Midtown Bar Refuse Gay People

[BryanS]

I was wrong. I apologize, to everyone.

The HGLPC recently elected new leadership. Cleary, it is now amateur hour at the HGLPC.

Here are the details, that were missing from the initial release:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=58138541794

"Chip" was like me, in that he did not dismiss "the incident" simply because too many people showed up, or any of the other discussions/arguments. Anyway, he gives a good timeline and has changed his position, as I have, too.

What I find interesting is that "the caucus" has not posted its joint release, with Union Bar, to its web site. You'd think they would have done that by now. They're probably on track now to do more harm than good to Annise Parker. It is "the caucus" now that I believe deserves protest, until their leadership is purged so that they can get back on track. I had other reasons for not being a member of this org, but this is yet another. They

[TheNiche]

On the Facebook page BryanS linked to, it states in the basic information:

On Friday, March 13th 2009, a fun group of gay folks chose Union Bar as the first location for Houston's Guerrilla Gay Bar movement. While this activity is designed to thank bars which are good to the Gay Community, and reward them for being nice, a series of unfortunate events occurred.

It was my understanding that the activity was designed to promote awareness of gays in straight bars. Even the name of the activity, "Guerrilla Gay Bar," implies a clandestine activity against some menacing force. Something seemed amiss when it was revealed that the gay group even bothered to RSVP, that the event was in a gay neighborhood, and that it was in a gay-friendly bar...but this is certainly the first time that I've heard it be spun as some kind of a reward for bar owners.

[Reefmonkey]

Well, sounds like it was just a big misunderstanding, and some people in the gay community jumped to conclusions and started shouting "discrimination" prematurely.

It even sounds like Union Bar was trying to control crowds from a capacity standpoint, not a "maintaining rations" standpoint, but I am going to share my thoughts on bars that routinely have velvet ropes anyway. From my bar hopping days, I remember a few bars with the velvet rope up, not for fire code capacity reasons, but to make sure they let in the "right" people and also kept a high girl to guy ratio, but mainly I think they did it to have a long line of people waiting outside to make it look like the bar was really cool inside and worth going to. I always thought this kind of elitism was lame and poseuresque, like they are trying to be an NYC bar. This is Houston, we are more laid-back, that kind of pretention doesn't fly here. In the first few weeks a bar is open, a velvet rope may work to keep generating hype, but pretty fast people are going to tire of it and remember there are a lot of great bars in this city that actually welcome your business no matter who you are, and that you can get into immediately without waiting. I for one rarely went to those velvet-rope bars (and always brought a female friend with me so I wouldn't have to wait) because my Friday and Saturday night time has always been too valuable to me for me to spend it waiting in line so that a bouncer can use me to generate hype for his bar. I remember going to Prague back in its waning years, just on a lark, and happened to have two female friends with me, so the bouncer waved us past the 10 or so single guys waiting in line. We went in, looked around at a big, empty bar, had one drink, then left. On my way out I said to those guys waiting in line "Guys, don't waste your time here, it is dead inside." Several of the guys said "thanks" and left the line. I also think it's pretty dumb to stand out in the rain waiting to get into a club when there are hundreds of others who will welcome you with no wait.

[CoolBuddy06]

The group can consider itself successful because they got more publicity from being denied entrance. If everything went as planned, how would this "suburban homophobe" know that gay people have communities and associations in Houston? And I leaned a few new words, or old words with new meanings: bear, queen, etc. Don't really know the new meaning, but will find out.