“I don’t get how so many people took it as a personal attack, because it was our wedding, it was something personal to us,” Jamil Smith Cole told Southern Voice. Pictures of the wedding of Michael Cole Smith and Jamil Smith Cole, who both live in Minneapolis, were used in some homophobic email chains and on blogs in the last week.

The pictures were posted on Bossip.com under the heading “What the hell is wrong with these pictures?” followed by a number of homophobic comments.

Bossip.com bills itself as “the leading celebrity online property which has an urban sensibility and the fastest growing urban-focused new media property on planet earth.”

In addition, Sandra Bradley, an administrative assistant at Morehouse College in Atlanta, passed them on in an email chain. She said:

I can’t believe this wedding. It’s 2 men. They don’t smile in a lot of pictures and they look like a few brothers I’ve seen in the streets looking STRAGHT. Black women can’t get a break, either our men want another man, a white woman (or other nationality that’s light with straight hair), they are locked up in jail or have a ‘use to be’ fatal disease. I’m beginning to believe Eve was a black woman and we Black women are paying for all the world’s sins through her actions (eating the apple)

Vanessa Crites, an Atlanta lesbian who received the homophobic email told the Voice, “I almost started to cry. I almost could not believe what I was looking at, and I thought that [Morehouse President] Dr. Franklin needed to know,” Crites said. “I think she covered all biases, she’s discriminating against gay black men, she’s discriminating against white women, she’s discriminating against people with HIV.”

The college promises swift action and fired an employee responsible for the email:

Morehouse College has a no-tolerance position on discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and the College has taken great strides toward building a diverse and tolerant community. After investigating the matter, the College has disciplined the persons involved in the incident, and one of the implicated employees is no longer with the College. In addition, the College has reminded its staff that the Morehouse e-mail system is College property, should be safeguarded as any other College property, and that e-mails that are discriminatory, inflammatory, or derogatory to any group are prohibited at the College.

Michael Cole Smith and Jamil Smith Cole were married in Minneapolis on Sept. 13. Michael Cole Smith owns and operates the well-known Talk of the Town Salon on Nicollet Ave. He’s done work for many local celebs including Prince, the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Minnesota Vikings and Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton.