Picture this.

You are a cocktail bartender working in a lavish open dining-room in an iconic Melbourne CBD venue. You wanted to progress from your previous job, they gave you a chance.

It’s lunch service and your first sitting trickles in. For context, this is your first role as a bartender of this caliber–you’re eager to please, and a little bit out of your depth. You have an ounce of hope to hold onto. You are tired.

You’re dispensing, which means making drinks solely according to a docket. Each docket must take no longer than 7 minutes to reach the table.

The first tables’ drinks get run through the system, the dockets spill out, you’re doing ok. A few more spit out and you’re all of a sudden in the thick of it.

The room is alive with the chatter of guests and the humming of the kitchen behind you. You’re working the next round. Stirring a martini, building a highball, prepping tins to shake.

Ordered chaos.

Someone’s index and middle finger slides between your butt cheeks, over your pants, very close to your anus and wiggles them.

You freeze up and your round comes to a halt.

What plays out from this very action comes a stage of your life full of confusion, unworthiness and self-compromise.

Your whole being pings into alarm and turn quickly, to see it’s the sommelier.

You know it’s wrong but you say nothing. A sense of panic kicks in. You have to dump a part of your round.

10 minutes later, another touch. The dread kicks in.

All you can think about is how cruel it would be if you did that to someone at work. They know I’m gay. How would that make them feel? But then two words appear in your mind’s eye, ‘boys club’.

You tell the assistant bar manager a week later. He takes it nonchalantly.

“He does that to all the boys in the bar”.

Another week goes by and it happens again. The defences kick in.

I stop in my tracks.

“Can you not thanks!”

“Woah woah, this is normal in France. It’s a sign of respect”.

You are hurting.

Fast forward a little while.

You inform the venue manager of what has occurred. A meeting between the sommelier, yourself and the venue manager is arranged.

An apology is given, the seriousness of the situation is realised.

“Do you want to proceed with charges? It’s your call, or it can be an instant dismissal”.

“No”, you say. You are content.

A short while later.

You explain to management that you want to transfer to a floor role in wine, to be out of the bar. A reasonable request.

You tell a couple of workmates what’s gone down, and how you desire to move into a wine role.

You are called for a meeting.

The beverage director, the head sommelier and the bar manager are all sitting in.

The beverage director begins.

“Now, firstly, I’ve heard you’ve been telling people you’re going to join the wine team. This is simply untrue, for now. For starters, you can’t go around telling people things loosely, like “I’m going to be a part of the wine team”. If you want to be a part of the wine team, a certain level of trust has to be instilled. Our discounts and partnerships, details of our guests, what they drink, our margins.

Also, you’ve put your hand up for this role in the bar and now we are hearing you’d like to move to the floor. How can we know that you’re not going to want to move again, and again, if you don’t like that role”.

At this point, you’re in tears. Because seemingly no one at this table knew what had gone down in the bar a few weeks prior.

Or, they didn’t care to acknowledge it.

You resign a day later.

Congratulations. You made it this far.

My intention to write this is not to shit on anyone but rather an exercise in introspection. I’ve done a lot of it particularly around these events. I was listening recently to a podcast called ‘Gay Men Going Deeper’(for which I highly recommend to anyone and everyone). In a lot of their content they talk about minority stress.

Minority stress is the chronic, high-level stress faced by stigmatised minority groups—particularly LGBTQ+ individuals—due to prejudice, discrimination, and systemic inequality. This model explains that unique, social-based stressors, such as harassment or concealing one's identity, cause severe mental health disparities (e.g., anxiety, depression) compared to the general population.

If you ask me as a cisgender, white gay man , ‘do you feel minority stress?’, I would hesitate to say yes. Because it is much less an overall feeling for definition on the word, but rather an hard to actualise wheelhouse of micro-aggressions, stereotyping, trained thought, auto-piloting, and inadequacy all shaped by internalised homophobia spanning your life. Rough, huh.

Because the truth is.

Gay men give into masculinity too much, are the renowned over-achievers, the stubborn perfectionists, the chronic over thinkers, the lone wolves, the beautiful and the mysterious. All because by pure design they grew up and aged in a world that rejected them from the get-go.

The actions of this co-worker from my story earlier, perceived as normal by other men in the bar team compromised my hard work to get where I was, and it fucking hurt. I gave up on myself and my talents too quickly in that instance because of it. It goes without saying that women and femme presenting people face and reckon with the fallout of harassment in the workplace all too much. Forever disappointingly, they make up majority of the statistics

I still try to trick myself that these feelings of guilt around the events come from an inadequacy with Me.

But, the world we occupy is a minefield of complexity. I am gradually evolving. To see the lack of discourse between my managerial team, that bar bros (and all men) still need to keep their hands to themselves, to accept my radiant and radical queerness, to practice safe sex, to be humbled that things sometimes don’t work the way you want it to, to slow down, to love more fiercely, to communicate (although this isn’t always going as planned), and to quietly acknowledge that I am my own best advocate despite the anomaly of my queerness.

As my grandma Phyllis always said “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".

Let’s all give a bit more of a fuck about everything. Internally and externally!

xx

Jordi Yeates (he/him) manages Crooked Drinks, a little wine store on Smith Street in Collingwood on the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung poeple of the Kulin nation.

Always was, always will be.

(Suicide Help Line call 1300 651 251)

(Sexual Assault Crisis Line call 1800 806 282)

Extended reading on the impact of sexual harassment in hospitality https://media.unitedworkers.org.au/uploads/2023/04/230331_hospo_submission-sexual-harassment-a4_IM_v1.pdf