No Boys Allowed
Murdock, Deroy
No Boys Allowed by Deroy Murdock It Took 32 Years, But I Finally have come face to face with discrimination. From Cape Cod to Capetown, from Santiago to Stockholm, my black skin never has kept me...
...Her biceps were bigger than mine...
...As long as I could pay, no establishment has barred me because of my socioeconomic class...
...As for me, I'm left with the words the bouncer uttered when I told her I was appalled to experience sexual discrimination in late-20th-century New York City: "Get yourself a lawyer...
...Silently, the bouncer took a step back and pointed to a small black and white sign in the window that read, "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone...
...Indeed, Pamela McKenzie of the National Organization for Women once said of ladies' night, presumably at straight bars: "It results in loss of dignity, reinforces harmful stereotypes, and pushes women as sex objects...
...The First Amendment guarantees the American people the right to associate freely with, and, presumably, without, anyone we choose...
...But before I could take even three steps inside Meow Mix, a short, tough, drill sergeant of a bouncer blocked me like a barricade...
...No more...
...We try to keep Saturday a ladies' night," she said, using a quaint term for which she might have slapped me had I referred to her customers as "ladies...
...Sorry," she declared...
...In fact, most places today have at least a handful of women who walk in and are welcome or, at least, tolerated...
...Would you move so she can get out of here...
...That's right," she answered, standing her ground...
...I'll talk to you about this outside...
...And so it goes...
...And my American national origin has been good enough for restaurant, theater, and museum owners at home and abroad...
...So you're saying you won't let me in just because I'm a man...
...Tonight's ladies' night...
...Purely out of curiosity, I strolled into a bar at the corner of Houston and Suffolk streets on Manhattan's Lower East Side on the balmy evening of June 8. With the name Meow Mix painted in festive yellow letters across the entrance, the place was too intriguing to go unexplored...
...the bouncer huffed...
...But cover your ears before pondering the shrill response that would erupt were a Gotham gay bar to announce a "gentlemen's night" where women would be intercepted at the door and told, as the bouncer breezily informed me, "There are lots of other bars for you to go to...
...She had finished entertaining this small room full of women with one sort of music or another...
...For my part, I'm willing to accept the concept of a canteen full of lesbians too self-absorbed to permit a man to stand in their midst even long enough for his eyes to adjust to the subdued lighting...
...She looked even burlier than she had seconds earlier, what with her tight, white cotton tank top and cropped blonde hair...
...So I can't come in...
...Neither Christian, Muslim, nor Jew has held a Bible, Koran, or Torah in my path...
...She stood before me on the sidewalk beneath a street light, more clearly illuminated than before...
...On the other hand, four decades of civil rights law have so whittled and shaped the right to free association that commercial establishments rarely discriminate against potential customers on the basis of race, sex, religion, nationality, or, most recently, handicapped status...
...But in this era of double and triple standards, equal access flows, like Suffolk Street, one way...
...New York political commentator Deroy Murdock is president of Loud & Clear Communications, a marketing and media consultancy...
...Men are allowed in during the week if they are accompanied by women...
...From Cape Cod to Capetown, from Santiago to Stockholm, my black skin never has kept me from going anywhere I have tried to go...
...I have yet to visit a gay bar anywhere in America where females were turned away...
...Just then, a young woman tried to wheel an amplifier out the door...
Vol. 1 • July 1996 • No. 41
