On September 22, 2022, we publicly cut ties with Nowhere Bar after one of their owners (Dave Mattingly) was arrested on felony charges for sexual assault. We have received questions and criticism for that decision, and this statement is an attempt to provide more context around the decision. One line of criticism is that we acted too soon, and should wait for the case to go to trial. The other line of criticism is that we are hypocrites for waiting so long to cut ties.
Why did you have a relationship with Nowhere Bar/Dave Mattingly in the first place?
Dave Mattingly was a founding Board Member of the Louisville Pride Foundation, and Nowhere Bar was a sponsor of the original Louisville Pride Festival. The Festival was organized with the help and support of the three bars on Bardstown Road that cater to the LGBTQ+ community. The relationship is as old as our organization. Dave Mattingly has not been a Board Member for several years, but Nowhere Bar has been a sponsor in all six years that the Festival has happened.
Why didn’t you sever ties when Christopher McKinney was killed there?
In January of 2020, a gay man, Christopher McKinney, died at Nowhere Bar after an altercation with a bouncer. The event was tragic and shocking. It was also accompanied by a widespread response in the community that many people felt unsafe at Nowhere Bar.
Our Board discussed the issue and how we should respond at great length on several occasions after it happened. We discussed it formally at our meetings and informally in conversations with current and former Board members. We hoped to try to find a path that was unifying and proactive. We discussed working on an initiative to promote safety in all of the bars that serve our community. To this end, we endorsed “Christopher’s Law” in the 2021 Kentucky General Assembly, a bill aimed at making bars safer by requiring security cameras, as well as background checks and training for bouncers.
In the immediate aftermath of Christopher’s death, we decided to wait until the investigation was completed before we said or did anything. The Commonwealth Attorney decided not to file charges in April, 2020. By then, COVID-19 had shut down everything, including Nowhere Bar. There was speculation that it might never re-open. We missed another opportunity to speak out.
And while we discussed what it would mean to cut ties with an establishment that is literally in the middle of the Festival, money was never a part of the equation. We have not accepted any donations or contributions from Nowhere Bar or Dave Mattingly since 2019.
As weeks turned into months, we failed to speak out. In retrospect, our hope for finding a unifying solution was naive and our inaction was unworthy of the community’s trust in us.
Moving forward
Our Board knew we had been unprepared for the situation at Nowhere Bar and none of us were happy with how we handled it. We began a conversation about accountability. What do we do when one of our partners or sponsors does something wrong? How do we decide what constitutes a private conversation and what calls for a public severance? How much weight do we give to rumors of bad activity?
In 2021, our Board revised our mission statement and vision statement and began crafting a set of core values that would guide our accountability. We decided that if we could point to a violation of our mission, vision, or core values, we would address it with the partner and encourage them to fix it. If they failed to do so, we would end the relationship.
This conversation about values and accountability has happened in the shadow of Christopher McKinney’s death at Nowhere Bar, and our collective acknowledgement that we did not handle the situation well.
Yesterday’s decision
With that history behind us, there was no doubt that we had to take immediate action when we learned that Dave Mattingly had been arrested. We regret that we did not take action sooner. Our only explanation is that our inexperience as an organization in dealing with an issue like this meant we dropped the ball as the dramatic events of 2020 overtook us.