The altercation began early Sunday morning, as the bar staff was locking up for the night. Several men who were passing by the bar on the Pottebakkersrijge in Groningen started yelling homophobic slurs, and then started a fight with the staff. Andy Wilson, owner of the bar and drag performer Dorothy Male, says that a female staff member was knocked out, a male staff member was punched and cut in the face, and he and his partner were both punched in the face and head repeatedly.
Wilson says via Instagram that they were locking up as a group – “safety in numbers” – and tried to de-escalate the situation. “Then some other guy turns up and starts filming, and generally getting involved when it was not him. At first we thought he was ok, he stopped filming, and then started to argue with the other guys, and it started to escalate from there.”
“The bunch of guys shook our hands and started to walk off. This guy with the camera then started to argue with us, and then attacked a female member of the staff, and a younger male staff member, and punched both.”
“The fight involved 4 bar staff including its owners who tried to protect its staff when leaving the venue after it was closed for the evening after a successful dragshow.”
Dorothy Male, the drag name of Andy Wilson, posted a statement on behalf of himself and his partner, Waynne Meek, on Dorothy’s Drag Bar Instagram early on Sunday morning. The Instagram page also shared a photo of Meek with a swollen lip on Sunday.
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Anouk Harteveld, a spokesperson for the northern Netherlands police force, confirmed that the police are investigating the incident. “After a reported assault around 2:20 at the Pottebakkersreige, we went to the scene and spoke with several people in order to determine what had transpired. We do not have anyone in custody at this time.”
The bar was hosting a drag show on Saturday night dedicated to the memory of Lilly Savage, an influential British drag queen and LGBTQI+ advocate who died last week and served as inspiration for Dorothy Male, who grew up in the United Kingdom. The bar hosts regular drag shows, drag bingo, and karaoke.
There was a similar incident at the bar in September 2022, when another group of people passing the bar yelled offensive statements at the bar’s patrons, but did not escalate to violence. Sikkom reported at the time on a post by a patron of the bar about the altercation.
Wilson bought the drag bar, which was previously named House of Scandal, in July 2022. The drag performer was born and raised in the United Kingdom, and posts on the bar’s Instagram page are often in Dutch and English. Dagblad van het Noorden reports that that Wilson and Meek relocated to the north from the Amsterdam region in 2021.
Dorothy’s is one of several LGBTQI+ bars and cafes in Groningen, which also includes Café de Prins, Out of the Closet Café, and Scandal.
“As a community bar, we are a safe space”, Wilson says. “We experience silly comments like every venue. And generally violence-wise we have zero issues, we have zero homophobia in the bar because we are a community and we look after each other. But as a whole, the LGBTQI [community] is experiencing a big increase in homophobia, we hear reports from customers across the city.”
The Netherlands was the first country in the world to legally recognise gay marriage in 1998, and is one of the most accepting nations in terms of LGBTQI+ rights: it was ranked second in a study by UCLA in 2020 of 175 countries. But homophobic and transphobic attacks and threats still regularly occur: in 2021, the most recently confirmed statistics, there were 2,471 reported incidents of discrimination or violence targeting queer people, which was an increase from 2020.
The drag scene in the Netherlands has existed for decades, but it has experienced increased popularity and visibility in recent years with television shows like Drag Race Holland. Globally, there has been a counter response to the mainstreaming of drag in the form of restrictive laws and and discrimination against drag performers and trans people: in the state of Tennessee in the United States, a controversial “drag ban” law was recently passed (but is currently on hold), and far-right protestors regularly target drag queen story time events in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Members of the LGBTQI+ community also face other forms of exclusion and erasure. In March 2023, in a small municipality in South Holland called Goeree-Overflakkee, a local union for municipal events organization sought to prevent representatives of a gay group from laying a wreath during the annual Dutch Remembrance Day on 4 May. The municipal government intervened and made clear that LGBTQI+ representatives were welcome at the memorial.
The effort to exclude them was especially cruel when considering that as many as 15,000 queer people were sent to labour and concentration camps during the Second World War. LGBTQI+ people were the second largest group targeted during the Holocaust following Jewish people, and Amsterdam has a permanent memorial to queer victims of the Nazis: the Homomonument, three pink granite triangles near the Westerkerk in Amsterdam. The shape of the monument evokes the shape of the patches queer prisoners were made to wear.
