Hundreds
of people flocked to a London pub earlier in April to oppose
bigotry against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community
after two men were thrown out for kissing. Jonathan Williams and
James Bull were asked to leave the John Snow pub, which is in
London’s Soho, a neighborhood generally considered LGBT friendly.
News
of the mistreatment spread rapidly on Twitter, receiving front-page
coverage in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Two days later, about 300
people met outside the pub for a protest “kiss in” to express
their support. The organizer, Paul Shetler, originally from New York,
noted that the mistreatment “struck me as the kind of thing I would
see in a small town in the States, not in the capital of the U.K.”
Civil partnerships have been given the same
legal standing as marriages in Britain, but bigotry still exists, and the
city was shocked by the murder of a gay man on Trafalgar Square in
2009.
