A North Carolina bar is facing national backlash after the owner asked a gay couple to leave.
Andrew Deras and Justin Baker were forced to leave Louie’s Sports Pub in Fayetteville last week after owner Pam Griffin asked the couple to stop kissing. Deras and Baker apparently shared a short kiss when Griffin approached them to complain.
“He put his arm around me, he gave me a kiss, and she said this wasn’t right, this wasn’t OK,” Deras told WRAL. “She threatened both of us. He gave me a kiss. It was very minor. It was just a peck. It was two seconds.”
Griffin approached the men with a security guard after receiving complaints from customers, “eight or nine” according to The Fayetteville Observer. “They came to me and said, ‘Pam, you got a problem out here and it’s going to get ugly.'”
According to Griffin, customers were complaining over the couple’s affection towards one another. “I walked up to them calmly. I asked them guys, you know, can you kind of just separate, kind of move apart?” she said. She told the pair that she didn’t care if they remained in the bar, but asked them to “just calm down because you’re making people feel uncomfortable.”
Both sides disagree on what happened next. Griffin maintains that the men cursed at her and started to aggressively kiss one another. Deras and Baker claim that they laughed at her request and shared another kiss.
“I just gave Andrew a kiss, and that’s when she started getting really crazy,” said Baker. “She’s saying, ‘This is enough. This is enough,’ like basically telling us to get out.”
The bar’s Facebook page has since been inundated with comments from gay people angry with Griffin’s treatment of the couple. Griffin stated that someone called and threatened to burn the bar down, while she’s also received death threats.
“I tried to be as nice as I could. This is a straight bar. I don’t mind who comes in – white, black, mixed, Chinese,” she said. “Everybody’s welcome. But you have to respect the kind of place you’re in.”
Russell T Davies, creator of the British TV series Queer as Folk and the current showrunner of the BBC phenom Doctor Who, says gay society is facing dire peril ever since the presidential election of Donald Trump in November, 2024.
"I'm not being alarmist," Davies told the British newspaper The Guardian. "I'm 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we're in the greatest danger I have ever seen."
Davies said the rise in anti-LGBTQ hostility is not limited to the United States, where Trump has signed various anti-LGBTQ executive orders, many geared to diminish and seemingly eradicate the transgender community.
When I was 13, my father took me on a weekend trip to New York City. I remember sitting with him at the Howard Johnson's in Times Square, nibbling on fried clams, and somehow the question of homosexuals arose.
Now, I was an extremely closeted Cincinnati, Ohio, teen back then and had no inkling of the greater depths of my own sexual identity or of being gay in general. But I saw a few flamboyant men on the streets of New York in that summer of 1972 and asked dad about why they acted the way they did.
"They're homosexuals," he said. "They like men." He didn't offer further details.
Muhsin Hendricks, the world's first imam to publicly come out as gay in 1996, was shot dead in South Africa on February 15 in what appears to be an ambush. Eastern Cape provincial police confirmed that the 58-year-old was killed in a possible targeted hate crime.
According to police, Hendricks and a driver were inside a gold Volkswagen T-Roc SUV in Bethelsdorp when a silver Hilux double cab stopped in front of the car, blocking its way. Two unknown suspects, their faces covered, exited the cab and fired multiple shots at the VW before fleeing the scene. The driver, who survived the attack, realized that Hendricks had been killed by gunfire.
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