I still maintain that this is the stupid, left-wing controversy of the month. It's hard to top people burning their own shoes because a slant of light in an ad looks too much like a Klan hood. But this story about a lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts also contains a pretty great left-wing freak out. Consider this a runner-up to yesterday's story.
It all started when the bar in question, the Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue, announced it would no longer require patrons to wear N95 masks on Saturday nights.
“It is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional,” wrote Last Ditch...
The new policy was not received with love.
“Just say you’re being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with,” wrote one commenter.
“people like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience,” posted another.
“I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic],” wrote a third.
You can probably guess what happened next. What happens next in all of these stories? The bar apologized because of course they would.
We are sorry for our passive and dismissive tone of our change to the norms and schedule impacting the most intersectional of us.
We understand everyone faces different intersections and we are always working to consider all needs fully.
Actually, that's just the text from the caption. The main Instagram image contained a slightly different text which read in part:
We are sorry to disappoint valued community members with access changes by a casual announcement.
Our diverse disabled immunocompromised team make decisions by multiple open community meetings, feedback form review, & advice from intersectional business advisors/elders.
Vast feedback over almost 2 years pushed for varied accessibility, not one size fits all. People consent to varying risks every day to be in community, though we generally try to follow universal design.
So there were two statements, both of them apologetic, but instead of making things better they made it worse. There was a fresh round of complaints that the visual text wasn't supportive of the visually impaired because it lacked the alt text that some browsers can read aloud.
“This is not an accessible post,” wrote one user. “It indicates the lack of care or interest in Disability intersectionality.”
The Last Ditch bar was started by three people in their 20s who wanted to see if they could create a space to replace a couple of other gay bars that had closed. Their commitment to far-left causes extended to free entry for anyone who couldn't afford a cover charge. Everyone was welcome, except the cops who were forbidden entry.
“After an unwelcome visit from local law enforcement last week, we need to make it clear that we will never welcome police or any law enforcement into the space. We reserve the right to refuse entry and service to the pigs in all their forms,” Last Ditch’s Facebook post states. “We plan to lock the door when law enforcement attempts to enter moving forward. Thank you to our amazing bartender who did all they could to de-escalate and keep everyone safe. Thank you to the community members who stepped in as well.”
What actually prompted that was that a cop saw two people sitting in a car, one of whom seemed to be snorting drugs. As he approached, one of the two went into the Last Ditch bar. The officer followed and was told he could look around but the person he'd seen entering had disappeared. He left. But it was enough to elicit the ban above.
The ban itself is almost certainly illegal, in part because police are responsible for enforcing the bar's liquor license and the city charter actually requires that they be allowed inside. But you get the idea. The bar was prone to freak-outs even before the message about masks being optional on Saturday night.
Things really got ugly at a monthly community meeting where everyone was supposed to share their feelings. The bar's sole owner Jackie Metellian (the other two founders had stepped back), admitted she was struggling and broke.
“I never really wanted to do this,” Matellian says, beginning to cry under her mask. “I don’t think I’m doing a very good job.”
Matellian tells the group her credit score is trashed. For six months, she lived in her truck because she was pouring money into the bar. She is working four different jobs. She is responsible for paying off the $50,000 loan the three took out to launch the business.
But one of the bar's leading critics, Soe Noire (who is black), is part of a Zoom call. Noire wants to make sure the meeting is not a safe space for Matellian (who is white).
The online critics are unmoved. “[Y]ou chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings,” Noire posts in the chat. “This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.”
Eventually, after 3½ hours of discussion, the meeting wraps up. Noire has more to say, but when someone suggests he come to the next community meeting, he refuses. “There’s a lot of emotional and physical labor that goes into this, so for you as a white person that asks for me to stay for another meeting for free,” he says, is “incredibly disingenuous and racist. I’m not doing that.”...
Noire spends the hours after the meeting posting furious Instagram stories about Matellian and Last Ditch. Matellian (who uses she/they pronouns) had been shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS,” he writes. The bar was not “a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary praxis.”
Why is a person using male pronouns fixated on a lesbian bar? Because "he" identifies as a "gender-expansive lesbian" of course. Honestly, it's impossible to really tell what any of this means. There's too much actual labor required for me to care. Just know that Noire is a man and also somehow a lesbian.
The story ends with a description of a Saturday evening on week 2 of the new policy. Almost no one shows up and by midnight the bar is empty except for one regular who works next door. She suggests they should have a Lady Gaga theme party to draw in more customers. But the bartender quickly points out that won't work, "Gaga is canceled,” she says. “Gaga is Zionist.”
The funniest part of this may be reading some of the reactions to the apology on Instagram.
I just read the Boston Globe article and had to come here to be sure that whole article was not some kind of RW psyop... and oh my DEAR LORD
More than a dozen people have responded to that:
100% not a psyop. As someone originally from western MA, the queer community there is Like That. They call this specific area the Tofu Curtain
And it's not a psyop because there are people still arguing that the bar made a terrible mistake.
Perfect accessibility is impossible, but covid is actively disabling thousands of people and killing others at extremely high rates; masks required is a huge part of why I even followed y’all.
It’s crazy for even one moment to prioritize people with different “wants” over the health and wellbeing of literally every person.
That was written two weeks ago, not in 2020. These people are crazy.
i had to come here to see if this was real and i still can’t believe this place and these people are real
Lots of reactions like that one. No one can believe people like this really exist, but they do. I suspect there are a lot of them in Massachusetts.
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