Bar gay lille vice versa

It's the face of homophobia," Wilfred de Bruijn wrote beneath a photo he posted on his Facebook profile earlier this month. The Dutchman had gone out with a friend in Paris' 19th Arrondissement the evening before and had been walking arm-in-arm with him when they were attacked by three or four people.

Then they badly beat de Bruijn. The photo, which his friend took as evidence to give to the police, shows de Bruijn's badly bruised face. De Bruijn filed a complaint with police over bodily injury with homophobic motives. In the days since, the photo has gone viral on the Internet as evidence of a dangerous escalation in aggressiveness toward gays and lesbians in France.

Gays and lesbians have reported being cursed at, insulted and spat upon. It's a situation that has made young gays especially feel ill at ease. On Sunday, a large crowd of young gays and lesbians gathered at the Place de la Bastille to protest against homophobia.

Vice Versa

Fear has become widespread among gays and lesbians in France following an attack in mid-April on Vice Versa, a popular gay bar in Lille. Four people showed up at the bar, located in the city's historic center, at 10 p. They destroyed furniture, broke the front window and slightly injured gay bar's owner and a handful of employees.

The Paris activist group Act Up described the developments as "an explosion of hatred and violence," and the organization SOS Homophobie complained about a week of violence. She said the debate over same-sex marriage simmering for months in the country was the cause of the "tensions" and "radicalization.

Ever since parliament began debating its "Marriage for All" legislation that would place same-sex marriage on the same footing as heterosexual marriage, a front has been forming against gays and lesbians across the country. France legalized same-sex relations in and then introduced gay and lesbian civil unions inbestowing a number of the rights of marriage.

But the recent protests, which have attracted hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, have brought prejudices back to the surface that many had thought were long forgotten. The legal reform, which is expected to pass its final hurdle in parliament on Tuesday afternoon, has divided society and sparked intense political debate.

And in the margins of the protests, people with animosity towards gays and lesbians have been celebrating their own coming outs of sorts. The latest example came on Monday, when Claude Bartolone, the chairman of the National Assembly, received a threatening letter filled with gunpowder. The national campaign against same-sex marriage and the mass protests even caught President Hollande, who listed the new law as "Proposal No.

Hollande has warned in the face of the attacks that any anti-gay violence and "any form of homophobia" will be punished. The vast majority of anti-gay marriage protesters have remained peaceful. But even as they have claimed to only rebuke the marriage reforms, the ideological leaders of the "Demonstrations for All" movement have certainly done their share to foment hatred of gays and lesbians in recent weeks.

Finally, Frigide Barjot, the acid-tongued self-appointed icon of the anti-gay marriage movement, declared, "If Hollande wants blood, then he will get it. So is the homophobia currently being expressed in France proof of a shift in vice opinion in the longer term or just an ugly temporary phenomenon? For Louis-Georges Tin, such animosity towards gays and lesbians hasn't come as a surprise.

Tin lille that the conservative opposition is bar to use versa at times strong rejection of the reform to burnish its own damaged images. On the one side, he argues the conservative Catholic Church has been marred by pedophilia scandals.