Why did a gay bar call the police on a drag queen during Atlanta Pride?

Features

Oct 22

Featured

During Pride weekend, the bouncer at TEN Atlanta, apparently incapable of managing RuPaul’s Drag Race icon Tatianna, referred the belligerent Tatianna to their cop-for-hire, who arrested her.

So far, in queer media, this seems to merely be a tabloid headline. But I am bothered.

You might be wondering, why would I care about TEN Atlanta? It’s a bar I pass on the way to another bar. TEN Atlanta is another failed attempt at bringing back mid-century architectural brutalism, and Tatianna was probably booked into a more aesthetically pleasing venue, with better music and fewer cokeheads.

Certainly, it could be ignored as just another TMZ headline.

But I am bothered.

So I have to ask a question, a question I can’t get out of my head:

WHY THE FUCK DID A QUEER BAR CALL THE POLICE ON A DRAG QUEEN DURING PRIDE?

Perhaps you think I’m asking how this happened. Perhaps you want to quibble about the minor details, like how they didn’t technically phone the police, but rather, a bouncer called over a police officer to handle it. That’s not what I’m asking. I’ll ask it again:

WHY THE FUCK DID A QUEER BAR CALL THE POLICE ON A DRAG QUEEN DURING PRIDE?

Am I instead asking what did Tatianna do to get arrested? Am I asking about the narrative of what led to this? The details?

No. Because this question:

WHY THE FUCK DID A QUEER BAR CALL THE POLICE ON A DRAG QUEEN DURING PRIDE?

…is not actually a question at all. It’s a rhetorical question. It’s an argument. It’s a statement of outrage. Because, in our lost times of He Who Shall Not Be Named (Trump), and racist comments that cratered a queer bar not that long ago (Burkhart’s), our threshold for what is offensive and outrageous disappeared. Concentration camps are yesterday’s news thanks to today’s news of ethnic cleansing. How does one get upset about anything?

Except somehow, I’m angry. Because: I expect that through this waking nightmare, our queer venues will be the brief moment in which we’re awake, the night of the week and the weekend of the year in which we treat each other with empathy and respect our history, and that we do this through community.

So again, I ask:

WHY THE FUCK DID A QUEER BAR CALL THE POLICE ON A DRAG QUEEN DURING PRIDE?

Now, there are a series of answers to this question which I will state now that I am perfectly willing to accept. Because I am about forgiveness. If the answer is:

“This was a moment of terrible judgment which we made because the hour was late and people were tired, and we’ll examine our policies to make sure this does not happen again,” then I will be the first to say: Good. Thank you. I appreciate the effort.

Perhaps they might say:

“In a time of mass gun violence, we hired police to protect the event, but they clearly misinterpreted their role, massively overstepped, and terribly embarrassed us.” This would be acceptable.

But they’re not giving that response and no one has publicly confronted them with the question. It needs to be asked.

They don’t just owe Tatianna an apology. They owe the community an apology. Throwing a visibly queer person into a jail cell is innately dangerous for that visibly queer person. A drag queen is going to be booked into a sex segregated cell with men in a full drag look. They may have to spend the night. Or several days. They are exposed to a unique risk of harassment and sexual assault. This, and the prospect of this, is terrifying. The idea that a queer bar might do this to one of us for drunken misbehavior is terrifying.

They will spend the rest of their lives with an arrest record. They will be exposed to job discrimination permanently. They will have to describe the event in every background check forever. They may have to pay attorneys fees. They may have to take time off work, or get fired, to show up to court, because a bouncer brought in the police instead of pulling them from the club. So again, I ask:

WHY THE FUCK DID A QUEER BAR CALL THE POLICE ON A DRAG QUEEN DURING PRIDE?

“But Tatianna should have behaved herself.”

“But Tatianna broke the law.”

“I never would have done that.”

I know.

You wouldn’t have thrown the first brick at Stonewall. You wouldn’t have formed a line of queers and forced the cops into a bar and set the bar on fire (history lesson: this happened). That was a lot of law breaking that I’m very much convinced you would not have participated in, and you wouldn’t have the opportunity to march in a sanitized corporate float in the parade that commemorates that whole multi-day riot-against-police thing.

And I know, Tatianna wasn’t fighting decades of police oppression by trying to get into the back room and yelling about it.

If I were cynical, I’d wonder if cashing in on zillion-dollar wristbands while farming your crowd management out to the police could be seen by some of us oversensitive snowflakes as a betrayal of what Pride is commemorating, which, I thought, is safety of vulnerable queers from the police state. But what do I know?

Enough about that.

I have other questions:

If a bouncer does not bounce, are they still a bouncer?
Is this bouncer subcontracting other bouncing duties, like checking ID’s, to a call center in Wisconsin?
Is there more to bouncing than bouncing?
When I see bouncers at the Drunken Unicorn carry a large belligerent man away, are they not bouncers?
Am I confused about what bouncing is?
When manager Becky at Starbucks calls the police on homeless people using the bathroom, is she not, as I heretofore thought, a barista, but rather a bouncer?
Is manager Becky a bouncer who also makes coffee and that’s why she doesn’t know how to use the espresso machine because making coffee is her second job?
Is bouncing just calling the police when patrons don’t follow your orders?

Surprise! Those aren’t really questions either! Gotcha again!

“What about the bouncer’s safety?”

Good question!

Just kidding, it’s not.

What do you think the cops do in this situation? Is it somehow different than what a bouncer does? Do they not also carry away the belligerent person who refuses to leave? Are we wary of putting our LGBT bouncers in danger from the claws of a wayward Tatianna, and it’s best to let the police shoulder the risk?

Transferring crowd management to the police just transfers the safety hazard to a different person, piles a much larger safety hazard on Tatianna, and terrorizes a community into thinking that they (or a drunken friend) could be thrown in jail in a dress and heels and makeup by a queer bar during Pride just for being rowdy. Transferring crowd management to the police transfers our safety into the hands of an entity we already know isn’t capable of preserving our safety.

In these times, deserved shame feels irrelevant. Toxic, victim-blaming arguments play in a loop until they’re accepted as normal in the American psyche. Arresting a drag queen for being belligerent during Pride doesn’t trigger a wave of shock and articles with condemnations about Stonewall or how irony is dead.

It is simply a cute article on TMZ.

It is in these times of unreality, when morality feels optional, that we must grip to the confidence of our own reality ever tighter. It is the only way that we stave off the unconscionable new reality that is being imposed upon us.

And in my reality, queer lives have value, queer lives deserve empathy, queer lives deserve grace, and queer bar patrons deserve venues that hire cops to protect queer lives, not endanger them. Also, my reality will probably include a ban from TEN. If that means I won’t be forced by friends to listen to bad Taylor Swift remixes while surrounded by the acoustic and aesthetic nightmare of mirrors and concrete and roid-heads on too much coke to stick it in me after escaping or being arrested, so be it.

ADDENDUM: TEN Atlanta owner James Nelson wrote, “We did not call the police, I had APD on staff the entire weekend and she was very confrontational with the officer and resisted his plea, it was his decision to arrest him not ours. And lastly, be very cautious what you defaming content you write, my attorney is a phone call away.”

The original article states, “Perhaps you want to quibble about the minor details, like how they didn’t technically phone the police, but rather, a bouncer called over a police officer to handle it.” The article also refers to a possible apology that would say, “we hired police to protect the event”, and the article refers to the dangers of “farming your crowd management out to the police”. The piece’s references to having hired cops is why the piece is in part a critique of having police on staff at a queer bar, and the statement about “quibbling details” is an argument that the distinction about whether they’re hired or called *is* a quibbling detail, because a bouncer getting the attention of your hired cop, and phoning the police, both lead to obviously similar results.

There is no better finale to this criticism than the owner’s response of bullying via financial power: “My attorney is a phone call away” to threaten action against a local queer rag using the incredible power of the judicial system proves that irony is in fact dead.

Featured