All right, everybody out of the pool except the straight, healthy people!
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- An employee at a public swimming pool in eastern Kentucky was suspended for a week without pay after telling two disabled gay men to leave, city of Hazard officials said Saturday.
The suspended city employee Kim Haynes told investigators that the two men were engaged in an excessive display of affection June 10, and that he would have told any other couple to leave had he seen similar behavior. Haynes, however, also acknowledged he said "We don't tolerate that kind of activity around here" and cited the Bible in an argument with Laura Quillen, a member of the social service group Mending Hearts, which was overseeing the group.
Quillen told investigators the men did nothing inappropriate.
This is the kind of story I might not have commented on were it not set in Hazard, which is the county seat of Perry County where I grew up. I remember it as the "big city" (pop. around 3,000, I seem to remember) of our patch of coal country, and it was the sort of place where unemployed men gathered on corners to spit tobacco juice and whittle on pieces of wood and where Saturday nights involved a lot of drinking and pickup trucks. I do not recall it as a hotbet of liberal sensitivity, so I guess things have changed.
People quoted in the story seem to disagree on how affectionate the men were toward each other, but are in general accord that the employee went too far in admonishing them. It's OK to disallow PDA at the pool, but not to single out any group -- it's just as wrong if between a man and a woman or two women or two men. It's the difference between, say, a laundromat in Fort Wayne telling someone from Burma not to spit on the floor and putting up a sign that says "No Burmese allowed."
One annoying aspect of the story is that the men are described as "disabled gay men," but the story never returns to the disabled part to explain what the disability is. Why even bring it up if you're not going to develop it?
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"Why even bring it up if you
I suspect they didn't say what the disabilities were because they weren't physically disabled. Every time someone comes up with a new polite euphemism for having mental or emotional problems, it takes about three weeks before it becomes the new "in" insult.
That would explain why reporters talked to Laura Quillen, rather than to the two men.
Anderson Cooper's crew for CNN tried to talk to the pavilion manager, who said no comment in "inappropriate and obscene language", with the result that she, too, was disciplined.