Valentine's Day: Kiss-in in Paris

By maxime68 on Monday, February 15, 2010 - 14:56

How did you spend your Valentine’s Day?

Did the earth move under feet, were you able to spend it with your sweetheart at all? Perhaps you belong to those who “don’t do” Valentine’s Day?

Did our various posts about Valentine’s Day urge you to show the world who you love and did you go to one of the many kiss-ins? The kiss-in being a French invention (read more about it on the kiss-in blog) it comes as no surprise that the majority of kiss-in events were held in France.

Footage and photos from several events are already up on the kiss-in Facebook fanpage, with updates still coming in. Almost every kiss-in went smoothly, except for the one in the capital. While it is nice to see European events, especially lgbt-events, being picked up by US news, it is kind of sad that it’s the one from Paris they reported about.

If you read Ley’s article carefully, you remember that the location of the Parisian kiss-in was moved because of threats made by a specific Christian group (they’re called 'intégralistes' in French, which I don’t know how to translate properly).

The place in front of Notre Dame was the original meeting place which was then moved to Saint-Michel, which is not more than a 10-minute-walk away. The kiss-in at Saint-Michel went well, and the group SOS Racisme, who organized another kiss-in an hour later, was already present in solidarity.

video by Yagg

Afterwards some lesbians, gays and transsexuals walked over to Notre Dame and were physically attacked as soon as they started to hug and kiss. A participant told Yagg that the police acted immediately and stopped the attackers. He also said that among the attackers there were people giving the Nazi-salute (which is forbidden in Germany, Austria and Switzerland). He and his peeps didn’t file complaints with the police, but others did as can be read in the comments of the Yagg article.

I didn’t read all of the comments but enough of them to take notice of a certain discussion, sort of telling the kiss-in people that it was improper to provoke members of the church on their territory?