Dear Badger,
We are all aware that homophobia is a very real and very serious problem, even in the liberal bastion that is Brighton. A kiss-in at Sainsbury’s is not the way to change this.
As stated by Mr. Segalov in his Guardian piece, the protest is to raise awareness that homophobia has not been abolished, and to stand in solidarity with those in the eight-one countries where it is still illegal to be openly gay.
I fail to see how a load of ‘activists’ snogging in a grocery store achieves any of these objectives.
It is patronising and reeks of first world privilege that a group can overrun a grocery store to show their affection in public without any fear of retribution whatsoever, whilst LGBT people in Russia or Uganda face real and dangerous consequences if they were to show the slightest form of affection.
This is the opposite of solidarity. What began as an unfortunate incident between a loving couple and an uppity customer has become nothing more than a self-aggrandising publicity stunt by the attention loving Mr. Segalov and Sussex Student Union.
It is lazy, short sighted activism and serves no purpose but to trivialise the very real persecution LGBT peoples face across the world.
Anonymous
Finally somebody expressed what I feel about this unneeded event. Oh yes, hate on Segalov as well as he is nothing but a two-face controversial, who I don’t trust at all.
Oh come on now. Why has the badger gotta be all about a perpetual chain of sniping between two polarised and more often than not reductionist views – merely for the sake of it. The incident was not nice, the unions response exaggerated to say the least, yet the protest turned out a neat little publicity stunt that got a message out. Of course the issue is bigger than us, so lets treat it that way with open dialogue, instead of sniping at each other with a weird narrative of uppity opinion just to sprawl ‘junior journalist’ across our cv’s.
Reg – I don’t think you can accuse the paper of saying/ perpetuating these things, since this was a letter and it was submitted anonymously. That means it could be any one of the 13,000+ students at Sussex.
Of course, although I speak of most of the article that go’s up (including ironically a few of my own). This isn’t news, or a lively student based discussion, this is petty one-upmanship. Neither do I criticise the student who wrote this, its the template the badger’s established. An article I have previously written had a response which misunderstood my point (a fault of my own given the extremely small word count)- we discussed on facebook afterwards and arrived to some conclusions that could never have sprouted within the confinements of the paper. It’s just all a bit closed, and students articles for some reason seem to propagated against each other reductively within less than a few hundred words, instead of encouraging a constructive point many can contribute to.
Fair enough! Obviously there are constraints on someone’s ability to engage in a thorough argument given the limited work count, but unfortunately most things pertaining to student/ SU politics are closed, because there’s a only a small group that are being engaged with in the first place.
Maybe a constructive point hasn’t been reached in the letter, but it has been constructive insofar as it’s stimulated this debate?