Taste of their own medicine? More like heterophobia

After the recent revelation that a gay bar in Sweden has barred straight couples from kissing within its premises, you can’t help but think are we going backwards and not forwards in our fight for equality.

It was revealed that a woman was told she could not kiss her boyfriend at the Never Mind bar in Copenhagen and that the owner could decide “who can kiss and who can’t kiss in the bar.” (Read here)

The thought that after years of fighting for equality and dealing with prejudice ourselves as gay people for kissing the one’s we love in public, that a gay bar can outright ban straight people from kissing is completely shocking. It appears that some people are now giving off the same intolerance to straight people that we ourselves have suffered.

Last year a gay couple were kicked out of a bar in Soho for kissing, which sparked outrage within the gay community and lead to the now infamous kiss off outside said pub. The act was deemed as homophobic by many within the gay community, but is this act of banning straight people from kissing in a gay bar heterophobia or just giving them a ‘taste of their own medicine?’

You can see where they may be coming from as there are plenty of bars and clubs deemed as straight where heterosexual people can meet, dance and have a good time, just like us gays can at a gay bar. But do we really want to be sending out the message that we are just as intolerant as the people who have victimised us for decades? The answer is no, we don’t.

By doing this it just opens up many more reasons for people to victimise us, which could may allow for more gay people to be banned from kissing at ‘straight’ bars, which will ultimately send us back to the dark ages where the only places we can purely be ourselves is in a gay bar. and for many the nearest gay bar isn’t around the corner.

If we as a gay community want to continue moving forward in our fight for world wide equality then this sort of thing shouldn’t happen as we should continue to show our heterosexual counterparts that we are tolerant and accepting of everyone, just like they should be. In other words we should lead by example.