The social construction of gay oppression as a determinant of gay men's health: ‘homophobia is killing us’

Abstract

Where once the health sciences concentrated much of their efforts on curing homosexuality, contemporary health science is concerned largely with the mental and physical effects of oppression, which are now taken as the legitimate focus of health research and intervention. However, gay men's health has imported into its practice a fairly individualistic ideology, one that undermines efforts to address the social determinants of health and to achieve social justice goals. In this article, I explore the social construction of gay men's health in the health literature. My analysis focuses specifically on constructions of gay oppression as a determinant of health. Through an analysis of the gay men's health literature, I identify three recurring themes: (i) gay oppression is conceived as a psychological phenomenon, (ii) gay men's damaged psychologies are a determinant of gay men's health, and (iii) individual therapies are proposed as the solution to gay oppression. Like mainstream health research and practice, gay men's health focuses attention on the mental and physical functioning of the individual, ignores the social and structural determinants of health, and directs health intervention squarely on the individual. I propose an alternative (anti-oppression) research agenda; one that shifts our conceptualisation of the ‘the problem’ from the oppressed to the oppressor.