Flying While Gay

Southwest Airlines has issues.

And those customer issues, on any given day or flight, appear arbitrary.

For example, little did Billie Joe Armstrong, lead singer and guitarist for the punk rock band Green Day, know that flying while wearing saggy pants could get you evicted from a Southwest Airlines flight. This past Labor Day weekend, on Sept. 1, Armstrong was booted off a Southwest Airlines flight for saggy pants. When Armstrong, in disbelief, queried, "Don't you have better things to do than worry about that?" the response from the flight attendant was curt and pointed: "Pull your pants up or you're getting off the plane."

Another example: little did film director Kevin Smith know that flying while being oversized could also have you evicted from Southwest. In February 2010 Smith was removed from his Southwest seat because he was deemed too obese to fly safely, despite the fact that he was able to put both armrests down, in accordance with airlines policy.

On the morning of Sept. 26, Leisha Hailey, an actress and musician known for her role as Alice Pieszecki in the Showtime series The L Word, and, her girlfriend/bandmate Camila Grey of Uh Huh Her boarded Southwest Airlines Flight 2274. Hailey and the band were preparing to launch a 21-city tour to promote breast cancer awareness.

But little did Hailey and Grey know that kissing while flying could cause a kerfuffle with the airlines. Hailey and Grey, both incensed and humiliated, were escorted off the flight.

Hailey immediately tweeted: "We were escorted off the plane for getting upset about the issue.@SouthwestAir endorses homophobic employees. No one made her accountable."

But Southwest thought their action was justified. Several passengers on Flight 2274 complained that their display of affection with each other was objectionably inappropriate, "characterizing the behavior as excessive." And Hailey tweeted that a "Flt. attendant said that it was a 'family' airline and kissing was not ok."

With all the brouhaha about Hailey's and Grey's "excessive" and "inappropriate" smacking, of course, we all now want to know what kind of kiss it was to garner such national attention. What category of kissing does theirs fall into within the science of kissing, called philematology?

The Romans created three categories of kissing: 1) "osculum," a kiss on the cheek, 2) "basium," a kiss on the lips, and 3) "savolium," a deep kiss.

"We want to make it clear we were not making out or creating