six days before he died, Vincent asked his sister if anyone would show up. a thousand people did.

via AZPM, The Advocate and KVOA.

We wrote last week about the two men shot dead outside the Venture-N in Tucson, and about the note the gunman was carrying with the names of LGBTQ businesses on it. This is the part that happened after.

a thousand people, at sunset

On Wednesday, September 2, around a thousand people filled Catalina Park on North 4th Avenue at sunset with candles for Vincent Anthony Siqueiros, 42, and Cameron Davis Capara, 33. Their photographs were propped up at the front. People left flowers. Someone left a silver Polaroid camera.

the question he asked her

Kate Marquez, Vincent's sister, told the crowd that six days before he was killed, her brother had asked her a question. He wanted to know whether anyone would actually be there for him if something happened to him.

She was standing in front of a thousand people when she said it.

"No gun gets to define my brother," she told them. "No hatred gets to erase his joy." Earlier she had put the rest of it as directly as anyone has: "Hate does not begin with a gun. It begins much earlier. Our rhetoric matters, the jokes matter, the words we excuse matters, silence matters."

who cameron capara was

Cameron was a photographer. He spent years shooting Tucson's protests, the marches and the rallies, the unglamorous middle of a Tuesday when about nine people turn up. His father Jeff Capara said his son "cared deeply about people in Tucson, or those thousands of miles away. People who were marginalized, overlooked or misunderstood." He also said Cameron fed feral cats, because he could not walk away from a hungry animal.

Alli Lee, Cameron's best friend, said she "was always so proud of Cameron being there out on the streets at every protest and rally." Their friend Brian King said the thing everyone kept circling: "They were genuinely who they were. They didn't try to be anybody else, they didn't conform."

Mayor Regina Romero was there. So were Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz, Councilmember Miranda Schubert and Pima County Supervisor Andres Cano. The Venture-N opened its doors again at four that afternoon, before the vigil, which is its own kind of statement. Down on the corner, volunteers at Boycott Bar made six hundred paper luminaries and lined the street with them.

One more thing, because it is happening in real time and it deserves saying. Since Friday a wave of accounts that have never once cared about a dead gay man has been passing these two around as ammunition, mostly because of who the shooter was and what Cameron photographed. They are not mourning. They are shopping. Vincent and Cameron were a Tucson bar's regulars, a photographer and a man whose sister called him bigger and braver than all of them at five years old, and they do not belong to anybody's argument.

He asked if anyone would show up. Say their names properly: Vincent Anthony Siqueiros. Cameron Davis Capara.