Only Homos Don't Eat Meat

A straight and married Wall Street trader is suing his former employers, saying that they tormented him for his vegetarianism and told him that only homosexuals don't eat meat.

Ryan Pacifico is suing Calyon in the Americas, charging that his one-time boss at the French financial firm presided over a testosterone-fueled trading desk, where he was mocked for avoiding meat and wearing snug-fitting shorts during triathlons. "A trading floor is certainly a manly man's world," Pacifico said. "I just never expected someone to think it's gay to be a vegetarian or to constantly poke fun at me." The 28-year-old Long Island man worked as a junior foreign-exchange trader in Manhattan for the firm from 2005 until he was fired last March. Pacifico's discrimination lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, contends the firm cooked up lies about his job performance to fire him - when the real factors were that he was a vegetarian who was perceived to be gay by boss Robert Catalanello. "They associated being a vegetarian with being gay," said Rick Ostrove, a lawyer for Pacifico. "It's a ridiculous male stereotype that only real men eat meat."

Pacifico says at one time his boss taunted him with "You don't even eat steak, dude. At what point in time did you realize you were gay?"