Bus Ride Bigotry: What Really Happened to Ari Gold?

[w8liftinglady]

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2011/07/13/What_Really_Happened_to_Ari_Gold_/

When musician Sir Ari Gold and his boyfriend Timothy Nelson boarded a Shortline bus at New York City’s Port Authority terminal to visit his family in the Catskills last Sunday, he couldn’t have foreseen that the couple would soon be at the center of a possible civil rights violation.

The two men who were seated next to one another near the front of the bus, holding hands and listening to music on a shared iPod, soon caught the attention of the allegedly homophobic driver. The man demanded that the couple move to the back of the bus. And when Gold refused, the driver pulled over and called police.

Fortunately another passenger offered to be a witness for Gold and Nelson, and The Advocate has exclusively corroborated the men’s story with Florence Mattersdorfer of Livingston Manner, NY. Mattersdorfer says she and her husband have been longtime advocates of LGBT equality, and so she was disturbed by the way Gold and Nelson were treated. She says it was completely without provocation.

"It was certainly unprovoked in my opinion and it was personal bias," Mattersdorfer says. "He was offended by them. And I don’t believe that had it been a man and a woman he would have made an issue out of it because they were not doing anything at all that was inappropriate in my opinion."

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[joeybee12]

2. KNR

[Historic NY]

3. Ah, so thats what was going on I saw the bus with 2 other and the trooper...

seemed strange then they all took off.

[damntexdem]

4. Well. the driver certainly knew his legacy.

The back of the bus for those to be subject to discrimination.

Maybe he wishes he'd been driving buses in Birmingham, AL, in the 1950s.

[starroute]

5. Er -- that should be "Livingston Manor"

Haven't these journalists found out about the Google yet?

[just55650]

6. self-delete