The quote in the title of this article is attributed to Emma Goldman, a feminist activist whose literature was influential around the time of Stonewall. It suggests the importance of being allowed to celebrate the changes that we have fought for in our society.
We are fortunate in this day and age to have freedom of speech, freedom of press and freedom of information – although those who generate unflattering information are usually not very free about it. Even common knowledge by word of mouth is often dismissed as idle gossip. However, when this troubling information goes down on paper, it can be a lot harder to ignore.
This article was written in response to the overwhelming quantity of complaints, verbal and written, that this magazine has received on a monthly basis about a particular Calgary club. They come from the experiences of community members, community groups, business owners, and people who just want to go out and have fun.
For a long time, the financial pull from the advertising of this business caused this magazine to overlook these complaints – in fact, trying to quash them on the business owners’ assurance that they were false, unreasonable, or even laughable. Upon further investigation however, it has become evident that something must be said.
On busy nights, many guests to the Twisted Element spend part of their evening in the line-up outside, watching as owner/manager RayJean Fafard (known to many as simply “RJ”) personally hand-picks mostly young men (whom he refers to as VIPs), giving them permission to circumvent the first-come first-serve expectations of the line. When inside the door, your attention might turn to the large free-standing sign that proclaims the bar a gay venue that is “straight friendly”. But this positive affirmation of openness is quickly contradicted by another sign, not fifteen feet further in, declaring “No skirts, No heels, No purses at discretion of management.”
The owners and staff of Twisted Element are not shy about explaining this policy or why it was implemented. “99% of our problems come from straight people getting drunk and stupid, causing fights with gays and lesbians,” RJ told GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine in an informal encounter. This must not have been a concern in the past when the club ran advertisements repeatedly in FFWD and the Gauntlet, publications that target a primarily straight demographic. The club has also been reviewed or received mention in Avenue Magazine, The Calgary Herald, and The Calgary Sun to name only a few additional straight-oriented media outlets – not to mention Facebook. Is it any wonder why so many straight people know about the club, and indeed feel entitled to frequent it?
We asked to sit down and have a formal interview with the owners of the club, to give them a fair chance to respond to our questions. However they were reluctant to comment any further, accusing this of being “another Twisted-bashing article.” In the end, although they were contacted numerous times, we received no definitive response before time of press for this issue.
Despite his expressed intentions, the policy has the potential to affect a large and diverse array of individuals, and indeed it has. Femme lesbians, bisexual women, and trans-identified individuals have been turned away outright or charged five dollars cover for “being straight,” while their gay male friends are exempt. But other testimonials suggest the cover may also be selectively applied to individuals over 30, or of ethnic minorities. When there is no real proof of one’s VIP status, members of the gay community – even loyal regulars – can be subjected to the ‘hetero head tax’ at the discretion of door staff.
A cover charge for non-VIP members is common practice at other bars in the city, as we found out from our investigation. The Warehouse, for example, maintains a private club licence (as the former Metro Boyztown did) and charges five dollars for a year-long membership, giving members a card to show at the door. Meanwhile the Back Alley charges everyone a flat rate of four dollars to cover their mandatory coat check. Neither of these establishments charged cover based on visual appeal or sexual orientation – nor did they pull even their VIPs to the front of the line-up. In fact we were quite impressed with the lack of discrimination considering the diverse company I travelled with on the evenings we chose to visit these establishments – a bisexual man and woman, a lipstick and butch lesbian, a drag queen, and more. We paid the same cover as everyone else, drank, danced, and made out until early hours of the morning without incident.
I spoke to a former employee of Twisted Element who wished to remain anonymous. He admitted that the door policy was introduced to cut down on the number of straight women coming into the club, an action prompted by customer complaints. He confessed that, as time has progressed, the policy was often used on women who were part of the community but did not look obviously gay.
“It gave them an excuse to turn people away who they didn’t want in the club.”
It is a valid observation that there are many straight bars, and only one gay dance club in the city; straight individuals have the option to go elsewhere when queer people often feel they don’t. However, being part of a sexual minority does not place our rights above the rights of everyone else around us. Regardless of orientation, human rights are just that. In a political fight for equality there cannot exist the idea of being more or less equal - this would defeat the purpose of equality altogether.
Once you make it inside, Twisted usually provides a good time. The staff are friendly, the music is good, the space clean and upscale. However it is clear that there is a target audience – a subset of the gay community that Twisted Element particularly caters to. The owners have a very strong vision about how the club should be represented, and this is evident in more than just their advertising. The looped porn playing on the wall screens is strictly gay male, the advertised events are male dominated and the staff consists mainly of men. There is very little in the club’s entertainment repertoire that does not appeal specifically to gay males, with the exception of the recently created variety show.
While targeting a particular demographic is not a bad strategy for a bar, blatant prejudice and discrimination at the door are. When they first opened their doors, the Twisted Element’s advertising hook was a promise to be welcoming of everyone in the community; this was in contrast to the private men’s club of Metro Boyztown that was Calgary’s popular gay dance club at the time. Even before Twisted Element came onto the scene, there was always the alternative of Detour/Arena. Now it seems that Twisted Element is moving towards a similar polarization as Boyztown. Uncontested as the only gay dance club in Calgary, many customers feel they have no choice but to tolerate the hassle at the door. Those that are fed up are spilling over into the other bars, gay and straight, or simply not bothering to come out at all.
The co-operation between gay business owners and non-profit groups is the foundation of the gay community in most cities. This can sometimes be a difficult relationship to maintain, stemming from the fact that businesses and non-profits have vastly different ways of serving their sectors of the community. While non-profit organizations exist to assist minorities within our minority community, gay businesses cater to a broader range of community members. A healthy gay community cannot exist when these two cannot garner a working relationship.
This is particularly difficult when individuals from many non-profit groups in Calgary have been barred entry to the Twisted Element, often for their actions outside of the establishment. Over the last three years, the club has barred or made to feel unwelcome directors, volunteers, or members from Pride Calgary, Fairy Tales Film Festival, Herland Film Festival, Apollo, ARGRA, Different Strokes, Calgary Outlink, Miscellaneous Youth Network, the ISCCA, and OutGames/OutFest/OutRights – citing reasons surrounding the operation of their groups, or their members’ personal opinions of community representation. The staff of Metro Boyztown and Detours/Pulse also received blanket bans for the actions and opinions of individual staff members, as did other gay businesses in the city. At times these bans affected some individuals that had not set foot into the Twisted Element in their life.
In June of 2006, an article appeared in Beatroute magazine in which Tyler Hunt, a director of that year’s Pride Calgary Pride Board, among other things made a statement that Calgary still needs an “alternate, friendly space” in the queer community. Many of the quoted individuals were not informed that their words were being used to support the author’s criticisms of the Twisted Element, but regardless the owners of the club were furious at the Pride Board for their involvement. The Pride Board maintained that they did not sanction the statement, insisting that it was the individual member’s own opinion. Despite this, Twisted Element pulled out of the Pride parade, banned all members of the Pride Calgary Board from their club indefinitely, and hosted an event to compete with the Pride Dance. We revisited the incident with John Skorka, a director of the Pride Board at the time, who pointed out that other prominent community members quoted in the article did not receive the same harsh treatment.
GayCalgary Magazine’s own Steve Polyak was one such person quoted in the article, admitting that another gay dance club would not be bad for the community. He now reveals that Twisted Element did threaten to pull GayCalgary Magazine from their club and terminate all advertising if he did not retract his sponsorship of Pride, and elicit letters of apology from the Pride Board and Beatroute Magazine. GayCalgary refused to pull their sponsorship and support of Pride, although they expressed disappointment about the tone of the article and the usage of his quote to the author. After some consideration following an informal discussion with Pride Board director Linda Craig, GayCalgary decided that it was not their place to pursue the apology letters either. Twisted Element did not follow through on their threat at the time.
For Pride Week the following year, the Twisted Element did enter a last minute float and marched in the parade, to the surprise of a many in the community. Skorka hopes this means that bridges are being rebuilt.
“We were quite happy to see them, and actually, as a sign of good will we waived the entry fee.”
Although it was business as usual for GayCalgary, Polyak states that the Pride 2006 incident was neither the first nor the last of many difficult demands made on the magazine by the club owners.
For some time now, the Twisted Element has championed their support of the Imperial Sovereign Court of the Chinook Arch (ISCCA) and The SHARP Foundation as proof of their community support and involvement. In a discussion with Lonnie Starlight, the current reigning Empress of the ISCCA, she expressed some frustration about the lack of advertising for their Wednesday night fundraising shows, as well as the limited fundraising methods that the court was permitted to use during the event. Recently the club owners cancelled the ISCCA’s Wednesday night shows, after an ultimatum that the group must take action to make the nights a success. The ISCCA strives to involve all bars in their fundraising efforts, but this decision effectively pushed them out of the club. We contacted many other gay businesses and non-profit groups in the city, who would only comment off the record for fear that they would suffer setbacks in their efforts to rebuild a relationship with the club, or to simply co-exist peacefully.
Last month we attempted to contact the SHARP Foundation that operates Beswick House and Scott House - two AIDS Hospices that care for the terminally ill from the GLBT community. Our inquiry was as to whether moneys raised from the Twisted Element Bike Giveaway, which concluded in June of this year, were received in good order. Perhaps this is moot point considering the club publicly donated $10,000 to the charity after their World AIDS Day service.
“The Twisted Element has been our biggest supporter,” commented Floyd Visser of the SHARP Foundation.
Twisted Element owner Fafard has traditionally been the face and voice of his club, and during personal appearances at events such as Paragraph 175 (an event honouring Gay survivors of the Holocaust) he has also claimed to represent the gay community as a whole, based on his status as a successful business owner. On the other hand, looking at his club’s behaviour - their treatment of the majority of non-profit organizations, their door policies, and their attempts to control free media outlets - he is far from being the ideal representative of Calgary’s GLBT community at large. Perhaps it is time the organizations in the community cast off their feeling of obligation to be accommodating to the Twisted Element when they are not willing to afford the same courtesy back. Although organizations should be open to working WITH them, they must draw the line before ending up working FOR them.
For some bar patrons, there is still hope that something will change for the better at the doors of the Twisted Element – they enjoy the club and would gladly return if they could avoid the frustrations at the door. However, the fact that their complaints are reaching this magazine indicates that outcries directly to the bar have been falling on deaf ears. Others can’t wait for a competitive “alternate space” to open in Calgary, on the hopes that things might be better elsewhere.
To date, bars have been a hub of the GLBT community, and it is there that we should all be welcome to celebrate our revolution and build the organizations that serve us. This feeling is best represented in Twisted Element’s own slogan: “Coming out was hard enough, going out shouldn’t be.”
