Gay clubs, cops and arrests or how to get your first story published

The first day that I had to produce something was Sunday (which is now almost a week ago). Obviously our two week seminar in Paris didn't prepare me for this at all, since writing about "that AIDS problem they got here" won't get you real far in the actual newsroom. Stuck with no ideas, I headed out into the Cape Town night on Friday, wondering what the hell I was going to write about. Rather than pack it in early, because I know no one in the whole city except for the owner of the Dubliner and a few of his friends, I decided to keep drinking.

Eventually, Pat (one of the Dubliner regulars and about as Irish a guy as you'll ever meet), came in and we shot the shit until 4am. That's when the bars close here in Cape Town. Or most of them. Pat said that a few clubs, that moonlight as gay clubs during the week, become major hangouts - straight and gay alike - on Friday nights because they have 24-business licenses. They can't sell liquor after 4am, but they turn some good music. So we went to a club called Sliver, which sounds only a hair's breath seedier than it actually is. After being in there for 10 minutes, the cops came in and roughly arrested the owner and 2 managers and shut the place down. One actually got maced in the face. And I was right there. Interestingly, what the cops did was illegal, because the club had a right to be open with its license - and no one was charged with selling drugs or anything. Combined with excessive force by the police - this was a seemingly great story.

Luckily I got to do this story on Sunday, rather than some crappy story on Grandparents Day in Cape Town. But on Monday, when I opened the paper, the Grandparents Day story got 4 times the space my story got and it had a picture to boot. Moral of the story, in Cape Town don't write about police brutality if it involves gay people in any way.....

I hate editors.