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Written by Louis Weisberg, Staff writer
Sep 22, 2010
The heated battle over a liquor license in Janesville has brought allegations of homophobia and unleashed a torrent of charges and countercharges between those seeking to maintain an LGBT-friendly bar in the city and those with an apparent vendetta against the license applicants.
The controversy surrounds the former site of Off the Wagon, which was the city’s only predominantly gay and lesbian bar until it closed over the summer. Off the Wagon was housed in a building at 18-24 S. River St. owned by local businessman Kurt Miller of Integrity Quest and 4M Ventures LLC.
Miller evicted the bar’s owner Robert Forbush for non-payment of rent and unscrupulous management practices, including allowing a straight swinger’s club for married couples to operate in an upstairs space in violation of a local ordinance.
Miller is attempting to get a new liquor license issued to Macksforyou LLC, whose five partners include Mary McIntyre, who formerly managed Off the Wagon. Their goal is to open an LGBT-friendly bar called Club Haven and the Bridgeport Bar n Grill in the same location.
Forbush has lobbied the city’s Alcohol Licensing Advisory Committee to deny the license, sending a letter to the committee’s members charging Miller with criminal activities. A police investigation concluded that the charges against Miller were unfounded, according to Janesville City Clerk Jean Wulf.
But the doubts raised by Forbush combined with the site’s troubled history and at least one adamantly opposed ALAC member have thrown the license’s fate into question.
Former Off the Wagon employee Christian Schmidt is attempting to rally public support for Club Haven. He’s signed up several hundred supporters on Facebook and he’s planning “a big gay rally” outside the ALAC meeting scheduled for Oct. 5, when the committee will consider the license again.
Schmidt said LGBT people in Janesville currently have no welcoming place to congregate. Since Off the Wagon closed, “there’s nothing here,” he said. “There’s nothing to do.”
Schmidt and other LGBT locals described Janesville as intensely homophobic, which they believe is behind the ALAC’s reluctance to issue the license. They complained that the application process has been subjected to an unusual level of scrutiny as well as an unprecedented demand that the applicants produce a detailed business plan demonstrating the financial viability of the business proposed for the site.
Wulf acknowledged that the application process has been uniquely rigorous but denied that homophobia is the cause. She said the ALAC has been frustrated by Miller’s inability to find a viable tenant for the site.
“The owner keeps trying to find an applicant and it falls through,” Wulf said. “Virtually in the last year and a half, every time we have an ALAC meeting, 50 percent of the time they’re considering something that’s going on at this location. That’s why they wanted to make sure that the applicant has the wherewithal to open a business and make it a go. No other location in the city has had this history and turnover in applicants.”
Miller countered that this is only the third applicant he’s brought before the committee concerning the site.
Forbush, who moved to Eau Claire after Off the Wagon closed, said he’d like to see another LGBT bar in Janesville, as long as Miller isn’t involved in it. He acknowledged his responsibility for the failure of Off the Wagon and said it was intentional.
“In front of witnesses, he told me to un-gay the place because he didn’t want drag queen posters or advertisements on the front door of the building,” Forbush said. “I felt that was discriminatory. That was why I decided I was no longer going to give him any money. I let the place go down because I felt he was discriminatory. I was breaking my end of the lease because he was homophobic and very destructive of my business.”
But Miller dismissed the accusation. “If I was homophobic I wouldn’t be trying to get this gay and lesbian group as my tenant,” he said. “The bottom line is that (Forbush) was not running a legitimate business. He was not paying payroll, unemployment or worker’s comp. He was running everything on a cash basis.”
Former Off the Wagon employees echoed Miller’s charges. “He didn’t know how to run a bar, he didn’t know how to operate a business,” Schmidt said. “He did not pay his bills. He did not pay his rent.”
Schmidt and McIntyre said Forbush also gave Off the Wagon a bad reputation due to his constant sexual solicitations of patrons – both gay and straight. “He would hand notes to people saying, ‘I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you’ll go out into the parking lot with me,’” Schmidt said.
Forbush denied propositioning clients, but McIntyre said she had saved notes he passed to people at the bar offering cash for sex. McIntyre said she was particularly upset when Forbush offered her straight son $25 for oral sex.
Miller said Off the Wagon deteriorated further after Forbush introduced Humpday Meet and Greet events, which were held on Wednesdays. These were organized by Christine Anclam, who described them as G-rated get-togethers where straight swingers and wife swappers could meet.
“There was no kind of sexual interaction or anything on site,” said Anclam, who, like Forbush, has relocated to Eau Claire. “It was like a coffee klatch party.”
But in addition to the Wednesday meet-and-greets, Anclam also staged parties upstairs behind locked doors that were anything but innocent, according to former Off the Wagon employees who had to clean up after them. Anclam denied that sex was involved at these events, but notices posted online suggest otherwise: “Grab a shot … select a partner … and suck and blow baby!!!” proclaimed a posting for the July 24 Leather N Lace Party at Off the Wagon.
The most vocal critic of Miller on the ALAC is William Truman, an unemployed truck driver who also sits on city council. Truman recently staged an unsuccessful bid for the Assembly in the Republican primary elections.
Some of Miller’s supporters believe that Truman is angry with Miller for banning the swinger’s parties from the site, a charge he loudly denied.
“I’ve never been in that bar,” Truman said.
“Whatever they want to say, I guess they can say,” he said, adding that he’d sue anyone who said what they said.
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