At a press conference
last Friday,
GLBT activists and
union leaders marked the one-year anniversary of the Manchester Hyatt
Boycott, launched last year in response to
hotel owner Doug Manchester’s $125,000 contribution to qualify Proposition 8 for the ballot.
“For over a year we have urged San Diegans,
Californians and Americans to
boycott the Manchester Hyatt because of Manchester’s contribution to Proposition 8 and onerous
workloads for the hotel’s
housekeepers,” said
Cleve Jones, a national
gay leader and former aid to slain
San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk. “The hotel’s own
people have admitted to losing over $7 million in business due to the
boycott. This
boycott has truly shown the power of our reenergized community and the alliance between the
gay community and labor.”
Proposition 8 eliminated the right of same-
sex couples to marry in California.
Boycott organizers also committed to continue the
boycott and expand its scope.
“One of our
goals for the next year will be to take the
boycott to the next level – global,” said
Fred Karger, founder of
Californians Against Hate. “We will ask
travel planners and tour operators throughout the world not to
book meetings and room nights at the Manchester properties. We will put up a virtual bright
yellow caution tape around Manchester’s
hotels, and ask
people not to cross it.”
The
boycott has drawn increasing
media attention and picked up
steam since it began. Early on, several
groups announced that they would move or cancel
events at the hotel. Recently, the American Association of Justice, a trial
lawyers group moved its entire convention out of the Manchester Hyatt to
San Francisco to honor the
boycott. At a recent
gay and
lesbian travel exposition, a hotel
spokesperson confirmed that the
boycott has cost the hotel more than $7 million.
At the
July 17 press conference,
organizers unveiled more than just a
new approach. They came with a new logo and visual aid – bright
yellow caution tape reading “Do not cross. Do not support
bigotry and
discrimination.”
Organizers say the caution tape is intended as a reminder for individuals throughout the country not to patronize the hotel.
“We want to send a very
simple message to all those planning to travel to
San Diego that the Manchester Hyatt
Boycott is on and stronger than ever,” said
Human Relations Commissioner, Nicole Murray-Ramirez. “The
unions, hotel workers and
gay community started this fight together and we intend to finish it together.”
See Gay activists and union leaders commit to year two of Hyatt Boycott
Gay and Lesbian Times
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The Fort Worth police have “some explaining to do,” said Jacquielynn Floyd in The Dallas Morning News. On June 28, officers raided a gay bar called the Rainbow Lounge, sending a patron to intensive care with a head injury. “In what I can only hope is a spectacularly infelicitous coincidence,” it took place on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Raid, the gay-rights movement’s catalyst. The cops’ story—drunk gay men groped them—doesn’t add up.
Well, police chief Jeff Halstead is backing his men and their classic “Gay Panic Defense,” said Dan Savage in The Stranger, which goes: He made a pass at me, so I was justified in beating/killing him. That would still be illegal, but it’s also bunk. “I’ve been in a million gay bars” like the Rainbow Lounge, and “gay men don’t grope police officers when they enter gay bars.”
It is, “obviously, very sad” that one of the Rainbow Lounge patrons is in critical condition, said Rod Dreher in BeliefNet, but come on, the report that “cops who entered a gay bar were set upon by drunk, horny patrons who played grab-ass with them” is “hilarious,” and not at all far-fetched. Gay people, especially drunk gay people, can be “as stupid as the rest of us.”
Except that the hospitalized man was reportedly drinking bottled water, said Jeff Epperly in New England’s Bay Windows. But 40 years after Stonewall, this kind of gay harassment goes on all over the U.S., not just in Texas. The raid at Forth Worth’s Rainbow Lounge “was the work of a police department that wasn’t smart enough to hide its bigotry.” See A Texas gay raid and Stonewall The Week Magazine
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Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief called on federal prosecutors Friday to ensure a thorough review of last week’s bar raid that resulted in a serious head injury to one patron.
Parallel investigations — one by Fort Worth police and another within the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission — are already under way into what happened Sunday at the Rainbow Lounge.
And, police chief Jeff Halstead has announced the indefinite suspension of bar checks conducted jointly by his department and TABC.
Mon
See Fort Worth mayor wants federal review in raid of gay bar Dallas Morning News
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