Danny Miller, the straight 19-year-old actor who plays gay Aaron Livesy on the British soap Emmerdale, says on Twitter he was attacked by two men for the sexuality of his television character.
Says a witness who saw Miller and a friend leave a bar: “It was terrifying. A group of lads shouted, ‘Oi gay boy, you out with your boyfriend tonight?’ “Another screamed, ‘Oi faggot, is that your boyfriend?’ Then the yobs started running and screaming, ‘Get him, get him.'”
PopSnap
I’m sorry, but “Mo” makes me think of ghetto talk.
“Tyresha? Can ya’ll get me some ‘mo coffee?!”
Brutus
Yes. It’s about perception and the motivation for beating someone up, not whether that person is actually gay. If thugs beat up a guy whom they didn’t know or suspect to be gay, it wouldn’t be gay-bashing. My uncle was gay-bashed in the Meatpacking District a while back because some jerks thought he was queer. He isn’t.
Hilarious
Ironically the guys gay bashing him sit around watching soaps together and his story in particular to know any of this.
Sounds like a bunch of closet cases.
Dave
Um, yes?
Bias crimes don’t occur because of the actual identity of the victim in the victim’s own eyes; they occur because of the perceived identity in the eyes of the perpetrators.
Thousands of straight kids are harassed and subjected to homophobic insults and abuse every day. Whether or not someone is treated as “black” by bigots has everything to do with their appearance and nothing to do with their ancestry or their identity. Transgender people aren’t discriminated against because of their actual gender identity, but because of their “failure” to “live up” to their perceived gender in the eyes of their harassers.
And it’s important, from a legal perspective, that these bias crimes be treated the same, whether the victim was actually a member of the group for which they were discriminated against or not. Sadly, most of the earliest cases involved people who were erroneously labeled, because it was just easier to get a jury to sympathize with someone who was “wrongly accused” than someone who some jurors may have felt got what was coming to them.
When a straight women was denied a promotion because she was “too butch” or “too aggressive”, or when an effeminate straight man was constantly harassed by his coworkers, it paved the way for protections based on sexual orientation, whether actual or perceived.
It’s disgusting that whether someone was incorrectly labeled or not made a difference—much like how early AIDS activism frequently had to focus on hemophiliacs and other “innocents” who were infected to gain any sympathy—but it works, and ultimately the laws and the court precedents help everybody.
Look at it this way: it’s like when WBC started protesting soldier’s funerals, and suddenly, they were the Bad Guys, despite all the vile shit they’d been doing to us for years. If you can personalize the discrimination for straight people, so they can see what you’re going through (and perhaps believe that they might be subject to it themselves), it’s a hell of a lot easier to get them on-board.
YAHUEY
Who was the guy at the ATM? What’s they’re story?
Oh yeah..gay bashing bad..boo.
fredo777
Bstrds! You leave Aaron alone. I started watching Emmerdale (which doesn’t even air in the States) just b/c of Danny’s character + have been hooked ever since.