Posted on 09/03/2013 9:07:06 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Bureau of Labor and Industries has ordered a North Portland bar owner to pay $400,000 to a group of cross-dressers he banned from his club last year, the agency said Thursday.
The bureau's civil rights division began investigating The Twilight Room Annex, formerly known as The P Club, last summer after owner Chris Penner told The Rose City T-Girls not to return to the bar. It was the first complaint filed by Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian. The bureau's deputy commissioner issued the final order. Read #25-13 Final Order.
The penalty is the first imposed under the 2007 Oregon Equality Act. The law protects the rights of gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender Oregonians in employment, housing and public places. The order also requires Penner to pay a $5,000 civil penalty.
"This allows them to feel justice was done and move on in a positive way," Avakian said of the cross-dressers excluded from the club. "These cases are significant in providing the sort of justice individuals are entitled to when they're discriminated against."
The bureau interviewed the T-Girls, as well as Penner's employees and other customers. The 57-page order details what the T-Girls described in the report as a "devastating" and "humiliating" year after being told they were not wanted as customers.
The complaint lists 11 aggrieved persons, 10 of whom present as women. The bureau did not reveal the legal name of any of the T-Girls.
A person identified in the report as "Cassandra Lynn" formed the Rose City T-Girls as a Yahoo group in 2007. The T-Girls met at another bar for years until the owners asked them not to visit more than once a month, they testified. They began frequenting The P Club instead.
The North Lombard Street bar was perfect, the girls said. It had a dance floor, games and "televisions for T-Girls who like to watch sports."
Best of all: they felt safe there. The Friday night bartender was a lesbian who treated them well. The bouncers walked the girls to their cars as they left. They went every Friday for two years until Penner left a message on Cassandra Lynn's voicemail.
"People think that A: We're a tranny bar, or B: We're a gay bar," Penner said in the July 2012 message. "We are neither. People are not coming in because they just don't want to be here on a Friday night now."
Lynn testified at a hearing before an administrative law judge that she could not sleep in the months after Penner's voicemail. She was irritable at work and considered disbanding the group. Other girls said they stopped going out in public as women. They pulled away from friends, showed up late to work and gained weight.
Penner last year said he is neither homophobic nor anti-transgender people. He once hosted a weekly queer dance night in the space, and a gay pool team has practiced in the bar. But, he said, other customers complained that the T-Girls left the stall doors open and seats up in the women's restrooms.
Penner said business had declined since the T-girls started coming to the bar. Between eight and 54 T-Girls came in on Friday nights. But all other P Club customers stopped coming, Penner said. In 2009, the bar sold a total of $110,000 in drinks on Friday nights, Penner said. By 2012, that dropped to $81,000.
"We said at the hearing he was an idiot when he said that," said Jonathan Radmacher, Penner's lawyer. "But he has a track record of decades of being supportive of the LGBT community.
Investigators found no evidence to support Penner's contention that the T-Girls disrupted business. In October, investigators announced that the bureau found substantial evidence of discrimination against the transgender patrons. The bureau then tried to reach a settlement with Penner. When no settlement could be reached, Avakian said, and he took the case to a hearing.
"The individuals had found a place at the P Club where they found they could share their lives, their stories. When that is stripped away, that is an indignity that is severe," Avakian said.
Penner's lawyer said his client was not surprised by BOLI's decision; it was Avakian who brought the complaint, and Avakian's deputy who affirmed it.
"The writing was on the wall," Radmacher said, "but we went through the process because we thought it was important that the facts came out."
Penner legally could have booted the T-Girls prior to 2001, when Portland enacted a law banning discrimination against gay and transgender people in employment and public places. The Legislature passed a similar ban for the whole state in 2007. Since then, the labor bureau has received 182 complaints of discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation.
Some of those complaints have gone to settlements, but Penner's case is the first in which the state has imposed a fine. The bureau is still investigating Sweet Cakes by Melissa after a same-sex couple who requested a cake for their wedding said they were refused service by the Gresham bakery.
Since leaving the P Club, the T-Girls have taken their business elsewhere. They meet every Friday night at Sweet Home Bar & Grill.
RE: What about the rights of women not to have to share a bathroom with men? Or vice versa.
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Oh that issue?
Well, California has that PUT INTO LAW...
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/California-transgender-students/68289/
EXCERPT:
In a bill signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown law on Monday, California has become the first state to require schools to allow transgender students to choose which bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams align with their gender identity.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE REST...
I'm aware of that law. And I'm afraid that as the fruits and nuts on the west coast go (it ain't just CA anymore), so will go the rest of the country.
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