When I was a kid, calling someone a 'homo' was a term of abuse, even among people who had no idea what being 'gay' meant. Then I went to a better school and was taught it was the first word in the fancy and entirely respectable phrase 'homo sapiens sapiens'. A picture of a creature gradually lifting his knuckles off the floor stuck in my memory to accompany the word. 'Homo' was replaced by other terms of abuse, and the homicidal ape known as 'homo sapiens' meant the 'me' my school was attempting to evolve me into. 'Ecce Homo' was an even finer-sounding phrase encountered very close to the end of the refining process achievable at the school to which I was sent.
At some point I also learned that 'homosexual' was more polite than 'homo' and 'gay' was to be preferred to that, unless the person concerned referred to themselves as 'queer'. It was all very confusing. Despite that, the playground term 'homo' never quite went away.
With all these variously nuanced terms available I also found over time I had a number of friends who were 'out' to varying degrees. Some of them would regularly get themselves into trouble and bring trouble onto others, (much of it also criminal in nature). I have never felt entirely comfortable about the use of the stock phrase 'homophobic crime' to mean a situation in which a gay man (or woman) comes to be a victim of crime, especially as there are a number of assumptions involved regarding the sexuality and motivations of their perpetrators.
I always have this odd feeling. It has never quite gone away over the years, from assumptions I made on first hearing the term that 'homophobic crime' that it was like 'homicide' - some kind of crime against man, as in Mankind. For reasons that I don't understand, it apparently means something wider than what used to be called 'gay-bashing', and almost includes any instance where a gay person comes to be the victim of crime.
Only relatively recently has it been measured by the police as far as I know, and when reported in the press, it is either done so as a curiosity or only in the specialist news outlets, such as Pink News. Thus it is that the trial of Adil Zahid, 27, has not received much detailed coverage locally. He used gay chatlines to find men to rob, which is apparently fairly common.
Zahid, from Walthamstow, pleaded guilty to four counts of robbery, one of false imprisonment and one theft of a motor vehicle between June and August at Wood Green crown court and has been sentenced to six years in prison. At the time of his crimes, police urged gay men to take care when using chatlines, saying that people should only meet in busy public spaces.
Meeting in public spaces, however, is not always that good an idea for gay men. Statistics out recently indicate that homophobic crime has risen a whopping 107% in Waltham Forest in the last year.
According to Stonewall, a study conducted last year, showed one in five lesbians and gay men surveyed in London had experienced a homophobic hate incident in the previous three years. But three quarters of those experiencing such an incident did not report it to the police. In fact, seven in 10 people did not tell anyone else about it.
"Over a third of respondents in our research didn't report incidents to the police because they didn't believe the police could or would do anything about them," says a Stonewall spokesman. So the number of people experiencing homophobic crime could well be far higher than crime figures show.
[Updated 12 November 2009]
Never liked any movement to create special categories of victimhood; prejudice is something else, such as not renting a flat to someone for whatever reason, or the singling-out offences mentioned above, but robbery is robbery.
Would these offences cease to be homophobic if the perpetrator is himself gay (which we aren't old?), and just become boring old crime again?
Whenever someone nicks my car I don't consider myself a victim of baldism, or beardism , or even left-handedism: they just nicked my car, and I want to do things to them which the law does not allow.