The G1 Group have been making headlines in Scotland recently for all the wrong reasons, first installing two-way mirrors in the ladies loos in the Shimmy Club, so men can spy on unsuspecting women from private booths, then more recently denying entry to disabled gay champions at the Polo Lounge and having them removed by police.
Wonder what they’ll do next, to complete the hat-trick?
You forgot to add that the Polo Lounge is a gay bar.
Double the cover charge for transgendered and pregnant people.
According to that article, being gay wasn’t the problem, and maybe not even a factor. Being disabled was.
Require that bar staff wear black face?
Tuesday is 2 for 1 roofie night?
I was going to go the opposite way: Pregnant woman drink free!
So the reason for including the word “gay” in the thread title was… ?
In the first situation, the club was clearly wrong and the local officials, in my opinion, handled it correctly by shutting the club down while their license is brought up for review.
But the second situation is much more questionable. As others have noted, the club caters to gays and there was apparently no discrimination against the customer for being gay. But he was in a wheelchair and the staff at the door told him the club is not wheelchair accessible and he couldn’t come in. (This is apparently legal as the club was build before the current wheelchair accessibility law was enacted and was grandfathered in.) It appears the club had a legal right and probably even a legal obligation not to let him in. The customer appears to have been unhappy about this and chose to make a public demonstration.
A good question to ask the OP.
Yeah this kinda stuff seems to happen a lot…
By “this kind of stuff” I mean minorities thinking that they are being discriminated against personally by an entire institution because they don’t like someones tone of voice… then it gets blown out of proportion through the grapevine.
It was true, and attention grabbing. “Gay disabled clubber denied entry” is more shocking than “disabled clubber turned away from gay club with no disabled access”.
You’d also assume a gay club, designed for clubbers used to being discriminated against by mainstream society, would be less likely to discriminate against other minority groups.
So you’re saying that Gays are just as likely as any other group to discriminate against minorities ?
The actual fact is that all premises of this sort are licenced by the local council, no licence then they can’t open.
To get the licence they have to operate under certain Health & Safety stipulations dictated to them.
The most important ones being related to evacuating everyone in the event of a fire or similar emergency.
You may well have plenty of spare bodies to help carry in someone in a wheelchair in ordinary day to day circumstances, but when you have a large number of panicing people, many of whom have been drinking, all trying to get out of the premises at once, then you not only won’t have the means to get the wheelchair user out of the building, but the W.C. user may themselves cause a blockage resulting in many deaths.
It has nothing to do with anti Gay prejudice and nothing to do with anti disabled prejudice.
If the management had allowed the wheelchair user in they would have been committing a criminal offence, could have been closed immediately, the manager and other staff arrested for the criminal offence and the premises permamently losing their licence.
The report itself said that the men had been “celebrating” and were acting abusively and anti socially.
Someone a lot more cynical then me could suspect that they were in fact drunk, still high from receiving their awards for Activism and decided to get themselves a little bit of notoriety on their night out by making themselves unpleasant to the clubs long suffering staff.
Though I couldn’t possibly comment myself.
They have unfortunately undermined the credibility of the cause they espouse in the eyes of the general public for the sake of a little bit of self promotion while their judgement , was presumably impaired.
As to the Shimmy club, what sort of weirdos want to watch women washing their hands in the toilets ?
Closed down and rightly so .