Cabbie Asks Gay Couple To Leave After They Kiss; Couple Files Complaint
A Chicago cab driver didn’t like that two men kissed each other in the backseat of his car, and so he told them to get out of his cab. Now the couple is filing a complaint against the cab company.
The couple, Matthew McCrea, 30, of Chicago, and Steven White, 29, of West Hollywood, California, say they had exchanged a brief kiss in the back of a Sun Taxi cab when the driver pulled over on a busy expressway on a rainy night and told them to get out.
Though the driver has been fined by the city over the May incident and fired by his company, McCrea and White say they took their complaint to the Illinois Department of Human Rights to help others who might find themselves in a similar situation. The complaint asks for unspecified compensation.
“We’re doing this because what happened to us isn’t right, and we want to make sure other people, if they find themselves in this situation, they know it’s not OK,” said McCrea in a phone interview…
When an officer questioned the driver, Jama Anshur, he said McCrea and White had been “making sex,” the complaint said. The officer let Anshur drive off, and waited with the couple until they found another cab.
The driver was fined $1,540 by Chicago’s cab-regulatory agency over the incident, according to the complaint, and Sun Taxi fired him, according to Sun’s general manager Jong Lee. Anshur, who was named along with Sun in the complaint, could not be reached for comment.
