Jack H.
Yelp
I came to Larry's tonight in a group of predominately folks of color, and we were immediately treated in a strangely antagonistic way by the white bartenders behind the bar. Both of the bartenders, white femme-presenting people, were clearly very drunk (both slurring their words, aggressive, and stumbling behind the bar). We truly came in to just have a casual drink after a long day of work and the bartenders (especially one, a blonde white woman) immediately behaved aggressively toward my friends, Black nonbinary and Latinx nonbinary friends, suggesting that they were drinking underage and threatening to call the police for entirely baseless "underaged" drinking (both of my friends are 25 years old with legal and scanned/verified government IDs). The behavior was completely confounding and out of nowhere--again, we had just arrived for a casual drink after a long day of work at what we thought would be a safe space as a gay bar (all members of our party are queer and gay). When I inquired as to the reasoning behind the bar staff's aggressive treatment of our group, the bartender was incredibly defensive and suggested that DC was "not racist," as compared to wherever we might be coming from (Los Angeles, lol). They refused to take any accountability for their unacceptable racist, unprofessional, inappropriate behavior and instead suggested that we were "assuming" that they were racist, which they couldn't be because they "have Black friends." The more drunk of the bartenders was dismissed by their coworker and went off to talk with their friends on the other side of the bar, pointing and looking at us. My friends--again, QTPOC folks--had felt immediately unsafe, freaked out, and scared at why the bartenders were behaving aggressively toward them. They wanted to leave immediately, were scared, and even when I (the only white member of the group) tried to intervene with the slightly more sober bartender, the bartenders were defensive and blamed us for their own aggression.
I think it goes without saying that this is completely unacceptable behavior, ESPECIALLY at a supposedly queer-affirming establishment. It is laughable that the bartenders balked at the suggestion that race played a factor in what was a bar almost entirely populated that night (11/28) by white people. I hope management takes into serious consideration the gravity of this behavior and undertakes appropriate training to correct highly inappropriate behavior.