Gay Kiss at Commonwealth Games Snubs Member Countries that Criminalize Homosexuality
Michael Sam, you just got upstaged.
Last night, Scottish-American actor John Barrowman kissed a male dancer on live TV during the opening ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games.
It’s the biggest live-TV gay kiss since ESPN aired footage of Sam giving a celebratory kiss to his boyfriend in May. He had just found out he had been picked up by the St. Louis Rams, making him the first publicly gay player to be drafted in the NFL.
Barrowman’s scripted kiss was meant to emphasize the value Scotland places on equality, said Games CEO David Grevemberg this morning. The Commonwealth Games are the fourth largest multi-sport event in the world (the first being the Olympics, followed by the Asian Games and the Maccabiah Games).
Very few Commonwealth countries agree with Scotland about gay rights. Homosexuality is illegal in 42 of the 53 member countries. It is punishable by death in Nigeria and Brunei.
The public response to Barrowman’s kiss has been overwhelmingly positive:
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More people seemed upset about Barrowman’s American accent than the fact that he snogged a man:
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The Glasgow-born Barrowman emigrated to the US in 1975. He and his husband, Scott Gill, were married in 2013 in California, 10 years after they met.
An ecstatic Barrowman even retweeted some of the negative responses to his kiss:
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No word yet from the Queen on her opinion of “new Glasgow kiss,’’ but here’s hoping she was into it. Same-sex marriage is legal in the United Kingdom, after all.
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