Players of San Diego, the Mission Valley restaurant and discotheque, opened on May 30 to much fanfare and long lines of young people eager to gain entrance. In those first hectic days, the club gained popular notice in the daily press for its extravagant opening parties, and for its posted dress code, which read: “Dress code at our discretion.” Interpretation of this code seemed to prohibit anyone who wasn’t stylishly attired. A few incidents of patrons being turned away, reported with good humor and amusement, only added to the thrill of being part of San Diego’s newest fashionable nightspot.

Today, two months after Players' grand opening, the blush of celebrity has faded from the club; the crowds are much smaller, the sense of excitement not quite so intense, and few people are denied entrance because of “inappropriate" clothing. As assistant manager Mitch Mathes says, “We’ve loosened up on the dress code. It’s nice to have high standards, but numbers are important too.” And these days at Players the numbers include a significant proportion of black customers mixing with white customers on and around the dance floor. That wasn’t the case just a month ago.

Two weeks after Players opened, one employee witnessed a doorman turn away a black at the club’s front door. The man was one of a group of five well-dressed blacks, four of whom were allowed into the club, but all of whom left shortly after they discovered that their friend had been denied admission. The doorman had claimed that the black man’s drivers license was suspicious, that the photograph didn’t resemble the black man. The employee who witnessed this incident was angered by the apparent effort to exclude the black, and said so to the doorman. The doorman later confessed to this employee, “It’s not me. It’s managers’ orders. We’re not supposed to let that many blacks in.” Also in the first month after Players opened, another employee several times witnessed well-dressed black customers being turned back at the door because they supposedly didn’t meet the club’s ambiguous dress code.

“I’ve seen blacks dressed real nice, wearing those boxer-style tennis shoes,” says this employee. “The doorman wouldn’t let them in, but he’d let in whites wearing the same shoes.” These Players employees, who were interviewed three to four weeks ago and who demanded anonymity for fear of losing their jobs,-say they have at least five times overheard the club’s doormen talking about “keeping down the number of blacks. If it looks like an easy effort to turn them away, they’ll do it.” Subsequent to their initial interviews, the employees say that blacks are no longer “harassed” at the door and are coming to the club in greater numbers than before.

Two weeks after Players opened for business, another new club began operating in Mission Valley. The club is called Confetti and is located on Mission Center Road, on the old site of Flanigan’s nightclub. Like Players, the opening crowds at Confetti were overwhelming, with long lines and extended waits common on most evenings. Recently a couple waiting in line at Confetti watched as a black man at the entrance was asked for a “KGB card,” adiscount/promotion card issued by local radio station KGB and used for discounts and prize giveaways at selected clubs and restaurants. The black man didn’t have the card and was turned away by Confetti’s doorman.

But a white couple in line behind him was admitted to the club without having to produce the KGB card. The crowd inside Confetti was then and continues to be almost exclusively white.

Players and Confetti are new clubs whose continued success will depend in large part upon the reputations they develop in their first weeks of existence. However, a nightclub’s successful longevity doesn’t necessarily mean that such matters as dress codes become unimportant. For example, Crystal T’s has survived its infancy in Mission Valley, adjacent to the Town and Country Hotel, but the club still maintains a restrictive dress code. A knowledgeable employee at the club explains why hats and sunglasses are posted as being prohibited at Crystal T’s. White customers, he says, seldom wear either hats or sunglasses at night, but many blacks do. “Sometimes they (blacks] get angry when they read that dress code sign, and they turn away.” But Crystal T’s does not enforce its code uniformly. The employee says, “We’ll tolerate a tourist in shorts [which are forbidden by the club’s code), but a black guy has to look real good.”

These are just three examples among many in San Diego, past and present, of nightclubs whose managers appear to make conscious efforts to control the racial mixture of their clientele. Those who candidly admit to the practice say that it stems not from outright racial prejudice but from economics: white crowds mean good money; black crowds supposedly scare away whites; and so it’s important to monitor skin color to enhance profits. Those managers and owners who deny that the practice exists at their own clubs far outnumber their more candid competitors.

At Players, assistant manager Mitch Mathes and his boss, co-owner Tim Herbst, both deny that the club’s doormen have been told to exclude blacks by using the discretionary dress code or by questioning the validity of identification cards such as driver’s licenses. They say that IDs are carefully scrutinized in order to prevent underage customers from entering the club. Mathes insists that dress-code judgments have been made entirely without regard to race. Herbst says, “There’s a lot of white guys turned away with tennis shoes,’’ adding that he watched earlier this month as one of his doormen refused entrance to three white customers for that very reason.

Confetti’s manager, Mike Daly, was informed in an interview of the incident involving the KGB card and also of information from his employees that blacks often are required to produce four pieces of identification, this in an effort to develop “a more select clientele’’ and to “keep out minorities.’’ Daly says, “I won’t deny that has happened, but I will deny I’ve condoned it.” The manager says he’s received just one complaint from a black man who felt he was refused entrance because of his color. Daly says the man was turned away because he wore a sleeveless “muscle shirt,’’ which is prohibited by the club’s dress code. “When we first opened [in June], we turned away fifty or sixty people a night on dress code violations,’’ says Daly, who gives his doormen great latitude in determining who should be allowed inside Confetti. “If a guy comes up with a scowl on his face and our doorman smiles at him and asks, ‘How ya doing tonight?’ and he scowls back, he’d be asked to come back another time when he's in a better mood. We want happy people here.’’ According to Kirk LaRowe, manager of Crystal T’s, his club’s dress code is uniformly and strictly enforced, despite statements to the contrary made by an employee. Crystal T’s caters to a large number of tourists due to its proximity to the Town and Country Hotel complex. “Unlike other Mission Valley clubs,’’ LaRowe explains, “we have to maintain an atmosphere that’s pleasant to tourists and local businessmen, as well as to our disco patrons.’’

Despite these denials of racial discrimination, many local club owners admit privately that they believe blacks and whites in San Diego simply do not want to mix socially, and they express fears that their clubs will develop a reputation as a “black club.’’ Some of these owners contend that black men often make white women feel uncomfortable. One example they point to as evidence of this is that of a black man who won’t immediately walk away from a white woman who has declined his invitation to dance. “Maybe only twenty percent of the blacks will ‘harass’ pretty white girls, but that ruins it for all blacks,’’ says one San Diego nightclub owner who has witnessed such encounters. “That one white girl will cost you fifty to one hundred customers, because bad news spreads faster than good. She and her friends won’t come back, and every club in this world revolves around women. If you don’t have pretty white women, you don’t have a club.’’ Players manager Mitch Mathes says he recalls one instance in which “two blacks made one of my [female 1 bartenders cry by demanding she dance with them.” Mathes’s boss, Tim Herbst, adds bluntly, “I know what blacks can do [to] a club. They do intimidate some people.”

Another club owner, whose experience in San Diego spans a decade but who requested anonymity for fear of damaging his livelihood, admitted that “you can have five or ten percent blacks on your dance floor, but if it reaches twenty percent, you’ll lose your white clientele. It doesn’t mean you dislike or hate blacks, but word spreads through the grapevine [of white customers] and within a week to a month, the whites are gone.” This general phenomenon is illustrated by an incident club owner Martin Montoya recalls that took place at his Great Escape nightclub on El Cajon Boulevard near Sixty-third Street. The Great Escape until this year was known as My Rich Uncle’s and, with a musical format of rock and roll, had attracted a mostly white crowd drawn from San Diego State University. As the Great Escape, Montoya began featuring more funk and soul music on its two dance floors; the result was an increase in the number of black customers. Montoya says that one evening last January a group of about forty blacks had arranged to meet at the club for drinks and dancing. A number of whites were already at the club when the blacks arrived. “You could tell that all the whites noticed them [the blacks] come in,” Montoya remembers. The blacks danced to a few songs on one of the club’s dance floors, then filtered over to the other dance area. That floor had been filled with whites, but when the blacks arrived, the whites — as if on cue — all moved over to the dance floor that moments before had been occupied by the blacks. ‘‘That shocked me,” Montoya says. ‘‘I thought, ‘This is 1984, isn’t it?’ ”

Montoya knew when he changed his club's music from rock and roll to soul and funk that he was, in effect, inviting blacks from throughout the city to patronize the Great Escape. Music isn’t the only reason blacks or whites choose to visit a particular nightclub, or choose to stay at the club once they are there. But the type of music a club provides for dancing is a powerful determinant of the crowd a club can expect to attract. In fact, next to “screening” at the door, music selection is the most potent tool a club owner can employ in his effort to control the racial mix of his customers. “Nothing works better,” says local nightclub disc jockey Chuck Borra, who has spun records at numerous San Diego discotheques. What Borra is referring to is something known in the nightclub business as “deterrent music,” a practice in which a club’s disc jockey will alter the music during the evening, either at the order of management or because the disc jockey himself recognizes a need to do so — the need arising from too many blacks in the nightclub or on the dance floor. “You could get on the microphone and say, ‘We don’t want blacks in the house. Leave!’ You could use bug spray. That won’t work as well,” says Borra in reference to a change from the funk and soul music popular with blacks (as well as whites) to rock and roll or new wave or even country-western. “The blacks will stick around for a while, but it gets to the point where they’re going to leave. And they never come back, never.”

Other disc jockeys and club owners acknowledge the importance of music selection in drawing profitable white audiences, but they also recognize the dilemma inherent in the fact that whites enjoy dancing to funk and soul as much as blacks do. So for those club owners who fear being overwhelmed by blacks, a musical mix of funk and soul with rock or some other type of music is a necessary part of every evening. In some cases, the music manipulation is a blatant effort to discourage the presence of blacks.

Disc jockey Jeff Marcone, who now works at the Great Escape, experienced this sort of manipulation in 1979 when his music selections kept blacks dancing — and arriving in ever larger numbers — at Rasputin’s nightclub on West Point Loma Boulevard. “The manager told me not to play soul music because he didn’t want that type of clientele,” Marcone says. (Today Rasputin’s management emphasizes funk and soul music and welcomes blacks.) Borra and fellow disc jockey Jim Allen, both of whom are white, had a similar experience when they worked at Crystal T’s in 1977 and 1978. “The manager told me to dump the soul and rhythm and blues music because it was attracting a higher percentage of blacks than they wanted,” Allen recalls. “I was reminded that the disco caters to tourists.” Borra, who also worked at the Aspen Mine Company on El Cajon Boulevard in the late Seventies, says management there “would actually take a head count. . . . The doorman would come up to the DJ’s booth and tell us that there were twenty or thirty blacks in the house and that was too many. It was time to play some Rod Stewart, some rock and roll.” (Ownership of the Aspen Mine Company changed three years ago, and current manager Rick Abate stresses that today the club does not engage in the playing of deterrent music.)

But deterrent music continues to be used as a racial control at San Diego nightclubs. The manager of a popular Mission Valley club, when promised anonymity, admitted that his disc jockeys currently manipulate music playlists in order to regulate the number of blacks at his club. While substituting country-western or rock and roll for funk and soul ‘‘won’t get blacks out of my club, it does get them off the dance floor, and that’s okay with my boss,” says this manager.

Two blacks with intimate knowledge of the local club scene say they frequently hear complaints from other blacks who believe that Crystal T’s playlist is used to keep the disco from becoming too popular among blacks. “When there’s not’a lot of blacks there, it looks and sounds like a black club,” says Monroe Greer, whose Solid Productions Record Pool provides current rhythm-and-blues hits to local clubs. ‘‘All of a sudden, if there’s too many blacks, the music does a 180, it flipflops.” The R&B and funk preferred by blacks is replaced with country-western or Top 40 tunes, which are much less popular with blacks. Greer continues, ‘‘You hear that mess for a few minutes and you ’re gone.” Greer’s observations are shared by Ken Hollis, who works as a disc jockey at Spanky’s, the popular black nightclub at Midway and Rosecrans. Hollis says he often hears from blacks who visit his club after leaving Crystal T’s. “They say it’s stiff over there, that the music isn’t good like it used to be,” Hollis says.

Crystal T’s manager Kirk LaRowe confirms that his club’s disc jockeys aren’t playing as much funk and soul as they did in the past but insists that the music ‘‘is not used as a deterrent to blacks or to control the [racial mix of the) crowd.” As evidence of Crystal T’s efforts to appeal to all musical tastes, LaRowe notes that weekend crowds at his club are jokingly referred to by employees as ‘‘United Nations West . . . twenty percent black, twenty percent Hispanic, twenty percent Southeast Asian, and forty percent white.”

Disc jockey Hollis has received equally unfavorable reports from blacks when they discuss the music at Players, which is located in the old Playboy building near the intersection of interstate 8 and Highway 163. At Players, Hollis says, “the clientele was too stiff fwhen the club first opened]. They were kind of uppity. People don’t get loose there.’’ Players co-owner Tim Herbst says his disc jockeys mix current Top 40 hits in a way that’s appealing to “the certain demographic I’m catering to — the twenty-five to forty-five-year-old.’’ But others believe that Players’ music mix is consciously intended to be unappealing to blacks. When a local fashion show promoter negotiated last month with Players management in hopes of staging a weekly fashion show at the club, one model brought along some funk and soul albums to serve as background music for the modeling. The music, which included Chaka Kahn, Jocelyn Brown, Germaine Jackson, and the “rappin’ scratchin’ ’’ sound of the World Famous Supreme Team, was vetoed by a disc jockey who told the models that “my boss said [such music] attracts too many blacks” and that Players “isn’t out to promote soul music.”

Herbst, however, says the funk and soul music wasn’t played because it’s not what the club’s patrons want to hear. “I don’t want new-wave music either, and that’s white music,” he says.

Some other popular clubs, such as Confetti in Mission Valley and Bobby McGee’s in La Mesa, train their disc jockeys or use those provided by their parent corporations. Typically, in such corporate situations, the club will be provided with albums already selected by the headquarters office. If the individual club manager wants to purchase albums on his own, the headquarters will supply him with a list of recommendations. At Confetti, for example, the parent company, McFaddin Productions, supplies the local club with about 500 albums, plus the names of others approved for purchase. Customers at Confetti can make suggestions to the club’s disc jockeys, but the disc jockey is not obligated to comply.

If many blacks believe that various forms of deterrent music limit the number of nightclubs at which they enjoy dancing, they complain just as much that they are limited in their choice of clubs designed primarily for socializing, with dancing a secondary consideration. Among these blacks are the educated, middle-class professionals who may go out to dance once in a while but who also enjoy a comfortable lounge where they can gather with other educated blacks and feel welcome and at ease. The Black Frog restaurant and bar in Southeast San Diego used to be popular with such blacks, but the Black Frog closed in December of 1983 and since then there hasn’t been another club or lounge specifically catering to middle-class blacks. Which is one reason Gil Brown began his “Private Affairs” gatherings last summer at the Cricket Lounge in the Mission Valley Holiday Inn.

Brown is a thirty-eight-year-old director of the city’s Regional Youth Employment Consortium who, with several of his friends, organized the Friday-evening happy-hour affair at the Cricket Lounge. Linder the terms of an agreement Brown reached with hotel management, his group would be welcome at the lounge Fridays from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. “Private Affairs” wasn’t exactly a club with a closed membership, but it was directed specifically at black professionals. Word of the gathering spread last summer in the black professional community, and the politicians, lawyers, engineers, and many others grew from an initial fifteen to 175, all of them drawn to an attractive setting that Brown made the more so by his addition of door prizes and impromptu comedy hours. In November, however. Holiday Inn management abruptly terminated its verbal agreement with Brown’s group.

Brown says many “Private Affairs” regulars later told him that it appeared obvious the hotel was concerned that its mostly white tourist clientele was reluctant to gather and drink in a lounge catering to so many blacks. A black woman who regularly attended the Friday-evening gathering says a comment she heard muttered by a hotel employee convinced her that the “Private Affairs” parties wouldn’t last long. “There was a group of us sitting at the bar,” this woman says, “and we heard one bartender say to another, ‘I’ll be glad when these niggers get out of here.’ ” But hotel manager Felipe Castro denies that his decision to terminate the “Private Affairs” agreement had anything to do with color. Castro says that promoter Brown’s policy of having his guests pay a two-dollar cover charge at the door was a violation of hotel rules. “The lounge, like the lobby and restaurant, are public rooms, and no charge can be made to use them,” Castro says.

Brown’s agreement with the Cricket Lounge was negotiated by a subordinate of Castro’s, and Castro says he was unaware of the cover charge until several months after the “Private Affairs” had been running. When he found out, he says, he allowed Brown to continue his gathering for several more months, as a favor to Brown. Castro also offered to let the group relocate to the hotel’s banquet room. In that. Brown faced a dilemma. “After being up front in the lounge, I was concerned our clientele would Find it insulting to go to the back (banquet room]. If we had started out [in the banquet room], it’d be okay, but we worried that they would put it in the category of being taken from here and moved over to there. It was too risky.” Rather than take the chance that his friends would be offended. Brown refused Castro’s offer. “We lost our business but saved our name,” he says.

Brown estimates that seventy-five percent of the “Private Affairs” guests “believe in their hearts that the happy hours were killed because they were black.” He now says that he believes that Castro was in fact telling the truth about the cover charge violation but wonders whether “maybe our color was an incentive for [Castro) to rethink the situation. ... It’s hard to know that had it been a white group, would [the hotel management) have cared? Unfortunately, you’re never quite sure why. And that’s what’s hard to deal with — not knowing why.”

Two years before the Cricket Lounge incident, blacks lost another popular gathering spot. Since 1977 blacks and interracial couples had danced and socialized nightly in the small discotheque of the Smuggler's Inn and Restaurant in Fashion Valley. “It was hot, really hot; just the place to go,” recalls Ardy Shaw, a forty-three-year-old native San Diegan who works as an assistant to a newspaper editor and hosts a weekly talk show on radio station KSDO. “Interracial couples were accepted. then black guys came to meet white women, and black women came to meet the black guys,” says Shaw, who is black and who first visited the Smuggler’s disco as the guest of a white man. Twenty regular customers, more than half of them black, joined Shaw at the club three or four nights a week. Another regular recalls that the crowd often numbered one hundred or more. “There were waiting lines to get in,” says this man.

Then in the summer of 1981, Shaw says the disco’s music changed abruptly. No more Arthur Prysock or Lionel Richie. “They actually put on a Gene Autry record,” she remembers. “We looked at the disc jockey like it was a joke, but he told me he was given that music to play and that he had to do it.” Shaw says she and several friends “stayed around for a half-hour because we just didn't believe it. But then the light dawned, and we knew what was going on. We got up and left.” Another black who frequented the disco says he and some of his friends refused to leave at the sound of country-western music. “We just sat out the music,” he recalls. Several weeks later, the music stopped altogether. “We were going to picket, but decided to hell with it, it would just give them free publicity,” says this customer. He recalls that several people wrote letters of protest to the restaurant’s management in Los Angeles and that one letter writer received a response. “It was just a runaround,” he says.

Smuggler’s general manager, Al Mojtahed, says the closing of the disco “had nothing at all to do with color. We just wanted to bring in more business. . . . The disco fad was over so we switched to live music. It was a trend, we were forced to do it.” Mojtahed admits, however, that despite the passing popularity of discotheques at that time and the concurrent rise in popularity of live bands, he could not be sure that Smuggler’s had suffered any loss of business or bar receipts while catering to Shaw and her black friends. Mojtahed later amended his answer to say that in addition to the necessary switch to live music, the disco had been hurting business in the Smuggler’s adjoining dining room. “There was no soundproof wall and the diners were disturbed,” he added.

Controversy over the closing of Smuggler’s as a gathering place for blacks raises an issue that further complicates the perception among San Diego blacks that they simply are not wanted anywhere in large numbers. Several club owners and nightclub disc jockeys believe that blacks may have on occasion mistaken as prejudice decisions that were actually based on economics, especially with regard to the change in music formats several years ago to replace disco. “The switch in music at that time wasn’t prejudice,” says Great Escape owner Martin Montoya. “Disco — with its flashiness, three-piece suits, and fake gold chains — was fading. . . . Nightclubs are a fickle business where everything goes in circles,” says Montoya. “If new wave dies,-you switch to rock and roll. If rock and roll dies, you switch to funk and soul. If funk and soul dies, you switch back to Top 40. You do whatever it takes to bring people and their cash through the door.”

Bernard Lipin says that’s exactly why he closed his Voyager disco on Shelter Island in 1980. Blacks active on the local nightclub circuit still believe that Lipin bowed to pressure from the San Diego Unified Port District (landlord of Shelter Island properties) and neighboring businessmen who allegedly complained about blacks loitering in the parking lots and breaking into nearby hotel rooms while visiting the Voyager. But Lipin says he pulled the plug on the Voyager’s popular disco only because “business was falling down to the point we were making no money. There was no violence, no break-ins, no problems.” In an attempt to keep the disco open, Lipin says he gathered together ten of his regular customers and searched for an explanation as to why business, especially at the bar, had fallen off so badly. “We knew by researching the L.A. market that we’d get the black crowds when we opened that disco in 1977,” Lipin recalls. “We didn’t object to that.” Blacks drove to Shelter Island from throughout the county to dance at the Voyager and listen to the music of K.C. and the Sunshine Band, the Spinners, and the Brothers Johnson. “It went over like a house a-fire,” Lipin says.

By late 1979, however, the crowds began to decline and revenue was falling, so Lipin asked the group of regulars gathered in his office to explain why business was sliding. “I told them, ‘Here we have a place where you can come and congregate. Can’t we get the word out in Logan Heights, in Southeast San Diego?’ ” Lipin says he would have liked to rejuvenate his disco, but nothing developed from his meeting and the club closed. After several failed attempts at different music formats, Lipin finally gave up and converted the club to a banquet room. This last July 3 he brought in a black promoter for a one-night disco event. The evening was advertised on XHRM-FM (92.5) and attracted a mostly black crowd of nearly 400, many of whom turned out because they remembered the Voyager disco. The promotion made money for both Lipin and the promoter, and Lipin says he’ll probably repeat that experiment. Which is proof, he says, that he didn’t close the Voyager disco because he felt blacks were giving him a bad name or hurting business at the adjoining Kona Inn motel and restaurant, which he also manages. “Being a religious minority myself [Jewish), I do not allow discrimination.”

Lipin’s experience with the Voyager’s mostly black crowd did teach him that blacks are not necessarily loyal to one place. Toward the end, he also had a problem with guests who would bring their own liquor and step outside to drink in their cars instead of at the Voyager’s bar. This last matter — blacks not drinking as much as whites — is confirmed by other club owners and by black observers of the local social scene. “Unlike some whites, blacks don’t tend to go to bars or clubs in groups, so they don’t buy lots of rounds,” says Donell Smith, a local black fashion model who this year promoted the well-attended Friday-night functions at the now-defunct Oz nightclub in Mission Valley. “And rather than stay in one club and get shitfaced, we'll move around and check out a few places.” Great Escape owner Martin Montoya says that while blacks tend to order more expensive, name-brand liquor when they do drink, they drink fewer hours per night. “Blacks come out later,” says Montoya, “usually 11:00 p.m. instead of 8:30, and they’ll stay maybe two hours instead of four.” Bar owners often make up for this by asking steeper cover charges at the door; three or four dollars a head at clubs catering to blacks instead of the one or two dollars levied by clubs that attract mostly white audiences.

Some blacks are at once mystified by and resentful of the fact that more club owners don't seek out their business. They note several examples of club owners who have promoted special funk and soul nights only when the club in question was on the verge of closing down. “It’s always the last resort,” says Darryl Yarborough, a local black promoter who last year persuaded the management of the old Flanigan’s in Mission Valley to allow him to sponsor Sunday nights there. “Sundays were just dead there,” recalls Yarborough. “In a matter of weeks, I took it from zero to 300 people.” When the manager saw Yarborough’s success, he tried to promote the Sunday nights by himself and, according to Yarborough, failed. Several weeks later the club closed down and was sold to new owners, who reopened last month as Confetti.

Donell Smith, the fashion model, had a similar experience with Oz, Mission Valley’s former private club. Smith started promoting a Friday funk and soul night at the club, this past January, and like Yarborough, he enjoyed almost instant success, filling the club to its capacity and selling up to $3000 each night in liquor. In May, however, the club was purchased by National University, which will transform it into a university library.

Aside from Montoya’s Great Escape, the only other discotheque intentionally aimed at blacks is Spanky’s, the popular Midway Drive nightclub that has been attracting blacks since 1979, when owner Yale Kahn began promoting Thursday rhythm-and-blues and soul nights. Kahn realized that the closing of the Voyager meant more business for Spanky’s, so he and disc jockey Ken Hollis began promoting other special nights, first on Thursdays and Mondays, then adding other nights over the years, until now the club plays black-oriented music seven nights per week. Kahn and Hollis agree that Spanky’s success is due in part to location — a good number of the club’s 200 to 300 nightly patrons are young blacks stationed at the nearby Navy and Marine training centers.

Kahn’s club, like Montoya’s, appeals to a certain segment of the black population — those who like to dance to loud music. This, however, still leaves a large number of blacks without a nightclub similar to the old Smuggler’s or the Cricket Lounge or the Black Frog. Some black professionals frequent Cynd’s on Fifty-fourth Street or the T&T Lounge on Sixty-third, both in Southeast San Diego. Others travel to Cid’s, a neighborhood bar in Tierrasanta owned by former San Diego Charger Cid Edwards. But Gil Brown, who organized the “Private Affairs” gatherings at the Cricket Lounge, says, “There’s nowhere we’re going now. It’s terrible. There’s a whole bunch of us out here. We,’re not elite, just professional. Spanky’s. is too young a crowd, and it’s always dance, dance, dance. I like to dance maybe every two months, but now there’s no club where you can talk and socialize. So we’re not going anywhere.”

Donell Smith, the former Oz promoter, says flatly, “There’s no place in town for sophisticated blacks. If we want to go to a nightclub, we go to Los Angeles.”

If the black social scene in San Diego is as limited and frustrating as many blacks suggest, why are there no complaints, no serious protests of any sort that people are being ignored, or worse, discriminated against? Those black lawyers, civil servants, teachers, and other professionals who say they have experienced discrimination at the front doors and on the dance floors of local clubs seem to agree that protesting to the clubs or to government agencies such as the Alcoholic Beverage Control or the Equal Opportunity Commission is generally a waste of time. “First, you can’t prove anything,” says Ardy Shaw, the black woman who was fond of Smuggler’s Inn. “It’s just your word against someone else’s. So you may complain, but nothing ever happens.” Gil Brown agrees with Shaw that repeated incidents of discrimination — or the appearance of discrimination — have led to apathy among many blacks. “Being turned away from a club is kind of commonplace in San Diego,” Brown says. “Once it’s par for the course, it doesn’t shock you as much, and you’ll just let it happen.” Brown also says that club owners today are more discreet in their efforts to deter blacks than they were in the mid-1970s, when blacks who lived in Southeast San DiegoYirst began venturing out to Mission Valley and Harbor Island and Shelter Island. “I’ve been to clubs six or seven years ago where I was asked for a cover charge and whites weren’t,” Brown recalls. “When you’ve gone from that to something subtle like dress codes and ID checks, you just tell yourself, ‘I know that’s been going on for a long time.’ ” □