Bar manager apologises and invites drag queens to educate staff following rude exchange

Saturday, 5 September 2020

CoCo Flash, left, and Erika Flash received a short, rude, response to their offer to perform a show at a Napier bar.

The owner of a Napier bar accused of being homophobic has apologised to a drag queen who received an offensive message from his bar, and says the matter is now “an employment issue”.

Taranaki-based drag queen CoCo Flash (Sunita Torrance) sent a Facebook message to the Thirsty Whale bar on Friday.

The message said CoCo and another drag queen, Erika Flash, would be in Hawke’s Bay to perform shows on September 19 and was looking for venues that might be interested in having them perform.

The succinct response was: ‘f*** off’.

CoCo Flash and Erika Flash have recently finished a nationwide ‘Rainbow Story Time’ tour.

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Torrance was not impressed. She said she rang the bar and spoke to a woman who denied the message was sent by the bar “and would only keep saying ‘it’s a restaurant’”.

“It didn’t go very well. I ended up hanging up on her. It was then that I put the exchange on Facebook,” Torrance said.

Thirsty Whale owner Chris Sullivan told Stuff on Sunday morning that he doubted any of his staff would have sent such a message, but he was getting an IT expert to go through the bar’s computer system to “get to the bottom of this”.

Later on Sunday he said “we have now found that this is an internal issue with one of our team. This is now an employment issue, and we have been looking into ways to rectify the situation”.

“We have reached out to Sunita to apologise on behalf of The Thirsty Whale team. We understand how this has affected not only Sunita but the LGBTQI+ community and this is not what The Thirsty Whale endorses,” he said.

“We have invited Erika and Coco Flash to come into our workplace and educate the team on diversity and acceptance. We are also looking into other avenues to educate ourselves about diversity and acceptance in the workplace, so we can put in place new policies to make sure we are upholding the values of The Thirsty Whale,” Sullivan said.

“This event has allowed us to take a closer look at our workplace culture and really focus on how we can make improvements,” he said.

Torrance said she was pleased that Sullivan had contacted her and expressed an interest in some sort of education.

“That could be something positive,” she said.

“Most people are not too bad, but we are finding that this year, particularly around election time, that it has got bad. We just got back on Monday from a two-week New Zealand tour of ‘Rainbow Story Time’ where we read to kids in libraries, and we had controversy in Timaru where a petition was started to ban us from the town,” she said.

“Hopefully people will start to want to be more inclusive and realise the Rainbow community is part of the community,” Torrance said.