Peter Tatchell.

In London antigay hate crimes have risen 8.5% over the past year, while other hate crimes have decreased about 4%. In October, Jody Dobrowski, 24, was savagely beaten to death in Clapham Common--a gritty but popular cruising spot. His was the third gay bashing in a month in that location. Meanwhile, the U.K. Civil Partnership Act--which gives gay couples civil union-like protections--becomes law on December 21. How can it be both such an awful and celebratory time for Britain's gays? Veteran gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, of the group OutRage! has some theories.

Why does it seem that gay bashings are on the rise in London? The gay bashings never stopped. It has taken a grisly murder to highlight the ongoing scale of homophobic violence. Some of the increase may be due to higher rates of reporting homophobic hate crimes. There is huge complacency among LGBT people. Having won a few legal reforms, the general assumption is that continuing improvements are inevitable.

What about the gay bashers? Don't many of them come from impoverished council estates (housing projects)? It has always been the case that poorly educated, macho, impoverished teenage men living on run-down council estates take out their frustration and resentment on gay and black people. Their racism and homophobia involves dehumanizing minorities, which they see as inferior, in order to boost their own battered self-esteem.

Did the Civil Partnership Act help to provoke these attacks? Every movement for social change provokes a backlash from the die-hard supporters of discrimination. It happened with the black and women's liberation movements. The more gains LGBT people win, the more strident and aggressive is the reaction of the defeated homophobic hard core. They see their world of heterosexual supremacism crumbling, so they lash out.

London's police have been reaching out to the gay community and hiring gay police officers, but what else needs to be done? The police are better than they used to be. There are some excellent officers, both gay and straight. But a lot of what the police do is window dressing. There needs to be better police liaison with local LGBT groups, venues, and media to warn people about attacks and urge witnesses to come forward with information.

The earlier gay bashings on Clapham Common were not communicated by the police to the wider LGBT community.

Still, the Civil Partnership Act at least is a big step forward, isn't it? It is a positive step forward, but it is not equality. Marriage is the gold standard of relationship recognition. Gay couples are being fobbed off with a second-best option. No one would accept a legal system that denied Jews the right to marry and sought to placate them with a separate system of partnership law.

So you'd like to gain marriage rights? I am no great fan of marriage, but I am no great fan of discrimination either. If the U.K. government were serious about legal recognition and rights for LGBT couples, it would open up marriage to same-sex partners. Tony Blair supports a system of sexual apartheid, whereby gays are barred from marriage and straights are barred from civil partnerships. This two-tiered system of partnership law is not equality. It perpetuates and extends discrimination.