A lesbian couple traveling from Brisbane to Melbourne this week was asked to move so a straight couple could sit together, Pink News reports.
Merrin Hicks was sitting between her partner, Kristina Antoniades, and a man, with the man's wife in the row behind them when the couple asked her to switch seats so they could sit together. When she refused the couple's request, the flight manager asked them why she wouldn't move.
Antoniades wrote on her Facebook (the post has since been made private) that she told the flight manager that they were a family and wanted to remain sitting together, but the flight manager did not stop there. She then asked Antoniades why she had moved the wife away from her husband, to which she replied that everyone as just sitting in their designated seats.
Antoniades says the Qantas airlines flight manager kept bothering them, asking for their boarding passes, and repeatedly asking them why they wouldn't just let the straight couple sit together. Antoniades told them that Hicks was her partner and Lily was their daughter, and they had "just as much right to be seated together as the married couple." The manager walked off without apologizing, leaving Antoniades and her partner in tears.
Qantas quickly issued an apology, saying that they were "faced with two separate groups of customers asking to switch seats to sit together, including an elderly couple."
It's tough to know what actually happened on that plane but dude, if you ask someone to change the seats they had (and it's totally likely the family bought seats that were specifically together and who knows why the straight couple didn't do the same when they booked their flight) and they say no, move the hell on with your life.
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Lane Moore is an award-winning comedian, actor, writer, and musician. She is the creator of the hit comedy show Tinder Live and author of the critically acclaimed book How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't. Moore is the front person and songwriter in the band It Was Romance, which has been praised everywhere from Pitchfork to Vogue. She has written for The Onion, The New Yorker, and was previously the Sex and Relationships editor at Cosmopolitan.
