We get to meet some great souls through working at Instinct Magazine. Two such wonderful men are Jacob and David. We were introduced to them when we posted Roxette Says "Nice One!" To Gay Couple's Lip Sync Of "Some Other Summer". It was a fun energetic video that brought some joy to many of us as well as reintroduced a great Roxette hit to Instincters.
When you can share fun news or entertainment, it's always an added bonus. Unfortunately, some bad news came to us recently from Jacob and David. Surprise, surprise! There are some hateful people out there, they found the boys' "Some Other Summer" video, and were not too pleasant with their comments.
Jacob and David sent us this letter yesterday.
Hi,
I would like to thank your for sharing our holiday video to Roxette song "Some other summer". We did it just for ourselves but it turned out that it was already seen by huge amount of people. And it all started from your article in "INSTINCT MAGAZINE" which was shared/copied by other media.
Since then our story spreads all over the world and we felt really proud and honoured. People really liked our video and mostly appreciated what we did. Respond was really great and overwhelming. We felt really confident and honoured.
Everything changed when polish media found the story. It appeared on several polish sites and people reaction was totally different. We knew that polish society is very catholic and conservartive but we still expected that they would be proud of us and our job.
We were wrong. After several polish articles we were really shocked. They were some positive comments, but most of them were very homophobic and agressive. I didn’t mind people who didn’t like our video. That’s fine, but when we read comments like – „you should be ashamed of you”, „I’ll cut your throats if I evere meet you”, or „you should be send to a gas chamber” – we were really devasteted. We also received private messages via Facebook account saying „I’m gonna find you” or „Your neighbours will come after you”. Even yesterday someone wrote on our YouTube account „You two should be burnt at the stake like witches. Go to hell”.
They were serious threats among tchem and when I came back home one day, I saw David really devasteted. I’ve known him for 7 years and I’ve never seen him crying – but this time he was literally crying. It was really too much for us. We started thinkng about taking our video down, but I used to live in UK where I lernt to be proud of being gay and didn't want to change it so we finally came to the conclusion that if we did it we would have let them win so we decided not to give up and spread our story all around.
Roxette also gave us their suppor. When they were told by polish journalist what happened to us they sent us a message. They also put their video again on their site with comment: "Remember: love is love is love".
It’s not easy, but this situation showed us that is not just a funny video. It showed us how much needs to be done in our country to let gay people in Poland feel really safe and proud of being gay in our country. We do not regret doing our video and sharing all around. We both feel stronger now, we lernt something and I’m glad we went through it.
Thank you so much for all your kindness and suport.
Thanks guys for sending us this letter. We shared your video because it was fun, beautiful, and brought us joy. So with that in mind, we're going to share it again and love it even more.
Your strength and love is inspiring. Thanks for allowing Instinct to help share that with our readers.
