Pascal Kaiser, an amateur German soccer referee, proposed to his boyfriend at a soccer game in front of 50,000 spectators. The video went viral online as people celebrated the couple’s happiness.
A week later, three men appeared in front of Kaiser’s home and beat him up.
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Kaiser proposed to his boyfriend, Moritz, at a Wolfsburg-Cologne match on January 30, getting down on one knee and asking Moritz to marry him.
“HE SAID YES,” a post with the video from DW Sports read. “The moment queer football fan Pascal proposed to his boyfriend before a Bundesliga game.”
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Many of the comments on that video are positive, but quite a few aren’t. Kaiser said that he started getting threatening messages online that included his address. He called the police about the threats, but they determined that there was no immediate danger.
But just 20 minutes after calling the police on Saturday, February 7, Kaiser went outside to smoke. Three men were waiting for him there and beat him up, he told the French sports magazine L’Equipe. He said he suffered an injury to his right eye.
According to Spanish politician Carla Antonelli, “The police intervened after the attack, and Pascal Kaiser is now in a safe place under police protection.”
“The message is terrible: if you come out, we’ll beat you into the closet,” she wrote in an Instagram post. She said that Kaiser had been getting “explicit threats that revealed the exact address of his home.”
Kaiser said that he believes the attack is connected to the proposal video.
Kaiser came out as bisexual in 2021, one of the few people associated with professional men’s soccer to come out as LGBTQ+. He said that he came out so that people could see “a man loving a man in football,” according to Attitude.
“I see this as my mission: to create visibility,” he told the German LGBTQ+ news site Schwulissimo last year. “To be a voice. And to encourage people who haven’t yet dared to speak up. I know how lonely it can be when you think you’re the only one. I want no one to have to think that way anymore.”
In that interview, he talked about the “DMs with death threats” that he had gotten since coming out. “But they don’t break me. Because for every hate message, I receive five in which people tell me: ‘You helped me accept myself.’”
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