YOU CAN GET MARRIED NOW, but can you walk down the street without being attacked? Maybe you can, if you live in cosmopolitan London. I’ve spotted at least three gay couples brazenly holding hands this past week alone – but try pulling that sort of thing in a quiet, traditional village and you may be opening yourself up for all sorts of trouble. A new report from the University of Leicester suggests that hate crime is an “everyday reality” for many LGBT people. Tell us something we don’t know, right? Maybe you’re lucky enough to live somewhere safe and accepting. Maybe you don’t ‘act’ gay, and ‘get away with it’ that way. If so, good for you. But I suspect that, at some point or other, most of us rainbow babies have experienced abuse on the streets.
I’d like to think that the worst thing about living outside of London is not being able to get a decent facial on your lunch break but, sadly, for regional gay people it’s a tad more serious than that. Dr Stevie-Jade Hardy, a lecturer at the University of Leicester’s Centre for Hate Studies and author of a new report into hate crime, says that people in rural communities are being left “lonely and isolated with nowhere to turn”. Blame regional yobs with nothing better to do than terrorise people like us. “It would often start with young people shouting derogatory names and then escalate to where victims’ houses were being vandalised,” says Dr Hardy, adding, “the impact can be devastating. Some LGBT people are scared to leave the house, feeling anxious, fearful and vulnerable.”
Tell me about it, sister. When I lived at home with my grandma as a teenager, in a small town on the outskirts of Nottingham, I used to peer out from behind the net curtain to check if it were safe to go outside. She lived, sadly, in a cul-de-sac of homophobia. One neighbour had three horrible, noisy boys, and they’d often shout “You’re gay” at me whenever I had the temerity to walk out my own front door. Yes, thanks for that, lads. I mean, it wasn’t that bad – at least they didn’t threaten to beat me up, like the older lads waiting for me at the corner shop – but it was enough to make a girl like me (a queenie gay boy, outwardly, at the time) ever so slightly anxious.
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