Anti-Gay Jamaican Artist Capleton Concert Goes On At Sacramento Club Harlow’s

An update on a previous post, a performance by anti-gay Jamaican artist Capleton proceeded as planned despite pleas and protests by the gay community to cancel the concert, Fox 40 reporting that the owners of the Harlow’s, in Sacramento, California, who only last year cancelled a Capleton concert, this year refused, saying “We’ve never censored anyone else; any other artist before. I don’t see a reason to do so now. Never in the history of booking the shows have we censored anyone because of their lyrics and what not. So, we’re sticking to our guns on this,” said one of the managers of the family owned clubs Victor Torza, his words a study in irony. Capleton’s lyrics reference a cleansing of homosexuality by burning, activists rightly arguing that the lyrics articulate a call to violence against homosexuals. An estimated three dozen protestors gathered across the street from Harlow’s Sunday night, yelling “Harlow’s breeds hate,” one of the protestors, Erin Lawrence, saying “There’s a man in there that’s doing comedy against gay people and they think that it is funny and he doesn’t care.” Ken Pierce, of Equality Action NOW, a gay rights advocacy group, said that words are not simply empty words and that their meaning can have catastrophic consequences, saying “We’ve had a lot of suicides; youth suicides because of hate speech that kids are inundate with sometimes.”