When you name your bar Inch, there’s a good chance you’re going to attract gay clientele for the same reason any bar named The Cock is going to. But when the local tourist office also says you’re running a gay bar, well, no wonder the ‘mos are flocking to your establishment. Jon Simcock, who owns the bar in Dunedin, New Zealand, says the i-Site Information Centre has slotted Inch as a gay bar, even though he’s been asking them not to for the past two years. “I’m just waiting for the day someone burns the place down or I get beaten up,” he says. That’s because patrons of the Inch, Simcock says, are regularly harassed (with words like “homo faggot” thrown their way). Is this an issue of a local bar owner being homophobic? Hardly. If a venue doesn’t cater to gays, then it shouldn’t be lumped in with other gay bars. (There could be a category for notably gay-friendly bars, of course.) “It’s really embarrassing when gay couples do come down, because they’re looking for an experience we can’t provide,” Simcock adds. Then what’s the problem?
Simcock said he has spoken to the council about the issue and has been assured the reference would be removed. But his wife, Sandra Kellian, said she knows for a fact the i-Site was still promoting the premises as a gay bar.
“I popped into the information centre on Friday and asked if there were any specific gay bars in Dunedin and the woman circled the Inch Bar. “I said: `Well, I’m the owner of the Inch Bar and I can tell you categorically it is not and never has been a gay bar’.
“She just looked at me blankly,” Kellian said.
Probably like gay patrons do when they show up at Inch.
Hyhybt
Nothing on *how* it got such a listing, or *why* it’s so hard to get fixed?
B
No. 1 · Hyhybt wrote, “Nothing on *how* it got such a listing, or *why* it’s so hard to get fixed?”
It is probably for the same reason that, some years ago, I kept getting phone calls at 5 AM, with the phone stopping to ring just as I got to it. Finally I caught the guy – some moron stockbroker who thought I was a billionaire – he read his dossier on me (sounding like Philip Vandamn in _North by Northwest_ telling Roger Thornhill that he is George Kaplan). According to this guy, I lived in a multi-million dollar house that I paid cash for! My reply was more or less “What the #()*$#$ are you talking about?” It was probably some sort of data entry error, but after being woken up at 5 AM repeatedly, I was not exactly in a good mood.
It is hard to get fixed presumably because some poorly written software is making it hard to delete the error.