A gay couple were brutally beaten by men in a bar after kissing. When they complained to the police, they were told they shouldn’t have kissed in public in the first place.
Two men, identified as Eric and Nicolas in the media, were at a bar on a Tuesday evening last June in Ajaccio, France. They said they were having a great time, until around 3 a.m. when they shared a little kiss at the bar.
Related: Gay Man Needed 5 Staples In His Head After Being Attacked For Kissing Another Man
“I felt a hand on my shoulder,” Eric explained. France Info. “I turned around and came face to face with a guy who was about 20 years old, who said, ‘Aren’t you ashamed to kiss here? “”
“I pushed his hand off my shoulder and his voice grew angry.”
He said the man started insulting them, but then some people tried to intervene.
“An older guy told me not to say anything, that they were just jerks,” Eric says.
But the verbal argument continued and the manager came. According to the couple, the manager got mad at the gay couple for kissing ‘here’, implying they were taunting the crowd.
Nicolas said they left the bar, but then four or five people followed them down the street. It’s “impossible to remember exactly what happened, it was so fast,” he said.
“We didn’t even have time to turn around before we started punching,” Eric explained. “I had had two beers, so I was pretty sober, but I was seeing red. Truly.”
“I fell, I came back up, I got punched, I punched again, then I fell again,” he continued.
Hearing the noise, other people came out of the bar and the alleged attackers fled.
The couple went to the police station to report the attack, although Eric said he didn’t think the police would actually help. And he was right at first.
“One of the officers who spoke to us said the same thing as the bar manager, that we shouldn’t kiss in public,” Eric said.
However, other officers told them to undergo a medical examination and then file a complaint.
The next day, Eric saw a doctor, who said his injuries required him to take five days off. Eric said the punches he took to his jaw caused him so much pain that he couldn’t chew for days.
The pair then returned to the police station and filed a complaint of gang violence, which they said was a hate crime against gay people.
“I will always be on the side of the victims of homophobic violence,” Ajaccio mayor Laurent Marcangeli said in a statement.
ARCU LGBT+ organization Corsica denounced the “nightmarish” attack and said it had spoken to the victims, who are “determined not to let this happen”.
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