A five-minute video posted by a burly, heavily tattooed Kansas barber accusing the participants in an upcoming LGBTQIA+ festival of being “demonic” kiddie-mind molesters has triggered a maelstrom of hatred against the event’s organizers.
Four years ago, Thomas Galindo of Legends Barber Shop in Hutchinson participated in a fundraiser for the same Salt City Fest. But whatever prompted the change, the poisonous ranting on Galindo’s business Facebook page last week—first reported by The Hutchinson News—has caused the event’s organizers and sponsors to endure a barrage of threats and insults and slurs.
“By the next morning, the first threatening phone call came in and it was just call after call after call after call after that,” Julia Johnson, the chairman of the board and co-founder of Salt City Pride, told The Daily Beast.
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Johnson and other board members were called child molesters. The treasurer was called a child rapist. An unceasing deluge of reprehensible comments caused the group to take down its website. Fake facsimile Facebook pages sought to make it appear as if the group endorsed what it was falsely accused of.
“They actually took pictures from our actual Facebook pages and started making false Facebook pages with a barrage of, the only thing I can call it is vile descriptions.”
They kept the genuine Facebook page up, with members of the board maintaining an around-the-clock watch.
”The profanity that’s been put on there, the threats that have been put on there,” she said. “It’s supposed to be a safe space for all.”
The group blocks and deletes the offenders. It takes screenshots of threats and turns them over to the Hutchinson Police Department, which always sets up a booth at the fest.
“Our Hutchinson police department has always been gracious.,” Johnson said. “They’ve brought the canine units so the kids and the different families can get to meet them.”
The group had contracted to hold this year’s festival at the Sand Hill Event Center, with a donor paying a $327 deposit and providing a full rundown on the scheduled activities. Two days before the video was posted, the venue provided Johnson with a code to the door so she could take measurements. At 5:39 p.m. the day after, the donor got an email from the venue saying it was returning the money.
“Events that may involve or have potential to involve sexualized content or confusing gender content in an environment for children isn’t something we prefer at this facility,” the message from the venue said.
Johnson is still waiting for a full explanation.
“They didn’t even pay us the courtesy of a phone call,” she said.
Johnson suspects that the venue may have been one of a number of businesses that were besieged by the haters.
“They were not just hitting our pages and our Facebook page,” she said “They had gone through our page, found every single vendor and sponsor, and started to call their businesses, making accusations against them, hitting their websites.”
One business’s page was filled with so many revolting comments that Facebook deemed the page “against community standards.”
“They were having those constant hits all day,” Johnson said.
The eruption of hate was all the more startling because the reception to Salt City Fest—Hutchinson is known as Salt City due to the extensive salt mine there—had been only positive in the seven years since it began.
“It is beyond crazy,” Johnson said. “ We’ve been here since 2018 and we’ve never had pushback. We’ve never had any violence, we’ve never had any threats of violence. We never saw this coming.”
Johnson was well aware of the anti-gay and anti-trans sentiment sweeping red state legislatures, last week taking the form of Senate Bill 180 in Kansas, the so-called “women’s bill of rights” that bans any identification of a gender other than the one assigned at birth. She nonetheless imagined things were different in Hutchinson.
“We knew, of course, the climate was getting worse,” she said. “We knew that things could potentially take a turn. But we never thought this would happen.”
And the video that triggered it was made by the same local barber Johnson had publicly thanked for supporting a Halloween fundraiser for the 2019 Salt City Pride Fest by donating tattoos and haircuts as Bingo prizes.
In his shocking video, Galindo wears a sleeveless T-shirt. He has called himself a former gangbanger and he looks the part, with a hand grenade tattooed on his right bicep and an inked-on beard rising from his cheeks.
“An influential person in town had come to me and asked me if I was aware of what’s happening in our community,” Galindo says at the start of last Wednesday’s video. “And I was like, what are you talking about? And he explained to me that there's some drag queens coming to Hutchinson.”
Galindo, who did time for drugs in the state prison in Hutchinson, goes on to say that the drag queens in question are affiliated with Hutchinson Pride, as the Salt City Fest is also known. He says they are expected to read to children.
“This is on my mind demonic,” he says. “If you’re gonna be a drag queen or you choose to be with another gender, let that be within your family. Teach your family that stuff. We have people who are unaware.”
He goes on, “You, you want to dress up like a girl and you’re a man, but you wanna have storybook time with these children in our community that we love dearly… You molesting their mind. You’re literally molesting their mind.”
He insists he is not preaching hatred for gays.
“There’s people that come in my barbershop that are that way, and I respect them wholeheartedly because they don't come my way with it,” he says. “But don’t come here with a child book about it that has a rainbow over it.”
He continues on into absolute insanity.
“Do y’all know what the rainbow is?” he inquired. “When Noah asked God, ‘Why is there a rainbow above my arc?’ God said, ‘Because I promise you, there will be no more flooding.’”
But, he said, “the demons” have decided to “make sure there’s another flood and take it another way.” He means the way of the Pride Rainbow and drag queen story hours.
“Johnny’s going to leave there and ask his mother, ‘Can I go stay the night with Matt?’” Galindo says. “He's gonna go over to Matt’s house and Johnny’s gonna kiss Matt in the face. So what do you think about this?”
The video had some 800 views when somebody sympathetic to the festival sent it to Johnson.
“LGBTQ has become the political punching bag recently, so I’m not surprised by that,” she recalled. “I think what was shocking is the fact that we’ve worked with him before and that he has cut my own son’s hair.”
She was now witnessing what must have been slithering underneath.
“Then to see it so blatant and so full of hate and misrepresentation,” she said. “I can’t even tell you the words I felt. I think I literally just sat there. I just welled up in tears and I just was silent.
Johnson was initially reluctant to go online and remind people that Galindo had helped them in a past fundraiser. She hoped he would reconsider. She decided otherwise when she saw two of his subsequent videos.
In one posted on April 30, he looks decidedly stressed but insists he is not. He also says he is not homophobic and is only trying to protect children.
“You can be gay,” he says. “You can do as you wish. You will grow into it. You’ll get groomed into it later. I say groomed because that’s what happens. They see it, they like it.”
He goes on, “When I was 13, I knew I was gonna be a gangbanger. That's what I wanted to do…I was banging before I wanted a female. But did I like females at that age? Yes. I was trying to show them, ‘Hey, I’m a hard mug.’”
He once told a local news outlet, “My whole childhood, I was incarcerated. From 12 years old to 18; in and out of juvenile correctional facilities; shot at people; stabbed people; been shot at. You name it.”
But he is worried about the effect on kids of a drag queen reading a story. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Galindo appears to have initially taken down the video about demon kiddie mind molesters, but it was back up on Tuesday.
The Salt City Fest group is continuing to keep a 24-hour watch on its Facebook page, which now has a posting by Johnson addressed to Galindo.
“Sooooooo, I thought you would be quiet. I thought you would quit. But you didn’t. Well receipts don’t lie! It is called FAUX OUTRAGE AND YOU ARE FULL OF IT!!! We held a Halloween fundraiser in October for our 2019 Pride event and YOU DONATED!!! I knew it because I was the one who publicly thanked you. I hoped you would stop facilitating the hate… You just dug in. “
She continues, “You were fine with us when you could publicize your business to our patrons. Patrons who truly believed you were supportive of our community because of our interaction with you. They thought you were a safe space for them to go to. They, we, were all wrong on that front.”
She ends by saying, “We are human beings Mr. Galindo. We bleed red just like you. We were worthy then, we are worthy now, and we deserve to be treated with dignity. Words have consequences. I hope your ‘views’ are worth it.”
The good news for Johnson is that only five of the many sponsors have dropped out—and the group has a new venue for Hutchinson’s Salt City Fest. It is scheduled to be held on June 16 and 17, just as planned.
