Tizzies Erupt Over Kissing Men
Two men on a first date locked lips over a pub table in London's gay-friendly Soho--and found themselves ejected from the premises by a woman who identified herself as the landlady.
Jonathan Williams and James Bull shared a "snog" at their table at the John Snow pub in the trendy London neighborhood, but, they say, they were not behaving in an "obscene" manner, as the landlady claimed they were.
"We weren't being over the top; there wasn't anything that would be deemed unseemly," Williams told British newspaper the Guardian, which published an article on the incident on April 15. "I'm not the kind of person to do that kind of thing in public."
A witness verified this, telling the Guardian that the men were "snogging, but it wasn't heavy petting." Nonetheless, another man who was drinking nearby told them to stop kissing and said that he was the landlord.
The two rejoined that they were simply kissing, and went back to their evening. Later, as Bull was getting ready to leave, he gave Williams another kiss--which he described as "a peck on the lips"--and the woman claiming to be the landlady accosted them.
"She said we had to leave because we were being obscene," Bull recounted. "Then the other guy from earlier came over again and said we had to leave now, we 'weren't allowed to do that.' "The men said that the man took hold of Williams' coat by the lapels as he was speaking to him. Other patrons called for the pair to be left in peace.
"I was totally shocked," said Lucy Clements, who was at a nearby table when the situation unfolded. "Dumbfounded, really. From a pub in the middle of Soho you just don't expect it."
When Clements talked to pub staff, she was told that the man who had grasped Williams by the lapels was the landlord--and then she and her companion were told to leave, as well.
Bull, upset, went home and called the police to make a complaint, the article said.
"I felt so belittled, and to be made to feel so dirty and cheap over something like that--it's just wrong," Bull told the newspaper.
Meantime, Williams took his complaint public via Twitter.
"Seven years in London & I've never been made to feel bad for being gay," he tweeted on the night of April 13. "45 min ago the John Snow pub, W1F had me removed for kissing a date." W1F refers to the pub's London locale.
London's gay community was outraged. The tweet was picked up and passed around, two Facebook pages were established, and it wasn't long before two kiss-ins were scheduled to take place at the pub in protest, one of them slated for April 15 and the follow-up for about a week later. Hundreds signed up for the events.
The John Snow pub is not a gay bar, although it is located in a neighborhood popular with the gay crowd. British law allows landlords to tell customers to leave if they are acting in an unacceptable manner, but members of one demographic cannot be tossed out of an establishment for the same conduct that brings no such action against members of other demographics. In other words, the pub's landlord remains within his rights to ask a gay couple to leave for kissing as long as he enforces the same rule when heterosexual couples also kiss.
The pub's management did not welcome inquiries from the press. The Associated Press reported on April 15 that no one answered the phone at the pub. The Guardian article related that the newspaper called the pub twice for comment and was threatened with legal action.
"Can you just stop calling this number please, or we'll have you done for harassment," the person on the other end of the line, a woman, told the caller from the newspaper.
"Police are investigating an incident," a spokesperson for the London police force stated. "There have been no arrests and inquiries are ongoing."
A crowd of protesters coalesced before the pub on Friday, April 15. The establishment did not open its doors for business, so the kiss-in participants carried out their protest in front of the business. The Associated Press reported that someone had hung a rainbow flag in the pub's doorway.
The men's ejection from the pub "struck me as the kind of thing I would see in a small town in the States, not in the capital of the U.K..." said organizer Paul Shetler, originally from New York.
Though British gay and lesbian families enjoy legal recognition in the form of civil partnerships, and public services and accommodations may not refuse service because of sexual orientation, gays are still sometimes targeted for discriminatory treatment or harassment, sometimes even deadly violence.
"Recently, a Christian couple was fined for refusing to allow a gay couple the use of a double room at their hotel in southern England, a case which drew national attention," the AP article recalled. "More dramatically, a gay man was stamped and kicked to death on Trafalgar Square in 2009--a brutal hate crime which shocked the city."
"If that can happen in Trafalgar Square, meters from Soho, on a Saturday night then this sort of thing can happen anywhere," Gary Nunn, of the British GLBT advocacy group Stonewall, told the AP.
Across the Atlantic, in the first of America's fifty states to allow marriage equality, an anti-gay group posted an April 12 article claiming that "young homosexual activists" target establishments by staging public displays of affection. If they are reprimanded or ordered to leave, claimed MassResistance, the "activists" call in the media as a form of punishment.
"Of course, the natural reaction to two men kissing each other is revulsion," the article asserted. "But these days businesses know they have to endure it. Thanks to the state's sexual orientation laws which cover public accommodations (which, sadly, conservatives often support) homosexual activists can and do strike back with impunity. It's how they force acceptance of their behaviors on society."
Here's a Sky News report on the April 15 "Snog-in" that resulted from the incident.
In the Dark of the Night
The posting claimed that two gay men entered a 24-hour business located in Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at 3:00 a.m.
"The night clerk, being normal, was disgusted and threw them out," the posting said. Then, the article went on to claim, the men contacted the local Fox affiliate and the story became a public sensation. The article called the story a "show trial" and said that the manager "was forced to grovel and beg" as a result.
"This is just the beginning, from what we hear from our friends in Britain and other places," the article intoned.
MassResistance claimed that the Boston area Fox affiliate had "push[ed] the homosexual agenda and intimidate[d] people with traditional values," and declared that although Fox's national broadcasts are "conservative," local affiliates tend toward liberalism. The site called on its followers to contact Fox News to complain about the story having been covered.
Recently, anti-gay Saturday Night Live alumna Victoria Jackson attacked popular Fox comedy Glee because of an episode in which a gay teenaged character shared a kiss with another male teen.
Jackson, clutching her Bible as she was interviewed on CNN Headline News Showbiz Tonight on March 21, declared that the program "should have a celibacy campaign and tell kids that 50% of teenagers now have this new STD from oral sex. That's what they should be, you know, doing, instead of trying to make kids gay.
"Now, listen, I just want to know why the liberals are pro-Muslim and pro-gay," Jackson continued. "Muslims kill gays. That's what's confusing to me. The only thing I can come up with is that the Muslims hate God and the gays hate his word." At this point, Jackson held up a Bible.
Two years ago, an incident in which a group of gay friends was tossed out of an El Paso restaurant for "homosexual conduct" generated national headlines and led to the city's leaders reaffirming El Paso's anti-discrimination ordinance.
The incident took place June 29, 2009, at a restaurant called Chico's Tacos. A group of five men was confronted by security guards because two of the men had kissed one another. The security guards called the police and, in turn, the police threatened to arrest the men under a long-invalidated Texas law banning same-sex intimacy.
"It was a simple kiss on the lips," said one of the five men who the guards ordered to leave, Carlos Diaz de Leon, in a July 9, 2009, El Paso Times account.
The anti-gay law cited by one of the responding officers, and others like it nationally, was struck down in 2003 when the U.S. Supreme Court found that such laws contradict the Constitution. El Paso Police Department chief Greg Allen later disavowed the officer's statements as "an incorrect recitation of the law."
A July 22 El Paso Times article quoted council member Steve Ortega, the resolution's sponsor, who said, "In 40 years, we'll look back on this that this is the right thing to do." Added Ortega, "This is the civil-rights issue of our time."
The article also said that the City Manager, Joyce Wilson, had indicated that the El Paso police department would provide more comprehensive training to its officers.
The resolution drew some criticism from the public; the article reported that one man, identified as Bob Strong, spoke out against it, calling tolerance a "euphemism for encouraging sodomy."
"I think people need to be tolerant of all views," countered another council member, Eddie Holguin Jr. "That's what makes this country unique."
The article noted that El Paso was ahead of the national curve in 1962, when a similar ordinance extended anti-discrimination protection to racial minorities.
While the men who were ordered to leave the Chico's Tacos restaurant said that the incident was sparked by a mere kiss, the restaurant's management disagreed, saying that the men were causing a much more serious disturbance.
That claim fit into a pattern of other controversies around the same time involving police or security guards accosting gay men in public places. Two men arrested for sharing a kiss at a Mormon-owned plaza in Salt Lake City on July 9, 2009, said they had simply shared a brief buss; the church, however, claimed that the men were groping one another and that foul language also entered the picture.
A June 28, 2009, police raid on a gay bar in Fort Worth was also seen in different lights by the gay patrons, who said that police entered the establishment aggressively on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, and the police, who insisted that the raid, which included seven arrests, was a mere spot-check that turned ugly when the patrons of the bar began to treat the officers in a profane and unruly manner.