Montreal Gay Bar Faces Human Rights Complaint After Woman was Refused Service

By Gudrun SchultzMONTREAL, Quebec, May 31, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A young Montreal woman has filed a human rights complaint with the Quebec Tribunal after a gay bar said women were not welcome to enter the establishment.Audrey Vachon, 20, with her father Gilles, entered Bar Le Stud in Montreal’s gay neighborhood for a drink on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. Once seated on the establishment’s patio, a waiter told her father that women weren’t welcome in the place. “On the spot I didn’t believe it, I thought it was a bad joke,” Vachon told the Canadian Press on Wednesday. “I didn’t say a word until I’d left. I was too shocked. I was embarrassed, I was humiliated, I felt guilty that I’d even gone there, like I’d done something wrong.”Vachon said the waiter did not look at her and communicated only with her father. Le Stud describes itself as a “truly manly meat market” in online Yellow Pages advertising. The pool bar has been operating for the past 11 years. Bar owner Michel Gadoury denied the policy was discriminatory on Radio-Canada, saying, “women have the right to come on certain days…it’s a choice, it’s a choice that my clients make, that they ask me to make, and we’re respecting them.”Following a 2001 Human Rights ruling in Prince Edward Island, a Christian couple were forced to close their bed-and-breakfast operation and pay a fee to two male homosexuals, after they refused to comply with the Human Rights Commission demand that they attend a pro-homosexuality seminar and permit practicing homosexuals to rent rooms in their home business. Two homosexual men from Quebec had filed a complaint against the couple after the men were refused a room with one double bed.In Australia earlier this week a Melbourne gay pub was granted the right to ban heterosexuals and lesbian women from the premises. Collingwood’s Peel Hotel applied for an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to the state planning tribunal, arguing that heterosexuals would put their homosexual patrons at risk for “sexually based insults and violence.”The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal granted the exemption last week, saying if heterosexuals were allowed into the venue in large numbers they could “swamp” the homosexual patrons.

2007-05-31