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‘In Sweden we should all understand gay culture’

The first club night for gay, lesbian and transgender people has just launched in the Swedish town of Falkenberg. But the venue's owner tells The Local he's already been threatened with violence, despite the Nordic nation’s reputation for promoting equality.

Published: 10 November 2015 13:28 CET
'In Sweden we should all understand gay culture'
Bar and restaurant owner Christoffer Gustavsson (right) with his chef Stefan Andersson. Photo: Private

It was a gay chef working at Christoffer Gustavsson’s restaurant that gave him the idea to run a club night at Syrran & Brorsan, the bar and dining venue he runs with his sister in Falkenberg on Sweden’s west coast.

The town, which is a popular tourist resort during summer, is home to more than 20,000 residents, but doesn’t currently have any bespoke club nights catering for the area’s gay, lesbian and transgender crowd.

“Our chef is pretty sure this is the first gay club in Falkenberg (…) it’s like a normal club but with lots of gold confetti and pride flags,” explains Gustavsson.

“It’s a special place people can go to where nobody is looking at them in the wrong way.”

But Gustavsson says the new club night’s first event took place over the weekend against a backdrop of homophobic tensions in the town.

“It started last Thursday when I got a message from someone threatening that they were going come to the restaurant and try to destroy the party, and also that they wanted to beat me up,” he tells The Local.

According to Gustavsson, around a dozen diners who had arranged to eat in the restaurant ahead of the gay party also cancelled their reservations soon after he and his sister Theresa Andersson spoke to local media about their project.

“We don’t know for sure if it was linked but the booking was made three weeks ago and cancelled two days after we started talking about it [the club night].”

Gustavsson says that while the event still went ahead and turned into a “cool and happy party”, he remains “angry…more angry than scared” by both incidents, considering his country’s reputation for embracing equality.

“I was so disappointed (…) Because we live in Sweden we should all understand gay culture. I don’t have an answer about why this happened,” Gustavsson argues.


Stockholm's Pride festival. Photo: Vilhelm Stokstad/TT

Campaign group ILGA-Europe recently rated Sweden the top spot in Scandinavia for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people (LGBTQ). A new record for Pride parties in the Nordic country has also been set in 2015, with more than 30 Swedish towns and cities organizing special celebrations.

However, the events in Falkenberg are not the first to cause commentators to question tolerance in Sweden this year. Back in February, a hotel hit the headlines after a man was told he could not book a spa weekend, but managed to make the same reservation a day later after using a woman’s name.

Gustavsson says his experiences have made him even more determined to offer more club nights for the gay community in his region.

“We’re gonna make a new club night around Christmas and New Year (…) we already know we're gonna need an even bigger venue.”

GENDER

Berlin activists show manspreaders who wears the trousers

Manspreading is annoying for everyone on public transport. Now Berlin-based activists are trying to raise awareness and stamp it out.

Published: 26 February 2021 09:53 CET
Berlin activists show manspreaders who wears the trousers
Feminist activists Elena Buscaino and Mina Bonakdar on the Berlin subway. Photo: DPA

A man lounges across two seats on a crowded Berlin train, oblivious to his surroundings – until the two women opposite him suddenly spread their legs, revealing a message on their trousers: “Stop spreading”.

Feminist activists Elena Buscaino and Mina Bonakdar are on a mission to stamp out manspreading – the habit that some men have of encroaching on adjacent seats without consideration for their female neighbours.

“It is perfectly possible to sit comfortably on public transport without taking up two seats by spreading your legs,” said Bonakdar, 25.

The two female activists’ provocative stunt is part of a wider initiative called the Riot Pant Project featuring slogans printed on the inside legs of second-hand trousers.

READ ALSO: How much do women in Germany earn compared to men?

Bonakdar and Buscaino, both design students, came up with the idea as a way of helping women and LGBTQ people reclaim public spaces often dominated by men.

As well as “Stop spreading”, the project’s slogans include “Give us space” and “Toxic masculinity” – which, in a nod to the behaviour of those they are aimed at, are only revealed once the wearer shows their crotch.

“It is only through imitation that the interlocutor understands the effect of his or her behaviour,” said Buscaino, 26. 

Ancient phenomenon

But she also admits that very few men immediately change their posture when confronted with the slogans, as observed by AFP on the Berlin underground.

“They are often just astonished that women are behaving like that in front of them,” she said — but she hopes the project will at least give them food for thought.

For Bonakdar, simply wearing the trousers in itself allows women to “feel stronger and gain confidence”.

Although it may seem trivial to some, the problem of manspreading has existed almost since the dawn of public transport.

“Sit with your limbs straight, and do not with your legs describe an angle of 45, thereby occupying the room of two persons,” the Times of London advised as early as 1836 in an article on bus etiquette, as cited by Clive D.W. Feather in “The History of the Bakerloo Line”.

The term “manspreading” was coined in 2013 when New York subway users began posting photos of nonchalant male passengers and their contorted neighbours on social media.

According to a 2016 study by Hunter College in New York City, 26 percent of male subway users in the city are guilty of the practice, compared with less than 5 percent of women.

The US metropolis was one of the first in the world to try to start curbing the behaviour.

In 2014, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority launched a campaign featuring signs with the message: “Dude… Stop the Spread, Please”.

Gender roles

Similar campaigns have also since been launched in South Korea, Japan, Istanbul, and Madrid, where manspreading has even been punishable with fines since 2017.

The campaigns have sparked a backlash on the internet, with men citing biological differences as a way of justifying the need to spread their legs even if no scientific study has yet proven their argument.

Instead, the phenomenon has more to do with “gender roles” in society, Bettina Hannover, a psychologist and professor at the Free University of Berlin, told AFP.

“Men sit more possessively and indicate dominance with their seating position, while women are expected to take up less space and above all to behave demurely,” she said.

By David COURBET

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