I live in a pretty liberal area, so I've never had issues with discrimination before yesterday. My boyfriend and I went to a restaurant in Chicago yesterday, and we were celebrating my half birthday. (He wanted to do something special for me because he said since my birthday is so close to Christmas I go too long without a day to feel special!) The food was great, and the host was very polite. He sat us down at a table. The table had a candle lit and looked pretty nice (perfect for a date). Our waiter comes to the table while my boyfriend is in the bathroom, and I could sense something is off. I tell him what drinks we want and that he can come back in a few minutes to take our orders. I did sense something slightly off about his attitude, but of course I gave him the benefit of the doubt. We get our bread and butter, drinks, and he takes our order. I could tell he seemed uncomfortable about something. His speech became kind of robotic and he just seemed focused on getting the orders done with. Afterwards, he kept awkwardly passing by our table to help the other tables around him. Multiple times. We finished our bread and he never came back to ask if we wanted more. My boyfriend even pushed it to the edge of the table in plain sight just to see if he's doing it on purpose. That didn't work, and he still passed by our table multiple times and basically ignored us. My boyfriend kept track, and our waiter constantly made sure all the tables around us had more bread. The tables around us always had their bread baskets full. We got our appetizer, and it was amazing. But our waiter didn't even say anything to us. He just dropped it off at the table and left. My boyfriend had ordered a soda, and it wasn't until after we started eating our meals when he was offered his first refill (that was the only drink refill he was offered the whole time). We eventually got our salads, and then after a while our food. He never came to check on us and he only dropped off the food with one words responses after we said "thank you". The food itself was great. Could easily be a five star meal if I'm going off of taste alone. But the service itself honestly ruined the whole thing. He talked to the people around us, and checked on them many many times while completely ignoring us. The whole time, we never got a second basket of bread (something we were kind of hoping to get). Towards the end, we asked for him to wrap our stuff to go. Then he asked us, in a rather unfriendly way, if we'd like coffee or desserts. We said no and then he said "Have a good evening." as if he was finally glad to be done serving us. For a restaurant in liberal Chicago, it really felt like we were being served in Mississippi. I'd normally notice staff notice that we're gay, usually never a problem, but even ones that might have a slight problem never treated us differently. This really was the first time I could say I was treated unfairly while going somewhere. We left a tip less than 10%. I think he wasn't expecting us to give any tip, probably because we were young. But I did want to still make a statement by saying we know about tipping, but we won't reward horrible service. Now, despite my boyfriend and I being young, 19 and 20 years old, we do remember to tip well when going out to eat at a nice restaurant. I aim to give about 25% if the service was very good, and 15-20% if the service was fair. Even a %5 tip would have been too much for the kind of service we received, but I still wanted to make a statement saying we know it was bad service and we aren't too dumb to know about tipping. What kind of experiences do you guys have? I could only imagine what some people go through on a regular basis in more conservative areas.
I don't really know what kind of restaurant it was or exactly what went down, but I have to say that from what you have written and from my own experience as a former server I suspect the issue wasn't with you being gay but rather with your age. Either way it sucks... As far as my own experience I have the somewhat odd situation that I am generally assumed straight when alone yet because of the way we are together pretty easily recognizable as gay when I am with my husband. And I can say hands down in restaurants and retail establishments I receive better service when with my husband, pretty much without exception. It may have something to do with the number of gay people in the retail and restaurant industries, but frankly I think it has more to do with a certain reputation gay men have for extravagance in purchasing and tipping. I think it's the most evident when I meet my husband at a high end shop. If I arrive first I can easily wander for 45 minutes without an offer of assistance. The moment he arrives, boom, there's the sales associates. Again, sorry you had a bad experience.
I'm not sure if most people think my bf is my friend or bf. Either way, the only time we got any sort of comments was when we were getting kinda PDA-y during a bar crawl lol. Things like "is that two guys?". But one guy in the parking lot right beside us started honking his horn and flashing his high beams at us, then aggressively drives past us. Literally the only time I feel like I've gotten treated differently and feared for my safety lol
Other than from my parents and very religious former friends which is a whole different mess, the only time I'm certain there was discrimination was from one of my teachers. I had been sitting in the front row of the class for most of the semester with no problems, and my chemistry professor would frequently say stuff to me just because I was the closest person, give me papers to hand out for him etc. Then one day he saw my boyfriend and I being a little affectionate on campus and realized I'm not straight. Immediately all communication in class stopped - he would go out of his way to not look at me, not talk to me, and just pretend I didn't exist. Eventually even that became too much for him and one day I walked in to find that my chair had literally been unbolted from the floor and was laying on its side so nobody could sit there. It was the only chair in the 100+ chair lecture hall like that and I'm pretty sure he did it himself just to make me leave the front row so he didn't have to see me every day anymore. There goes that potential letter of recommendation... kind of sucks that he got promoted to the head of the department right afterwards too so I'm guaranteed to have to deal with him for the rest of my time in college for administrative stuff.
It's good you left a tip at all, but it may not have gotten the message across. Of course it could've been for any reason that he was ignoring you but that was uncalled for as far as I'm concerned. Agreed. Young people are often assumed not to tip, which is no reason to treat them like that. Glad you're okay! Stories like this tick me off. With the money these schools are asking for people to attend, they need to treat everyone equally as paying customers at all times! Maybe you can out the behavior in some way? Write about it somewhere where prospective students will see it?
I'd rather not be public about the location (at least not posted publicly), and I will say I also don't really blame the restaurant, just that specific waiter The food was good, the other staff seemed nice, the inside looked pretty, but that waiter kind of killed the experience
I moved schools but I was outted in one of my schools. I’d regularly get disapproving stares, be called “Faggot” and more stuff. The worst of all of it was the feeling of never being physically safe, I have extreme paranoia and when that happened that didn’t help at all. Thankfully I was never assassulted. I never did anything wrong to anyone and I was hated on a large scale! I don’t understand it. It makes me sad.
I think you should have been more assertive actually. If you wanted bread, why not ask for it? I would have called him over and said " Is there something bothering you? We have noticed that we have been fairly ignored for the last 30 minutes and would rather clear the air and apologize if that's something that we have done." He would probably get embarassed and provide better service. I also wouldn't tip at all if I was to be ignored like that but I would definitely challenge the behaviour. I think by tipping he got rewarded for being a shit waiter which will make him less likely to improve in the future.
Wow! That is really bad service. I would have been tempted to leave 5% or nothing at all. I can't say as a definite that it was because of your sexuality, but it's possible and frankly, I agree with you in that I would be even more upset if someone was treating me like this based on the gender of my partner/date than how old I was. The only way to know for sure I guess would have been to observe whether a similarly aged straight couple was getting superior service to you. If they were, I would have to sadly concur that yes, you were probably being discriminated against. Which is totally wrong. I am torn between being surprised and not surprised that this unfortunate thing happened to you. But I would have to say I am surprised, and not because I have some Pollyanna-like view of the world. I live in the southern US in the Bible belt, so here would be a more likely place to be discriminated against or witness it against others. And I honestly can't recall it ever happening, to me or anyone I knew who was gay. I am not out, and pass as straight,t so for me it has never even come up, but I have several gay uncles and during holidays and family reunions my extend family and I frequently go out to eat in restaurants. And never once have we be discriminated against, and my uncles almost always show up with their husbands. I suppose it's possible that the waitstaff don't realize they're gay, since they do all dress in very conventional ways, but surely someone who was very observant would realize that yes, we are all a family, and the number of men in our family greatly outnumbers the number of women present, so that they might surmise that some of the men at our table have husbands instead of wives. We don't go to pains to hide it at all. And since this is what happens in a small southern town I am very surprised that in a big city like Chicago with an LGB population probably five times the size of the area I live in, you experienced this. I would complain to the manager, and explain what happened. Surely, they must realize that employing anyone in their business who does not respect their patrons should not be serving. I am sure there are plenty of people who would be happy to have this man's job and he could be easily replaced if he can't be pleasant and treat all of his customers with dignity. If you don't want to call the manager, then I would post a public review or something of that nature to let people know to beware of the service. I would like to think this was a one time thing and it was only this specific waiter, but one never knows.
I do wish I left a note at the very least. At least one explaining why he doesn't deserve a tip (and let him realize that we would have tipped decently had he provided fair service). I'll definitely do that next time. I was quite appalled because I never actually expected that treatment, so I didn't really know how to react.
