The Outlaw Saloon in Cheyenne, Wyoming, recently started a Wednesday singles night. Singles get badges at the door. Their enticing offer is that if you, a single person, attend and fall in with another single person, one of you gets a free icebreaker drink. Basically, half-price drinks. What a deal! Notice how easy this makes it to strike up a conversation with a stranger – you can pass it off as thrift. “I’m not hitting on you, I’m just trying to save us some money – come here often?”
But the Outlaw put up signs reading “No same sex couples may participate in our Wednesday night promotion!!” Someone photographed a sign and put it on FaceBook – it’s gone now – and other people sent the photo around and blogged in outrage.
People stomped over to Yelp to condemn homophobia and give the Outlaw the lowest possible rating. It’s been scrubbed now, but before that happened the Outlaw put up a post about how it was all a huge misunderstanding. Caused by, you know, clumsy language usage.
The Outlaw rushed out a statement. A long defensive one. The essence of it is that they love same sex couples! What they don’t like is people who want cheap drinks, and pretend to be linking up with someone who is in fact a mere friend they came in with. You know, where the ice was broken already.
Can’t you read?
Apparently the Outlaw figured that unscrupulous boozehounds like these were apt to be straight people coming in with friends of the same sex. So the way to stop such dishonesty was to rule out same-sex pairs.
Let us be clear: we are not discriminating against the gay/lesbian/transsexual community. This promotion simply means to get single individuals to come to our bar and encourage them to mingle with each other.
But the leaflet we posted outlining the event was far too vague and obscure. Consequently, it elicited a ton of public outrage in a brief period of time.
The sign we posted was never designed to exclude any member of our community.
The meaning behind stating that people of the same sex were not allowed to participate is not to enable friends to come in, feign that they’re homosexual and claim that they just met so that one can buy a drink and claim a free one for the other single person. …
Anyone who frequents the bar should know that plenty of same-sex couples come in and enjoy the atmosphere. They’re some of our best patrons….
They added, “It has become clear we should have posted nothing at all.” They want people to know “we are not an ignorant, hate-generating establishment…. We honor our patrons of the gay/lesbian/transsexual community and hope to always have your business and your good company.”
Yup. Still clumsy.
Under their new no-bigoted-sounding-signs-nothing-to-photograph-here policy, the door person will simply ask people if they are single and give them a badge if they are.
I believe that the Outlaw’s management isn’t homophobic, but they still haven’t thought things through. There’s a lot that gets missed in this long explanation. Even if the sign had been perfectly clear, the original policy wasn’t fair. Gay people might be single and wish to take part in the hi-cutie-wanna-get-thrifty? festivities.
This isn’t the bucking horse on the Wyoming license plate. But I like this horse just bucking for the fun of it
Also, the Outlaw policy was based on the premise that people travel in single-sex, single-orientation groups. But those “mere friends” might be opposite sex. A man and a woman claiming the free drink might be feigning that they’re heterosexual, or feigning that they’ve just met.
Really, is there anything people won’t feign for free drinks? The Outlaw should know this. It’s the frontier mentality.
In fact, the most likely feigning going on at Singles Night is not going to be people pretending to be gay when they’re not, or straight when they’re not. It’s going to be people pretending they’re single when they’re not. I have seen such things with my own eyes, even when there were no half-price drinks to be had. Why yes, you did spring to mind, Professor Cowboy Hat.
