Homophobia

I recently heard my son call the Boy Scouts, homophobes in a disparaging way. I was surprised that it would make sense to declare that a bunch of people you don’t know have a phobia of any kind, and if they did, why it would be fair to degrade them for their phobia. I felt a need to look into this word and its use.

The etymology of homophobia is a portmanteau of homosexual and phobia.

Phobia is from the greek meaning fear. A phobia is an irrational, intense and persistent fear of certain situations, activities, things, animals, or people. The main symptom of this disorder is the excessive and unreasonable desire to avoid the feared situation, thing, activity, etc.

The word homophobia was popularized by George Weinberg, in his 1972 book ‘Society and the Healthy Homosexual.’ and he defined it as “the dread of being in close quarters with homosexuals.” Jack Nichols claims to have created the word in an article he wrote for Screw magazine in 1969 with Lige Clarke. They defined homophobia as "fear of being thought attracted to one's own sex." Nichols credits Weinberg for coining homophobia because they were just being flippant in their article. Within three years the definition had shifted from a fear of being thought a homosexual to the fear of homosexuals. Weinberg also paved the way, in his book, for the next shift by claiming it is a fear by religious people who see homosexuals as a threat to home and family. A bit more political than psychological.

In 1982, the Times of London defined homophobia as “the dislike and distaste felt by many heterosexuals for homosexuals,...." A decade after Weinberg’s book, the word now means a dislike of homosexuals. The idea of a homophobe as a person with an irration fear of homosexuals is now someone who doesn’t like homosexuals. In this case ‘dislike’ is not defined in relation to homosexual either. Dislike of what? Homosexual acts, or their very presence.

The Oxford Dictionary defines it as an extreme and irrational aversion to homosexuality and homosexual people.

The World English Dictionary added hatred to the Oxford definition.

I have seen, more recently, homophobia definitions include  ‘being against homosexual rights’ to the dictionary definitions. The Oxford definition seems fair enough, but I’ve never heard other phobias related to hatred or politics. 

In 1993, behavioral scientist William O’Donohue and Christine Caselles concluded what I had noticed in my son’s use of the word "as it is usually used, makes an illegitimately pejorative evaluation of certain open and debatable value positions, much like the former disease construct of homosexuality" itself, arguing that the term may be used as an ad hominem argument against those who advocate values or positions of which the speaker does not approve.

Twenty years after it was first coined as a word to reference actual fear of homosexuals, it is now a pejorative to be used against people you disagree with. As the name calling increases I might tend to agree with another definition I read: homophobia is the fear of speaking out against homosexual behavior or politics.