Warning: Offensive content
Members of the LGBTQ community are being targeted by an escalating campaign of intimidation and threats of violence, including neo-Nazi demonstrations, prompting urgent calls for Chris Minns not to proceed with plans to exclude LGBTQ people from hate speech laws being introduced into NSW parliament this week.
The Herald can reveal a series of previously unreported threats and attacks against LGBTQ organisations, including a neo-Nazi demonstration outside a queer film festival in Albury last year, have left community leaders fearful that worsening homophobia will end in violence.
Some threats have forced members of the LGBTQ community to leave their homes. In one case, a volunteer at an organisation that hosts drag story time events relocated to a hotel for a week after receiving calls in which the caller identified the volunteer’s home address and her daughter’s name.
The call, received at about midnight, was reported to police, but officers were unable to trace it because it was made via a satellite phone.
“The threats started coming in to staff at the library and to the council. Then late one night, about midnight, I got a call from a mobile number and the person started telling me they were outside my house,” said the volunteer, who spoke anonymously due to concerns of reprisal attacks.
“They rattled off my address, said my daughter’s full name and that they wanted to speak to her ... they said they were here to save her, to pick her up. I freaked out and hung up and called the police.”
The threat occurred in the context of a significant campaign of online harassment against members of the organisation hosting the event.
The Herald was shown reams of messages containing violent homophobia, and threats to “crash” similar events.
“[O]ur company knows a lot about you what’s the go with your f--- queens talking to kids aye … so many of us know where this event is taking place your thing … is gonna get crashed by us all if you go threw (sic) ur (sic) a pedo (sic) f------ c---,” one message seen by the Herald says.
Another read: “Stay away from our kids. You’ve been warned.”
Those threats, along with a spate of other recent attacks against the queer community in NSW, have prompted calls for Minns to reconsider his decision to exclude LGBTQ people from hate speech laws being introduced into parliament this week.
NSW Labor will this week move to criminalise speech that intentionally incites hatred following a spate of attacks against Sydney’s Jewish community.
Minns foreshadowed the legislation by saying he believed the genesis of antisemitism was “hateful, racist language” that inspired violent acts. He said he would seek to stop bigotry “at its source”.
But the laws will apply only to racial hatred, meaning other groups protected by existing vilification laws such as the LGBTQ community will not be covered.
Minns last week said that was because the heightened risk faced by the Jewish community required him to move quickly. Though he did not rule out further changes to hate speech laws in the future, he said they were “more difficult” to progress.
LGBTQ groups such as Equality Australia say increasing incidents of homophobia mean broader reforms are just as crucial. In a letter sent to Minns last week, the chief executives of ACON and Equality Australia, Michael Woodhouse and Anna Brown, condemned antisemitic violence while pointing to “a rise in hate crimes against LGBTQ people across NSW”.
They included an appendix of recent violent incidents, including cases in which gangs of teenagers have used dating apps to lure, bash and rob men in Sydney parks.
The men, who had believed they were meeting a consenting adult, were viciously attacked before being forced to falsely “confess” to being paedophiles on social media.
Brown echoed Minns’ comments about the source of violence, saying: “Unless we stop hate where it begins, people will continue to suffer harassment and abuse with the very real risk it will end with someone getting seriously hurt.”
The Herald has obtained numerous other examples of previously unreported homophobic incidents which have taken place in NSW recently. In one example from July, more than a dozen masked neo-Nazis held a banner stating “destroy paedo freaks” outside a Pride event in Albury.
In a separate incident at a large festival in northern NSW over the summer, attendees were hit with fireworks and smoke flares which emitted acrid orange smoke into the campsite late at night. A group of young men had been screaming derogatory remarks, and some campers’ tents were urinated on.
Louis Hudson, who has been attending the festival for about 15 years and who witnessed the attack, said while there had been incidents in the past, it was the first time he had witnessed a violent attack.
“It set the whole campsite into a panic,” he said. “There were a series of sparks and explosions across the campsite. There was a real risk of someone being seriously hurt.”
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