Monday, August 01, 2016

Alleged Bayou City Bigotry?

Ever since our HERO ordinance went down in flames last November no thanks to an unholy coalition of out of town right wing haters, the GOP controlled Texas Supreme Court, the Harris County and Texas Republican Party and sellout kneegrow ministers, my pissivity has increased with every story I hear about discrimination happening within the city limits that would have been prevented and people would have a local recourse to deal with had HERO been in effect.

It's bad enough when entities inside our city limits gleefully discriminate because they know if the group they targeted for it is pissed about it, the only recourse they have now post-HERO repeal is file an expensive, time consuming federal lawsuit.

It's even more egregious when the entity doing the alleged discrimination is a gay nightclub located in the Montrose gayborhood.


I do an occasional trip from time to time to visit some of our local LGBTQ bars and establishments and support people with my presence at their events.   And when I was doing my Houston Montrose bar hopping starting in 1980, I ran into situations in which I was blatantly discriminated against for being Black and trans by being denied entry into the now closed Mother's, or had racial or transphobic slurs aimed at me from people in this LGBTQ community while patronizing those clubs.
So I'm keenly aware of the undercurrent of anti-Black attitudes that sadly exist in elements of our Houston GLBTQ community

But my attitude has been since the early 2K's because my life has evolved from the bar culture to leave the bar hopping to our TBLGQ millennial generation because I personally never wanted to be the 'old girl in the club.'

That personal point out of the way,  I'm still not happy about hearing and reading disturbing anecdotal claims from my millennial siblings that the Bayou City nightclub on Grant St.is harassing and targeting Black customers of the establishment.

I'm also hearing and reading in these anecdotal reports from people that I trust and who have no reason to prevaricate to me about the situation that the alleged targeting at this particular nightclub has possibly been going on since 2010.

If it's happening, it needs to be called out and immediately fixed.  I would encourage people who feel they have been targeted for discrimination in this or ANY other situation within the Houston city limits to file complaints with the Houston Office of Inspector General or your district and at large city council members so that we have a documented paper trail to point to

You can also sign up and show up to talk about it to Mayor Turner and our city council during the open city council sessions that are held at City Hall every Tuesday starting at 1:30 PM.

This is once again another example of why we need HERO 2.0 (or whatever we decide to call it) immediately back on the Houston Code of Ordinance books, and phuck the faux faith based GOP haters if they object to that.

As I've said far too many times and in multiple posts in the ten years this blog has been in operation, anti-Black attitudes exist in LGBTQ World because we are a microcosm of the parent society we all marinated in.

We need to be as a LGBTQ community BETTER than our parent society,and when I say that, I mean that we need to be role modeling how a diverse community handles its human rights business for the benefit of the entire group.

Discrimination's time in the Houston city limits, and especially in the Houston LGBT community needs to expire, and we shouldn't have to potentially file a federal discrimination lawsuit to make that happen.

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