On Saturday night around 2 a.m., after dinner and card games with some friends, I exited the metro in Arlington and began my very routine ten-minute walk home. The temperature was below freezing and I was bundled uncomfortably in my coat, trying my hardest to make it home as quickly as possible. Moments after beginning my trek, two men walked toward me.
One of them sort of walked past me – and stopped a few feet away – while the other man came up to me and started to talk. And from the way he began his interactions, I was fairly certain that they wanted something sexual. I’ve been approached on the street for this reason before and the timing seemed right. And so did the conversation. He asked me what I was doing and where I was going and, when I said I was going home, he wanted to know where I lived. I motioned up the hill in the obvious direction that I was walking and tried to get away. I was sandwiched between him and a building.
Then the conversation’s tone changed. He pointed to my North Face jacket and said I must have a lot of money. I’m not sure what kind of rich white boy he thought I was, but the comment was almost laughable. But he said it again. And again I said I wasn’t rich. In a sort of startling way he asked what my name was and, after repeating the question several times and me saying it didn’t matter, I escaped up the hill and didn’t look back. Home was only a few blocks away, and thankfully they didn’t follow me. I couldn’t tell if the other man was annoyed that his friend was doing it or if he was there to offer support in some way. A lot was unclear from my interaction with them.
I didn’t know what they wanted. I thought they were going to ask to go home with me, or ask me to go home with them, but then I thought they wanted to rob me. And then, when he kept asking for my name, I thought he might have wanted something sexual again. I also didn’t know why they targeted me. Did they want someone shorter than them? If they wanted to sleep with me, then possibly. If they wanted to rob me well, then, probably. Did my race affect their decision to pursue me? And how important was it that they perceived me to be male? I wanted to be active in my dismissal of them, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure how to respond because I didn’t know what I was responding to.
And as scary as it was, and as I try now, still, to conceptualize exactly what happened to me, it’s raised some interesting questions in my mind about how I sort of binarize male-on-male street harassment. I think about it in a very plain way. The perpetrator might be a homophobic straight guy, or a group of men (not necessarily all straight) operating within a homosocial space as they prove their heterosexuality via the harassment of others. Or the perpetrator could also be gay and approaching another gay man as I thought the two men above were initially. While these two options use hate-filled and sexualized language, respectively, in both instances the man is targeted because he is perceived to be gay. And either way, access to public spaces is being restricted.
So it’s more complex than my assumptions. My perception of the situation included both of these models. It was murky. I’m not sure that I would have rather been harassed in a clearer way, because I don’t want myself or anyone else to ever be harassed, but not understanding this incident has certainly stayed with me in a very different way. Did they want to sleep with me? Did they just want to rob someone? Or did they want to rob me because they perceived me to be gay? I can’t draw many conclusions, because if they wanted to rob me they certainly could have, and if they wanted to assault me they could have accomplished that as well. Maybe they were drunk and really had no goal other than to mess around with the nearest passerby. I’m really not sure.
What I do know is that I perceived the event in a way that I’m not sure all men would have. Men who are perceived to be gay or bisexual expect harassment in public spaces because of the ways that we interfere with some men’s ideas about appropriate masculinity and sometimes because our appearances might be pleasing to other men. In my own research that I’ve cited before, more than 70 percent of the gay and bisexual men I surveyed said they constantly assess their surroundings when they are navigating public spaces. This number, I imagine, is lower for those whose appearance is consonant with societal gender expectations.
So while I can’t be sure about what I experienced that night, I know what it felt like, and how it would have felt for others who experience harassment regularly. Not everyone walking down the street is about to harass, but when it happens often enough it’s hard not to think about. And that’s one of the things that makes street harassment so dangerous. It’s not forgotten. It takes up mental space. It’s complex. Sometimes we can’t make sense of it, but that shouldn’t be our responsibility. Equal access to public spaces is something we need now.
This is a guest post by Patrick McNeil. Patrick is finishing his master’s thesis at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he is pursuing his Master’s in Women’s Studies. His work focuses on whether and how gay and bisexual men experience street harassment and how this form of harassment intersects with and diverges from the gender-based street harassment of women. Follow him on Twitter at @patrickryne.
