A story like this usually has a face: for example, an accompanying photo of a grave person standing outside the place where a grave thing happened.

But the subject of this story doesn’t want to be defined by that thing. Or in this case, by that word.

“I don’t want the word ‘f----t’ attached to my face ad nauseam,” says Jeremy, a 29-year-old Torontonian who alleges that in the early morning hours of Feb. 15, an employee at a midtown Gino’s Pizza used the homophobic slur against him three times.

Jeremy, who asked to be identified only by his first name for safety reasons, alleges that after working a late shift at a nearby restaurant he and a group of friends entered the pizza shop to pick up a few slices.

Some of Jeremy’s friends waited outside, so he entered and exited Gino’s two or three times in order to ask them what they’d like to eat.

This let cold air into the store, apparently angering an employee behind the counter, who then allegedly used the homophobic slur twice to reprimand Jeremy, who is openly — and in his own words — “flamboyantly” gay.

The third time the employee allegedly used the slur, Jeremy caught it on tape.

You might have seen the footage.

Jeremy, who goes by the alias Jeremy Mizu online (the latter is a nickname, not his legal surname), filmed part of the altercation and posted the video to social media that same weekend; it has since been viewed thousands of times.

The video begins in the middle of a loud argument between Jeremy and the employee, who is clearly visible behind the counter; Jeremy is behind the camera.

“I can film you, I’m allowed,” Jeremy says.

The employee smirks. “You are?” he says. “Because you’re a f----t?”

“Yeah, cause I’m a f----t!” Jeremy shouts.

The video currently making the rounds online is a shorter version of the original clip Jeremy posted to social media and later removed, in order, he says, to protect the privacy of the other people visible who came to his defence.

But both the short and the long versions of the video tell virtually the same tale: an employee at Gino’s Pizza in Toronto discriminated against a customer. The lead up to the discriminatory act, Jeremy argues, is irrelevant.

“Having worked in the service industry myself, you just don’t go to a slur,” he says. “No matter how annoyed you are or angry with somebody, whether I opened the door and it was cold, you don’t call somebody a f----t or a racist term.”

Gino’s Pizza seems to agree.

The Ontario chain announced in a statement shortly after the incident went viral it has “terminated” the offending employee. A spokesperson for the chain told the Star that as a direct result of the homophobic event, it is rolling out a province-wide retraining program around issues of “diversity, hidden bias, sensitivity and overall customer service experience.”

When I meet Jeremy in a downtown coffee shop a week after the incident, he’s skeptical about the retraining scheme. He wonders if some people are capable of being “retrained.” But more so, he’s skeptical of the presumption many Torontonians have that what happened to him is extremely unusual.

“I think it’s important for people to know that this stuff still does happen,” he says. “It’s something people face everyday, not just for being gay, but for being Black, First Nations. I think a lot of the time people think ‘we’re all good now.’ ”

Jeremy tells me he’s been the victim of verbal homophobic attacks in the city a handful of times before, on the subway, outside a bar where he used to work and once on King Street during Pride month, where he was told by a stranger, “F----t, don’t show your face around here.”

“When you look at me,” he says, “you know I’m gay. When I open my mouth, you know I’m gay. Regardless of how PC people want to be, you know I’m gay. I’m that ‘showtunes, drag queen loving, walks with a sway in his hips’ kind of gay.”

This description might bring to mind a few names in lights: “Queer Eye” star Jonathan Van Ness, drag matriarch Ru Paul, actor Chris Colfer in “Glee.” Our popular culture is increasingly friendlier to and inhabited with figures like these; people who complement Jeremy’s picture of himself. And yet while representation in media is encouraging, it doesn’t inoculate anybody from hate in everyday life.

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Things might be better than they were before, in Toronto and elsewhere.

But they’re not quite so good that a noticeably queer person can get a slice of pizza in the middle of the night with the certainty they won’t be called a f----t.

“This isn’t something that happens in a vacuum,” says Jeremy. “It doesn’t cease to exist when this story ends.”