What a kiss-appointment

The recent news of a third year Sussex student, Annabelle Paige, being asked to leave Sainsbury’s for kissing her girlfriend, was met with a huge amount of protest.

A customer branding their behaviour “disgusting” and complained to security, who in-turn asked the couple to leave.

Michael Segalov, Sussex Communication Officer, started the Facebook event “The Big CONSENSUAL Kiss-in – Sainsbury’s” in retaliation to the way the two women were treated.

The event increased in notoriety, to a national scale, with reporters from The Times attending and being joined by many other journalists (and me) to report the event.

Despite the crap weather the turnout was impressive, even at 5.30 – a good thirty minutes before it was all meant to kick off.

However, once it hit 6 o’clock I became aware of more and more people around me growing impatient and tired of the rain and general air of confusion.

The sense of excitement quickly followed the rain down the drain as people strained to hear the rallying cry of Lydia L’Scabies, Phélim Mac Cafferty (Brighton Greens) and Fran Cowling (NUS LGBT Women’s Officer).

Standing in a crowd, feeling the uncomfortable warmth of a stranger next to you warming up your wet clothes isn’t something I signed up for.

After finally making our way into Sainsbury’s it seemed as though people were just mingling around the entrance – hardly the huge protest I was expecting.

Despite all the planning that seemed to have been put into it, there appeared to be a little actual organisation.

Speakers and special guests are all fun and games, but publicity apparently doesn’t go very far nowadays as I ended up standing inside with the most exciting thing around being a food which I’d never heard of (still yet to find out what a Sharon Fruit is).

An elderly male couple mentioned to me how they were “appalled that they [Sainsbury’s] would allow these girls to be kicked out for a simple snog” (not my choice of word, but heyo).

Members of the Sussex LGBTQ society noted how they found the whole event “really underwhelming”, something which I feel represented the general feel of the crowd.

“I think the idea was nice and there was a good force of support behind the campaign but the way it was implemented was just so underwhelming.” – 1^st year English student at Sussex.

The whole idea of the public joining together in order to show support to consensual kissing in public, regardless of gender, was undeniably a good concept. It just seemed that “for a kiss-in there was a distinct lack of kissing”.

Nevertheless there were hundreds of people in the crowd who seemed to be having fun and enjoying the kiss-in, even if they ended up getting as much action as I did (big ol’ zero).

I got the feeling that the majority of the crowd was there just to see how it panned out, and that many of the 1,400 who were meant to attend ended up staying at home because of the weather. Hardly the ‘fight the power’ mentality of the 60’s, but such is the world we live in.

On a brighter note, donations to charities that work towards ending homophobia in today’s society are always welcome. So fork a couple of quid out of that student budget and give it to those that need it. Not to that extra VK one a ‘cray’ night at Wah-Kiki.

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