But as Chris Crain, editor of the Washington Blade, was walking hand in hand with his boyfriend near one of the gay districts in Amsterdam, two men standing on a street corner spat at his face. He stopped to ask why, was called a “fag” and suddenly the two youths turned into seven.

Surrounded, Mr Crain was kicked to the ground by the gang and ended up in hospital with a broken nose and badly bruised face.

His attackers were Moroccan youths, blamed by Dutch gay rights groups for a disturbing rise of gay-bashing, as conservative Islamic culture clashes with Dutch liberalism.

For the first time, the Amsterdam Tourist Board has issued a warning to gay visitors to be careful in the city. In the first country to legalise homosexual marriage, gays are increasingly fearful of holding hands in public. Some have been chased out of their houses and middle-class gays are moving to rural areas for safety.

“I was really surprised. I felt comfortable, because it is San Francisco times ten. But I didn’t appreciate the depth of hostility between different groups there, and we walked right into the middle of it,” Mr Crain said from his home in Washington.

In the city where six months ago Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker, was killed by an Islamic extremist, the tourist authorities felt compelled to issue a warning.

Herman Terbalkt, of the Amsterdam Tourist Board, said: “Gay visitors should be careful and alert. Some people in Amsterdam are not tolerant of other people. It is a social problem.”

Social tensions have permeated to the heart of Reguliersdwarsstraat, the main gay street, known simply as the Straat, lined with cafés, restaurants and bars. Paul Buckley, originally from Birmingham, who works at the Downtown Café, was recently chased down the Straat by a Moroccan youth shouting flicker — Dutch for “faggot” — at him.

“I had to run into a café and hide, and he stood outside shouting abuse and threatening us for five minutes,” he said. “It was horrible. A lot of Moroccan and Turks aren’t that tolerant of homosexuality. They stand around causing trouble.”

Officially, the police do not keep figures on homophobic attacks, so they cannot say what the trend is. A gay policeman, who liaises with the gay community, said: “It is the same as it has always been. It is basically safe.”

Gay groups seem to be in little doubt. “In the last three or four years, we’ve seen an increase in gay people reporting incidents (of aggression against them) by members of minority groups,” said a spokesman for Amsterdam’s Gay and Lesbian Switchboard, quoted in the Amsterdam Weekly newspaper.

COC Nederland, the Dutch gay rights organisation, which led the struggle for acceptance, said that the tolerant climate was “slipping away like sand through the fingers”.

Rene Soeren, a COC spokesman, said: “The feeling of insecurity in Amsterdam is rising. Gays and lesbians are less willing to walk hand-in-hand because they might be beaten up.”

Recently, some homosexuals living in the centre of Amsterdam have been so harassed by their neighbours that they have had to move out.

“This is a new phenomenon,” Mr Soeren said. “The group that causes the problem is more dominant in the centre of town than 20 years ago — there is a struggle for public space. The gay middle class is leaving Amsterdam and living in smaller towns.”

The clash between Dutch liberalism and Islamic conservatism led to the rise of Pym Fortuyn, the populist homosexual anti-immigration campaigner, who was outraged that gay teachers were being sacked because Muslim parents did not want their children to be taught by homosexuals. He was murdered by a left-wing activist.

“The things Fortuyn mentioned were all true and need to be mentioned, but he dealt with them in an offensive way,” Mr Soeren said.

Gay campaigners are outraged that sensitivity about intolerance towards Muslims is blinding people to intolerance from Muslims. Scott Long, the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender programme at Human Rights Watch, the human rights group, caused outrage when he declared: “Gays often become the victims of this when immigrants retaliate for the inequalities they have to suffer.”

Mr Crain, who has been deluged with e-mails of support from Dutch citizens, thundered back: “Long’s ‘blame the society’ political correctness is a distraction from the very real cultural clashes happening in Holland and elsewhere.”

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