I think the proprietor was going out of his way to offend people. I think it smells of an attempt to get publicity.
It's certainly a possibility... but I'm not so sure that's the most likely answer.
There's a thing that has been going on among the lesbian community for quite some time now. Male-bodied people who identify as woman consider themselves to be "lesbians". There is a portion of transwomen who are attracted to females. And for a good while now, they've been infiltrating lesbian spaces, and hitting on female lesbians. They've been harassing, shaming, and deriding lesbians who do not want to have anything to do with their penises. This particular subset of transwomen view themselves as women, and because they're attracted to females, they believe that lesbians should also be attracted to them. They label female lesbians as bigots and transphobes if they aren't interested in having penis in vagina sex with them.
They even coined the term "the cotton ceiling". The politest interpretation of this says that lesbians will be supportive of transwomen in many ways, but that they draw the line at having sex with them... and that transwomen want those lesbians to "examine their inherent bigotry" in not wanting to have sex with penises. The more blunt interpretation is that it's a direct reference to "the glass ceiling" with respect to women in business and politics - something that needs to be "broken through" in order to gain equality... only here the thing that needs to be "broken through" is the cotton gusset of women's underwear. Oh, it's also interesting to note that the term was coined by a transgender pornographer who was displeased that they couldn't get work in lesbian productions... because they had a penis.
Over the years, the pressure on lesbians - especially young lesbians - to accept penises into their pool of potential sex partners has been increasing. Enough so that a fairly large number of lesbians have been leaving the alphabet soup community altogether.
For the most part, gay men have been a bit insulated from this phenomenon. In part, I think, it's because males aren't as likely to feel physically intimidated by a female, no matter how masculine they might present. Females are smaller and weaker, even after taking testosterone. So at the end of the day, transmen simply don't present a risk to gay males in the same way that transwomen do to lesbian females. I also, however, think that gay men have been sheltered because most females are conditioned to be unobtrusive and to give way before males. It's only been relatively recently that some transmen who consider themselves to be gay men with a "front hole" have started getting pushy toward gay men and insisting that gay males are "transphobic bigots" if they don't want to have sex with them.
Personally, I don't find it particularly surprising that males are a lot more vocal about not wanting to accept obvious bullshit. Males are generally (not always, not all males) conditioned to feel entitled to speak up for their wants, to be loud and pushy and to take up space.
I have it on good authority that a lot of female lesbians are very happy that *finally* the gay males are having this problem, so maybe something will get done about it and they won't be left facing this particular menace to their personal and sexual boundaries all by themselves.
