The McGrory/Glob article

[jbsegal]

I thought I had it someplace...

I realize this is in violation of the Glob copyright. If they ask me to take it down, I will.

---

They had reservations

By Brian McGrory, Globe Columnist, 1/20/2004

Not often enough in the life of any newsman does a note arrive over the
transom with a sentence that reads, "As the elevator door opened, in
walked a woman in a leather bustier leading, by a dog leash and collar,
a man wearing nothing but a string thong."

Let's first of all thank astute reader Mark Warter, formerly of Boston,
now of Rhode Island, who had the good sense to know that the issue might
be of interest to the community at large.

When I called him, Warter laid bare his story. On Friday, Jan. 9,
he checked into the Park Plaza Hotel with his wife, two daughters,
their husbands, and his two grandchildren, all to attend his grandson's
christening at the Trinity Church. Any more wholesome it doesn't get.

Back in the Paleozoic Era, about the time of its last full-scale
renovation, the Park Plaza wasn't a bad hotel; these days, it's more
exhausted than just tired, catering mostly to downscale conventions,
airline crews, and people who don't know any better.

Put Warter in that last group, but he'd quickly learn. After he settled
into his room, he rode the elevator back to the lobby with his wife and
their 3-year-old granddaughter.

Ding-ding. Elevator stops. Doors open. And that's where the woman in
the bustier with the man on the dog leash come in.

"She's not a small woman," Warter said. "She's overflowing out of this
thing, and she has fishnets on. He is looking down, and he has a collar
around his neck.

"I immediately start talking to my granddaughter to distract her,"
Warter added. "The other women in my elevator and my wife, their jaws
drop. You could hear them hit the floor."

Next stop: the front desk, where a clerk informed Warter that the
Fetish Fair Fleamarket was being held in the upstairs ballroom all
weekend. Okey dokey.

Soon, a bored-looking manager explained to Warter that the Park Plaza
was a convention hotel and, as such, refused to discriminate against
any group. Hotel executives never thought it necessary to prewarn other
guests. He offered a free breakfast.

"I told him, `So you value money more than decency?' and he replied,
`Apparently,' " Warter said.

By this point, the lobby was literally filled with hulking cross-dressers
gallivanting about in skirts, men in leather chaps and little else, obese
people with whips, and dwarfs in masks -- all of them ready to celebrate.

"It's everything you can think of," Warter said. "I'm not a prude,
but I couldn't believe it."

Admittedly, I'm the suspicious type, and was starting to think hoax.
I envisioned the night I'd be sitting at a bar with a bunch of college
friends when one of them would say, "Remember the time we got you fired
from the Globe . . . ."

So I plugged a few words into Google and, sure enough, there it was,
the Fetish Fair Fleamarket at the Park Plaza, Jan. 9-11.

According to the event website, for a $10 admission charge, attendees
could visit vendors such as Dungeonware and Happy Tails or take classes
such as The Joy of Canes and Flogging 101. There was a masquerade ball
on Saturday night.

The management of the Park Plaza didn't return calls. Maybe they were,
ahem, tied up. But event organizer Cecilia Tan bragged that more than
4,000 S & M-minded people and 100 vendors came through the hotel, making
it the most successful fair she's hosted. She said the most scantily
dressed and sexually open people were discouraged from lounging in
the lobby.

She sympathized with other guests, but said of her group: "If people
are in their rooms having a lot of sex, they're not getting drunk and
running down the hallways." Good point, and one that the Warter family
can laugh about now. But you have to believe that in the back of their
minds they wish someone would whip the hotel back into shape.

Comments

Fair use...

[(Anonymous)]

This isn't a violation of the Globe's copyright, it's a fair use of the "article" they posted that damaged a business relationship to the point that a very profitable, low impact event was kicked out of the hotel. It's crap like this which maintains Boston's bad name, and the Globe's lawyers can get tied down and whipped for all I care. ;)

Re: Fair use...

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Fair use covers reposting of snippets and summaries, not of entire article texts.

That said, the Globe can suck it: this is an editorial masquerading as an investigative article, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Re: Fair use...

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

this is an editorial masquerading as an investigative article, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

It never claimed to be "an investigative article".  Look at the byline, it says "By Brian McGrory, Globe Columnist".  He's trying to fill Mike Barnacle's shoes as the Globe's "man of the people" columnist.

Re: Fair use...

[jered]

Is the Flea no longer welcome at the Park Plaza?

Re: Fair use...

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Nope. Check out my previous post. (actually, 2 posts previous...)

What he doesn't get...

[(Anonymous)]

is the economic benefit of it all.

Assuming that each of the 4000 attendees spent $500, that's $2million pumped directly into the Boston economy.

Then theres the economic thingey (I forget the name possibly multipler?) where each dollar is spent again. The money paid to the Park Plaza goes to its staff, which then buys groceries, and the grocery store staff buys clothes, etc.

Maybe if Boston loses the $2million, the city can lay off the police, firemen and garbagemen who service Brian McGrory's neighborhood.

Oh, wanna bet he's seen Passion of the Christ?

Re: What he doesn't get...

[leahseraph.livejournal.com]

What does the Passion of the Christ have to do with it at all? *grumbles* sorry, I think you hit a pet peeve. Not sure which one at the moment...

Re: What he doesn't get...

[avram]

Whipping and scourging, I suspect.

Re: What he doesn't get...

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

The article was from 1/20/04. He certainly hadn't seen the movie when he wrote it.

Re: What he doesn't get...

[jered]

... is the economic benefit of it all.

No, it's just that these people don't care about that sort of thing. According to Forbes, legalizing same-sex marriage in the US would be worth 16.8 billion dollars to the marriage industry, which does not normally see much growth. (I just did my part; yesterday I gave the Boston Harbor Hotel a deposit for next May.) A few months ago, San Francisco made at least $250,000 in licensing fees before the state told them to stop issuing licenses.

The economy doesn't mean anything to religious zealots. You're supposed to suffer for your sins.

[bluepapercup]

fucking ugh. that article pissed me off the first time, and pissed me off this time too. well, money talks, and I'll take my money somewhere else, thanks.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Didn't they used to warn people making reservations on Flea and Arisia weekends about it? I could've sworn they did (I talked to some of the mundanes last year, and they said as much.) Has their corporate ownership taken them that far down the drain?

[quietann.livejournal.com]

Actually if you read JB's first post on this, the Park Plaza is co-owned by an individual and a corporation, and it's the individual who has "issues" with the Flea. Though I agree, a warning to "mundanes" would be a good idea when they are making reservations...

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Yes, I caught that after posting (reading backwards.)

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Why should they warn anyone about a legal gathering in their hotel?

Check out a comment I just posted about 5 m ago for more about this.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Well, frankly, for this exact reason? Stories like this do the kinky community absolutely no good. I realize they're going to happen anyways, but a "victim" who has to say "yes, we were warned and we made the reservation anyway instead of coughing up the extra $20, because we're cheap" is a good bit less sympathetic than one who can say "we had no idea about all this, our Puritan souls are offended, we're going to hell now."

[skreeky]

I can assure you they didn't two Arisias ago. I was so fed up with the Arisia room-booking snafus, I'd stopped booking my room through Arisia. I booked online with absolutely no indication I had ever heard of Arisia.

They gave me a room on Dealer's Row, between a bookseller and a clothier. I was fine with this, as I prefer to be near the parties, but imagine if I had been the completely random person they thought I was.

[missionista.livejournal.com]

How dare those dwarves wear masks, those men wear women's clothes and those obese people carry whips!? This is an outrage, I tell you, an outrage!

4000 S & M'ers vs 6 Warters. Ha, ha, we win!

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

We half win.

They get the Park Plaza, we have to change dates and venues with 3 months warning, after the publicity has already gone out and people have made plans.

Yes, we DO get a much better space...

[entirelysonja.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, I didn't really find the article all that offensive. Sure, there were a some inflammatory phrases and the choice of language wasn't particularly objective, but I know a lot of people who would have felt at least as outraged as Mr. Warter by the situation.

I'm somewhat surprised that other guests weren't warned in advance about the event, since it can reasonably be expected that many people wouldn't want to have to explain floggers, restraints, and barely street-legal costumes to their children.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

I'm very much in your corner on this one. There's a *reason* that the Flea is explicitly (ahem) free of minors. I rather suspect that the best solution would have been to close the hotel to all minors for the duration. Adults can take care of themselves, and all but the most provincial would know about BDSM. Kids are another matter entirely.

(Plus, a lot of the BDSMers aren't terribly comfortable with kids in general; a good friend of mine got crap from a fetish girl for nursing her baby in public at Arisia...)

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

I'm somewhere in the middle, but more toward the FFF's side. Yes, the hotel would have been better off warning potential lodgers that the Flea was going on there that weekend, so that people could have made informed decisions about staying there. Other than that, though, well, there's no inherent right not to be confronted with confusing and possibly offensive things in life, even when you're a child. As Mark says, you have to worldproof the child, not childproof the world.

The thing I objected to was McGrory's smarmy tone throughout, and the bias against fat people. OH MY GOD, how DARE fat people and dwarves have SEX? DEVIANT sex, at that? Don't they know that only thin, tall, beautiful people are allowed to have sex? :-b

And yeah, the Warters had reservations, but I guarantee you that the Flea had reservations first. Conventions are booked far in advance, and the Park Plaza is a convention hotel, as the manager noted. The Flea brings in money to the hotel and the city during one of the driest spells of the hotel/tourism year, and McGrory would have the hotel cut off its nose to spite its face (and, as it turns out, so would half the ownership). Starwood understands that.

I'm sorry that some people feel outrage at BDSM people and their conventions. But you know, I'm outraged at Republicans, and you don't see me trying to keep them from having conventions; I think Republicans are far more harmful than people who like fetish sex.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

The reason the flea is explicitly free of minors is that NELA will be held legally responsible for 'corrupting' them if we don't keep them out. I know a fair number of previously 16 and 17 year olds who remain torqued about that.

As for the person with the problem with nursing, I really hope the friend told her to get over it... (Not that I can argue with the 1st clause of your parenthetical...though I think one of the major reasons for that is that people with 'alternative' lifestyles and kids spend a fair amout of time worrying about whether someone's going to call CPS (or whatever it's called locally) on them... Hm. Of course, most of the kinky folks with kids are pretty much ok with kids, at least outside of a kinky context... Hm...)

(I'm about to go an comment to aquariumgirl about the idea of 'street legal'...you may want to take a look in 5-10m.)

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

barely street-legal

As I opined to the board on Tuesday: The Commonwealth and the Municipalities have decided some while ago what is 'Street Legal' and the operative word of that phrase is LEGAL.

I don't feel that we (NELA) have any obligation to keep our attendees wearing anything more than that at any time. I don't feel that Mr. Warter has anyone to 'blame' other than Massachusetts and Boston for not meeting HIS community standards.

I know a great many people who would be similarly outraged...and I'd be similarly non-sympathetic.

(There was discussion after about whether the hotel did warn and if they SHOULD warn. IIRC - and I may not, there was a strong feeling that the hotel shouldn't warn about any legal gathering. Where do you draw the line? Jehovah's Witnesses offend me, as does any evangelical christian religion. I'm not going to ask the hotel to warn me that they're doing something there when I'm going to be staying there...only to insure that I can sleep through whatever they're doing.)

[judith-s.livejournal.com]

I want a warning about this. I would also want a warning about the Jehovah's Witnesses, BBQ Convention, or the National Loud Singing Club. I don't care what all you have going on in the hotel, but if any of it is going to impact me (by seeing, hearing, smelling, or touching something, anything, different from generic hotel state) I want to know. Personally, I think all hotels should post their entire convention schedule... so that I can see what I'm in for. Having been stuck in the same hotel as a high school basketball tournament -- and those kids are LOUD -- I now ask if there are "any events going on that might affect my stay."

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, I suppose. But I know no hotel that does that.

If they warn about EVERYTHING, I can deal...however, it has to be everything above "we have lots of other guests here"...

I mean, the HS Basketball Tournement is just a large reservation block...they're presumably not even using the hotel other than as a place to sleep (and go wild, yes.)

But at any granularity larger than that, they'd better not just be warning about kinky groups.

[merde.livejournal.com]

IMHO, hotels should always warn non-convention guests if there will be any sort of convention going on while they're there. in most cases it will have at least some impact on their stay, since hotels are generally much more crowded when any sort of convention is on. there may be lines to check in, lines at the hotel restaurants, noise, crowds to navigate in the lobby, etc.

i really can sympathize to some extent with the family who found themselves surrounded by a fetish fair without warning -- i once found myself in a hotel with a salesperson convention, and let me tell you, nobody, but nobody has loud drunken parties like salespeople.

what i don't get is what's so hard about saying, "some grownups like to dress up and play games with each other sometimes, but we don't do that and we think it's pretty silly." i mean, honestly. the kids will forget all about it in mere moments unless they have the inclination themselves, in which case there's not a damn thing the parents will be able to do about it anyway.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

I gather the Shriners are worse than salespeople. Ok, I'd guess that half of the Shriners ARE salespeople, but that's just a guess.

...and then there are the times when there are _two_ conventions in the same hotel at the same time, say Unicon and the Boy Scouts...

Boogida boogida boogida.

(Or Philcon and the Tri-State (PA, NY, NJ??) Monument Makers Convention. There was born my nickname...)

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, that was the big comparison...

Does the hotel have to warn other guests about queer and bi conventions? I'd argue not.

It can be reasonably expected that many people wouldn't want to have to explain sodomites, drag queens, and barely street-legal costumes to their children, after all...

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

In truth, I feel the most sensible thing to do is thrust upon the non-attendee guests of a convention hotel. If you're staying at a convention hotel, for gods' sakes, ASK WHO ELSE IS THERE!!! "Convention" covers an awful lot of ground, and the only way the person taking your reservation will know if you're going to be offended by nekkid people, people with pointy ears, men in skirts, drunken capitalists or geeks is if you ask.

[entirelysonja.livejournal.com]

Um, I didn't say I thought the hotel HAD to warn the other guests -- I said I was surprised they didn't.

Surprised because it strikes me as bad for the reputation of the hotel, and for future business, to have guests staying there who are not only inconvenienced by the convention in question, but also offended by the behavior of the convention guests.

As we see by the Globe article in this case.

Although I will say that I actually think it would be smart of convention hotels to tell prospective guests about any kind of convention when they made a reservation. Pretty much any convention is a pain in the ass if you're not a participant.

Image.

[marmota.livejournal.com]

When the FFF moved from hall space to hotel space, it transitioned from being a community event to being an interface event. By that, I mean attendance shifted from being exclusively those involved to overlapping with the world at large.

Once that happened, something else should have happened but didn't. (Alternatively, more thought could have gone into whether the venue shift happened.) The degree of flamboyance and exuberance expressable in being surrounded by one's community no longer applied... the event instead became, by design if not intent, a commercial. While I'm sure most, possibly all, of the organizers are aware of this, I know from attending that many, possibly most, of the attendees aren't. Did anything mention it to them?

So, what's the message of the commercial?
a) This is all just another kind of normal
b) We're all really different, and don't care what you think

The attendees, to my eye, send the b) message.
Which may be honest, but is mediapathic and leads to jerks like Warter hooking up with
hacks like McGrory and making trouble.

I've seen this problem in pretty much any activist context I've ever been involved in or peripheral to. Anti-nuke power, land conservation, reproductive rights, NORML, heck even the Dean campaign. I even see it in the opposing sides. The camraderie and high spirits of a group of people with shared beliefs all in one place and time lead to a sharper definition of "us and them" boundaries, and a willfully defiant attitude towards whatever "them" is. This can be a good thing in a sense of community bonding, but an utter disaster when the place and time in question is an interface event. There, what's needed isn't pushing "them" away, but selling "them" on ignoring "us", acceptance of "us", or even joining "us".

As extreme flamboyance is one of the facets of Fetish activity, I think you're stuck with this problem, short of completely isolating the event. Which may be a solution but isn't an answer, as I'm sure that has it's own problems. I do however think you can manage it a little better with some sort of PR awareness information in the attendance literature.

Re: Image.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

'PR awareness' (internally directed) is on our radar already.

Re: Image.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Or taking over the whole hotel as BR tended to do. Isn't squicking the mundanes rather nonconsensual on their part?

I remember one time at 3lf when a guy and a girl dropped by fyrdmoot (the fighter side). He was leading her by a leash attached to her wrists and collar. My general reaction was "not the place or time. You're involving everyone else in your game." Fetish Flea is certainly a different venue than UMD's Armory, but when I'm wandering Arisia (or dropping by the more interesting parties) I'm not riding the elevator in next to nothing.

[blk]

... since by definition, "fetish" is all about skimpily-clad fat people with whips.

.... since, of course, if it was some skimpily-clad cute skinny bombshell, nobody would have cared.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

See? I keep telling you you need to make it to the flea more often...

[blk]

Wouldn't work. I wouldn't be holding a whip, I'd be on a leash. and, y'know, it's a crying, degrading, abusive, fetishy shame when someone cute is on a leash and the end is being held by someone else.

[ksteppe.livejournal.com]

*tries not to choke*