Union Bar Claims It Didn’t Refuse Service To Patrons Because Of Sexual Orientation

Union Bar, the Houston pub that has been in the spotlight this weekend for allegedly refusing to serve gay patrons on Friday has issued a statement denying that sexual orientation had anything to do with denial of entry or service.

Capitol Annex received the statement via email about 6:30 Sunday night. The statement reads, in part:

The staff and management at Union Bar are very apologetic for the misunderstanding that happened at their place of business. Union Bar in no way refuses entry to any persons due to sexual orientation, race, gender or religion. We do have a capacity of 117 persons as set forth by the City Of Houston and The Fire Marshal. We follow this guild line to the letter for guest and employee safety. This was the main factor or refusing entry Friday night. Persons have booked parties 6 to 7 weeks in advance and have limited of RSVP so their guests have the right to entry first. The Guest in question was allowed to bring his 50 RSVP guest. His party showed up at 10 with approximately 200 guests and could in no way accommodate that. We offered to take all 50 guests and he demanded that we let in all. Accordance to city code we could not allow this. At no time was the staff of Union Bar rude or uninventive to their needs while inside. At 10pm we were almost at capacity and the enclosed pictures will show that (1) We were almost full (2) We had a very high numbers of male guests that were not turned away.

We would be open to speak with the GL community on this and help prove to the G&L committee that we are a gay friendly bar!

As Charles Kuffner and Phillip Martin at BOR noted, there are some serious descrepancies between Union Bar’s press statement and what the Houston GLBT Political Caucus claimed. The Caucus said they had “nearly 100″ people present, while Union Bar doubles that number. In addition, some of the language that the Caucus cited in its press release certainly makes it sound a lot like the bar was excluding people for more reasons than fire code violations. After all, if it was because of exceeding the fire code that the gay patrons were excluded from the bar, why didn’t Union Bar say that at the time? It certainly would have saved them from at least some of the fallout they are experiencing now.

RELATED: Equality Texas notes this incident is a great example of the need for a the proposed public accomodation non-discrimination law now before the Texas Legislature to be passed.

COMMENTS: Check out some of the comments Capitol Annex has received on its earlier post on this controversy.

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