Fighting hot air with hot air
If you live in an urban environment, you’ve likely seen homophobic protesters at urban intersections rattling off hateful rhetoric with dizzying fervor. We can all agree these rants are the worst; still, most of us typically throw a subtle stink eye or look the other way rather than get directly involved.
[quote position="right" is_quote="true"]I’m a gay bagpiper and I’m proud.[/quote]
One woman decided to fight back—not with her fists or words, but with the beautifully loud sounds of her bagpipe, Laughing Squid reports. After seeing the preacher use a megaphone to relentlessly spew homophobic hate speech on multiple occasions, Ehmig devised a plan to overshadow his words with a bagpipe version of “Amazing Grace.” Lucky for us, her girlfriend, Gabrielle Cicolani, recorded the entire thing.
“I’m a gay bagpiper and I’m proud,” Ehmig told the Gay Star News. And in an interview with her local ABC News affiliate, Ehmig said:
“He started mentioning a lot more violent things against, you know, homosexuals… When I hear things like that, I just think about me when I was 12 and still in the closet and feeling really bad about myself. I wouldn’t want her to feel bad, 12-year-old me, I need to stand up for her… I just wanted to do something that made me feel brave.”
Brice Ehmig isn’t the first person to get creative about taking down obnoxious hate speech perpetrators. Last month in New York City, firefighters blasted over one female preacher’s racist rants with non-emergency alarms and their full arsenal of loud sounds, rendering her hate speech incomprehensible to the delight of bystanders. On another occasion, a cyclist in Glasgow pulled over on his bike and confronted a homophobic preacher head on, saying, “I’m gay! I’m gay, so say it to me.” He received applause from all those watching.
Watch the video of Ehmig battling homophobia with expert musical skill above and get inspired to drown out the haters in your own unique way.
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