News from Minnesota Municipal Beverage Association

By ABBY SIMONS, Star Tribune

For nearly two decades, Minnesota native Steve Horner has crusaded against what he considers a monumental injustice: Ladies' night.

The complaints he filed with Human Rights Departments in several states have earned him at least $6,000 in damages for being denied ladies' special prices at bars.

He's also garnered public support, derision, and a lampooning on Comedy Central's hit "The Daily Show," where the white, balding, bespectacled Horner compared his quest to Rosa Parks' refusal to go to the back of the bus.

Horner, who now lives in Utah, revealed this week that he made the complaints that triggered charges by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights against five Twin Cities bars for ladies' night gender discrimination in pricing.

News of the charges, filed quietly last year, broke recently in the Minnesota Daily student newspaper.

"I believe that to be vigilantly in defense of the constitution, one needs to speak up about these issues," Horner said in an interview.

The department said it won't reveal the bars' names until the cases are concluded, possibly with a monetary settlement. But according to documents provided by Horner, they are Jersey's Bar and Grill in Inver Grove Heights, Dive Bar in Maplewood, the Wild Onion Bar and Restaurant in St. Paul, Sally's Saloon and Eatery in Minneapolis, and Bogart's Nightclub in Apple Valley.

Horner, 62, who works in advertising and marketing sales, admits he hadn't set foot in any of the bars. Their owners complain they've been jerked around not only by Horner, who they say filed frivolous complaints, but also by the Human Rights Department, which charged their bars while ignoring hundreds doing the same thing.

"The [department] is pretty much discriminating against our bar,

because they're not going after every bar," said Dive Bar manager Mat Phelps, who said the bar ended ladies' night specials as soon as it was charged last June. "It's costing us a lot of business."

The department admits it has charged bars only when someone complains. In 18 years, it charged just six establishments -- the five last year, and one in 1992. In every case, the person who complained was the same: Steve Horner.

Picked bars at random

Horner, brother to Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Horner, got a $500 settlement in 1995 as a result of his 1992 complaint against now-defunct Gators bar in the Mall of America. In 1999, he moved to the West, where he filed a total of 22 complaints against bars in Arizona, Oregon, Idaho and Colorado. He has netted about $6,000, though he says money isn't his objective.

He was living last summer in North Mankato when friends alerted him to an article listing dozens of ladies' nights in the Twin Cities. He randomly called five bars from the list and asked if he could get their ladies' night discount. Each said no. He filed complaints.

"I knew that the law, because of my '90s activism, said that you didn't have to be present," Horner said.

The department's commissioner, James Kirkpatrick, declined to be interviewed, but Velma Korbel agreed to comment. She was commissioner last summer, when the charges were filed, and is now director of the Minneapolis Department of Civil Rights.

"I know there is a mixed feeling about the finding [of discrimination] from the department," she said. "[But] the finding is proper. ... Those who disagree with it [would have to] change the law."

Kirkpatrick said in a statement that special prices for women violate the state Human Rights Act, which calls it an "unfair discriminatory practice" to deny the "full and equal enjoyment" of the benefits of a "public
accommodation" because of race, color, creed, religion, disability, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation or gender.

The department originally charged the bars with Horner as complainant, but then the department refiled them as "commissioner's charges." Korbel said that because all the complaints were from one person, bundling the charges under the commissioner's signature was more efficient.

One effect of that is that Horner is no longer eligible to receive any money from the settlements. "They circumvented my activism and ... just wiped me out of the picture," Horner said. He accused the department of
trying to avoid the criticism it got when it took up his 1992 complaint.

"Back then it was, 'Why are you standing up for this guy? This is trivial. This guy's just a troublemaker,'" he said. "...They knew ladies' nights had bounced back a month after my [settlement] in 1995. But nobody enforced it. They slept on the job all the way until last June when I filed on this."

Phelps and Dive Bar owner Brian Meyer said they'll soon meet with state officials to discuss settlements. They say that by ending their ladies' nights as soon as they were charged, they've lost at least tens of thousands of dollars. And, they say, they have counted 60 other bars in the metro that continued to have ladies' nights.

But those bars could be playing human rights roulette, because Horner says he's watching. "I guess I'll always be on the prowl," he said,
"for a good ladies' night fight."

(Editor's Note: After the first go-around, many changed the name of their promotion to "Skirts & Bras night. If men wanted to wear these items, they could.)