Alex Grant and his boyfriend were holding hands and walking home from the Highgate Men’s pond of a muggy July evening when a pair of men began to shout at them. The men – one tall, one short, equally bald – were slouched against some shop shutters. Neither Alex nor his boyfriend understood the language they were shouting in, but their hostility was apparent.
The couple continued along past their abusers, trying to pay them no heed. But as they did so, they heard loud hawking noises – and each felt a wetness against their right leg. Alex’s boyfriend recalls looking down to see green phlegm gunked against his skin. They had been spat on. They began to hurry away. The taller man, a glum, hard-looking figure, rose to follow. He plucked an orange from an off-licence fruit stand and hurled it after them. It missed, narrowly.
‘Fuck off whores!’, he called, in what would eventually turn out to be Polish. ‘Fucking gays! Fuck off whores! Fuck off whores!’
The couple broke into a run; the man ran after them, scooping the errant foodstuff up off the floor and throwing it again. Once more, it missed. Alex and his boyfriend kept sprinting until the men were just barely in sight.
It all seemed at odds with the setting: they were in Hampstead, after all. It’s leafy, it’s affluent, and its residents are even famously (largely) tolerant of cruising that’s been going on up at the heath for centuries.
Alex’s boyfriend, meanwhile, is from a country where homosexuality is widely stigmatized. Part of the reason he moved to the UK was to be somewhere he could openly have a boyfriend.
‘If something like this could happen there,’ he said of the attack in Hampstead, ‘where exactly were we supposed to feel safe?’
Four days later London would hold its annual Pride parade. The festival, and pride month more generally, have come in for renewed scrutiny of late: the leader of the Reform party recently commented that he saw no issue in local councils axing the celebrations because most queer voters he spoke with felt they already have equal rights.
The trouble is this overlooks a major reason many queer people celebrate Pride: to essentially say fuck you to the many people who simply don’t like them.
It’s perhaps easy to imagine, in the age of gay marriage and newsstand magazines publishing dispatches from gay sex clubs, that old-school vitriolic homophobia has mitigated to nothing - that where it does occur, it’s an aberration. But while they may not happen to us every day, most queer people I know seem to have some experience of abject hate.
I was once passed by a car full of men who slowed right down as they passed me so that they could all repeatedly call me a faggot. I was fairly sure they were about to hop out and beat me up; I keenly remember the grip of the adrenaline on my body.
My boyfriend had a similar experience when he was 17. And he and I also share an incident: a few years ago four young lads on the Overground spent minutes flinging various slurs down the busy carriage at us - stuff like ‘battyman fi dead’ (i.e. ‘gay men must die’).
My boyfriend, thinking clearly, recorded audio of what they were saying while I, attempting to ignore them, continued attempting to describe the plot of the 1989 James Bond film, Licence to Kill. No bystanders interacted with us. We reported it to the British Transport Police, but the case was quickly shut. See it, say it, close it because it’s ‘unlikely to be solvable’.
My sister Rosa revealed as I was writing this story that she had been cornered by a group of teenage boys on the train and harassed with homo- and transphobic comments about her appearance. ‘I get that from teenage boys every time my hair is short,’ she said.
My friend Claire, meanwhile, said she’d once been walking in Brixton holding her then-girlfriend’s hand at 9am when a very large man stood in their way and shouted in their faces ‘FUCKING lesbians you better watch your FUCKING BACK,’ before spitting on the ground.
Another friend, visiting a pub in a well-to-do part of Hammersmith, recalled platonically sitting on the lap of her (straight, married) female friend, which prompted a woman to walk over and say: ‘I know what you’re doing. I’m from Sweden, we have a lot of those. It’s disgusting.’
Having gotten away from their abusers, Alex’s boyfriend just wanted to go home—but Alex insisted they call the police. The operator informed them it could take officers anywhere from five minutes to an hour to arrive, during which time their antagonists began wandering toward them.
They fled once more, phoning the police as they ran and asking for urgent assistance. This time officers arrived within ten minutes. The perpetrators were still milling around within view down the road, so it was not difficult for Alex and his boyfriend to point them out. The officers sped off and arrested them.
Police in England and Wales recorded 18,702 sexuality-based hate crimes in the year to March 2025. The total appears to have declined over the last few years, but due to recent methodology changes the 2025 figure excludes the Metropolitan police: Ben Kernighan, co-CEO of LGBT+ abuse victim support charity Galop, said that fact ‘throws into doubt whether there has been a recent reduction.’ Galop’s own helpline for queer people who have experienced abuse has seen a 27% year-on-year increase in the number of calls, he said.
Of those crimes that are reported, few see justice. London Policing Board data put the ratio of recorded homophobic hate crimes to ‘positive outcomes’ (i.e. charges, cautions and the like) in the second half of last year at about six to one - although that’s a notable improvement from eleven to one a year earlier.
The justice process following the arrest felt ‘slow - really slow’, Alex said. The trial was scheduled for April, then pushed back to June due to court delays. Alex and his boyfriend spent the year in paranoia: they didn’t know whether their attackers lived locally.
The defendants were named Dariusz Wawrzenczyk and Mariusz Smietana. Mariusz was the one who had verbally abused the couple and thrown the fruit, but both were accused of spitting.
The charge was ‘assault by beating’. In law, beating is the reckless or intentional application of unlawful force, which in this case meant spitting. Dariusz and Mariusz were not charged with committing a homophobic hate crime, per se - instead, if homophobic hostility was proven, it would be treated as an aggravating factor at sentencing.
The Met had managed to find CCTV footage showing Mariusz seizing and hurling the produce - remarkably, it also had audio, which meant the court was able to hear a translation of the abuse the two men threw at the couple.
The spitting, though, had not been caught on camera. The defendants denied it happened, accusing Alex and his boyfriend of making it all up. Dariusz, who was not depicted in the footage, claimed for a time not to have even been there at all. Alex’s boyfriend gave his testimony from behind a curtain so he didn’t have to see his abusers. At one point he broke down in tears.
But the couple’s word was more valuable than that of their attackers: they had been consistent, whereas Mariusz and Dariusz had said nothing on the day of their arrest to deny they had spat. The officer who had made the arrests had, to his credit, travelled straight to court from the end of a night shift in order to attest that Dariusz had been at the scene of the crime.
Once homophobic hate crimes reach the court, they usually result in a conviction: in 2025, the Crown Prosecution Service completed 3,532 prosecutions that were flagged as a homophobic hate crime, of which 88.8% resulted in a conviction.
But it’s likely only a minority of what would otherwise be anti-queer hate crimes even show up in the crime data in the first place: per a 2018 Government Equalities Office report, 91% of people who had experienced a serious anti-LGBTQ incident over the previous year simply didn’t report it.
Sentencing took place on 29 July. Four days earlier a van drove into a crowd of pedestrians at Berlin Pride, killing one and injuring 29.
Mariusz and Dariusz were each given a community order involving 180 hours of unpaid work, 15 rehabilitation activity requirement days and costs of a few hundred pounds. In mitigation, the court was told that Mariusz cared for a partner with serious health issues, that he had lost an unborn child, and that he had drinking issues. Little was said about Dariusz. They both continue to deny they committed any offence.
Alex was satisfied with the sentence, having felt uneasy with the idea they might be sent to prison, but he was struck by the ‘sheer lack of remorse’ they showed. He told me it was in any case ‘a relief this has come to fruition, because I know lots of people haven’t had that opportunity.’
But the hostility that night has changed life for the both of them.
‘Today I am self-conscious, especially if we’re holding hands, of individuals around us,’ Alex said in court. ‘Scanning the environment around us, looking over my shoulder to see who’s around us - risk-assessing our journeys together.’
His boyfriend, similarly, said in his victim impact statement that he had experienced homophobic bullying in school, and that ‘when I moved to London I genuinely believed I was leaving much of that fear behind. For me, London represented freedom and safety, and I hoped that I would finally be able to live an ordinary life.’
‘To be attacked here for the same reason made me feel that perhaps there was nowhere I can completely escape from homophobia.’
