Tim Steller’s column: Laid-back Tucson bar community torn up by attack

There hasn’t been much fancy about it since then.

In 1991, it became the Venture-N, one of Tucson’s oldest gay bars. But it’s not a nightclub with flashy lights, a dance floor and fancy drinks.

No, it’s a hangout, a beer bar with a tendency to attract “bears” — huskier, hairier gay men. It also has the occasional leather event, but that’s not the day-to-day scene. That scene, for many regulars, is one of casual socializing in a comfortable second home.

“If you want to have a conversation and a beer or a drink, you can do that here,” said Angel Montañez, standing outside the Venture-N as knots of people milled and mourned in the parking lot Monday evening.

“A lot of us come here to play pool and darts,” Frank Cañez said. “Everybody knows each other when they come here. Nobody leaves here lonely or without meeting somebody new, a friend, and being welcomed back.”

That’s one of the reasons it didn’t make any sense to the regulars I met Monday that the laid-back atmosphere of the bar would be smashed, as it was early Monday morning. A 75-year-old witness I spoke with, who asked not to be named, told me he was inside when he heard a shocking series of around 10 shots go off outside.

Tucson police said a man named Ousman Ceesay shot two patrons of the Venture-N outside the bar at about 12:30 a.m., then died in an apparent suicide.

It was apparently an anti-gay attack. Ceesay had “a note with several LGBTQIA+ associated businesses written on it,” Tucson police said. Thankfully, police say he chose to kill himself before attacking anyplace else on the list.

But two regulars, Vincent Siqueiros and Cameron Davis Capara, were lost, something that Cañez and Luis Kings and another patron, Doug Stewart, could hardly grasp as they stood together with the evening passing. Montañez said he and Siqueiros and a third friend would go to the bar three or four times a week.

Now, it seems, the bar itself and the community it brings together is also a victim.

“For something like this to happen here, it’s heartbreaking,” Cañez said.

He’s been going to the bar for 20 years, since the breakup of his first relationship, he said.

“I came here and it was just a welcoming place,” Cañez said. “No dance floor, you just mingle, talk to people, friends, people who you don’t even know their name, but the next time you see them they’ll say hello and give you a hug goodbye.”

Kings said: “It’s all about having fun and hanging around with the people that make you laugh, make you feel good. There’s no judgment here, no one to judge. Everyone’s the same.”

The Venture-N has a U-shaped bar and a pool table and a large outside patio in the back. The plastic sign is cracked, and the stucco has worn away in patches to reveal the block underneath.

Except in the front, it’s surrounded by a chain link fence with barbed wire on top, or a high wall. It sits on the transition in Feldman’s neighborhood between pricier homes to the west and cheaper apartments to the east.

This is no ostentatious nightclub. Until Monday, I hadn’t noticed it in all my 30 years in Tucson, despite being in that neighborhood regularly. Someone had to think about it and zero in on such an unpretentious spot to break its laid-back vibe.

Now, knowing why their place was attacked, many are angry and committed to going back.

“We gotta stand up,” Cañez said.