Melbourne Gay Bar Wons The Right to Ban Straights

The Peel Hotel, a gay bar in Melbourne has won the right, for the first time in Australian history, to refuse entry to heterosexuals in a landmark ruling at the state planning tribunal. The Peel Hotel applied to ban straight men and women to try to prevent "sexually based insults and violence" towards its gay patrons. The tribunal last week granted the pub an exemption to the Equal Opportunity Act, effectively prohibiting entry to non-homosexuals.

The Deputy President of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, Cate McKenzie, said in her findings that "if heterosexual men and women came into the venue in large groups, their number might be enough to swamp the gay male patrons. This would undermine or destroy the atmosphere which the company wishes to create,"

"Sometimes heterosexual groups and lesbian groups insult and deride and are even physically violent towards the gay male patrons. Some women even booked hens' nights at the venue using the gay patrons as entertainment. To regard the gay male patrons of the venue as providing an entertainment or spectacle to be stared at, as one would at an animal at a zoo, devalues and dehumanises them,"
"(This exemption) seeks to give gay men a space in which they may, without inhibition, meet, socialise and express physical attraction to each other in a non-threatening atmosphere." [Source]