Introduction

Research on the topic of street harassment has been rapidly expanding. However, similarly to critiques of research on gender-based violence more broadly, this work has been framed predominantly in relation to sexism and (cis)gendered power inequalities (Fileborn & O’Neill, 2021). In doing so, this field of research is largely unable to account for the experiences of gender and sexuality diverse people and the attendant roles of homo-, bi-, and trans-phobia, and cis-heterosexism (alongside other structures of power and oppression; Callander et al. 2019; Crenshaw, 1991; Donovan and Barnes 2020; Erbaugh, 2007; Fileborn & O’Neill, 2021 Graaff 2021). As with other forms of gendered violence, the focus on cisgender women is not unwarranted. Internationally, research demonstrates that public harassmentFootnote 1 is a pervasive and frequent occurrence for women, and that this harassment is almost exclusively engaged in by men (Fileborn & O’Neill 2021; Hindes & Fileborn 2022; Logan, 2015). However, as we explore momentarily, a smaller body of work illustrates that sexuality and gender-diverse people are subject to disproportionately high rates of street harassment (Kearl, 2014). It is, therefore, imperative to develop a robust understanding of LGBTQ+ people’s experiences of public harassment to inform theoretical and conceptual understandings of this phenomenon, and to ensure that queer experiences are reflected within policy and prevention efforts.

In this article, we aim to expand existing literature on street harassment by examining LGBTQ+ participants’ experiences of street harassment in Australia. We explore the nature and impacts of LGBTQ+ people’s experiences of street harassment. While there are certainly points of similarity and overlap with those of cisgender, heterosexual women, our findings suggest that LGBTQ+ people also encounter unique forms, contexts, and trajectories of public harassment. We argue that a more nuanced understanding of street harassment which considers homo-, bi-, and trans-phobia, and cis-heterosexism allows a deeper understanding of this phenomena, with our argument strongly informed by Crenshaw’s (1991) conceptualization of intersectionality.

Intersectionality recognizes that we are all differentially situated within structures of power, with these interlocking structures producing unique experiences of oppression and discrimination that cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts. As one of us has argued elsewhere (Fileborn, 2019a: 224), this approach “does not seek to construct hierarchies of oppression or to categorically organize and delimit lived experiences of street harassment,” and nor do we suggest that these categories or structures of power are fixed or essential. Rather, intersectionality allows us to consider the specificity of queer experiences without collapsing points of difference (see also Colliver, 2021). We first outline what is currently know about queer street harassment, and discuss the research methodology, before moving on to examine key findings.

Queer Street Harassment

While most street harassment research is cisheteronormative, there are some notable exceptions which provide insights into LGBTQ+ peoples experiences. This smaller body of research demonstrates that LGBTQ+ people experience similar, if not higher, rates of street harassment to cisgender, heterosexual women. A US-based national survey undertaken by Stop Street Harassment (Kearl, 2014) found that LGBT+ participants experienced higher rates of street harassment compared to cisgender heterosexual participants (57% vs. 37%). LGBT+ participants were also more likely to say they experienced street harassment daily compared to cisgender heterosexual participants (7% compared to 1%). Szalcha and colleagues (2017) survey of 8850 women in Australia found that sexual minority women were two to three times more likely to experience harassment than heterosexual women. A recent Australian study of NSW-based LGBTQ+ people also found high rates of sexual harassment, though this was not specific to the ‘street’ or ‘public’ space (Layard et al., 2022).

An Australian study of 528 trans and gender-diverse people found that 84.7% had experienced silent harassment (e.g., staring and non-verbal gestures), 71.1% had experienced verbal harassment, and 43.2% had experienced sexual harassment which they believed was because of their gender expression (Kerr et al. 2019). Ussher and colleagues (2022) qualitative Australian study with transgender women of color similarly found that all participants frequently experienced harassment in public places, including staring and ‘hostile’ looks, which participants interpreted as overtly transphobic rather than sexual flirtation or ‘appreciation.’ Participants in Ussher and colleagues (2022) study also reported frequent misgendering, abusive verbal comments and racist abuse. However, the experiences of trans and cisgender sexuality diverse women may be occluded in some research on street harassment where diverse gender and/or sexuality is not recorded or deployed as a category of analysis (see Fogg-Davis, 2006, and Kolysh, 2021 for some notable exceptions).

Visibility and the Policing of Queerness in Public

While the street harassment literature may be scarce in terms of LGBTQ+ people’s experiences, there is nonetheless strong evidence that LGBTQ+ people experience violence, policing and regulation of their gender and sexual identities in public spaces. In particular, the research on LGBTQ+ hate crime points to the violence and abuse LGBTQ+ people encounter across public and private spaces (though we do not suggest space can be readily classified in a binary, stable way; Clayton and colleagues 2022; Colliver, 2021). Notably, this work draws attention to the centrality of visibility in the violence perpetrated against LGBTQ+ people (see e.g., Colliver, 2021; Mason, 2001). Namaste (1996: 221) argued that “a perceived transgression of normative sex-gender relations motivates much of the violence against sexual minorities” with this violence serving to police “gender presentation through public and private space.” In relation to street harassment specifically, Fileborn (2021: 43, original emphasis) remarks that it “curtails queer embodiment in public space…at best, queerness may be tolerated so long as it is not made visible through bodily practices and interactions". Research by Mason (2001), Tomsen and Markwell (2009), and Fileborn (2021) illustrates how LGBTQ+ people manage their visibility as a means of affording a sense of safety in public spaces. However, as Colliver (2021: 166) observes, (in)visibility and safety vis-à-vis ‘passing’ are “messy” and “not clear cut,” something we attend to further in this article.

We also see the theme of visibility come into play in literature on the (criminal legal) policing of LGBTQ+ people in public spaces, with this work indicating that bodies that appear visibly queer or non-conforming are read as deviant and risky by law enforcement, rendering them targets of surveillance, control and intervention (Dwyer, 2012, 2015; Fileborn, 2019b; Girardi 2022). Collectively, this work illustrates that harassment and violence against visibly queer people (or those presumed to be queer) in public space functions as a mechanism for (re)inforcing public space as cisheteronormative, (re)producing queer lives and bodies as ‘other.’ It is also important to acknowledge that this public policing (both literal and figurative) of queerness is nothing new, with these forms of violence mired within a long and troubling history (see, e.g., Dalton, 2007).

The research discussed here illustrates that LGBTQ+ people also frequently encounter harassment in public places, and that these experiences are likely to have substantively negative impacts, particularly when considered alongside other forms of systemic exclusion and discrimination. While there is overlap between the concepts of hate crime and street harassment, these bodies of work address in some respects distinct contexts and forms of violence. We argue there is a clear need for research that examines the LGBTQ+ people’s experiences of street-based harassment in order to inform theoretical, conceptual and practice-based responses to this behavior.

Methods

In this article, we draw on findings from semi-structured qualitative interviews with 25 LGBTQ+ participants from a broader study on justice responses to street harassment in Victoria and New South Wales, Australia. The study sought to examine people’s self-defined experiences of street harassment and the impacts of these experiences across their lives, disclosure and reporting practices, and participants’ understandings of justice and desired justice responses to street harassment. In this article, we focus specifically on the experiences and impacts of harassment for participants who identified as gender and/or sexuality diverse. Ethics approval was received from the University of Melbourne Human Research Ethics Committee prior to commencing fieldwork.

To be eligible, participants were required to be age 18 or older, and to have self-defined experiences of street or public harassment, inclusive of harassment relating to gender, sexuality, transphobia, racism, and ableism. The study recruitment materials explicitly stated that participation was open to people of all genders and sexualities, and study advertisements were promoted by LGBTQ+ community groups and organizations in addition to the use of paid social media advertisements. All individuals who expressed interest in participating were provided with a copy of the study consent form and plain language statement that explained the aims of the project and what participation would involve. An overview of LGBTQ+ participants is provided in Table 1.Footnote 2

Table 1 overview of LGBTQ+ participants
Full size table

Prior to taking part in an interview, participants were invited to complete a Google map documenting experiences of street harassment across their life (see Fileborn, 2023 for a more detailed overview). This map was used as the starting point for the interview discussion, with participants invited to talk the researcher through their map. This approach aimed to afford participants’ control over the interview discussion and to center experiences that they felt were important to raise. Interviews took between 1–2 h to complete, and all interviews except one were conducted over Zoom or phone as the fieldwork was undertaken during the COVID19 pandemic. Participants were reimbursed with a $100 gift card in recognition of their time and expertise. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed by an external service with participants’ consent. Participants were able to review their interview transcripts if they wished. The transcripts were anonymized, and all participants are referred to using a pseudonym.

This research was informed by social constructionist and post-structuralist thought, meaning that we view analysis as a process of interpretation and sense-making that is always partial, situated and located within a particular socio-historic context (Braun & Clarke, 2022). The interview data analysis was guided by Braun and Clarke’s (2019, 2022) approach to thematic analysis, with initial coding and analysis conducted by the first-named author. This process of coding was iterative and involved undertaking an initial read of each transcript to immerse the researcher in the data and develop tentative themes. The researcher then coded all transcripts using a series of deductive and inductive codes. This included coding all LGBTQ+ participants’ experiences under the higher-level codes of ‘experiences of street harassment—LGBTQ+ ,’ impacts, contexts of harassment, and changes in experiences over time, with these codes driven by the interview and broader research questions. Inductive codes were then developed through further engagement with the data by the first-named author.

The second-named author then assisted in the conceptual interpretation of the data. In this stage, both authors discussed what was unique or specific to the experiences of LGBTQ+ participants in the dataset. In doing so, we developed the conceptual themes which are represented in the findings including: (in)visibility, which profoundly shaped whether and how participants experienced public harassment; temporality and trajectories of harassment across the life course, incorporating the influence of political events as a sub-theme within this; and the specific impacts experienced by LGBTQ+ participants.

Both authors remained attentive to how their positionality and subjectivity influenced the research process. Both researchers identify as genderqueer, and the second-named researcher identifies as queer in terms of their sexuality. They have also personally experienced street harassment based on their gender and/or sexuality. This situated them as "insiders" in many aspects of the research (Gorman-Murray et al. 2010). However, they were also mindful of their position as "outsiders" (Gorman-Murray et al. 2010) in relation to certain experiences, such as firsthand encounters with transphobia and other structural impacts described by participants.

Findings

Participants’ experiences of public harassment could be broadly categorized as either homophobic, transphobic, or as reinforcing cis-heterosexism through the policing of gender. However, experiences often traversed all of these, particularly for gender non-conforming and/or transgender participants. In the following sections, we arrange the discussion around two notable themes that weaved throughout participants’ experiences—(in)visibility, and temporality and trajectories of harassment—and use these to illustrate common forms of harassment. We then move on to discuss the impacts experienced by LGBTQ+ participants including impacts on behavior, identity, and emotions and mental health. We have organized our findings in this way to foreground the unique aspects of queer people’s experiences. Indeed, while the form that harassment took was often (though not always) similar to that encountered by cisgender, heterosexual women (e.g., verbal abuse, staring/leering), the content and contexts of harassment could be distinct. While we attempt to draw out how experiences of harassment differed across different iterations of sexual and gender difference, as we are discussing the experiences of LGBTQ+ participants generally in this work we inevitably collapse and gloss over important points of difference in how street harassment is encountered and lived.

(In)Visibility

Queer experiences of street harassment were intimately entwined with the concept of visibility, with both heightened visibility as a queer person, and invisibility or illegibility as queer, shaping whether and how harassment unfolded. While the experiences discussed here were overwhelmingly perpetrated by people who were assumed to be cisgender, heterosexual men, some participants also discussed harassment from people who were assumed to be cisgender, heterosexual women, and lateral violence from LGBTQ+ community members (especially biphobic, racist and transphobic harassment).

Transgender and gender-diverse participants in this study recalled experiences of harassment due to “not doing gender right” (Aaron, 36, transmasculine, bisexual). Often this harassment was aggressive, with harassers calling them derogatory names, sometimes with threats of, or experiences of physical violence. For example, Aaron (36, transmasculine, bisexual) recalls this experience:

I was in my last year of primary school and I got a can of Coke pitched at my head when I was walking home from school, because yeah I guess I was known to be butch I guess, you know gender non-conforming in some way.


Trans and gender-diverse participants discussed experiencing sexual harassment including being followed, propositioned, and groped, often with comments about their bodies. Virginia & Winona,Footnote 3 (30, Transgender Women, heterosexual) described experiencing relentless sexual harassment from men, recalling how:

…guys would follow me home and be like saying what they wanted to do with me, they wanted to lick my feet, they wanted to like suck my dick or they wanted to like do all of these sexual things to me.


Another common form of harassment described by transgender and gender-diverse participants was having inappropriate comments and invasive questions asked about them and their gender. Participants shared examples such as “wow you look exotic,” “are you a boy or a girl?,” “‘why do you look like that?,” and “I need to know if you are a man or woman.” These types of questions and comments served to remind participants that they were different, reinforced binary and cis-heterosexist understandings of gender, and demanded that trans and gender-diverse people owe an explanation of who they are when they are out in public. Conversely, Virginia and Winona discussed situations where they passed as cisgender when hooking up with men at nightclubs and were subsequently harassed and physically assaulted when these men ‘discovered’ they were transgender. This illustrates the double-edged nature of visibility and passing, with transgender and gender non-conforming people subjected to harassment for not doing their gender ‘correctly’ and for passing as cisgender. Winona and Virginia also reflected throughout their interview that transgender people were particularly vulnerable to harassment due to the broader social and structural context that positions them as “easy targets.”

One of the most common forms of harassment described by participants was having homophobic abuse yelled at them and/or threats of violence made towards them because of their sexuality. Participants reported encountering homophobic abuse when they presented in a visibly queer way, for example by showing affection or holding hands with their partner in public. As Franklin remarked “we committed the terrible sin, my partner and I, of holding hands” and by doing it you are “taking a big risk,” whereas this is something “that is so unremarkable for any heterosexual couple.” Two participants reported being called “disgusting” for being in public with their partners:

we were walking hand in hand and walked past an elderly Greek woman who cursed at us and then spat on the floor going kind of like going disgusting, disgusting. (Chris, 27, cis-man, homosexual/queer).

...we were just going on a walk me and my girlfriend and this man on a bike was like disgusting, he fully said that we were disgusting (Dee, 24, cis-woman, bisexual).


Visibility was a common thread running through participants’ experiences. It was not only identifying as gender or sexuality diverse that resulted in harassment but rather being visibly or identifiably queer. Indeed, as we discuss later, passing as cisgender or heterosexual in certain spatial contexts was a key form of safety work deployed by participants (Vera-Gray & Kelly, 2020), though as the aforementioned comments from Virginia and Winona already illuminate, passing itself was not without risk. In these cases, harassment functions to re-establish public space as masculine and heteronormative (Fileborn, 2021), with visible queerness positioned as abject and ‘other’—a ‘disgusting’ aberration to be policed and managed (Mason, 2001). For same-sex/gender attracted women, public displays of sexuality could be rearticulated as a spectacle for the pleasure and consumption of cisgender heterosexual men. Dee (24, cis-woman, bisexual) recounted being on a date with a woman and kissing in a public space when “a group of men crowded around us and started filming.” While queer sexuality is not explicitly constructed as ‘disgusting’ in this example, we can nonetheless understand Dee’s experience as a reassertion of the heteronormativity of public spaces. What might have been lived as a moment of queer intimate (yet public) exchange is transformed into a hyper-visible performance in a way that public heterosexual intimacy is rarely subject to.Footnote 4

(In)visibility and/or how participants’ gender and sexuality was read by others could also shape the form that harassment took. Participants who were (mis)read as queer women reported receiving harassment that was sexual and homophobic in nature. Aaron (36, transmasculine, bisexual) recalled two incidents when he was misgendered as a woman in a relationship with another woman being asked by a group of men, “hey girls who wears the strap on?” and whether they “were special friends". In Aaron’s case, he is both subject to abuse on account of his heightened visibility as a queer person, while his gender identity is simultaneously rendered invisible or occluded through harassment that misgendered him.

Participants described how the harassment they received varied depending on how the harasser perceived their gender or sexuality. Chrissy (22, cis-woman, queer) reflected that when she is read as a straight woman, the harassment she received can be “passed off as complimentary,” whereas for her friends who are more visibly queer “it’s always aggressive.” Parker (42, non-binary, queer) similarly said:

There’s definitely a difference between when they would’ve perceived me as queer versus when they would’ve perceived me as straight as well. So the difference there would’ve been hostility and aggression towards me, so that would’ve shifted from being like some sort of sexual advance to hostility around, so that would’ve switched into a sexuality issue.


Bisexual and queer cis-women often experienced similar types of harassment to straight cis-women, that being sexist/sexual harassment from cisgender-men, based on the presumption that they were heterosexual (simultaneously making invisible their identity as queer women). However, some of these women additionally experienced homophobic harassment when they were read as queer. This meant that bisexual and queer women were often experiencing multiple and compounding types of harassment. This aligns with research demonstrating that sexual minority women are at heightened risk of gender-based violence as not only are they experiencing violence based on their gender as a woman, but also from deviating from the norm of heterosexuality (Graaff 2021; Szlacha et al. 2017). Yet, sexuality is too often erased from mainstream studies on street harassment. This effectively erases bi + and queer women’s experiences and paints gendered violence as a ‘heterosexual problem’ (Donovan and Hester 2014).

Finally, while we have discussed the visibility of diverse gender and sexuality in a siloed way in this section, for participants who were visibly both gender and sexuality diverse, it was often impossible to disentangle on what basis they were being targeted for harassment (see also Mason, 1993). As Alex recalls:

...it wasn’t clear if they were trying to harass me because they thought I was a gay man, if they were trying to harass us because they perceived us as a lesbian couple, or if they were trying to harass me because I was wearing pink denim jacket and therefore not gender conforming (Alex, 26, non-binary, queer)

Temporality and Trajectories of Harassment

Another notable theme across participants’ experiences was that of temporality and trajectories of harassment over time. This theme provided striking contrast to the experiences of cisgender, heterosexual women, who typically discussed experiencing heightened sexual harassment during their adolescence, with the frequency of harassment decreasing over time (though there were, of course, exceptions to this pattern) (Fileborn & Hardley, 2023). In contrast, for queer participants, while trajectories of harassment sometimes did unfold in this linear age-related way, for others the nature and extent of harassment related to the visibility of their queerness, their gender affirmation process, and the social and political context surrounding gender and sexuality in particular times and spaces.

As a cisgender, lesbian woman, Ingrid (66) reflected on how her experiences of harassment shifted from sexist and gender-based harassment, to more overt homophobic harassment in early adulthood:

When I was thinking about doing this [interview] I thought well do I start from when I was a woman like a female, do I start from puberty pretty much, or do I start from you know homophobic comments. So…I’ve had pretty much a lifetime of it, because as a woman you get harassed, it's just you know with homophobia they pinpoint your sexuality and I think there's even more like, these people feel like they’ve got more right to do this.

Ingrid also discussed experiencing less sexualized harassment as she grew older (something mirroring cisgender, heterosexual women’s experiences), saying “I’m just invisible” and no longer perceived as a sexual object.

Some participants indicated that they began experiencing or encountered more frequent harassment when they started presenting as visibly queer, highlighting the entanglement between the theme of (in)visibility and queer trajectories of harassment. Chris (cisgender man, homosexual/queer, 27) discussed harassment becoming “more frequent as I’ve become more comfortable with my queerness.” He also indicated that in the 12 months leading up to the interview he had “stopped being openly queer in public in order to…not have these experiences anymore,” and that he had subsequently been experiencing less frequent harassment. Chris’ comments reiterate the role of (in)visibility in shaping queer experiences of harassment, and further demonstrate the nonlinearity of visibility and trajectories of harassment across the life course. Indeed, Chris discussed the ongoing emotional labor involved in having to “constantly renegotiate” feelings of shame associated with being queer “when something like this [public harassment] happens.”

For trans and gender-diverse participants, the forms and frequency of harassment were often related to their process(es) of gender affirmation. Aaron (trans masculine, bisexual, 36) described experiencing less harassment over time as he transitioned to male. While Aaron encountered anti-lesbian harassment and policing of his butch gender presentation when younger, Aaron said:

Since I’ve started passing as male, I just don’t have any issues…the sense that the world is like on my side just like can’t be overstated, like yeah, you really notice that there's just no threatening or creepy behaviour anymore.


However, Aaron also discussed the limits of this increased sense of safety and access to male privilege since transitioning. As Aaron said, “if I used a men’s toilets and I was somehow perceived to be like not having a penis, like I would worry that I might be killed.” So, while Aaron did generally experience less harassment and increased sense of safety since transitioning, this was attended by “a very big caveat,” and contingent on the invisibility of his trans identity (at least in heteronormative, sex/gender segregated spaces).

Virginia and Winona also reflected on how their experiences of harassment had changed over time. They discussed experiencing extensive harassment as teenagers presenting as effeminate gay men. As they transitioned, their experiences of harassment shifted from being underpinned by homophobia to transphobia and sexism. However, Virginia and Winona also felt that they encountered less harassment overall as transgender women (though it is worth reiterating that they both recounted extensive experiences of harassment as transgender women, and remarked on the increased vulnerability of transgender women), saying:

I thought if I transitioned I’d be more discriminated against, but like it actually helped me get less discriminated against, because feminine gay boys you can’t even blend in with society… If you're flamboyant or very like girly you know, it's like more not acceptable…Whereas now I guess I fit into society’s gender roles better because I look like … [a] really feminine woman, nice hair, like has make up on, short skirt, I feel like I kind of tick the boxes of society’s expectations of what a woman should be. So, I get treated better than a boy that breaks all of those rules you know.


Thus, while they experienced overt harassment as transgender women, their proximity to normative femininity afforded them some protection, relative to inhabiting a subordinated form of masculinity. Virginia and Winona also commented that their experiences of harassment were now more likely to be taken seriously by others, as their adherence to normative femininity meant they more closely aligned with cultural constructions of ‘real’ or ‘deserving’ victims.

The broader political context could also shape experiences of harassment, with participants discussing heightened periods of harassment—or fear and anxiety around the potential for harassment to occur—relating to political ‘debate’ about gender and sexuality diverse people. Within the Australian context, this included a period of intense public ‘debate’ in the lead up to a national plebiscite on marriage equality, backlash in response to the Safe Schools programFootnote 5 (see Law, 2017), and international ‘debate’ and legislation seeking to restrict transgender people’s access to public toilets and other sex/gender segregated facilities. The role of political debate in relation to toilet access arose organically in an early interview for the project, and participants were subsequently prompted to reflect on this issue.

Around the time of the same-sex marriage plebiscite in Australia when all Australians were asked to vote on whether same sex couples should be legally allowed to marry, Brett (29, cis-man, homosexual) recalled people in a car yelling out ‘vote no’ [to marriage equality] at him and his partner. Parker (Parker, 42, non-binary, queer) reflected:

...we got things in the mailbox, you know it’s okay to vote no kind of stuff…it was really hateful, hateful stuff in the mail […] we were definitely less safe at that time and a lot of horrible things were being said in the media and by politicians particularly.


Alex (26, non-binary, queer) raised the plebiscite during a broader discussed about public debate on transgender people’s access to public toilets, saying that there “was a heightened sense of…empowerment for people taking issue or saying what they thought” during this time.

Harassment when using public bathrooms was commonly raised by trans and gender-diverse participants. Aaron said harassment in bathrooms intensified when he was living in the United States during a period of debate over a bill proposing to legislate the exclusion of trans and gender-diverse people from using bathrooms that did not align with their assigned gender at birth. Parker (42, non-binary, queer) similarly described transphobic harassment intensifying when trans issues are being debated in politics saying: “there’s been a lot more hostility around times when you know Scott Morrison [former Australian prime minister] starts raising issues around trans stuff, you know. So it sort of brings people out of the woodwork around those sorts of periods.”

Such experiences illustrate how the trajectories of harassment across participants’ lives could be intimately connected to political ‘flashpoints’ in a way that was not discussed in the accounts of cisgender, heterosexual women. Political and media discourse contributed towards a conducive context for anti-queer harassment by legitimating the harassment of queer people. These accounts demonstrate the very tangible impacts that political and media commentary have on the safety and well-being of gender and sexuality diverse communities. Indeed, the “horrible things” articulated by politicians and media can themselves arguably be conceptualized as a form of public harassment. We move on now to examine the impacts of these experiences.

Behavioral Impacts—"Every Single Queer Person Makes a Choice Whether or not They’re Visible When they Step Out the Door”

Participants described queerphobic harassment as having significant impacts on their day-to-day behavior. While many of these behavioral impacts mirrored those experienced in the wider street harassment literature, such as the ‘safety work’ of planning safer routes, avoiding public spaces that were experienced as unsafe, and adjusting clothing to not attract attention (see for example: Fileborn, 2021; Vera-Gray, 2018), there were behavioral impacts unique to LGBTQ+ participants (see also Fileborn, 2021; Mason, 2001; Tomsen & Markwell, 2009). Most notably participants discussed engaging in extensive safety work to avoid appearing visibly queer in public. Avoiding showing affection to a partner in public was one theme that was common across the interviews, although some participants also discussed refusing to adapt their behavior as a form of resistance (see also Mason, 2001). While the degree to which participants avoided affection varied, with some avoiding all affection, and others okay to hold hands but not to kiss or hug, there was a consensus that showing affection to partners in public was dangerous and made you a target for harassment vis-à-vis being visibly queer. This is in stark contrast to the experiences of cisgender, heterosexual women, who generally discussed being with a male partner as something that enhanced their safety, though it did not guarantee that they would not experience harassment.

I think walking … hand in hand with my partner it’s like, the first impulse is just to like pull your hand away and kind of pretend to not be queer (Chris, 27, cis-man, homosexual/queer)


Participants discussed avoiding interacting with people in public by keeping their head down, not making eye contact, and not speaking to try and avoid being flagged as queer. Participants often sought to make themselves ‘smaller’ and less visible, seeking to blend in with a heteronormative world:

...I was really feminine so … I thought like I had to just blend in and not be noticed, so I just wouldn’t talk to anyone and I just would you know walk with my head down, I’d just try not to make eye contact […] just you know not to be noticed and not to speak. Because as soon as I spoke people were like oh you sound like a girl, like are you gay or whatever. (Virginia & Winona, 34, trans women, heterosexual)


Participants also spoke about avoiding going to overtly heteronormative spaces after experiencing harassment. For example, Aaron (36, transmasculine, bisexual) talked about avoiding a particular bar where people would go to watch sports after experiencing harassment:

I don’t go to [location – metropolitan suburb] very often, we just went because there was like this huge sports bar and we wanted to watch the play offs or something, and yeah I was just like well not going to do that again. You know we’d kind of gone into heterosexual land to try and so this mainstream sports activity and I was like no definitely not doing that again.


One participant, Parker (42, non-binary, queer) also said in queer spaces they would avoid disclosing their sexuality to avoid ‘lateral violence’ and harassment from lesbian women. Indeed, this echoes research that bisexual and other non-monosexual people experience discrimination from outside and within queer communities (e.g. Doan Van et al. 2019):

...in queer spaces as well, so if you’re bi and disclosing that you’re bi to a lesbian you know, or whatever. It’s not just heterosexual people who are violent towards us…there’s lateral violence that happens.


For some, the behavioral impacts of harassment were immense, with one participant Charlie (23, androgynous, pansexual/demisexual) saying harassment:

...led to me questioning every single choice I made in general. Like, well what if this thing sets them off? what if that thing sets them off? And it more became a case of me just trying to survive in that kind of social environment.

It was clear throughout the interviews that experiences of street harassment targeting participants gender or sexual identity made it difficult, if not dangerous, for them to be freely queer in public, and participants made significant adjustments to their behavior to blend in and not be visibly queer, or to occlude aspects of their identity in queer spaces.

Impact on Identity—“it Felt Like Just Being Myself was Almost Criminal”

Street harassment had unique impacts on LGBTQ+ participants’ ability to develop and express their queer gender and sexuality. Some participants discussed not realizing they were queer, not ‘coming out,’ or not feeling comfortable to publicly express their gender and/or sexuality until later in life, at least in part due to experiencing and witnessing queerphobic harassment. As Ellie (56, cis-woman, queer) said of witnessing queerphobic harassment when they were younger: “I remember thinking fuck, it’s hard enough being this that and the other, imagine being a dyke as well.” Witnessing and/or experiencing harassment could contribute towards feelings of shame and internalized homophobia or transphobia.

As we discussed earlier, for participants who were trans or gender diverse, harassment often involved misgendering, such as being harassed on the presumption they are a woman when they are not. This reinforced binary understandings of gender, often rupturing the immense amounts of work participants had undertaken to be comfortable in their gender identity, contributing towards experiences of dysphoria:

I mean all of the being read as female kind of stuff obviously all the sexual violence and harassment and stuff over the course of my life… I mean it’s really misgendering as well, so it messes with gender identity. (Parker, 42, non-binary, queer)


There were times in my life where I’ve had like dysphoria and it does remind me I will always be in this body, this body will not change and like you can love yourself as much as you like, you can wear clothes that affirm you and like learn to really love your body, but if your body means that you get harassed, like that can be really bad for your identity... (River, 19, a-gender, bisexual)

One participant, Charlie (23, androgynous, pansexual/demisexual), experienced unrelenting harassment for dressing in gothic style clothing and wearing makeup, saying “it felt like just being myself was almost criminal.” Charlie, who was assigned male at birth, described contravening norms of masculinity in the way they dressed, was targeted for harassment not only because they looked different but were additionally not performing masculinity “correctly.” This had a significant impact on their relationships and identity, saying that their family tried to change the way they looked and acted, and were embarrassed to be out in public with them. Charlie also said harassment impacted their romantic relationships and they would "seek out toxic relationships, like ones where my identity is constantly in question. Because that’s what I viewed as normal and affection.”

Another participant, Chrissy, (22, cis-woman, queer) said it was difficult to develop and maintain a sense of self due to being in “survival mode” from their experiences of harassment. Indeed, as the previous section demonstrated, participants were often adjusting their behavior, or trying to act in ways that were “not queer” in public to be “invisible” and “blend in” and not a target for harassment, hiding and masking what they felt was their true or desired identity. This often contributed to a lasting sense of shame around participants’ queer identities and compounded emotional and mental health impacts as the next section will explore.

Emotional and Mental Health Impacts—"I Thought I’d Never Really Feel Normal Again”

Participants reported a range of emotional and mental health impacts from queerphobic street harassment. This included emotional impacts directly during and following an event including fear, sadness, violation, embarrassment, and anger. However, it also included long lasting impacts, with harassment forming part of the larger anti-queer experiences and discourse which impacted upon LGBTQ+ participants’ mental health, with participants reporting impacts including anxiety, stress, PTSD, suicidality, and rage. This was deeply connected not only to feeling unsafe in public, but also not feeling free to be themselves and express their identity. As Chris (27, cis-man, homosexual/queer) said:

...it’s like that instinctive urge to kind of act less queer which can yeah contribute to this kind of sense of anxiety that I’ve had for a long time

Some participants talked about the experiences of queerphobic harassment, and wider public hatred towards them as a queer person, building up and ‘spilling over’ into other aspects of their lives:

I remember just saying something in class and bursting into tears because it was so stressful at that time [discussing the plebiscite] with the level of hatred that was just getting directed at us (Parker, 42, non-binary, queer)


Participants often emphasized the cumulative and compounding effects of street harassment, with seemingly ‘small,’ frequent experiences adding up to something bigger than the sum of their parts—something that has been identified in research with cisgender, heterosexual women (e.g., Fileborn & Vera-Gray, 2017). As Alex (26, non-binary, queer) explained, “the years of street harassment it all adds up and … it’s just really exhausting.”

While not all participants reported lasting impacts, and indeed some participants consciously resisted the impacts of street harassment, for many experiences of street harassment formed part of the “larger tapestry of anti-queer experiences” (Chris, 27, cis-man, homosexual/queer) that impacted on their ability to develop and express their identity, feel safe in the world, with cumulative impacts on their mental and emotional well-being. As Chris suggests, it was not necessarily “street harassment itself being the main issue for me,” but rather that public harassment was one of many contexts of systemic violence encountered as a queer person. In fact, in some interviews we barely scratched the surface of the multiple and compounding forms of violence and discrimination that participants experienced. As Parker said, “I guess I’ve actually just been talking about all the big stuff, because I’m just so used to all the micro aggression stuff. It is constant” and becomes “background noise.”

Discussion and Conclusion

We have aimed to demonstrate that LGBTQ+ people experience unique forms, contexts, and trajectories of street harassment that a cisheteronormative gendered framework cannot fully account for. While sexism certainly formed the basis of many participants’ experiences, it was clear from participants’ accounts that homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, and cis-heterosexism are drivers that have been under-theorized in street harassment literature.

Participants’ accounts demonstrated a complex relationship between visibly deviating from heteronormative constructions of gender and sexuality, and experiences of harassment. In many respects, our findings reflect those of previous research highlighting the connections between being visibly queer and subsequently being targeted for harassment and violence, reproducing public spaces as masculine and heteronormative (Fileborn, 2021; Mason, 2001; Namaste, 1996; Sharp, 2019; Tomsen and Markwell, 2009). However, our findings suggest that the ‘safety’ that might be afforded through invisibility is highly contingent, and invisibility could itself manifest as violence through the erasure of queer identity, particularly for bi + and gender-diverse participants (Clayton et al., 2022).

Findings of this research provide avenues for developing new conceptual accounts of street harassment that are attendant to the specificities of queer experiences. Notably, participants’ experiences often followed unique trajectories and temporal patterns compared to cisgender, heterosexual women, though there were also points of similarity and overlap. These queer trajectories were themselves entangled with the concept of (in)visibility, which informed the ebbs and flows of harassment in participants’ lives. Halberstam’s (2005) concept of ‘queer time’ is productive here. Halberstam’s (2005: 10) work considers more generally how queer lives “produce alternative temporalities” and rhythms by imagining futures “outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience” in heteronormative trajectories, such as marriage and the birth of children. We suggest this offers some utility in understanding queer experiences of street harassment as unfolding across different temporal and spatial logics to those often encountered by cisgender heterosexual women. Street harassment could in turn shape queer temporalities itself, with participants in this study and in earlier work (Fileborn, 2021) describing how harassment could contribute towards delaying processes of ‘coming out’ and gender affirmation. The temporalities of queer life and queer harassment are thus deeply entangled and co-constitutive. Others have pointed to the different temporalities of queer criminal ‘offending,’ which do not unfold across the pathways established in heteronormative literature (Asquith et al., 2017). Drawn together, this suggests that there may be value for future criminological work to take seriously the role of queer temporality in shaping queer people’s experiences of harm.

Further, as we have highlighted throughout, queer women often faced multiple and compounding types of harassment based on their gender and/or sexuality. Given this, we argue that the dominant framing of street harassment as an issue faced by cisgender, heterosexual women (inadvertently) obfuscates the multi-faceted experiences of queer women, and future research should use sexuality as a category of analysis to ensure such experiences are visible. Collectively, this work suggests that LGBTQ+ people may have unique needs in relation to support, as well as requiring different emphases in policy and prevention efforts. Responses must also be attentive to the specificities both within and across diverse queer experiences.

Our findings also point to the unique ways in which LGBTQ+ people can be impacted by public harassment, including concealing their identities, delaying ‘coming out’ (thus also shaping ‘queer time,’ to return to Halberstam), and internalizing shame around their queer identities. Again, such impacts largely reflect findings from literature on hate crime spanning different spatial contexts, though these bodies of research have largely eluded one another (Mason, 2001; Tomsen & Markwell, 2009). Indeed, while our findings echo aspects of the hate crime literature, they also point to the mundane and ordinary nature of the violence encountered by queer people in public space, particularly for queer women (Colliver, 2021, and see Vera-Gray & Fileborn, 2022 in relation to street harassment generally). Overall, it was clear that queerphobic street harassment had significant impacts on participants' ability to fully understand and express themselves. Certainly, street harassment was not the only factor at play here, or necessarily the most important factor shaping participants’ lives. However, as the title quote suggests, street harassment formed part of the broader tapestry of queerphobia experienced by participants across their lives. Given this, it may be valuable for future scholarship to draw together the different forms and contexts of violence in queer lives in order to produce a more holistic account.

Our findings help to broaden understandings of street harassment and demonstrate that an intersectional framework is imperative for understanding how multiple, intersecting forms of marginalization impact people’s ability to safely access public space (Crenshaw, 1991). Further research is needed that is attentive to how LGBTQ+ people’s experiences of street harassment are also shaped by other intersecting forms of marginalization such as cultural background, class, and disability, for example. Our work expands the arguments of other scholars who have critiqued knowledge production in mainstream gender-based violence research and practice: specifically, that approaches focusing exclusively on cisgender, heterosexual women’s experiences limit our ability to effectively respond to gendered violence, as they miss the specific forms and drivers of gendered violence for LGBTQ+ people (Donovan and Barnes 2020; Graaff 2021). Overall, our research demonstrates the importance of being attentive to the unique experiences of LGBTQ+ people in developing more robust conceptual and theoretical accounts of street harassment, and gender-based violence more broadly. It is vital to ensure that queer experiences are no longer ‘invisible’ within this field of research.