Friday was another wild one outside The Drip Café, the anti-gay “coffeeshop church” that opened two months ago in the Santa Fe Arts District.
Drip came to fight! They set up as presence as their official church, Recycle God’s Love, and handed out free burgers in an attempt to evangelize the uninterested crowd. They’ve been fundraising and organizing around our protests against them. This time, they had a dozen right-wingers countering our protest.
Among them was a member of t…he Three Percenters, the far-right anti-government militia infamous for their plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan and their hatred of immigrants and Muslims. Canada declared them a terrorist organization two years ago. They officially dissolved after six of their members were charged with conspiracy in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. After spotting his Three Percenter tattoo, dozens of us chanted him down with, “Nazi scum, off our streets!” As he began to crack under the pressure, other Drip supporters surrounded and prayed for their fascist buddy.
Drip is bound up with a network of far-right filth. Their previous supporters included a youth minister from an anti-abortion church, a failed anti-abortionist Republican candidate for state rep, and some asshole who directed threats of violence and lewd sexual gestures toward gay rights protesters.
Their response demonstrates that Drip is a political project. They’ve come to fight for their political agenda—to oppose the hard-won rights and very existence of LGBTQ+ people. They know their ideas are repugnant to most, so they’ve chosen a strategy of “trojan horse evangelism,” smuggling their backwardness into a queer-friendly neighborhood by posing as a mere coffeeshop.�
(part 1 of 2)
