I am.
She was super busy this morning making the donuts, but she took a few moments to tell me she’s shaken but undeterred. “It’s really heartbreaking,” she said, “that [drag queens] just existing here spurred on such hate and violence. They’re all the sweetest human beings, and they unfortunately feel guilt from all that’s happened, but nobody saw any of that happening.”
She clarified that her shop didn’t even host a drag show, as some news outlets have reported.
The drag queens just handed out donuts, real and sculptures. Sarah told me that at the first scheduled event, “about 500 people showed up, the show was only two hours, and everyone had a great time.”
That’s a lot of traffic for a little store!
But a fun event and a boost for her business ended up getting her store vandalized. That’s why she installed the cameras that caught Monday’s arsonist in the act. Tulsa law enforcement haven’t arrested anyone yet, though firefighters say they are investigating a “person of interest.”
Meanwhile, the joke’s on the haters.
After the first incident, The Donut Hole supporters started a GoFundMe to help out. The public responded generously, and Sarah and her partner have contributed a large sum, everything they didn’t need for repairs, to the Dennis R Neill Equality Center, which has been serving LGBTQ Oklahomans and their allies since 1980.
Despite that positive outcome, and despite that Sarah lucked out because the arsonist failed to burn her shop down, LGBTQ Americans are asking their friends and neighbors to to wake up.
We see insults, slurs, and toxic political rhetoric mounting almost daily. We see it turning into violence that is so easily predictable that we use “stochastic terrorism” to describe it.
I haven’t personally seen anything this bad since a rash of random gay-bashing dominated lower Manhattan when I lived there in the early 1990s.
Please understand that if you support leaders who demonize LGBTQ people, you are helping spread a false message that’s fanning violent flames.
It’s time to turn the temperature down before the next Molotov cocktail strikes with better accuracy.
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