Intersections

Last week at work, a coworker mentioned that the local gay bar (operated by one of her family members, and the only “official” gay bar in town) was in a dispute with the local chapter of the NAACP. I made a mental note because it seemed like an unusual situation, and began to research it this weekend.

It’s a particularly difficult situation to navigate from afar, personally, because I have friends that work and play in the bar and I go there in my free time because it’s such an awesome, quirky place, because I have also been party to well-founded complaints by friends of color for consistently unfair treatment by local police, and because I also have friends and family in the local police department. I’m relatively vocal about challenging discrimination when I see it, for both personal and political reasons (except perhaps at work, where my voice is limited for professional reasons), and I’m incredibly sensitive to how these things play out in our community as a typically concerned citizen and as a mother of a child of color. This situation is messy, to be sure, and the relative silence by local media is unhelpful.

The bar is an old one, and has undergone some major changes in the last decade. It has always been openly, unapologetically a hole-in-the-wall, Small Town Gay Bar as far as I can remember. I started going there when it joined the circuit for regional punk bands to tour, and found its unassuming air quite refreshing for a college town bar. It was an unglamorous, unpretentious place populated by townies, an older crowd, mostly men, a jukebox, folding chairs and tables then. My favorite kind of place. Since its most recent marketing conception, the bar is heavily associated with the local GLAAD office and the new OUTfest, an area festival celebrating the Lafayette area queer community. The crowd is changing, and lots of Purdue traffic is seen there thanks to their weekly drink specials, dance lessons and drag shows. It’s generally pretty awesome. This is a movement that is badly needed here and is gaining traction against local homophobia after years of activist community work.

Meanwhile, the NAACP in this area is generally regarded as a weak chapter, which is unfortunate considering the kinds of racial tension experienced in the Lafayette area. As I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, there is a general suspicion in the white community here that the two primary communities of color on the influx (that are permanent residents, and unrelated to the transient university population) are criminal, undesirable elements here to suck away at “our” resources and jobs, one being the Latino influx from the southwest and the other being the African-American influx from Chicagoland (ironically, neither of which racist concerns consider the enormous, consistent, if transient, international population drawn in by Purdue University). And while the local university community has multiple anti-racist, anti-discriminatory groups dedicated to protecting all sorts of people aside from the NAACP, they tend to preach to the choir, and aren’t nearly as vocal as the Bible-thumping religious conservative radicals.

In any case, what I can gather from the story reported about the bar is thus: A student went to the bar with her friend, arrived around last call, which by state law is at 3:00am, and ordered and paid for one drink. She was reported to be quite intoxicated when she arrived, and was asked to leave the bar on no less than three occasions before the bar closed at 3:30am. She refused, the police were called, and she refused to leave the bar peacefully at police request, in which case she was taken by force. They cuffed her and she was hurt in the process of being taken from the bar to jail, when her shoulder was reportedly broken. She believes she was discriminated against by the police and the staff at the bar, and so she contacted the NAACP, which called a public meeting between them and the bar staff. The woman who was arrested did not attend, nor did the police (because of the ongoing investigation?). The woman who was arrested is a black, heterosexual graduate student at Purdue, and she was forcefully ejected at a mostly white-populated, mostly male gay bar.

My first reaction is to take out the identity-based factors and recognize that we all live in a college town, one wherein alcohol-related complaints are a common nuisance, i.e. where most criminal complaints are alcohol-related. Because the first rule of drinking in a college town is to pay for your drinks and go home after last call. If the woman in question did not do so, and was defiant with the bar workers and police, it’s no wonder they used force to remove her from the premises. Or: When you’re asked to leave an establishment at 3 in the morning, just call a cab and go home.

I’m biased. I’m good friends with a bartender there. I know the gross gossip and all the other mess that revolves around the story.

So my next reaction isn’t so clear. The local NAACP chapter didn’t say that the calls were “too numerous to handle” on this complaint alone — and reportedly there were few left at the bar at this time — and it could very well have intended to address multiple complaints against the police department, not only the bar, in their handling of people of color in arrest situations. Which is very well-founded. But the police didn’t show up to the community meeting. The police appear to be passing off the handling of the complaint against a black woman on the gay bar owners.

I don’t know. It’s a shame. I’m waiting to see what results from the complaints.