Luckily, this one turns out well.
It was coming close to midnight and I was in a café/restaurant in my city with my boyfriend and my best friend. There were only two other tables with people at them in the restaurant and it was about 10 or 15 minutes from closing time. It was clear the employees just wanted to clean up and leave.
What happened next left us in total shock.
The three of us where chatting when something caught my attention. I thought I had heard one of the barmen say “faggot”. I stopped listening to our conversation and started to listen in on the barmen. After a short while I heard one of them say it again. I interrupted my boyfriend’s conversation with my best friend and told them what I had heard. The three of us started to listen into their conversation now, and then it got worse.
Two of the barmen started to sing “faggots all have pussies” at the tops of their voices whilst washing glasses behind the bar. Now, if that weren’t bad enough, it was clear my boyfriend and I were in a relationship and on the other two tables our well-trained gaydars told us there was at least one gay guy at each (you didn’t have to look too hard). Yes, despite this local café chain not being LGBT, it’s renowned for having a considerable amount of gay clientele for those who want to go to a bar or restaurant with their straight allies who don’t necessarily want to go to a gay bar.
One of the waitresses approached the bar and told them “it’s not funny” hinting at the number of gay clients in the premises. One of the barmen replied, “Yes it is. That makes it even funnier”. Feeling insulted by their remarks and chanting, one table got up and left shortly after. We, on the other hand, weren’t going to let this drop without being answered to (they landed on the wrong clients) so we decided what action we’d take.
It’s important to take action against homophobia, no matter who it’s against. Our decision had some pretty major consequences. We decided not to react directly to the barmen’s singing. Instead, we left the bar looking disgusted. But that’s not the end of the story. Before leavifng, we already knew what we were going to do. We had a good look at the two homophobic barmen before we left. It was going to come in handy later on. Unfortunately for the pair, what they didn’t know it that my boyfriend and I are two founders of the LGBT activism group in the city, and at the time we were highly followed by the press in fighting against the rising homophobia in the French marriage equality debate. We were also the joint presidents of the group, so we were hardly going to let this go.
The next morning, we rang one of the vice-presidents of the association. We explained what had happened the night before and we all agreed we should react. We went back to the café that morning and asked a barmaid what time the manager would be in. She told us to come back that afternoon, so after lunch we decided to pay him a visit and let him know what we thought of his customer service.
We recorded the meeting with a hidden microphone just in case we got any nasty surprises, and made him understand that if action wasn’t taken we’d have the local press onto him. He didn’t take much persuading at all and promised us we would “never see the employees in question ever again”. We learnt later that afternoon that the managing director of the café chain came into town to personally fire the two barmen.
For me, having lost my job due to my boss’s homophobia just a few months prior to this, it was a huge relief and restored a little bit of my faith in humanity. It felt as if justice had been served on a gleaming silver platter. I felt as if I had got revenge for my boss firing me. I felt we had done the right thing. Who knows what emotional state the gay teens at the other tables were in? What if they were dealing with depression at the time?
I had learnt that it’s important to speak out against homophobia no matter where you are and who it is, and no matter what the consequences will be for the person in question. Those two barmen were being openly homophobic whilst on the job in front of clients who were directly concerned by their hate. I'm sure they’ll think twice before using anti-gay slurs in future.
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