In college there was a gay professor, very clearly gay. I don't care about that stuff so it was a non issue, in fact I only thought about when he was overly flamboyant.
Anyways, one class was 3 hours and we had a 10 minute break halfway through. My buddies and I would hit the snack cart and shoot the shit before going back to class. Just a lot of joking and laughing really.
One day we're in class and 3 police officers came barging in, pointed at us and commanded us to exit the classroom. You'd think we murdered someone. What came to light was the professor was planning to file charges against us for being homophobic to him. Huh?
I don't want to write a really long anecdote here, but basically the guy heard us laughing and claimed we were pointing at him and he heard "faggot". We met with the professor and a mediator and me and my friend were let off the hook as his real target was this dude Dave. Dave ended up having to take a special night class about diversity and if he failed to appear they were going to charge him, expel him, and we're talking hate crime stuff (we were kids at the time, now I know this wasn't a hate crime).
The thing is, none of this happened. No one even knew the professor. But he had it is his head that it did , and Dave took the fall.
This was 15 years ago, so times never change.