Hello people. This is Nic Pourliaros the gay greek filmmaker with a new article coming straight ahead from Athens.
As you already know I am greek and I am proud of it. If had the choice to have another nationality I would choose Italian. I love Italy not only because it’s close to my country. Mostly because I admire its culture in cinema, in music, in gastronomy, in literature. This why I learned Italian and me study Italian almost every day. Italy has many gay parades, a lot of gay film festivals and in Rai- the national Italian tv-there is a tv show that narrates the love stories of gay couples that they decided to get married.
Of course like everywhere on the planet a lot more needs to be done. Still, there are a lot of people that they need to be educated in order to accept gays and gay couples. Some days ago in Rome- the capital of Italy-we had a homophobic incident that attracted the interest of the media. A young gay couple of two men went to a restaurant to have a meal. The waiter that took their order wrote on the restaurant’s Pda the word “Faggots” and when he printed their bill the insulting word was still on it. The couple saw the insult and asked for an explanation. The homophobic waiter said that this was an error of the computing system. The couple did not accept his explanation and demanded to talk to the manager. The manager, in the beginning, supported the story of the error in the computing system but she apologized and offered the meal to the couple for free.
When the two men decided to leave outside of the restaurant they met the homophobic waiter. He 
complained to them that the story was revealed to other clients too and some of them told him off about his homophobic behavior. And the end of the day the homophobic waiter was fired. The gay couple posted their story on the social media and they revealed everything to a local gay association.
The owners of the restaurant apologized numerous times they reassured the public that the homophobic waiter was fired because they respect totally the gay rights and the human rights in general. Unfortunately, that was not the end of their problems. The owners received insults from an extremist right political group that backs up the homophobic waiter.
Anyway, life goes on. That restaurant is open, accepts and welcomes everyone. That restaurant serves great food and above all underlines that homophobic behavior is not even slightly tolerated. It was a small step. It was a small victory. There is no turning back. We won’t stop until we are treated equally until we have all the human rights that everyone deserves.
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