Gay couple allegedly asked 'to stop what you are doing' in London restaurant
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A gay woman allegedly asked to stop consoling her distraught partner in a London restaurant has spoken of “shock” at the couple’s treatment.
Lydia Cawson, 29, alleges she and her girlfriend were asked by a staff member at Southbank’s Canteen eatery to "stop what you are doing please, this is a family restaurant."
Ms Cawson, who works in the Oxo Tower as a wardrobe assistant on the stage adaption of Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales, had met her girlfriend for a brief dinner.
She told London Live how her partner became upset after a stressful week and she was consoling her, sitting beside her and giving her a "light peck on the lips." A member of staff is said to have come over and asked them to stop.
"We were really shocked by this challenge because we didn’t feel like we were being overly affectionate," explained Ms Cawson. "I didn’t notice any adverse reaction in the restaurant myself."
"It was just a simple loving reaction," she said.
Although the restaurant has now apologised for any "issues" arising from the incident, and said it would investigate what happened, the incident comes amid a new report that shows rising levels of hate crimes across the capital.
According to the Metropolitan Police crimes targeting the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender) community have risen to as many as 100 cases a month, with a monthly increase of 21.5 per cent since March 2014.
"I feel like something needs to be done," Ms Cawson said when asked about the figures.
"I don’t know whether it is about awareness, I don’t know whether it’s about a sort of education of what is homophobia, what is offensive to people. I don’t think people are fully aware of different comments they make as to how they are received and I don’t know how that can be changed."
She claimed that many of her friends’ and family’s personal experiences did not attest to London being a LGBT-friendly city.
"But there are so many homophobic, not even homophobic but just prejudicial, acts you witness all the time, every single day in London," she claimed. "It happens all the time."
A spokesperson for the restaurant told the Evening Standard: "We have been already being in touch with the two guests that raised a complaint following their visit last week trying to get further details of the visit. We have apologised to them for any issues that this may have caused them and we have started a full investigation into these allegations.
"At Canteen we train all of our staff and managers in Equal Rights and opportunities no matter the race, religion or sexual orientation.
"We are very surprised and shocked to learn about this issue, which we have never encountered before. Nonetheless this has been taken extremely seriously and a full investigation has been launched to find out what happened."
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If religion didn't exist telling it's sheep that homosexuality is wrong then this wouldn't exist.
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What kind of "excuse" or justification is "stop what you are doing please, this is a family restaurant."?
This is SO homophonic… that stuff member should be fined for "hate crime"! ???
At least, in Spain this would be a typical reason to fine that person for that crime. -
Surely there is more to this than the original report makes out. London is a very accepting city, especially the Southbank area. Guess we'll never know.
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It is dangerous to generalize. You really can't say cities are safe. I lived in Chicago, and it is one of the best cities for gay people in America. On the North Side of town from the Loop to Howard St you can be as gay as you want to be. Heck there are places in Chicago that you can go for hours without dealing with straight folks. But I was also called "faggot" there more than anywhere else. Because if you were South of the loop or too far East it gets homophobic quick.
Plus, cities can have little homophobic islands in them. Boystown had the Salvation Army right in the middle of it.
Now I live in a small town. I am very open. I am a part of the leadership team at my Church. We have a gay man on city council. A gay man running the a huge community center and several gay business leaders in the red half of our State.
I encourage people to judge actions of individuals and not the collective.
As for the couple that seems pretty messed up to bother then, but one person's peck on the cheek is another person tonsil hockey.
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The OP was 5 years ago and things have changed.
The city I live in used to have homophobic (almost all were non violent) incidents fairly often and now it's quite rare to have one.
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Unfortunately there are still some homophobic attacks in many cities, including London (and mine, for example):
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This is not the case, unfortunately, in my country: hate crimes occur more often than before, and very few (to say almost none) of them are fake :cry2:
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This is not the case, unfortunately, in my country: hate crimes occur more often than before, and very few (to say almost none) of them are fake :cry2:
Fake hate crimes are very rare in the U.S. compared to real crimes but when they occur, they get a lot of publicity. People who get their news from unreliable sources like Fox News or Facebook have a very distorted view of the world that reinforces their ignorant viewpoints. Those people often focus on something that rarely occurs while ignoring what often occurs.
Sometimes they will even invent hoax hate crimes that never existed, for instance, claiming that Bubba Wallace falsely reported a hate crime when that is completely contrary to facts, because it fits their hateful, racist perspective. Even when presented with evidence, they will cling to their ignorant false beliefs, and that's how you know they are actually stupid and incapable of learning as opposed to just being ignorant. Sticking to false beliefs over facts is dangerous: think about regressive, autocratic politicians like Bolsonaro and Trump and how their denial of science for political convenience is costing hundreds of thousands of people their lives.
Any kind of false report of a crime should be taken seriously, but unfortunately the vast majority of hoax racial hate crimes in the U.S. are white people falsely blaming black people for crimes. White people will invent a black criminal as a convenient way of deflecting blame from themselves or other white people.
There's a long history of that in the context of institutional U.S. racism, white people accusing black people of violent crimes they did not commit, and particularly white women falsely accusing black men of rape. That goes back centuries. U.S. history is full of cases of such false accusations, often resulting in the gory death of an innocent black man by a lynch mob.
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