Homophobic and sexist behaviour has resulted in a formal complaint being made against Tru nightclub in York over allegations of cruel and embarrassing behaviour from the club’s DJ during LGBT’s flagship Ice Breaker event earlier this term.
Two female members of the LGBT society have complained both to Tru nightclub management and the LGBT representatives on campus about the incident, which occurred on Sunday 16th May. They claim that during the night the DJ inappropriately attracted the attention of fellow dancers in the club to the fact that the two girls were kissing on the dance floor.
Telling everyone in the club to look at them, the man jeered and pointed, even switching off the music that was playing and making an announcement through the microphone, much to the victims’ embarrassment.
Sunday night is Tru’s designated “gay night” and is seen by many students as one of the only places they can go on a night out where they know they will be free from the kind of prejudice or the behaviour that can exist on other nights in the social calendar.
YUSU LGBT Officer, Tom Martin, said of the incident, “in order to maintain the anonymity of the persons involved, the officers privately wrote a letter of complaint that addressed the nightclub and its owners, asking that the appropriate actions be taken to ensure student welfare at the club in the future. We have since received positive feedback from the club.”
The two students who filed the complaint say they feel that they can never go back to Tru, and that the DJ’s crude behaviour made them feel singled out and uncomfortable. They felt that the attack was deliberately sexist, as the DJ hadn’t done anything similar to any men that night, or to any straight couples.
Without doubt, this DJ is a bigot and was hopefully fired for this incident. I cannot tell however whether the writer of this article has negated some of the facts or has wrongly accused Tru of having any part in such bigotry.. A club, to my knowledge, has no way of knowing how the DJ would react to two girls kissing (I would imagine this rarely comes up when getting a DJ to play your club). If it had been a manager of the club for instance, that had jeered at the couple, then I would be the first to condemn the club as sexist and homophobic and deserving of its huge loss of business recently. I haven’t been convinced of this from this article though.
The DJ is an idiot and will hopefully receive some seriously bad karma for his general all-round dumbass-ness. The club however doesn’t seem to be at fault unless they supported the DJ in his jeers. The two girls shouldn’t be disheartened either. As lesbians they will probably come across worse reactions than this- it’s a sad fact but that’s just how the world is right now.
Companies are responsible for there employees. If an employee is incapable of doing his job he needs to be supervised. If Tru have managed to employ someone who is this unprofessional and then offer them the opportunity to broadcast an attack upon a customer then they need to ask themselves how they choose their employees and ultimately take the blame.
This would apply to any business
If he is an employee then I agree. My confusion came with the fact that it was a DJ who did this.. I thought DJ’s were hired for a night, rather than being part of the club’s team of employees?
All employees are hired. just on different timescales
I have to stick with what I said then- How were tru to know the guy was a bigot when they had barely met the guy, having hired him for only one night? It’s unfortunate but doesn’t look like they could have known.
Which isn’t good enough from a business with a reputation at stake. If they don’t know who this guy is then they shouldn’t be allowing him to DJ. If I rocked up at Tru with no experiance, no gear, and no references they wouldn’t hired me. Why have they hired this joker?
Maybe you should actually ask the club what happened? I’m afraid that you’ll find you certainly do not have the full story. I’m sure that the two girls would be happy to give the club permission to show you the CCTV of the event if they truly have nothing to hide. Here’s a clue: They weren’t on the dance floor, and they weren’t just kissing.
On any other night, this pair would have been kicked out. It is only because it happend on the “gay friendly” night that they were left alone by the staff. Please, get the facts straight.
FWIW, in answer to the rest of the comments, the DJ on that night is Gay Glen – the same DJ that has now done the LGBT-friendly Sunday night for around six years.
Actually they were just kissing, although they were not on the dance floor. Either way, it would have been far more considerate of the dj to privately notify the bouncer who could have approached them and asked them to stop or leave rather than directing the whole entire club’s attention to them and publicly humiliating them in this manner. I’ve been to many clubs and I have seen inappropriate behavior by heterosexual couples all the time (saw a couple having sex at ziggy’s) and I have never seen anything quite as unprofessional as what happened at Tru that night. It was clear to me that the two girls were treated this way because they were two women.
This would have never happened even if it was two guys making out! It’s blatant homophobia(or lesbophobia), yes it exists even within the gay community. His following comment of “I’m off to have a wank now” and “too late where are the tissues” I think sum up the sexist nature of Tru in general not just the gay night. I’d like to see a couple of hets face that prejudice. Maybe if it was a man-woman couple making out the DJ would have been too scared the guy would smack him one. Just typical of Tru and York in general. Even the gay nights are homophobic.
Point of consideration: don’t assume they were lesbians just because they were too girls making out. Just saying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbophobia