St. Daniel Aston
Daniel Aston was one of the people slain in the Club Q mass shooting in Colorado Springs on the night of November 19th, 2022. Aston was a bartender at CLub Q, was much beloved and remembered as caring, sarcastic, and intelligent. Aston, who worked as a bar manager, was described by a colleague as an “amazing person. He was a light in my life… He was the best supervisor anybody could’ve asked for. He made me want to be a part of the positive culture we were trying to create there.”
Daniel came out to his mother as a boy when he was 4, but it would take another decade before he would be able to begin transitioning to his true identity. He moved from his home in rural Colorado to Colorado Springs in order to find a larger LGBT community, which he found working at Club Q, the first and only job he would have.
At his funeral, his boyfriend, Wyatt Kent recalled that on hikes in the hills around Colorado Spinrgs, Daniel would remind Wyatt, “Never stop looking at the small flowers”.
A poem of Aston’s was read at his funeral, which is recorded here in memorium:
I may always be a lover poem
But that is just the way these things go
I am soft and I will always be soft
This world will never tame me
This world will never make me hard.
ARTIST NOTE:
I saw a photograph of Daniel being passed around social media, which I used as reference for this icon, shortly after the news of the mass shooting at Club Q. I was struck by the beauty and the serenity in his face, bathed in the warm glow of what I imagined to be a brisk Colorado morning. I heard that Daniel had moved to Colorado Springs in order to live his true life as a trans man, and I was transfixed by the vulnerability and the strength he displayed in that photograph. Naked torso with his top surgery scars displayed without shame or embarrassment—triumphant yet wounded. I couldn’t help but see the stigmata—miraculous embodiments of Christ’s bodily wounds he suffered during the cruxificition—in Daniel’s body… wounds that contributed to a transformation, both physical and spiritual.
For the flowers in Daniel’s halo, I chose the Colorado blue columbine, the state flower of Colorado— one of the small flowers that I like to imagine that dotted the trails that Daniel and Wyatt hiked together.