Those nice people at Virgin Holidays conducted a new survey on how different people were treated in vacation where they spoke to 1,000 LGBT couples and 1,000 straight couples, and the results are both sad and shocking.
One of the things that they uncovered was that only five per cent of LGBT couples are comfortable showing affection on holiday and half fear judgement and mockery when abroad, according to a new survey. Of course more than eight in 10 straight couples (84 per cent) were comfortable engaging in public displays of affection when they were away.
They went on to discover that one in three LGBT couples said they had experienced discrimination when on holiday, including being stared at (58 per cent), laughed at (35 per cent) and verbally abused (29 per cent). If this wasn’t bad enough, frightening one in ten LGBT travelers reported that they have been threatened with physical violence on holiday.
So Virgin’s boss Sir Richard Branson who has always been a superb ally to our community, commissioned a video from the ATTN people that parodies if we swapped places with straight couples for just once to see how they would like it. It is a very funny piece, but we should never forget that the problem is real and is far from being a laughing matter.
