Homophobia

Why George Weinberg coined the word homophobia

The psychologist George Weinberg coined homophobia in the 1960s, a portmanteau of homosexual and the Greek phobos, and is credited as the first person to use it in speech. He set it out at length in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual, published one year before the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

The timing is the point. Until 1973 the diagnostic manual held that the gay person was ill. Weinberg's word proposed that the person who could not tolerate them was, and he meant it medically. He describes the concept as a phobia about homosexuals, a fear associated with a fear of contagion and with a fear of losing the things one fought for, home and family, and calls it a religious fear that had led to great brutality, as fear always does.

Whether or not the clinical claim holds, the rhetorical operation was decisive. A single word transferred the label from the person being persecuted to the person doing it, and it became a central tool for gay and lesbian activists and their allies at exactly the moment the manual changed.

What homophobia meant in its first printed use

The word reached print on 23 May 1969, in the American pornographic magazine Screw, and it was used there to mean a heterosexual man's fear that other people might think he was gay.

That is a narrower and stranger thing than the modern meaning, and it survives inside it. An October 1969 article in Time described hostile attitudes to homosexuality as homophobia and included among them a mixture of revulsion and apprehension that some were calling homosexual panic. Kenneth Smith used the word in 1971 as a personality profile, for a psychological aversion to homosexuality.

Three uses within thirty months, in a sex magazine, a news weekly and a psychology paper, and only one of them means what the word means now.

Whether homophobia is a phobia at all

The objection is standard and it is made by people who use the word. Professor David Haaga notes that contemporary usage covers a wide range of negative emotions, attitudes and behaviours towards homosexual people, and that this is not consistent with the accepted definition of a phobia, an intense, illogical or abnormal fear of a specified thing.

Contempt is not fear. Prejudice is not fear. Discrimination is a practice rather than a feeling. The definition Wikipedia gives runs through contempt, prejudice, aversion, hatred and antipathy, notes that it may rest on irrational fear and may sometimes be attributed to religious belief, and only then reaches behaviour. Fear is one item on a list, and the suffix has taken the whole word.

What institutionalised and internalised homophobia mean

The categories in use are the clearest evidence that this is not a clinical term:

• institutionalised homophobia, covering the religious and state-sponsored forms
• internalised homophobia, experienced by people who have same-sex attractions themselves, whatever they call themselves
• social, emotional and rationalised forms, all of which have been proposed

There have been suggestions to classify homophobia and other bigotries as an intolerant personality disorder.

A state can be homophobic. No state has arachnophobia. Where a word can take a government as its subject, it has stopped naming an anxiety.

What the hate crime figures say about anti-gay violence

The FBI's hate crimes statistics for 2010 recorded 19.3 per cent of hate crimes across the United States as motivated by a sexual orientation bias. A Southern Poverty Law Center intelligence report the same year, extrapolating from FBI national data covering 1995 to 2008, found that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people were far more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be the victims of violent hate crime.

The American Psychiatric Association issued a statement in 1992 on the power of the stigma against homosexuality, and reaffirmed it through its board of trustees in July 2011. The chronology is worth holding together:

1. the profession classified homosexuality as a disorder until 1973
2. the United States Surgeon General ordered in 1979 that it not be classified as a mental disease or defect
3. the association was still restating its position on the stigma nineteen years after that

Why hostility to homosexuality is far older than homophobia

Hostility to homosexuality is recorded from antiquity, appearing first in ancient Greece and growing notably during the Middle Ages, and scholars apply the modern term to those periods knowing it is an anachronism. The word arrived in 1969. What it names did not.

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias, meanwhile, gives it seven words: fear of homosexuality or becoming a homosexual. That second clause is the 1969 magazine sense, still in a reference work forty years later, and it is the only definition in the entry.