Greek gays kiss in protest

2003-11-14 22:09

Athens - Under the glaring light of television cameras and the watchful eye of police, some twenty gay and transvestite protestors exchanged rather shy mouth-to-mouth kisses in downtown Athens late on Friday. They were protesting a €100 000 fine imposed on a local television station for showing a male couple kissing.

"It's a shame there are such problems in this country," said Jerome Castellano, a Frenchman living in Greece, who exchanged the happening's most passionate kiss with his Greek boyfriend Manthos Peponas.

"This decision is despicable and racist... what I most hate is the hypocrisy we have to deal with every day," said Marina Galanou, member of Greece's Transsexual and Transvestites' Union.

The protest took place at the doorstep of the National Audiovisual Council, Greece's media watchdog, which imposed Wednesday a €100 000 fine on private television station Mega, Greece's second-biggest channel, for showing two young men kissing in the popular late-night series "Close your eyes".

"(Kissing men) is not a usual phenomenon. It is a particularity outside life's reproductive process," the council's president Ioannis Laskaridis reportedly said.

"Laskaridis, resign," read a banner hoisted by the activists.

"The council said the 'atmosphere of our kiss' was obscene... we think a kiss is a beautiful, tender thing," said journalist Grigoris Valianatos.

"Due to European Union pressure, Greece will pass a law against discrimination for all persons, but that's not what happens in practice," said Vangelis Yiannelos, a computer technician representing the Greek Gay Community, a local pressure group.

One homosexual committed suicide in jail after a police raid on a gay club earlier this year, Yiannelos said. "There were innocent people who had nothing to do with what police were looking for. They went just to the club for a drink, and now they find themselves charged, their lives destroyed, defamed, with their jobs lost".

No prominent Greek has ever gone public with his (or her) homosexuality, which is not banned under Greek law. Gay bars do exist in major Greek cities.

- AFP