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Sunday, Jul 27, 2008
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Homophobia at 30,000 feet: A Gay man's ordeal on Southwest Airlines |
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| Homophobia at 30,000 feet: A Gay man's ordeal on Southwest Airlines | ||
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by Nick Ardizzone -
SGN Staff Writer A Gay Spokane man and his partner were subjected to anti-Gay slurs, discrimination, and eventual police action during and after a Southwest Airlines flight Wednesday. Kelly Brown, Associate Editor of Spokane's Stonewall News, contacted Seattle Gay News to give an exclusive interview about the mistreatment he and his partner received at the hands of Southwest employees. Kelly Brown and his partner, Fred Swink (Publisher of Stonewall News), were on a Southwest Airlines flight from Ft. Lauderdale, FL, through Nashville, TN, to Seattle, where they would catch a short Southwest flight to Spokane. They were returning from a trip to the Caribbean where Brown had picked up an illness with symptoms not unlike food poisoning. The pair - "very conservative individuals," says Brown, "who know how to behave appropriately in public" - sat in the back of the plane so as to be near the restrooms. Shortly before touching down in Nashville, Brown was overcome with nausea. "I think I'm gonna be sick," he said to Swink, who comforted him by putting his arm around him and patting the back of his hand. "It wasn't in any way a sexual situation," Brown explains, "but it was very clear he was not my son or my business partner." The stewardess - a woman in her 40s - was standing in the recessed area near the bathrooms at the rear of the plane and saw the compassionate gesture. "I heard her say, 'Fags,'" says Brown, recalling the "disgust or contempt" in her voice. "I thought, no, I didn't hear that. This is 2007 and people who work with the public don't say that; I must have misheard her." The plane landed in Nashville and all but 22 passengers deplaned, leaving the interior nearly empty. Contrary to the standard practice of giving passengers with small children priority, it was not until the plane had filled with new travelers that an announcement was made that a family of five - traveling with small children - was to board, and passengers were asked to voluntarily move to different seats to accommodate them. There were no immediate volunteers. The same flight attendant who had used the slur earlier approached Swink, who was seated on the aisle. "Someone will need to get up so that family can sit together," she said pointedly. When she received no response, she repeated herself again. "Finally, Fred got up and moved," says Brown, and was seated elsewhere for the entire flight. Swink was replaced by a woman holding a crying 18-month-old boy with an ear infection. Already ill, verbally abused, and now sitting next to a relentlessly screaming child instead of his partner, Brown was understandably despondent. "For five hours - the duration of the flight from Nashville to Seattle - I did not engage in conversation. I was not rude. I was not inappropriate in any way. I simply wanted to be left alone." "The flight attendant come by and asked the middle person and the person seated on the aisle if they would like something to drink," Brown says. "She ignores me as if I'm not there. I thought, fine, I'm not going to make an issue of it, you're obviously someone who has issues and I'm not going to play into it." Shortly after that she returned, but far from correcting her oversight, she offered snacks to everyone in the row except Brown. A few minutes later she offered refreshments for a second time, and Brown was again ignored. "The same stewardess came through again to offer beverages to the second and third person, and before she offered me something, she left. "Bear in mind I haven't said anything to this woman. She has absolutely no reason to have attitude on any level. She comes back and she leans over to give the woman her drink, and I say, 'Excuse me, do you not see me sitting here?'" Brown asked for a Diet Coke and some water. She returned with his can of soda and "abruptly slammed it down." Ten minutes later she was back. "She stands at the end of the aisle & she looks me in the eye," Brown continues. "She engages me and only me, and she says, 'Garbage.'" Taken aback, Brown said, "Excuse me?" Only then did the stewardess hold out her right hand to take his soda can. "It's very apparent to me that her comment was not about her needing to collect refuse; it was about her opinion of me as a person," Brown explains, noting the stewardess was not carrying a garbage bag. The flight was drawing to a close, and though he had endured five hours of abuse, Brown stayed calm. "If Gandhi has been in my seat, he wouldn't have been more patient, more cooperative, more positive," he says. "It was an incredibly stressful time, and I was doing the best I could not to inflame the situation." When the flight landed, he gathered his belongings, left the plane without saying a word and headed straight to the Southwest Airlines counter and demanded to speak to a supervisor. "My intent was to file a formal complaint the moment I got off the airplane," he says. With the Southwest supervisor en route, Brown turned toward the restroom - but his ordeal was not over. "A police officer in uniform stopped me and said that he was going to arrest me for making threats to the cabin crew," Brown says. "The stewardess & reported she did not feel safe around me." According to the officer, Southwest Airlines would not allow Brown to board his final flight from Seattle to Spokane. He would have to stay in a hotel that night and return home the following day on a different airline. The policeman was joined by another officer and, despite Brown's protests, they detained him for 45 minutes while they ran a background check. Rather than take him to a lounge or private room, the officers kept him in the middle of the concourse. As a further indignity, the officers would not allow him access to the restroom. When the Southwest supervisor arrived, she was accusatory and unapologetic. "Her attitude was [that] I am guilty until I am proven innocent," Brown says. "Her stance was, 'We have a zero-tolerance policy for incidents on the airplane.' My response was, 'There was no incident.' & I was seated next to a grandmother with a sick kid for five hours. My behavior was such that they didn't have a problem being seated next to me, they didn't have a problem having their kid seated next to me & I kept saying to [the officers], 'Give me an example of anything I did that was inappropriate' - they couldn't." Brown then cut to the heart of the matter. "I said, 'Is this because I'm Gay?' At that point she said, 'The cabin attendant thought you were business partners. She didn't understand why you would be so concerned about being separated from your business partner. You should have told her you were a couple. "My immediate response to that is, it's nobody's business what our relationship is or is not." Brown is firm in his belief that the police were called "because of my sexual orientation, not because of the events which transpired & I feel very strongly, had we been a straight couple, none of this would have happened. There would have been no incident." During the questioning, Brown's partner stood at a "respectable distance" so as to not complicate the procedure. As the situation stood, Brown was permitted to board his flight to Spokane without further incident, but Southwest "did not apologize. They did not make any effort to ease the situation. There was very clearly a radical difference of opinion." When asked about what action, if any, he will take, Brown is unhesitating. "I will be contacting Southwest to request an apology. I feel the flight attendant behaved inappropriately. I don't think calling a customer 'garbage' and 'fag' is a part of Southwest Airlines' approved customer service training & quite bluntly, she basically filed a statement with a law enforcement agency that was incorrect & she gave totally false and misleading information to a law enforcement agent, deliberately knowing what would happen to me when I got off that plane. That is actionable in Washington State." The SGN was unable to contact Southwest Airlines before press time. Perhaps most troublingly, Brown believes his experience could have happened to any Gay man. When asked to speculate on the reason why he was personally singled out for abuse, he responds, "I'd have to say simply because I was Gay. She didn't know me, we hadn't talked, we hadn't interacted, we had no contact & if there's a pattern of behavior here, it needs to be stopped. All clients should be treated exactly like every other passenger. I don't necessarily require respect, but I think any flight attendant who calls a stranger 'fag' has some personal issues which prevent her from effectively working with the public." Brown is adamant that nothing will dissuade him from filing a formal discrimination complaint. "I think that something needs to be done. This needs to be publicized because I don't want anybody else to have to go through what I went through," he says. "As a Gay community, we need to put our foot down and say we're not going to be treated like second-class citizens. Until we all insist on being treated with the same level of courtesy and respect, people are going to continue to feel like they can pull this crap." If you have experienced discrimination at the hands of Southwest or another airline, please tell us your story. E-mail seattlegaynews@yahoo.com |
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