You can’t move for representations of LGBTQ+ people now, apparently. There are many of us in parliament, for instance – 69 out of 650 MPs – and you only need to stumble into A&E to be surrounded by rainbow lanyards. We can be seen everywhere on TV, film and runways, and we can be heard all across the music industry. It could be assumed that if we regularly manifest the first half of that popular Pride slogan, “we’re queer, we’re here …”, those outside our delightful social bubbles will do their bit and “get used to it”.
However, for all of LGBTQ+ people’s increased visibility, not everyone has got used to us. Recent research from Stonewall showed that only 44% of LGBTQ+ couples in the UK feel safe holding their partner’s hand in public.
And sure, when we’re in the middle of decidedly LGBTQ+ friendly places –such as Hackney or Soho or Margate, or on holiday in European cities where we know we won’t actually understand any impending words shouted at us – we will be affectionate in some ways. But more often than not, we don’t hold hands. We snatch moments of affection when we know – because we’ve checked – people aren’t looking.
Hand-holding is a common metric for LGBTQ+ people’s perceptions of the tolerance of others. If we can’t hold hands with one another, how far out of reach lies true equality? Because straight couples don’t just hold hands in public. They kiss, they cuddle, they pat each other’s bums, they play footsie under the table and fall about on crowded Sunday trains because they’re so busy getting lost in one another. And there’s at least one straight couple I recently witnessed at an exhibition of historic female artists who spent hours stand-up spooning while discussing 17th-century brushwork in baby talk.
Same-sex couples’ thoughts on holding hands is not an accurate measure of homophobia or acceptance, of course. There are plenty of single people with no one holding their hands who bend expectations of gender and face homophobia and transphobia as a result. There are too many straight people who insist that same-sex couples’ fear of reprisals for holding hands are all in our snowflakey minds. (Experience tells me they’re not.)
I’m not alone; there’s been a rise in hate crime against LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender people, in recent years. That’s only for reported crimes, because why would this community gladly report any sort of crime against the person to police forces that have been found to harbour homophobic views?
And for all the increase in our visibility, for all our abundance, the profile of our potential assailants remains vague. We don’t know who to be wary of, so we watch out for everyone. Will it be the bored teenage boys loitering near the bus stop, who are trained on manosphere TikToks and pornography’s sick scripts of what lesbians do? Is it the traditionally dressed older man shuffling down the high street who’ll spit at us? Is it the short-sleeved football fans, looking us up and down? Staying alert requires stress and vigilance, a heightened level of cortisol that many of our straight counterparts don’t have to deal with. Women will of course know the terror of aggressive men, with public harassment a real and endemic problem, but when they’re walking hand in hand with a man, at least others tend to back off.
I say “boys” and “men”, because most of the public homophobia that’s been hurled at me as one half of a lesbian couple is from men, who also get to clobber us with misogyny at the same time. However, work must be done to get a clearer idea of who is actually harming LGBTQ+ people, when they act and how productive intervention works. BBC research in 2018 found that young people are the most common perpetrators of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes, but this needs updating and intervention methods need identifying and delivering. The government has already committed to halving violence against women and girls in 10 years; I imagine some of its work in retraining the police, deterring male violence and improving victim support will protect more LGBTQ+ people and could be built upon to improve life for the whole group.
Of course, the UK is not the worst place to be LGBTQ+. On a recent trip to Morocco for a friend’s wedding, my partner and I had to pretend we were cousins. Most people bought it, until a cab driver in a remote village decided to ask us who we were to one another, then promptly tell us how much his friends hate gay people. We, avoiding eye contact with him and each other, had no idea whether he was very much on our side, or very much not. The stress of it all, on top of having to cover up so much, meant we couldn’t relax. Conversely, on another trip, this time to a women’s festival at Lesbos, we felt sheer delight at just being able to be ourselves. We’re not asking to skinny-dip in the Thames, to naked conga along Hadrian’s Wall, to have a full bacchanal in Bath. We just want to feel safe in the knowledge that we, as human beings with the same need for love as the rest of the population, belong.
Sophie Wilkinson is a freelance journalist who specialises in entertainment, celebrity, gender and sexuality
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