I couldn’t tell anyone else about my terror, but I avoided the entire Montrose neighborhood for the rest of the summer. I remember gasping in horror at the story in the Houston Chronicle. Outnumbered and surrounded, he was stabbed and pummeled to death with steel-toed boots, a Buck knife and a 2-by-4 spiked with nails at one end. Broussard wasn’t as lucky, and ran into a dead end. Broussard’s friends escaped by running down a busy street. On July 5th, at two o’clock in the morning, a 26-year-old gay man named Paul Broussard was walking home from Heaven with two friends when they were confronted by a group of 10 intoxicated young men, some of whom had also taken marijuana and LSD. As several members of the group later admitted, they were specifically targeting gay men that night. When a new friend asked me to go to Heaven with her for a night of dancing over the July 4th weekend, I felt a shiver of excitement and fear.
I wasn’t yet out, but had heard about a popular gay bar called Heaven in the city’s Montrose neighborhood. In the summer of 1991, when I was 21 years old, I worked in a genetics lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
