The past six weeks has seen a rather sickening increase in reports of police mistreating LGBT people for kissing or hanging out in a gay establishment just being gay. This nauseating uptick in mistreatment has even prompted the Great Nationwide Kiss-In (which is tomorrow).
This is why any report of LGBT people being mistreated for being fundamentally human needs to be taken seriously and action must be taken swiftly. We cannot tolerate the homophobia that spawns anti-LGBT behavior.
And this is what makes the recent allegations by a gay couple in San Francisco, who alleged that they were thrown of the cafe Internos for kissing after being called “faggots” and “perverts,” especially irresponsible. Internos immediately denied the allegations and said that the couple had been thrown out because they had been behaving sexually inappropriately.
And it looks like Internos was right. And it looks like the couple lied about what happened. Worse, their lies sparked an impromptu kiss-in in protest of the cafe.
Via the Bay Area Reporter:
The gay man who told the Bay Area Reporter that San Francisco police wouldn’t respond after he said he and his boyfriend were ejected from a wine bar after kissing each other apparently didn’t call authorities after all.
The man, Joshua Barry, also changed his story when the B.A.R. contacted him last week, before abruptly ending the call.
When first contacted on August 3, Barry, 26, told the B.A.R. that he had called the police after he and his boyfriend were kicked out of a Richmond District wine cafe after they shared a kiss.
But after the story’s publication August 6, Richmond police Captain Richard Corriea called the B.A.R. to say that after a thorough search of department logs, he had not found any record of the call, which is unusual, he said.
. . . Asked last Thursday about Corriea’s comments, Barry told the B.A.R. that if police failed to file a report, then there wouldn’t be a record of it.
He said that he and Schilbe had gone to Mel’s Drive-In, which is near the bar, and called a police non-emergency number, but they couldn’t get a hold of anyone. He indicated they talked to officers in a police car near Internos instead.
That differs from his initial account to the paper last week, when Barry made no mention of his stopping a police cruiser.
When pressed for more information, Barry said, “This was so long ago already … my story hasn’t changed really at all.”
“The story I gave you is the one I have,” he added.
“We got out a phone book,” said Barry. “There’s a bunch of police numbers. We called all of them.”
Asked for more information about the police car, Barry said, “Okay, gotta go,” and hung up the phone.
He did not return subsequent calls.
This is, unfortunately, beginning to sound a whole lot like the Nick Haramis incident.







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