Getting Past the Bouncer

Imani Rose is a seasoned party and event planner and general Houston nightlife veteran. She's worked as a personal assistant for famous people and lived in the "cool" parts of the United States.

Marco Torres

Years of experience as a party and event planner has not kept Imani Rose from feeling the sting of discrimination at Houston nightclubs such as Roosevelt Lounge.

Marco Torres

Ray Odom outside Hudson Lounge, where he says the flood of negative feedback on social-media sites like Yelp following his Hydeout at Hudson party has "ruined" the Rice Village bar's reputation.

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• Imani Rose
• Hudson Lounge
• Houston (Texas)
• Racial Issues
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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Rose is young but not too young, trendy but not too trendy, thin but not too thin, successful but not too successful, and, most would say, attractive. Basically, she represents the ideal demographic for most upscale nightspots in town. Except for one thing — perhaps.

Rose is black. And when she goes out, sometimes this poses a problem.

She's hardly alone. Every few months or so, the simmering racial tension that goes hand-in-hand with nightclubs' right to decide who they do and don't let in boils over into another episode of hurt feelings, ugly allegations and hungry headlines. In the age of social media, this cycle can happen in a matter of hours.

And then, eventually, it dies down. Until it happens again.

Most recently, the focal point of this ongoing narrative has been Hudson Lounge, the posh Rice Village nightclub that opened last fall. The night of December 28, a large group of mostly African Americans — who had reserved the club in advance for their "Hydeout at Hudson" holiday party — were suddenly and unexpectedly told Hudson was closing at 11 p.m., well before its posted closing time of 2 a.m.

Hudson management says the reason the bar shut down early is that the number of people who showed up for the event was much more than the Hydeout organizers had initially told them, and the bar did not have enough employees on duty to properly accommodate the overflow. The Hydeout people didn't think so, maintaining someone there overheard the bar's owner saying he didn't like "the look" of the crowd, and said as much on Twitter and Facebook shortly afterward.

Over the next week, more traditional media jumped on the story, hard. One of the Hydeout organizers, Ray Odom, posted his account of the evening's events on Culture­Map ("Where's the Secret Checklist When You're Black?"). KTRH afternoon radio personality Michael Berry discussed the story on his show, Houston rapper Bun B tweeted Houston Press music blog Rocks Off's report to his thousands of followers, and Fox 26's Emily Akin included the heated telephone shouting match she got into with Hudson owner Adam Kliebert in her report.

Houston nightlife's racial difficulties were back in the headlines, but what happened at Hudson Lounge — whatever happened at Hudson Lounge — wasn't news to Imani Rose.

One night, Rose took her friend and her friend's sister out to several Washington Avenue clubs. Everything was fine at Brixx and Rebels Honky Tonk, she says, but not so at nearby Roosevelt Lounge. Although Rose had been turned away from Roosevelt once before when out with three other women and three men (all African-American), she thought it would be different with an all-female group.

"No. The doorman told us we had to make reservations and that they didn't accept walk-ins," says Rose. "He then proceeded to tell the white man after us the same story, except he asked him if he had friends inside. The man said no. [The doorman] then whispered something to him, then said, 'Sorry.'

"We all walked away," she continues. "Then we see the refused white man walk around in a complete circle and enter the club. We kind of staked out on the sidewalk to make sure we weren't hallucinating. Sure enough, white person after white person entered. A black man with a group of his white friends was able to enter. It was awful and blatant discrimination. The only label for that is undeniably racism."

If what Rose recounts is true, it's unfortunate but hardly unfamiliar. When the Press's photographer went to take pictures at Roose­velt, he witnessed a Hispanic couple get turned away for not being on "the list," while the doorman let several white people in without so much as glancing at his clipboard. (At press time, messages left by the Press for Roosevelt's management via phone and e-mail had not been returned.)

In fact, when the Press reached out to club owners, managers, promoters and bouncers with reputations for fair and equal practices for their insight, their response was essentially uniform: Discrimination based on race is, if not a standard business practice, a sight less than out of the ordinary.

But breaking it down along strictly racial lines would not be entirely correct. Someone could just as easily be turned away because they look gay — which local "Guerilla Gay Bar" organizers claim happened en masse at Midtown's Union Bar in March 2009, although Union management said it was purely a capacity issue — or because the doorkeeper doesn't think they look like they have enough money to make it worth unlatching the velvet rope. People are also refused entry to nightclubs for any number of reasons that are perfectly legal, from being obviously intoxicated to not being dressed properly.

Clubs do this. They always will. Things happen, people hear about them, shake their heads, fire off some angry tweets and leave bad reviews on Yelp. Everyone will act appropriately appalled.