Demagogue

I still can't get over the fact that a perfectly polite way to refer to gay men in Dutch is "homo's." And not just because of the Dutch punctuation rules in which the apostrophe is used correctly in forming the plural.

In a follow-up to Zoe's post on Amsterdam's recent high-profile gay bashing, I'm linking to a story (in Dutch) on yesterday's anti-homophobia demonstration, along with a link to video coverage (click on the photo to get to the video). My rough translation of part of the article:

Hundreds of gay men and lesbians stood kissing and embracing on Tuesday evening in Leiden Square [Leidseplein] in Amsterdam. They were responding to a call for action on the International Day Against Homophobia.

The Amsterdam demonstration followed the assault on American gay activist and journalist Chris Crain on Queens' Day [no, really] in Amsterdam. He was attacked by a group of youths after crossing the street while holding hands with his boyfriend.

The demonstraters gathered in the square at 6:30 p.m., the moment when they fell into each other's arms in an unaffected manner. The mass caressing ended a quarter-hour later. A single scandalized Japanese tourist quickly recorded the encounter on his camera. The demonstration was problem-free.

I'm particularly unsure about the last paragraph. I thought it said that the men and women fell into each other's arms "spontaneously," but that didn't make any sense; according to my dictionary, spontaan can also mean unaffected or natural. The sentence about the Japanese tourist was fraught with problems, so even if my translation isn't literally incorrect, I probably didn't catch the sense of the moment that the reporter was conveying in Dutch. But you get the point.