Homophobia: On the Cultural History of an Idea

Abstract

In the final third of the twentieth century, liberals and assorted leftists have aimed their guns at what appear to be the big three obstacles to a just social order in the United States: racism, sexism, and something called homophobia. Other figures sometimes enter into this picture: ethnocentrism, ableism, what is sometimes called classism or class prejudice (although this is largely absent in the American liberal imagination), cultural imperialism, evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. But, for the most part, the big three recur in a litany familiar to readers of the left press; in a more dilute form they make their way into the mainstream newspapers, where they have achieved a certain level of everyday recognition on the part of the larger public. While one can find plenty of racists, sexists, and homophobes in American society, one can find almost no one who will stand up and make a philosophical defense of racism, sexism, or homophobia. Those who defend white pride or the traditional family, or who are opposed to special rights for homosexuals generally use terms other than those that their political enemies attach to them. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are widely recognized as negative and disparaging terms, terms that racists, sexists, and homophobes would not use for themselves-although there are exceptions. What these three concepts share seems fairly obvious. What is less obvious is the way in which they differ from one another and, in particular, the way in which the last of the three-homophobia differs from the other two. Because homophobia is the most historically recent of the three-the word was coined in the early 1970s-it can tell us something