Is it ironic that gay people were regarded as mentally ill until 1973 and, now, a question is asked about the mental fitness of the people who fear or hate them?
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Hate and fear of the gay and lesbian person have been around as long as the person with a same-sex attraction. Only in the last couple of generations has a name for it been applied: homophobia. Clinical research into the psycho-dynamics of homophobia is even more recent, however, and research findings validate and heighten the danger to the target of a homophobic “gay basher.”
The first time anyone heard the word homophobia was in 1966 after George Weinberg, a Manhattan psychotherapist born in 1935 and who still survives, put a name to the “antipathy, contempt, prejudice, aversion or hatred” of homosexuals. After the term was picked up by the fledgling “homophile movement,” predecessor of what came to be the gay rights movement, Weinberg prevailed on a friend who published the underground newspapers Gay and Screw to introduce the word. Weinberg himself wrote articles for the underground gay press.
Yet Weinberg’s single greatest contribution to the gay equality movement may have come in 1973 when he was in a group of colleagues who ultimately prevailed in the effort to remove homosexuality as a mental illness from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the medical profession’s therapeutic bible.
Homophobia also now includes variant other prejudices against LGBT social groups.
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Since 1966, components of homophobia have been expanded to include not only individuals but social institutions like the work place, government agencies and churches that invoke religious beliefs to discourage and refuse gay worshipers. Homophobia also now includes variant other prejudices against LGBT social groups. Lesbophobia mingles homophobia with sexism directed against lesbians, and biphobia targets bisexuality and bisexual people. Transphobia has gained widespread public awareness only in the last couple of years because of a disproportionate homicide rate of members in that community and is directed against transsexual and transgender people, and other groups that don’t conform to traditional gender roles.
Homophobic acts of physical violence against LGBT people and those suspected of being gay are not new, of course. But no case heightened public outcry and a sense of national shame than that of Matthew Shepard, the 21-year-old college student who was beaten, tortured and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming, the night of Oct. 6, 1998. He died six days later from severe head injuries. One of Shepard’s two convicted murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, unsuccessfully invoked what came to be called a “gay panic” defense that argued a sexual proposition by Shepard ignited the fear of homosexuality and triggered the assault that led to his death.
Shepard’s murder is among those cited as reasons the federal government is prosecuting state murder cases as hate crimes more frequently. According to the 2010 Hate Crimes Statistics summary released by the FBI National Press Office, 19.3 percent of hate crimes across the United States “were motivated by a sexual orientation bias.” Further, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2010 Intelligence Report that compiled data from 1995 to 2008 concluded LGBT people were
“far more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be victimized by violent hate crime.”
Yet research of the psychological factors that explain homophobia on a societal level seems to be a newer and only recently an emerging quest. But an extensive academic study designed to identify psychologic aspects “associated with homophobia, as psychopathologic symptoms, the defensive system and attachment style” was published Sept. 8 in The Journal of Sexual Medicine. The link to the project is But a summary – probably unjust and over-simplified- identified homophobic features more often in women than men and “psychoticism and immature defense mechanisms (in) people with higher levels of homophobia, highlighting a remarkable association between dysfunctional aspects of personality and homophobic attitudes.”
It is perhaps ironic that gay people were regarded as mentally ill until 1973 and, now, a question is asked about the mental fitness of the people who fear or hate them. But the classification of homophobia as a mental illness might bear unintended consequences on a societal level, particularly in the legal arena.
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The “challenge” to understanding and preventing the stigma attached to LGBT people, researchers wrote in their discussion, is to “assess the relationship between psychopathology and homophobia.” Perhaps interestingly, the project found an important role of personal attachments to other people in the development of homophobia. But the study also identified possible psychotic features in homophobic attitudes and thereby heightened the urgency for further research. To that end, the study evoked the tantalizing question if homophobia, should it qualify, ought to be classified as a mental illness.
It is perhaps ironic that gay people were regarded as mentally ill until 1973 and, now, a question is asked about the mental fitness of the people who fear or hate them. But the classification of homophobia as a mental illness might bear unintended consequences on a societal level, particularly in the legal arena. Defendants charged with crimes against LGBT people could be armed with an insanity defense. Granted the defense seldom works but, in virtually every state, the accused doesn’t have to prove insanity and it falls to the state to disprove it.
Further, legal action against government workers and social entities accused of LGBT discrimination risks a judgment against the accuser and in favor of the accused, thereby possibly strengthening and legitimizing the use of institutionalized discrimination against LGBT people.
Homophobia as a mental illness could also hinder states’ efforts to ban gay conversion therapy, pedaled as psychological treatment of LGBT minors whose parents want their children’s sexual orientation changed to heterosexual. Adult “survivors” of the therapy and civil libertarians have had some success toward ending the therapy that critics have called legal child abuse. Two states – New Jersey and California – have legally outlawed gay conversion for LGBT minors, and a handful of other states have measures against the practice pending.
Given that the psychological origins of homophobia and its related discrimination are barely into their infant stage, a clear need for further and extensive research exists – if for no other reason than to encourage the homophobe to confront his prejudice and start the process of rehabilitation.
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