IMHO ABC News "Primetime": Would You Help This Gay Couple?

We mentioned in yesterday's Queerview that ABC News' hidden-camera experiment "What Would You Do?" was returning last night on Primetime with another situation involving gay people doing gay things in public. The question this time was how the denizens of a neighborhood sports bar in New Jersey would react to a gay couple being openly affectionate to one another, and to a homophobic customer's attempts to rally the regulars against them.

As with the last gay PDA experiment, the show chose an actual gay couple to play the canoodling lovebirds, and in addition also planted a straight couple at the other end of the bar to behave with similar open affection, as well as a noisy patron who made gay jokes and was openly hostile toward the guys.

The results were actually pretty surprising. Despite the homophobic patron's attempts to raise a lynch mob at various times of the day and using various tactics ranging from humor to outright nastiness, he was met with resistance every time, with the bar patrons turning on him in defense of the gay couple and at times becoming quite determined and even emotional in that defense.

A few moments from the experiment really stand out. The bit that stuck most with me was when the otherwise unassuming guy with his buddies told the homophobic fellow to shut up or they'd get rid of him, because the gay couple wasn't hurting anyone and had every right to be there. But the most unexpected reaction came from a young lady whose defense of the gay strangers reached the point of confrontation. They sat down with the woman afterward and she was visibly shaken by the situation, and revealed that she has gay friends who have to live with this kind of discrimination on a daily basis.

One of the few patrons who played along with the homophobe made a few comments under his breath about how "disgusting" the gay guys were, but when the cameras came out he changed his tune quickly. Host John Quinones asked a psychologist what would lead to this behavior and she said, flatly, "tolerance has become an American value," and that people do not want to appear to fall outside of that standard. I also liked that the piece framed the discussion by noting that gay rights are being widely and openly discussed (referencing Prop 8 and Milk) and not something that anyone should be afraid to talk about.

Did anyone else catch the segment? If not, it's available online. While I'm not generally a fan of hidden-camera pieces, this one was interesting and didn't make we want to relocate to an igloo in the tundra like some others have. But that's just IMHO - what did you think?