#policeharassment — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Nicola Griffith @[email protected] · 2026-06-04 · 15:00 UTC

Pride Not Fairyland

June is Pride month; rainbows are everywhere. In some parts of some cities in some parts of the world a visiting alien might be forgiven for thinking that being queer was something universally celebrated, something to be rejoiced in by all, with no stigma or negative consequences even a possibility. They might mistake our world for Fairyland. (Pun very much intended.)

I am not deriding Pride—far from it. We need Pride. We need to come together in joy, be among others like us and feel that being queer is safe and celebrated. We need it because for many of us, for most of the time in most places, it is not safe and it cannot be celebrated.1

Everywhere in the world queer folk are under attack. In the US and UK it has become even more dangerous for transfolk. Don’t forget this. And don’t get complacent about ‘respectable’ lesbian and gay rights like marriage and adoption. Where they do exist they are fragile.

There are many straight folk out there who simply have no idea how hard it can be to grow up queer even today, even in socially and culturally liberal enclaves. Similarly, there are many young queer folk who don’t have the faintest fucking clue of what their elders had to go through for us all to be able to have even this modicum of space to breathe.

Most people who meet me think I’m lucky, that I’ve escaped the bias, hatred and aggression of homophobia: I don’t look damaged; I don’t look like a victim; I don’t behave—or write—as a victim. But every year or two I wonder: who would I be, how might my life have turned out, if I hadn’t grown up having to walk uphill against a strong wind knowing there was an army of attackers waiting at the top?

Some years ago I had a conversation with a friend (she is still a friend; she will remain nameless) who thought that prejudice against queer folk, specifically lesbians, was a thing of the distant past, something for the history books that maybe only happened to a vague and shadowy group of Disadvantaged. I told her bluntly that, no, it happened a lot. It happened to everyone. It most certainly happened to me. She tried to wrap her head around it but part of her couldn’t quite accept it: I just didn’t look or behave like a victim. That’s because I’m not a victim, I said. I do’t understand, she said. Well, then, I said, ask me some questions.

What follows is a paraphrased transcript of our conversation.2

Well, have you ever been physically injured because you’re queer?
Yes. I was beaten by several men in a club and ended up in the emergency room covered in blood with a broken nose, concussion, etc. Every time I look in the mirror I see a face that was rearranged by fists and bottles for being a dyke—bias is written on my body. In addition, three men tried to burn my house down and rape me to show me what I was missing. Also, someone threw a brick through my window (I got out of bed and cut my feet to ribbons). Oh, and two men shotgunned the bedroom window of the flat I’d just moved out of. And coming home from the pub one night seven men made a line across the road in front of me and started telling me in graphic detail what they were going to do to me until I said, wearily, (because this was probably the twelfth time something like this had happened), okay, who wants their legs broken first? And then— Well, the list, frankly, is almost endless. (Seriously, one day, when I have nothing better to do, I’ll write it all down. I bet I could come up with more than a hundred incidents.) As for the daily microaggressions? Literally countless.

Have you ever been denied education for being queer?
Yes. I had to give up my degree course because my parents wouldn’t fund their part of the cost (this was in the UK before there were such things as student loans). “Why bother?” my mother said. “No one will give a lesbian a job, anyway.” And the fact is, no one would give me a job. And even before that my school refused to put me forward for the Oxbridge exams along with the other smart kids because they did not want their reputation sullied by the taint of homo-sex-syew-ality. And even before *that* they had threatened to expel me and my girlfriend.

Have you ever been denied official benefits for being queer?
Yes. I had to fight for five years to be able to get my Green Card. It cost somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 (at a time when, between us, Kelley and I were earning less than $30,000 a year; we maxed out three credit cards). My case made new law.3 It took years to get free of the psychological stress of constantly having to leave the country and come back in on a tourist visa and be denied entry on a whim4—I had nightmares (I still occasionally do)—and the burden of debt. If we had been legally married it would have been smooth and automatic and virtually free. In addition, I couldn’t get health insurance on Kelley’s employee ticket; this was before domestic partnership provisions. We were monumentally broke. I couldn’t get a job. I was sick. I had no health insurance. All because I’m queer. As a corollary, I suffered no only years of denial of official help but active official harm, that is, years of police harassment: dragged out of pubs by plainclothes and thrown in jail for hours and strip-searched; thrown bodily into a crowd by uniformed police in London; thrown against the wall by armoured-up SPG (Special Patrol Group) and held there with an arm across my throat so I couldn’t swallow or breathe. All for looking like a dyke and refusing to change. And there was no way to lodge a complaint: dykes would be laughed out of the room for the sheer temerity of mentioning it—and then of course the harassment would triple. Oh, and then there was the time my flat was invaded by nine uniformed police and two police dogs, and— Again, the list goes on.

Have you been been denied access to healthcare for being queer?
Yes. A gynecologist once tried to refuse me a Pap smear. Also, once in a very scary health situation, Kelley was told she would have no say in my care should anything go wrong. Fortunately, we could leave. We did. Similarly, once when Kelley was rushed to the Emergency Department for life-saving surgery they would not let through the door to her room until I left and came back with written Durable Power of Attorney and PoA for Healthcare. (Again, I could make a list.)

Has your career suffered for being queer?
Oh, let me count the ways… Actually, no. Let me give you three examples that will stand in for scores of incidents, denials, and dismissals. In 1993 as Ammonite was winning awards, I submitted a proposal for Slow River to my agent. She phoned and told me it was not a selling outline. Why not? Because Lore (the protagonist) was queer. But Ammonite‘s doing fine, I said. And she said: Yes, but the protagonist of Ammonite was on a women-only planet, she had to have a girlfriend, she had no choice poor thing. But why did you have to do that to Lore? Because she’s a dyke, I said. And fired her. (Oh, and when the book came out, the negative reviews were all about the lesbian sex: Too much! they said; it’s just Not Nice; also unrealistic for everyone to be a lesbian (but they weren’t; the main character was, and most of the people she had sex with were women, but there were plenty—plenty!—of straight folk doing their thing, too). In 1996 I sold The Blue Place on outline in the US. When I submitted the final draft my agents on both sides of the pond got very excited. And were then shocked when no one in the UK would buy it. Why wouldn’t they buy it? Because they ‘already had one of those,’ by which they meant: a novel with a lesbian narrator. One such novel, of course, was all they needed because obviously only lesbians read books about lesbians and, well, there just aren’t enough lesbians to make it cost effective. (This—that no one in the UK would touch the Aud books with a bargepole—continued to be true until 2024, when finally Canongate reissued them in the UK when FSG/Picador reissued them in the US.) And finally, for many years, whenever I published something new, the review always began something like ‘LGBT author Griffith…’ Even now, this is often still true—just not always.

There were many other questions with the same basic thrust: Did I really have a hard time? And all my answers were the same: Yes, I really did. I have been harmed physically, mentally, emotionally, legally, and financially.

I don’t generally dwell on this. I do not regard myself as a victim; I am not a pitiable figure. I choose—wilfully, daily—to focus my energies on moving forward, on staying open, on interacting with the world as humanly and humanely as possible. I’ve seen what victimhood does to those who claim it: they get bitter and wary and live behind walls so thick no one can reach them. (Or they die: my two queer sisters died young; my straight sisters are still happy and healthy and enjoying life.) They retreat further and further from the mainstream. They become even more Othered.

I honour activists who live in the war zone, and I understand those who retreat behind their fortress walls, but neither is my path. My choice is to remain as undefended as possible, to share—in person and through my work—how it feels to be me, to help others understand and empathise. To be human not Other. And more specifically to use my fiction to Norm the Other. To change the world, one reader at a time.

Perhaps because so many of us have somehow managed to weather this tide of prejudice without visible damage it’s easy for some to believe We’re All Equal Now. We’re not. Yes, as a class queerfolk are becoming more politically significant. Certainly more visible—though in the case, particularly, of transfolk this visibility can itself be dangerous. Individuals from the entire queer spectrum still can and do have a very hard time. Anti-queer prejudice is real; in many parts of the world—yes, even the US and UK—it stepped getting better s ome time ago and the bias and hatred are once again increasing. And through it all, many of us—the majority of those over a certain age—carry scars that influence our interaction with the world.

I am smart. I love my work. I have a wife and partner I trust with my life and heart. I have a home. I have a community (I have several interconnected communities). I have friends and family. In most ways I am lucky. I have a magnificent life. And still, sometimes, every few years, I wonder how it might have been. A decade or more ago I wondered how the world might change when we had achieved marriage equality and its concomitant rights. I believed a change in the law would lead to even faster and deeper change in the culture; make life easier, safer, and richer (literally and metaphorically). Might help some of us let down the barriers, just a little. And that then, oh, the world should get ready for such a flowering of human art and joy and innovation…

…and to a degree, this happened. But as I said at the beginning of this piece, those rights are fragile. We are already seeing backlash. Queer folk still face an uphill climb against a strong wind. The enemy still waits at the top of the hill.

So, yes, let’s celebrate Pride. But never forget: We do not live in fairyland.

And in fact I will be celebrating Pride with a special book event at the National Nordic Museum next week (Thurs 11 June, 6:30 pm) ↩︎
And was first published in a slightly different form as “The Personal Consequences of Growing Up Queer” ↩︎
Though the minute that new law was revealed—on the front page of th eWall Street Journal, where I was called a ‘kook’—the law was changed and the National Interest Waiver discontinued. ↩︎
Did you know it was illegal for homosexuals to even enter the US as a tourist until 1991? ↩︎

#consequences #homophobia #policeHarassment #pride #queerBashing

#consequences #homophobia #policeharassment #pride #queerbashing