A friend of mine has been to hell and back in the past couple of years, after falling foul of homophobic neighbours. He taped all the abuse and kept a journal of the harassment, but the police made it clear he was on his own unless he was beaten up or burned out of his house.

He was contemplating suicide when a miracle happened, in the shape of Galop, the LGBT+ anti-violence charity. Thanks to the latter’s intervention, the family were evicted and the main abuser was charged and successfully prosecuted. My friend has his life back and he can’t praise Galop highly enough.

The name, short for Gay London Police Monitoring Group, was a blast from the past for me. The group was founded in 1982, in the days of ‘pretty policing’, when good-looking young officers were used to entrap gay men. By the mid-1990s, when I worked for the London paper Capital Gay, that practice had largely ended, but it left a deep legacy of distrust. Victims of queerbashing at cruising areas were often frightened to go to the police, since outdoor gay sex was illegal and they feared they’d be criminalised, like rape victims in Saudi Arabia who end up getting flogged for adultery. Galop was a vital intermediary.

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