Q-Patrol returns to the streets of Houston 30 years after the murder of Paul Broussard in the wake of rising hate crimes in Texas

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — It’s been more than three decades since Paul Broussard was murdered, underscoring what so many in Houston’s LGBTQ+ community already knew at the time: police simply weren’t taking hate crimes seriously.

That’s why a group of determined young gay men have formed their own security force, Q-Patrol, working together to protect each other during a dangerous time.

It started in 1991 in Houston, Texas.

Stephen Tompkins and Mark Gartner were in their thirties.

“It was illegal for men to dance together, and any type of behavior could lead to this type of robbery,” Tompkins said.

“They accused you of public lewdness – dancing – and I was arrested once,” Gartner added.

Then came the murder of Paul Broussard.

While walking home from a bar in Montrose, the center of Houston’s gay community, the 27-year-old banker was jumped by a group of teenagers and young adults.

He was stabbed with a pocket knife, kicked with steel-toed boots and hit repeatedly with two-by-four nails.

Even after the police were called, no ambulance arrived for hours.

After emergency surgery, Broussard was pronounced dead.

“Okay, we have to take a stand. Stephen and I were involved in a number of community patrols in our southeast Houston neighborhood,” Gartner said. “We knew something about it, so we were the first to raise our hands and say we knew roughly how to put this together.”

“We know we might need some people on foot, foot patrols, maybe some people on bicycles, maybe in cars, communicating with walkie-talkies,” Gartner said.

“And be well marked, so t-shirts and cars with magnetic signs,” Tompkins added.

“We would find out what that license plate was on, and we would send a postcard,” Gartner said. “’Dear Mom or Dad, the driver of this car has been spotted harassing homosexuals in the Montrose area, and we want you to know that we know who you are, we know where you live and we know what’s going on is up.’ We got a lot of hate mail back from fathers saying, ‘I’m proud of my son.'”

“The most important thing is that they knew that we knew who they were and where they were if anything happened,” Tompkins added.

“It was dangerous, but it was exciting. That’s part of what made it fun,” Gartner said.

“Our good friend, Brian Bradley, got in the young men’s faces and said, ‘You’re going to jail and they’re going to call you Maria.’ The boy started crying. That had an effect,” Tompkins laughed.

‘That was when we first got the police on our side. Until then they were like, ‘Yeah, you all got beat up again, you probably all deserved it.’ That was the attitude we had,” Gartner explains.

In the mid-1990s, Q-Patrol started losing members.

“It just faded away,” said Gartner, “in a very positive way because people felt safe. Did you know that three years after we did Q-Patrol… the police, during their recruitment event at a gay pride event, set up a booth had to rent?”

But progress is complicated.

Hate crimes have increased in recent years, and survey after survey shows they are seriously underreported.

Here in Texas, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed more anti-transgender legislation than ever before during its last term.

“When I moved to Montrose in ’97, the Q-Patrol was a thing. I remember seeing them walking down the street. I remember feeling safer. So I wanted to do what I could to make this happen again happen, so we take care of ourselves,” explained Ethan Michelle Ganz.

Ganz is now a volunteer for the new, revived Q-Patrol.

Members don’t patrol the streets as much, but are called upon to support protests and other LGBTQ+ gatherings.

They encourage everyone to participate in self-defense and de-escalation training.

“We’re not trying to harm people. We’re trying to protect ourselves,” explains Andrew Degar, the co-founder of Third Ward Jui Jitsu, a nonprofit organization that provides self-defense training. “That can be done with words, that can be done with cunning actions, at different levels before it has to come to a rougher approach.”

‘Sometimes you don’t need to know anything. You just have to show up,” Ganz said. “That’s more important than anything because they see that effort. So many people have so much apathy about so many things, so they just stand by as bystanders, but if you show up and show that you care, then that matters and that builds real relationships.”

Tompkins and Gartner are both retired and no longer do their daily volunteer work.

For them, the re-emergence of Q-Patrol is both bitter and sweet.

“I think a lot of this is due to some of the changes we’ve made, so I’m very proud of that,” Gartner said. “But your other question: Is there more to do? Yes. There is always more to do,” Gartner said.

It is a new generation of activism, inspired by the work of the past.

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