‘TO SAY THAT LGBT+ PEOPLE ARE SAFE IN WALES IS BOLD AND FALSE’
Homophobic threats still haunt LGBT+ people in Wales every day, says Joseph Ali, as he recounts the depressing experiences of abuse and intimidation he and others in the LGBT+ community have experienced on the streets of Wales...
BEING a part of the LGBT+ community is a beautiful experience on the whole. Even online spaces can sometimes be a great place to connect and learn from each other.
But on the ground, in our day-today lives, it can be a different story entirely.
To say that LGBT+ people, wherever they may place themselves on the initialism, are completely safe and should act like it, is a bold and simply false statement.
To piece together just a fraction of the evidence, I used a pretty common resource: the internet.
But before I delve into all of that, I want to talk a little bit about my own experiences being gay in Wales.
Growing up, I was never taught anything about being gay, what it meant or how to safely navigate that world.
I was about 12 years old when I knew I was gay. But to lessen the blow, I came out as bisexual first. A move, that for some reason, made my peers in school accept me a little bit more.
I was made fun of in PE lessons. I was the talk of the year group, and the school, at one point.
It was a vanity experience that I didn’t ask for. Attention is great, but when it’s constant questions, whispers and laughter directed at you, it becomes hard to deal with.
If we’re talking specifically about hate crime, my first experience was when I was 18. Newly an adult, newly available to hit the club, legally, for the first time in my life.
And I wanted to get to the gay clubs of course, because that’s what everyone who was young and LGBT+ like me at the time wanted to do.
Walking to the club, wearing a red cardigan and skinny jeans, I felt great.
I was bronzed, my eyebrows were done, and I felt really excited and good. But that was all torn to shreds when a loud “Oi, f****t” was shouted my way from a bouncer. I felt instantly exposed.
I felt that all the times my mum said she was worried finally made sense. Some people were just not accepting of who I was and to experience that, alone, and late at night was scary.
Another moment was just a few years ago. With my best friend, we went to grab some food after a trip to Pulse before we tried to flag down a taxi ride home.
This was a weird one, because it was in front of people. It was in a public place; you’re supposed to feel at ease. A man and his girlfriend had the same idea as us, got some food, but they added an extra bit of homophobia with their order it seemed.
They called my friend a f****t and chaos ensued. I was raging. I love my friends, and to be called vile names with him just felt like a different experience entirely.
I have been so incredibly lucky to have not experienced physical abuse due to homophobia in Wales.
I’ve never been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I know people who have. I know people who have been jumped by a mob of people in London on the Tube.
I know people in Cardiff who’ve been beaten, simply because they exist.
And unless you’ve been living under a rock, we all know about the murder of Gary Jenkins – a murder that took place in the middle of a public park in Cardiff city centre.
LGBT+ people in Wales and beyond have a right to feel safe, show affection in public and be themselves. But we can’t, it’s too risky. And it’s not just me who thinks so.
Owain Proctor, 31, from Cardiff, told me about his reasoning for not showing affection while with his boyfriend out in public.
“Growing up gay in Wales gave me
PTSD in some degree. When I came out in school, being gay was not OK. As far as I know, I had a really tough time with it.
“I feel like if I presented gay in the streets I didn’t feel safe. I just didn’t.
“I was actually beaten up while I was travelling to work on Christmas Eve. I was jumped whilst on the Tube in London by four guys because I had supposedly gay shoes on.
“I was on a tube at eight in the morning, and not one person helped me. I was spat at and a lady with tissues opposite me didn’t even offer me one to help clean myself. Maybe it was the way I was carrying myself at the time, I don’t know. But that really scared me.
“When I was 14 or 15, I was bullied in high school. I go to the gym now, and I’m not small any more.
“But I think things like ‘am I OK in this situation?’ or ‘will I need to defend myself?’. And talking about the recent Gary Jenkins murder, I can’t believe that this is still happening. I thought this generation wouldn’t have to deal with the same issues I did, but things haven’t changed.
“In Cardiff in particular I get this small city vibe. Places like London have that big city attitude, but I sometimes feel Cardiff and Wales is stuck in its ways a little bit. I won’t hold my boyfriend’s hand in the street. I think it’s great that the younger generation
is being open and speaking up, but for a lot of the older generations we still have that fear ingrained within us.”
Jaz Sakura-Rose, 46, who lives in Nelson just outside Caerphilly, told me she feels safe for the most part in Wales but the recent transphobic and homophobic attacks in places like Cardiff have worried her.
“It’s very rare that I don’t feel safe as an LGBT+ person in Wales. It has happened, but it’s very rare, and I haven’t been physically attacked. Like a lot of trans people, though, I have had to develop a lot of situational ‘sudden inability to hear people around me’, or a sudden inability to notice the stares (or even being recorded by people on their phones which is less than pleasant.
“There’s always this fear in the back of my head of being attacked. I don’t feel it that much up in the Valleys – well, most places – but if I have to head to Newport, say, then it becomes much more obvious as a fear to me. Unfortunately, the homophobic and transphobic attacks in Cardiff are incredibly alarming. I doubt I’d feel safe being in either place by myself.”
Even our own Senedd members have been the victim of hate crimes.
Member of the Senedd for Delyn, Hannah Blythyn, said in a recent article she wrote for Wales On Sunday’s website, WalesOnline, following the murder of Gary Jenkins, that she and her wife have been subjected to LGBT+ hate crime.
“It can be difficult to reach or speak out, and many of our experiences are all too familiar – myself included,” she wrote.
“From wondering whether it is safe to hold my wife’s hand in public to dealing with the mix of misogyny and homophobia behind ignorant comments online and in person. Only recently, on the back of launching the Welsh Government’s LGBTQ+ Action Plan, my wife and I have been subject to what has been recorded as a hate crime.
“What was once considered not OK to say, is now said out loud in public. Fake news and false narratives have become much more pervasive. This is not about political correctness – this is about treating one another with dignity and respect. That what is said by those in power or with a platform has consequences. It is clear that we need to be better able to hold those with power and the platforms provided to account. Enough is enough.”
She is right. Enough is enough. It’s scary being an LGBT+ person in 2022 Wales.
From older generations to new ones, we’re still being taught the same lessons. We’re being told to “take care” more so than our heterosexual peers, because our risk of discrimination and violence is way higher.
According to a BBC report released in 2020, there was a 354% increase in trans hate crimes from 2015. The abuse quadrupled for this community.
During the pandemic, reported homophobic hate crimes in the UK soared. We are not looked at as equal in this society, we’re still the bad guys.
Ed Barnes, 23, grew up in Worcester but moved to Cardiff in August 2021 to study for his master’s degree. Two months before, on his first trip to the city, he was chased out of a park. A journalism student, he recounted his experience.
“I came down to look at a few places. A guy was showing me around town and I guess it became a bit of a date. We started kissing on a bench in Cathays Park when a group of teenagers started walking across the park quickly towards us.
“Immediately they started shouting ‘get the f*** out of here with that gay sh**’ and a bunch of other slurs. At this point, I just knew we needed to get out of the park. There were about seven or eight of them versus the two of us so I didn’t fancy our chances.
“They probably would have cut us off if we hadn’t moved quickly but we made it out of the park, perhaps because a family happened to come in as we tried to leave.
“It was the middle of the day and there were plenty of people in the park. I’ve had my share of homophobia in the past from comments, people spitting or bottles thrown at you while kissing in the club.
“However, this was the first time I felt genuinely scared and threatened. Then over the summer we saw high-profile attacks in cities like Liverpool and Edinburgh and obviously Cardiff with what happened to Gary Jenkins.
“Friends of mine have experienced abuse for the first time in years and the general consensus is things aren’t getting better.
“We have plenty of great LGBT+ spaces in Cardiff but what about when you leave them? It seems like there’s not a great deal you can do. You’re hardly going to be able to keep every homophobe or transphobe away but we need to start taking action. Education, reminding those debating the issues that we’re human beings at the end of the day.”
A lot more needs to be done, and these case studies are just a tiny fraction of Wales’ LGBT+ population who probably feel the same way.
The time to take action and make changes in our society is now.