LONDON, July 26 — A British man whose partner died has persuaded the police complaints watchdog to order a fresh investigation into whether homophobia tainted the original inquiry. Cameron Tewson, the partner of Scott Gough for 14 years, first lodged a formal complaint against Hertfordshire Constabulary in July 2024. He accused the force of discrimination and homophobic bias in its investigation of Gough’s death.
In letters and formal expressions of concern, Tewson said that no one had been willing to consider the thread of homophobia that he felt influenced the case. Now, the complaints watchdog has ordered a reinvestigation specifically into whether homophobia played a role in the police errors.
Homophobia in plain terms
Homophobia encompasses a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward homosexuality or people who identify or are perceived as being lesbian, gay or bisexual. It has been defined as contempt, prejudice, aversion, hatred, or antipathy, may be based on irrational fear, and may sometimes be attributed to religious beliefs. Homophobia is observable in critical and hostile behavior such as discrimination and violence on the basis of sexual orientations that are non-heterosexual.
Recognized types of homophobia include institutionalized homophobia, for example religious homophobia and state-sponsored homophobia, and internalized homophobia, experienced by people who have same-sex attractions, regardless of how they identify. Prejudice against homosexuality and homosexuals has been recorded since antiquity, first appearing in Ancient Greece and growing notably during the Middle Ages, especially by adherents of Islam.
The term “homophobia” was coined by psychologist George Weinberg in the 1960s, combining “homosexual” with the Greek “phobos” for fear. It first appeared in print in a 1969 article in the American magazine Screw, where it described heterosexual men’s fear that others might think they are gay. Weinberg later wrote that homophobia was “a fear of homosexuals which seemed to be associated with a fear of contagion, a fear of reducing the things one fought for — home and family.”
The practical upshot
For ordinary readers, the so-what here is straightforward: when authorities carry unconscious or conscious anti-LGBTQ bias into their work, real people suffer. According to 2010 Hate Crimes Statistics released by the FBI National Press Office, a significant proportion of hate crimes across the United States were motivated by a sexual orientation bias.
A Southern Poverty Law Center 2010 Intelligence Report extrapolating data from FBI national hate crime statistics from 1995 to 2008, found that LGBTQ people were “far more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be victimized by violent hate crime.” Those numbers are old, but they point to a persistent pattern. Tewson’s case now asks whether a British police force fell into that same pattern — letting bias steer a death investigation off course.
What to watch next: the reinvestigation’s findings, and whether Hertfordshire Constabulary will face consequences or policy changes. For Tewson, the practical upshot is a chance at accountability that he says was denied for years.
