Significant acts of violence against LGBT people

This is a list of notable violent acts against LGBT individuals and organizations. Examples include corrective rape, homicide, gay bashing, and other types of assault.

Argentina

*In 2016 in Bella Vista, Buenos Aires, lesbian football player , known as "Higui", was surrounded by a group of men who threatened to rape her. When the men hit her, she pulled out a knife and killed one of them. She was incarcerated for the killing, leading to protests in Argentina. Eva Analía De Jesús was absolved of the murder in 2022.

Australia

* In 1972, George Duncan and Roger Jones were thrown into a river in Adelaide by a group of men believed to be police officers, resulting in Duncan's death. Jones refused to identify their attackers out of fear for his life. Two police officers were charged but acquitted, and the case was said to have been the subject of a government cover-up. An independent police report described it as the result of a "'high-spirited frolic' that went wrong".
* In January 1987, Raymond Keam was killed in Alison Park, Randwick, Sydney. His injuries were consistent with attackers having jumped on his chest while he lay on the ground.
* In December 1988, Scott Johnson's body was found at the bottom of a 50-metre cliff near Blue Fish Point around Manly, Sydney. There have been many investigations into the cause of this death. The police had historically described his death as suicide, but a 2017 inquest – the third on his death – admitted he was murdered in an anti-gay hate crime.
* In January 1989, Richard Johnson was lured to a toilet block in Alexandria Park, Sydney where he had left his phone number on the wall where he was gang bashed to death.
* In July 1989, after a night drinking with friends on Oxford Street in Sydney, Ross Warren's keys were found at the base of the cliffs at Tamarama, his car was nearby. His body was never found.
* In November 1989, John Russell was found at the bottom of Marks Park (between Bondi and Tamarama) with a clump of hair in his hand. Police found no suspicious circumstances.
* In December 1989, David McMahon was attacked in Bondi while jogging in the same place another was attacked a couple days before. He says he clearly remembers them saying, "let's throw him off where we threw the other one off."
* In May 1990, a high school teacher named William Wayne Tonks was found dead in his home in Artarmon, Sydney.
* In July 1990, Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn was attacked with a hammer and staggered off a cliff in Bondi. Three men were convicted of his murder in the early 1990s.
* Several of the victims of the Snowtown murders (1992–1999) were openly gay men, while others were labeled by the killers as being gay and/or child abusers. Prosecutor Wendy Abraham suggested the accused men's attitude to paedophiles and homosexuals was a motive.
* On 3 December 2007, Craig Gee was attacked by four men whilst holding his boyfriend's hand walking down Crown Street in Surry Hills, Sydney. Part of his skull was reduced to powder and his leg was broken during the attack. This incident prompted a vigil against the rising level of homophobia in the city and apathy from police, and despite the attack, Gee and his boyfriend joined the Chief of Parade Margaret Cho to lead the 2008 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras parade.
* In 2016, a gay teenager named Tyrone Unsworth killed himself after prolonged homophobic bullying at his school, which culminated with his being hospitalized after his jaw was struck with a fence used as a weapon by another boy.
*Roffee and Waling (2016) conducted a study that aimed to investigate incidents of bullying, harassment and violence committed towards LGBTIQ people. They discovered an issue, however, when they found that many people did not view what they had been subjected to as a hate crime, or even a crime at all. Furthermore, many of the participants commented on feeling that they did not meet the criteria of being a victim of harassment, bullying or violence. This established that prospective participants may not have felt that they met the criteria and thus would not have elected to take part in the study. The conclusion of the study established that all of the participants had been subjected to some form of victimisation, with some of the attacks being extremely violent and criminal.
*In January 2019, news.com.au published an investigation into the murders of several gay men in Victoria in the 1980s and 1990s.

Brazil

* On June 10, 2006, the burnt bodies of Edivaldo Silva de Oliveira and Jeovan Bandeira were found in the back of a car in Bahia, Brazil.
* Osvan Inacio dos Santos, 19, was attacked and murdered in September 2007, on a street near a bar where he had just won the local "Miss Gay" competition in the town of Batingas in northeast Brazil. Dos Santos' naked body was found on Sunday morning, and forensic examination found his skull had been fractured, and had also indicated sexual assault.
* Alexandre Peixe dos Santos, a gay rights activist, was gagged, attacked, and beaten unconscious in February 2008 at the offices of São Paulo's Gay Pride Association in Brazil. Activists estimate that more than 2,680 gay people were murdered in Brazil between 1980 and 2006.
* Alexandre Thome Ivo Rajao, only 14 when he was brutally tortured and murdered in 2010, whilst on the way home from watching the South African World Cup at a friend's house. Many believe this attack to be motivated by homophobia, as Alexandre had been in a same-sex relationship with the cousin of one of the attackers.
* On June 16, 2016, 21-year-old Gabriel Figueira Lima, described as a " travesti", was stabbed in the neck and left to die.
* On June 24, 2016, the body of Wellington Júlio de Castro Mendonça was found northwest of Rio, and he was allegedly stoned to death.
* On February 4, 2017, Ágatha Mont, a 26 year old transgender woman, was a university student found strangled in Itapevi, São Paulo, after being threatened for using the women's restroom.
*Mirella de Carllo, a 39 year old trans woman and activist, was found strangled to death on February 19, 2017.
*Emanuelle Muniz, a 21-year-old trans woman who had been preparing for gender confirmation surgery, was kidnapped and murdered in Ańapolis, Goiás on February 26, 2017, by blunt trauma to the head with a stone.
*Hérika Izidoro, 24; Michelly Garcia, 25; Jennifer Celia Henrique, 37; Lexia Famosinha, 30; Camila Albuquerque, 20; and Bruninha Tavares, 17, were all violently killed between March and April 2017, on account of their gender identity.
* On June 27, 2016, Antonio Kvalo was beaten for being gay in Rio de Janeiro. Kvalo created a website named ''Tem Local?'' for people to document instances of LGBTI violence.
* On February 19, 2017, a 20-year-old university student, Marcos Valdevino, was punched in the face in public in Olinda, Pernambuco, while waiting for his friends to arrive.
* In 2020, an Evangelical bishop in Recanto das Emas, Brazil, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for raping a 13-year-old lesbian girl. The rape was an attempt to change her sexuality.
* In 2020, lesbian student Gabriela Oliveira Guimarães was harassed and beaten by a seven or eight men for her sexuality in São Bernardo do Campo. They called her slurs, then punched and kicked her until she lost consciousness. A group of trans women managed to scare the attackers away.

Canada

* Kenneth Zeller, a gay man in Toronto, Ontario, who was employed as a schoolteacher, was murdered by five young offenders in High Park in 1985. The incident spurred the Toronto District School Board to implement a program to combat anti-gay discrimination and violence – culminating in the creation of the Triangle Program, Canada's first alternative school program for at-risk LGBT youth, in 1995.
*On March 19, 1989, Joe Rose, a young gay activist in Montreal, was stabbed to death by a gang of teenagers who targeted him for having pink hair. The incident later inspired educator Michael Whatling, who had been a classmate of Rose's at the time of his death, to publish '' A Vigil for Joe Rose'', an exploration of the struggles faced by LGBT students.
*On August 21, 1989, Alain Brosseau, a straight man in Ottawa, was attacked by a gang of teenagers who wrongly assumed him to be gay, while walking home from his job at the Château Laurier. The attackers chased him through Major's Hill Park to the Alexandra Bridge, and then threw him off the bridge resulting in his death. This resulted in a gay and lesbian community outcry and eventually led to the formation of the Ottawa Police Service's GLBT Liaison Committee two years later.
*On November 29, 1992, Yves Lalonde was murdered in Montreal's Angrignon Park by a gang of four neo-Nazi skinheads.
* Aaron Webster, a gay man in Vancouver, British Columbia, was beaten to death with baseball bats and pool cues on November 17, 2001, in a part of Stanley Park known for cruising. Ryan Cran, along with two unidentified youths, was convicted of manslaughter in Webster's death. Cran was paroled in February 2009 after serving four years of a six-year sentence.
* Conner Copeman, 20, of Cumberland, British Columbia, was assaulted in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on July 11, 2007, by a group of men in a park in the city's Buena Vista neighbourhood. Copeman had recently moved to the city, and told police that he was flirting with some men, who later attacked him. Copeman was found lying in the street six blocks east of the park, with a broken neck. Copeman ended up a quadriplegic as a result of his injuries.
* Jordan Smith, 27, of White Rock, British Columbia, was assaulted on September 27, 2008, by 20-year-old Michael Kandola of Vancouver. Smith was holding hands with another male while walking in Vancouver's Davie Village, an area frequented by LGBTQ individuals, when Kandola started following the pair with four to five of his friends and began shouting anti-gay obscenities towards the gay pair. Kandola confronted the two and punched Smith on the side of his head, knocking him unconscious. Smith required surgery for his injuries. Kandola was charged with assault causing bodily harm, and police sought to invoke Canadian hate-crime legislation against Kandola. A Facebook group with over 4000 members was established and they petitioned for a minimum life imprisonment sentence for Kandola. On April 30, 2010, the assault was deemed by the B.C. Supreme Court to be a hate crime and Kandola was sentenced to 17 months in jail.
* Anji Dimitriou and Jane Currie were physically assaulted on November 3, 2008, at an Oshawa, Ontario public school while waiting to pick up their children. Mark Scott, the attacker, punched both women in the face, referring to them as "men", "fucking dyke bitches" and spit in Dimitriou's face. He was in court in January 2009, for two counts of assault causing bodily harm. However, the incident was prosecuted as a simple assault rather than a hate crime, because Scott did not advocate genocide nor did he incite anyone else to participate in the attack.
*On March 13, 2009, Shawn Woodward was charged with aggravated assault after physically attacking 62-year-old Ritchie Dowrey in Vancouver's Fountainhead Pub, allegedly because "He's a faggot. He deserved it." Dowrey had briefly bumped into Woodward's shoulder, which the heterosexual Woodward characterized during his trial as a predatory sexual advance. Although Dowrey survived the assault, he suffered serious and permanent brain damage, and spent the entire rest of his life living in care facilities until his death in 2015. At Woodward's trial, Justice Jocelyn Palmer rejected the allegation that Dowrey had groped Woodward, ultimately finding that " oodward'sintention was to deny, deflect and dissemble. He fabricated this story to justify his outrageous assault."
*On October 18, 2010, the home of a gay couple in Little Pond, Prince Edward Island, was firebombed. Both men escaped the fire unharmed, but their home was destroyed. In late October and November, a series of rallies and fundraising concerts was held in both Little Pond and Charlottetown to support the couple and to oppose homophobic violence.
*On December 8, 2011, in Whitehorse, Yukon, a gay man, Owen Williams, was kicked out of a bar, handcuffed and detained by the RCMP for looking at gay hookup sites on his laptop. As a result, a former supreme court justice stated that the RCMP tolerates 'misogynistic, racist, and homophobic attitudes'.
*On April 17, 2012, Halifax gay activist Raymond Taavel was beaten to death outside Menz & Mollyz, a gay bar on the city's Göttingen Street, by Andre Denny, a paranoid schizophrenic who was on an unsupervised leave from a nearby forensic hospital for those who are found Not Criminally Responsible for their previous unlawful actions, after he attempted to break up a fight between Denny and another man. Taavel was a former chair of Halifax Pride, the city's gay pride festival, and a former editor at the LGBT magazine ''Wayves'' and the spiritual magazine '' Lion's Roar''. Over 1,000 people attended a vigil in Taavel's memory later that evening, which included performances by poet Tanya Davis, actor and writer Stewart Legere and singer-songwriters Rose Cousins and Ria Mae. Although there were unconfirmed allegations that Denny used anti-gay slurs while he was attacking Taavel,"Man accused of murdering gay activist Raymond Taavel should never have been released: lawyer"
''National Post'', April 18, 2012. to date media and the police have not asserted that the case clearly constituted a hate crime, generally attributing the attack to Denny's mental illness rather than to a specifically anti-gay bias. Taavel had previously survived a more clearly anti-gay physical attack, which he wrote about in ''Wayves'' in May 2010.
*On September 30, 2012, in New Westminster, British Columbia, January Marie Lapuz, 26, was found in her home in the 500 block of Third Avenue around 10 p.m. September 30, 2012 suffering from stab wounds. She died the next morning at Royal Columbian Hospital. Charles Jameson Neel, 22, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in June in her stabbing death and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Lapuz was the first transgender person on the executive of Sher Vancouver, an organization supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender South Asians. She was named the organization's social coordinator, according to its website in 2012.
*On October 12, 2013, Scott Jones, a gay resident of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, was stabbed by a knife-wielding man after leaving the Acro Lounge. He was left paraplegic by the attack. His attacker, Shane Matheson, was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison in June 2014. During his recovery, Jones participated in the creation of Don't Be Afraid, a province-wide campaign to combat homophobia, and was selected as the grand marshal of the 2014 Halifax Pride parade. He was profiled in the 2018 documentary film ''Love, Scott