Gay Dad 52,Speaks Out for For Being Accused of Touching His 5yr.Son on United Flgt.
If you are Gay and have a small son, don't touch him while traveling on United or you will spend an hour or two explaining that you still change his diapers.
Last May, the story of Henry Amador-Batten, a 52-year-old gay man, who was wrongly accused of inappropriately touching his five-year-old son, Ben, on a United Airlines flight went viral. A male flight attendant sounded the alarm on a scene that turned out to be totally innocent: Ben had his arm laced around his father’s arm, whose hand extended onto Ben’s lap. That scenario prompted an attendant to allege that Amador-Batten’s hand was too close to his son’s genitals.
Last May, the story of Henry Amador-Batten, a 52-year-old gay man, who was wrongly accused of inappropriately touching his five-year-old son, Ben, on a United Airlines flight went viral. A male flight attendant sounded the alarm on a scene that turned out to be totally innocent: Ben had his arm laced around his father’s arm, whose hand extended onto Ben’s lap. That scenario prompted an attendant to allege that Amador-Batten’s hand was too close to his son’s genitals.
When the duo deplaned, authorities were waiting for Amador-Batten. They questioned him for 45 minutes in front of Ben and demanded evidence that he was indeed Ben’s father, which Amador-Batten immediately provided. He was released and United has since apologized.
Now, three months later, Amador-Batten tells People Chica that before his experience on United he’d never experienced discrimination on the basis of his sexuality. “I’m a 52-year-old man who has never had to fight because I’m gay. I’ve never been accused of anything, never been fired from a job, or lost a home. You hear all these stories, but I’d never experienced any of that.”
The same can’t be said for his existence in the world as a Latino man. Half-Puerto Rican and half-Spanish, Amador-Batten recalls chilling incidents of racial profiling in the 80s and 90s. “I was nearly always targeted by security both in the U.S. and in the countries I was entering. I’m assuming,” he says, “that a well-dressed Hispanic man flying out of Miami was easily suspected of being in the drug business. I missed flights, had luggage basically torn apart. I had tubes of toothpaste squeezed out and even hems on my jacket and pants ripped open.”
When asked if he thinks his ethnicity played any part in the flight attendant’s allegations on United, he says: “We can’t know what the flight attendant’s motives, perceptions or intentions were. Although both Ben and I are Hispanic, he is lighter than I. Did the attendant see an older Hispanic man traveling with a little white boy? I can’t imagine he could have but who knows?”
On that note, he adds that when the story first came out several publications inaccurately asserted that Amador-Batten was white and Ben was black. “Even when photos were provided,” he says, “the black and white assumption hung around. I think creating a wider difference between my son and I made the story a bit more sensational and may have even made the flight attendant’s accusation more believable.”
Amador-Batten read a recent report about a passenger on a United flight who wrongly accused a Mexican father of sex trafficking. The father, traveling alone with his half-Irish daughter, was detained and questioned by the authorities. Is it possible the attendant who targeted Amador-Batten was thinking along similar lines?
“The similarities in our stories,” Amador-Batten says, “are uncanny.”
BY STEPHANIE FAIRYINGTON
People
BY STEPHANIE FAIRYINGTON
People
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