Cabbie ‘drove at lesbian couple crossing road then and shouted homophobic abuse’

A burlesque performer has said ‘we can’t let homophobes win’ after a taxi driver ‘sped up’ when seeing her cross the road with her partner.

Caoimhe, who is known on stage as Freya Femme, said the driver shouted homophobic insults at the couple after narrowly avoiding them.

Writing on the Cork subreddit, Caoimhe claimed: ‘A taxi driver, in his taxi with another person, they were waiting to cross the road.

‘He waited for us to be in the middle and then sped the car towards us threateningly to make us run and shouted homophobic things out the window at us.

‘Taxis were supposed to be the thing that can get us home safe when we don’t feel safe walking the streets.’

Caoimhe added on the Reddit forum that only days after the alleged abuse she saw a gay man being ‘verbally abused with the most vile homophobic filth I’ve ever heard’ on a major Cork high street.

‘I stepped in to walk with him to his destination and the perpetrator followed us for ages threatening the man’s life, shouting at him to [kill himself], etc,’ the pole dancer alleged.

‘Oliver Plunkett Street in broad daylight with loads of people around.’

But the anti-LGBTQ+ abuse she says she saw didn’t end there. Two days after that, Caoimhe said her queer housemate was followed by a group of men after leaving the gym.

The men, they told Redditors, threw ‘glass’ at the performer’s face.

‘They ended up in A&E with a cut on their hand after luckily putting it up in time to protect their face,’ Caoimhe said.

‘These all happened within one week… Many many other people in my life have experienced a huge uptick in the frequency and severity of homophobic and transphobic hate crimes recently.’

In 2023, Ireland saw a 12% increase in hate crimes, with 548 incidents recorded by Gardaí. Of them, 16% were fuelled by homophobia, a 12% increase from the year before.

Nearly half of all LGBTQ+ people in Ireland feel unsafe holding hands with a same-sex partner in public, according to a report by Being LGBTQI+ in Ireland.

One in four have been punched, hit or physically attacked, while 72% have suffered anti-LGBTQ+ verbal abuse.

Caoimhe told the Corks 96FM Opinion Line programme that those with anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs are becoming ‘more confident about not hiding it’.

‘The queer community in Cork is really wonderful. And they’re really just banding together the more and more stuff happens to us,’ she said.

‘Now I feel sometimes reluctant to go out in the street, but I don’t want to let them win.’

The Gardaí, Ireland’s police force, was unable to comment.

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