EVERY SO OFTEN WHEN I’m walking from the LBC studios to Charing Cross Station to get my train home I spy a couple of guys walking down the street hand in hand. And every time I see it I get a spring in my step. If I saw a man and a woman holding hands I’d think nothing of it, but for two people of the same sex to do it, even in a metropolis like London, sends out a signal that they’re out and proud. And no one bats an eyelid, or at least if they do they don’t show it. Of course, this is all very well in central London, but imagine it happening in Chipping Sodbury or The Gorbals. Maybe we still have some way to go.
I read recently about a young lesbian couple who had been upbraided by a security guard at a Cardiff food festival for kissing in public. Apparently people had complained and he had asked them to stop because it was “o~ ensive” and “disgusting”. Would people have complained, and would he have acted in the same way if the couple had been straight? Well, quite possibly, yes. By all accounts this wasn’t exactly a smack on the lips or a peck on the cheek, the two young ladies were going for it and tickling tonsils in quite an aggressive way. In an official statement Cardiff City Council said that it was tantamount to sexual behaviour and inappropriate at a food festival. I hate myself for it, but I can see their point, not because they were two people of the same sex, but because quite frankly I don’t think anyone wants to see foreplay at a food festival, or indeed any other public arena for that matter, whether it’s two people of the same sex or two people of the opposite sex.
I don’t think this has anything to do with the traditional sense of British Puritanism; it’s more to do with what kind of public displays of affection society deem acceptable. People will have very different views about this, but surely it depends on circumstance. What is regarded as de rigueur and wouldn’t make anyone look twice in a nightclub on a Friday night is surely different to thinking you can do the same thing at a food festival. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, surely there is still such a thing as public decency, even in 2015.