Following last week's terrorist attack in Paris that killed more than 100 people, one young man from Phoenix says he's feeling backlash on the popular gay hookup app Grindr.
Gay Star News reports on the story of Anthony Magallanez, who updated his Grindr profile in response to the attacks to include a lyric to the Lebanese singer Fairouz's song "Al Thaniah." The Arabic lyrics read "I loved you in the winter."
Fairouz may be a Lebanese diva, but it was another gay man that threw a fit over Magallanez's show of support for Parisians. "You better watch yourself. I'll kick your ass..." the man wrote to Magallanez along with anti-Arab slurs, according to screen shots Magallanaz shared on Twitter.
He said that, at first, he assumed the message must have been a bad joke. "I asked for clarification and it became clear to me that he only wanted to be hateful, so that's when I stopped taking him seriously," Magallanaz told Gay Star News. "At the same time, I tried to be light-hearted with him and show that, 'Yeah, I'm Muslim, but am I the one being aggressive here?'"
Magallanez did not report the user to Grindr and opted to simply block him instead. He's telling his story out of concern for the wave of Islamaphobia sweeping the country lately, telling Gay Star News, "I'm scared for the Muslims in Europe as well as those here in the United States and most of all those in the Middle East." He's worried that if ISIS amps up attacks, the backlash will only grow "against innocent people on the part of bigots here in the U.S. and Europe."
Republican presidential candidates have called for the United States to reject refugees from Syria, with Jeb Bush suggesting the U.S. only accept Christians. More than 30 governors have said they will refuse any Syrian refugees even though they have no authority to do so. All of the suspects in the terrorist attacks were European; none were Syrian.
Grindr encourages users to block anyone being abusive. In a help section posting, the company describes a complicated process to report an abusive user that includes marking the abuser as a "favorite."
