It has been reported that CO2, Canterbury’s first real gay bar, which only opened in June 2009, will shut down as soon as its owners can sell the lease.
 
While we must constantly stress the need for Canterbury City Council to do much more to attract and welcome gay businesses and visitors to the City, what is most disappointing about the apparent failure of CO2 is the attitude of the bar’s owners from the beginning of their tenancy.  We have often criticised “straight” bar owners for thinking that they could make easy money out of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, but now it seems that those who are involved in gay businesses elsewhere, and should therefore know better, have made the same mistake.
 
Pride in Canterbury were unable to attend the bar’s opening night, but sent a “Good Luck” card. With this card was a letter, in which we stated that we felt such a venture would be difficult in the City and offered to give as much support as we could. We did not receive a reply.
 
Early on we attended a quiz evening, which we thoroughly enjoyed and publicised on our website. These quiz events were advertised as weekly, but when we turned up the following week, there was no quiz and no mention of its cancellation. As far as we know only one quiz was held.
 
We contacted GScene, the Brighton community magazine, which has a wide circulation and has been very supportive of Pride in Canterbury’s work. They expressed a willingness to publicise the bar, asking for details of events, photographs of staff and customers and the like, but in spite of this and the fact that we stressed the importance of the support of this magazine, the magazine received no response to these offers to spread the news of the existence of the new bar.
 
In the current financial climate, all bars need to make maximum efforts to attract customers, especially a new gay bar in Canterbury. We anticipated that there would be regular drag acts, and other entertainment of interest to the LGBT community, but little was arranged.  We were never contacted to put events on our website.
 
In the weeks running up to Christmas, a time when we thought a maximum effort would be made to bring in customers, we no longer saw or heard from Craig , who had been running the bar and who had talked to us of great plans to work with and for the community.  No events over the festive season were advertised.
 
We visited the bar on Christmas Eve.  There was no entertainment and, unsurprisingly, very few customers. The atmosphere was funereal rather than festive.
 
For the owners to now attack the LGBT community for not supporting them is not only risible, but is damaging to the prospect of any other gay bar opening in Canterbury.  Homophobes throughout the area will be celebrating.
 
Let no-one have any doubts, the responsibility for this fiasco rests firmly on the shoulders of CO2 owners.  They  have thrown away a great and important opportunity to build up the LGBT community in Canterbury.