Two years ago, the pastor of a small, fundamentalist, evangelical church called Recycle God’s Love opened a coffeeshop church in Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe Drive. The Drip Café immediately gained the attention of the local community for its anti-gay ideology, expressed as one of seven points of its doctrine on its website. This point read, under the headline “Homosexuality”:
This organization is opposed to homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle. Additionally, this organization holds that a homosexual lifestyle is contrary to God’s Word and purpose for humanity (I Timothy 1:10). The Bible instructs that it is a sin that leads to death. Moreover, this organization is instructed to love those living such lifestyles, while abhorring their sin. 1 Cor. 6:9 says the following: “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders.” Members of the church are forbidden to practice such sin. Any member found to be in such sin and unrepentant shall be subject to dismissal.
Posted just months after the queerphobic massacre at Club Q in Colorado Springs, this was a shocking position for a church trying to establish a presence in the queer-friendly Santa Fe Art District. Word of the Drip’s bigotry quickly spread through the community. It became apparent to the Denver Communists and other local activists that we needed to protest the Drip on its opening day in order to inform the broader community of the café’s abhorrent views, and to prevent it from becoming a foothold for reaction in Denver.
In June of 2023, the Drip’s opening was met with a large group of protesters, who readily took up our slogan and chant: “Drip Café is anti-gay! Homophobes, go away!” This had an immediate effect, as would-be patrons only had to read fliers with café owners’ own words to realize the harm of patronizing such a business. The ownership reacted by trying to soften their language, altering the statement on their website to read:
We Believe [sic] that showing hate towards people in these [LGBTQ+] communities is not the way Jesus would respond. Therefore, although disagreeing with the lifestyles we believe to be sinful, we must show love.
This revision does nothing to change the café’s hateful homophobic and transphobic ideas. It is purely a cynical attempt to minimize backlash to its business.
The Denver Communists and our allies have protested the Drip on its busiest day of the month for two years, usually during the First Friday Art Walk events that bring hundreds or thousands to the area. The protests have unquestionably damaged the Drip’s business and destroyed its ability to develop an organic clientele from the neighborhood. The business has instead been forced to turn to politically motivated donations and purchases from like-minded bigots from outside the city and state to stay afloat. In the far-right evangelical Christian media, Drip has positioned itself as a victim of persecution by communists.
Refuting the Drip’s bigotry and exposing its hiring policies
While the Drip’s bigotry is self-evident, its management still tries to deny it. They make the claim that they don’t discriminate against homosexuality, but rather the homosexual “lifestyle.” This is simply a rhetorical deflection, not any kind of meaningful distinction. The “lifestyle,” according to them, is engaging in any kind of homosexual act, effectively arguing that queer people cannot be their authentic selves in any capacity. To drive the point home, the café’s owner, Jamie Sanchez, has compared being homosexual to being a drug addict.
It became apparent to the Denver Communists and other local activists that we needed to protest the Drip on its opening day in order to inform the broader community of the café’s abhorrent views, and to prevent it from becoming a foothold for reaction in Denver.
Their belief that the “lifestyle” is “contrary to God’s Word and purpose for humanity” means that Sanchez and his fellow church members and employees advocate against LGBTQ+ rights, including the right to marry. While they claim they are instructed to “love those living such lifestyles,” the management’s actions directly refute this assertion; they’ve invited reactionaries into the community to harass queer people, they’ve used hate speech and deadnaming to attack protesters, told them they were possessed by demons, and threatened them with violence. They constantly tell protesters that they “love” us. If this were actually true, Drip would recognize the damage they’ve done to the community and close up shop.
digital pamphlet from June 2023
The Drip’s management has tried to mitigate the protests by claiming that they seek to give jobs to unhoused people and to help them rebuild their lives, while arguing the protests weaken any attempts at that goal. They are merely using this as a shield for their bigotry and as a way to raise donations for their for-profit business.
In its hiring policies, the Drip is no different than Walmart, McDonald’s, or any other business that hires an unhoused person; the worker’s labor is exploited by the company to generate profit. Unhoused workers are in a more precarious situation, unable to make demands for better wages or conditions because job loss would be more catastrophic. Furthermore, because Drip only hires disciples of its church and the church dismisses queer people from its ranks, unhoused queer people are effectively unable to take advantage of their program. It is reprehensible for the Drip’s management to pit two marginalized communities, the queer and the unhoused, against each other to deflect from their own bigotry.
The Drip’s views are not universally held by Christians, nor are they fundamental to Christianity. There are many Christian and even evangelical denominations that are accepting and affirming of LGBTQ+ people. Though Marxists are broadly critical of religion, The Drip’s suggestion that we oppose the café because we oppose their “Christian values” is ridiculous. We explicitly protest their anti-gay views and the destructive influence they’re trying to exert on our community. We’ve been joined by Christians, including a queer, non-binary pastor, who have progressive gender politics and are glad to stand side-by-side with us against the bigotry being espoused in their name.
Phases of the protest campaign
As mentioned, our protests began in June of 2023, initially confronting the Drip the very day they opened. Support for our protest from the art walk crowd and wider community was immediate and enthusiastic. The café’s management seemed completely overwhelmed. One of its only vocal supporters was Kevin Utile, the pastor-owner of a similar anti-gay coffeeshop church, Duolos Coffee in nearby Boulder, who helped Sanchez launch the Drip.
Over time, our protests have escalated in size and scope with dozens of people showing up each month, demonstrating queer joy and resistance by performing drag shows or impromptu acoustic folk-punk sets. The Drip countered us by bringing in a DJ to blast religious music at us, and by reading Bible verses and expounding their homophobic views at us.
The protests have unquestionably damaged the Drip’s business and destroyed its ability to develop an organic clientele from the neighborhood. The business has instead been forced to turn to politically motivated donations and purchases from like-minded bigots from outside the city and state.
Initially, we decided to apply extra pressure by protesting on Saturday mornings as well, to inform as many as possible about the Drip’s bigoted project. This led to the Drip’s management trying everything they could to get rid of us, including calling the police. Fortunately, the Denver Communists are well aware of our rights and experienced enough in handling the police to avoid being pushed around; we maintained our protest in spite of some minor police intimidation. Sanchez has lamented in multiple interviews that the police are unable to shut down our protests and that this is somehow an infringement on his rights.
After a few Saturday protests, we noticed that there was really not much foot traffic for the Drip at those times, and so we began focusing exclusively on our First Friday protests, which reach the most people and have the most significant negative impact on the hate-café’s business.
As the summer of 2023 continued and our protests gained momentum, the café’s management tried a new strategy. They had a group of wannabe tough-guys line the street in front of the shop, including a Three Percenter, whom we loudly exposed as fascist scum upon recognizing his tattoos. Two Drip supporters illegally open-carried pistols to protests in an effort to intimidate us. This tactic was short-lived. The wingnut Drip supporters were off-putting to would-be customers and only presented a target for the derision of the protesters and the art walk crowd. Goons or not, we weren’t about to cede the street to the Drip. We continued to interact with passersby, warning them about the café, and even continued our drag shows with the support of local queer rights group Bread and Roses Legal Center.
The next few months saw our protests go largely unopposed. We were able to connect with passersby, explain why we were protesting the Drip, and talk politics more broadly, including the fight for queer liberation, for Palestinian liberation, and against fascism. The Drip’s business continued to suffer thanks to our efforts. The protests took on a more party-like atmosphere, with activists we met at drag defenses or Palestine solidarity marches stopping by to hang out and socialize, and passersby joining in on the fun of confronting the transphobes. Despite the cold weather, our spirits were up and we were able to maintain decent crowd sizes of a dozen or two people — predominantly queer people, of course — through the first winter of monthly protests.
As our protests gained momentum, the café’s management tried a new strategy. They had a group of wannabe tough-guys line the street in front of the shop, including a Three Percenter, whom we loudly exposed as fascist scum.
It was during this time that two neo-Nazis started frequenting the Drip to show their support. Josh Yeakel and Russell Frankland of the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) have been peddling their Third Reich brand of racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, and harassing drag shows locally for years. TWP is an SPLC-designated hate group and its leaders were found liable for organizing the deadly white-supremacist Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017, which both Yeakel and Frankland reportedly participated in.
Though we loudly and repeatedly informed the owner-pastor and his staff/flock about the neo-Nazis they were serving and mingling with — including sharing photos of Frankland and Yeakel giving sieg heils — Sanchez and crew decided the neo-Nazis were worthwhile allies against the queer community protesting the café. When Drip began hosting Bible study during our protests, the white Christian nationalist Frankland participated regularly. According to a firsthand account of one Bible study, in addition to Frankland, the group included two self-identified Proud Boys, made liberal use of the f-slur, and instead of religion, talked about their guns, 5G conspiracy theories, and organizing a protest against a drag show. Frankland has since become a regular fixture at the Drip, spreading his fascist ideas to Sanchez’s broader congregation. We raised the slogan “No neo-Nazi Bible study,” got some local press on the matter, and loudly confronted the fascists at every opportunity.
digital pamphlet from February 2024
As the months rolled on, the Drip implemented another new strategy: sea-lioning. Rather than a group of goons to intimidate us, they began to send out trolls to pester us with incessant bad-faith questions and invitations to debate. At first, this distracted from our mission to inform the art walk crowd about the Drip, especially as Drip supporters are unlikely to be convinced away from their regressive gender politics and engaging with them is a waste of time. However, we quickly adapted to the tactic by chanting down, ignoring, or berating the sea lions.
In the course of trolling us, Drip supporters further exposed their bigotry by using the t-slur and f-slur, intentionally misgendering and dead-naming protesters, and repeating the antisemitic canard that “the Jews killed Jesus.”
It isn’t just about the Drip. Our protests are part of a broader struggle against a wave of reaction that seeks to force queer people back into the closet — or into an early grave.
Recently, the Drip began holding worship services during our protests, in a fairly successful effort to flood the café with supporters to counter our presence. The optics were initially frustrating, with passersby seeing a busy café. But like each previous attempt to counter our efforts, the tactic has only further isolated it from the community. Most are turned off by flamboyant praying, bad Christian music, and attempts to distribute religious propaganda. Foot traffic is worse than it’s ever been. The café has grown entirely dependent on support from suburban church members. The reality is that the community has rejected the Drip over its homophobia, and no amount of artificial support is going to change that.
Months after serving as a hub for fascist organizing under the guise of Bible study, the Drip allowed an anti-abortion group to use the café as a base of operations for its own protest at the Art Walk. Anti-abortion activists went out to nearby street corners to preach against reproductive rights, “sexual degeneracy,” and the “flaws of feminism.” The crowd wasn’t having it, and the anti-abortionists clearly weren’t ready for the level of confrontation and rejection they faced — with one even calling the police because he was intimidated by the crowd — before they retreated back into the café.
This highlights the significance of the protests against the Drip: it seeks to become a beachhead for a wider reactionary political project.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what strategies the Drip employs or how its management tries to derail our protests; we have the experience to adapt and the determination to win. The Drip has demonstrated time and again how harmful they are to the community by spewing their hate under the guise of love, lying about their intentions, and providing an organizing space for far-rightists. They want us to give up, but that’s never going to happen.
Conclusion
Some have asked why we continue the campaign, given that the Drip remains open despite two years of protest. The answer is simple: it isn’t just about the Drip. Our protests are part of a broader struggle against a wave of reaction that seeks to force queer people back into the closet — or into an early grave. LGBTQ+ rights and lives are under attack by the Trump administration, including through reduced access to healthcare, the transgender military ban, and being misgendered on official government documents.
Reactionaries demonize the queer community in part so they can shift the blame for society’s failings away from the capitalist class and system, while fracturing the working class by turning some against their queer fellow workers.
The rhetoric expressed by the Drip, which others and scapegoats queer people, has been embraced by many as the reactionary backlash against LGBTQ+ rights becomes mainstream. Reactionaries demonize the queer community in part so they can shift the blame for society’s failings away from the capitalist class and system, while fracturing the working class by turning some against their queer fellow workers.
Our protests may be relatively small and the existence of the Drip relatively inconsequential, but the campaign has enabled us to interact with the community to grow consciousness of LGBTQ+ oppression and build solidarity with LGBTQ+ struggle. Some class-reductionist socialists shy away from struggles against oppression or even parrot “anti-woke” rhetoric in a vain and destructive effort to reach the most backwards elements of the working class. By contrast, we feel that this struggle is exactly where we as Marxists should be. The fight against oppression is the fight for the working class.
We may not succeed in running the Drip out of town before the end of its lease, but that is ultimately irrelevant. The protests against the hate-café are serving as a training ground for new queer-rights activists, the message of queer liberation is being spread, and our ultimate victory, while delayed, is inevitable.
