Anti-gay Sentiment Research Articles

Gay and Straight Men Prefer Masculine-Presenting Gay Men for a High-Status Role: Evidence From an Ecologically Valid Experiment

There is increased acceptance of gay men in most Western societies. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that feminine-presenting gay men are still disadvantaged compared to gay men who present in a more traditionally masculine way. Though gay men themselves may be complicit in perpetuating this bias, studies that demonstrate this possibility are scant. Whereas most studies on perceptions of feminine-presenting gay men have manipulated gender nonconformity via written descriptions, research suggests that behavioural cues such as voice and body-language can mitigate or exacerbate prejudice toward a stereotyped individual. In the current study, audio-visual stimuli were created to investigate how masculine versus feminine behaviour would impact status endowment from other gay and heterosexual men. In total, 256 men (Mage = 42.73, SD = 14.48: half gay; half heterosexual) cast, from a selection of six video-taped candidates, one gay man to play a lead role in a purported ad for a tourism campaign. In the videos, the actors delivered a script related to the tourism campaign in a manner where their voice and body-language was manipulated to come across as either masculine or feminine-presenting. Findings indicated that gay and heterosexual participants showed a significant preference for the masculine videoclips. For heterosexual men, the preference for masculine-presenting actors was predicted by greater anti-gay sentiment, whereas internalised anti-gay prejudice did not predict a preference for masculine-presentation among gay men. Implications of the findings for discourse and education on intraminority prejudice and suggestions for future research are offered.

Social pressure for religious conformity and anti-gay sentiment among Muslim and Christian youth

Research on civic education, for the most part, investigates the alleged outcomes of deliberate civic education programs. Remarkably, few types of research have investigated how the outcomes of group process (e.g. based on religion) in schools, and more specifically, the pressure to conform to in-group norms, relate to civic educational goals (e.g. promoting tolerance for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender people). Against that background, this paper has two objectives. First, we assess social variation in perceived social pressure for religious conformity among Christian and Muslim Youth enrolled in secondary education in Flanders (N = 2765). Second, we investigate the relationship between perceived social pressure for religious conformity and anti-gay sentiment. Our analyses are guided by social identity theory and rely on multilevel analysis. We find that for both Christian and Muslim youth, anti-gay sentiment is higher among young people who experience higher social pressure through the perceived expectations from talking with significant others about religion.

Perceptions of molecular epidemiology studies of HIV among stakeholders.

Background: Advances in viral sequence analysis make it possible to track the spread of infectious pathogens, such as HIV, within a population. When used to study HIV, these analyses (i.e., molecular epidemiology) potentially allow inference of the identity of individual research subjects. Current privacy standards are likely insufficient for this type of public health research. To address this challenge, it will be important to understand how stakeholders feel about the benefits and risks of such research.Design and Methods: To better understand perceived benefits and risks of these research methods, in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with HIV-infected individuals, individuals at high-risk for contracting HIV, and professionals in HIV care and prevention. To gather additional perspectives, attendees to a public lecture on molecular epidemiology were asked to complete an informal questionnaire.Results: Among those interviewed and polled, there was near unanimous support for using molecular epidemiology to study HIV. Questionnaires showed strong agreement about benefits of molecular epidemiology, but diverse attitudes regarding risks. Interviewees acknowledged several risks, including privacy breaches and provocation of anti-gay sentiment. The interviews also demonstrated a possibility that misunderstandings about molecular epidemiology may affect how risks and benefits are evaluated.Conclusions: While nearly all study participants agree that the benefits of HIV molecular epidemiology outweigh the risks, concerns about privacy must be addressed to ensure continued trust in research institutions and willingness to participate in research.Significance for public healthWhen molecular epidemiology is used to study HIV, it can demonstrate how HIV infections are related and how to target prevention efforts. Applying these analyses for maximal benefit in the fight against HIV would almost certainly make individuals whose data are analyzed vulnerable to discovery. However, absolute protection of this sensitive information would require that research into these methods not be done. The success of HIV molecular epidemiology will depend on finding a balance between public health and the interests of individuals living with HIV. The stakeholders interviewed in this study agreed that molecular epidemiology should be used to study HIV epidemics and transmission despite risks to privacy. However, these interviews also highlighted the difficulty of understanding molecular epidemiology and its privacy implications. For HIV molecular epidemiology to continue, privacy protections must go beyond simply masking traditional identifiers and assuming participants are informed enough to consent to the risks.

“Different than an infantry unit down in Georgia”: Narratives of queer liberation in the post-DADT military

More than five years out from its implementation, we still know relatively little about how members of the US military and its ancillary institutions are responding to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Contrary to what one might expect given the long history of LGBTQ antipathy in the military, I found in interviews with Boston area Reserve Officer Training Core (ROTC) cadets unanimous approval for the repeal of DADT. When pressed to explain why there was so much homogeneity of favorable opinion regarding the repeal, interviewees repeatedly offered the same explanation: that Boston, in particular, is such a progressive place that even more conservative institutions like the ROTC are spared anti-gay sentiment. They imagined the Southern and/or rural soldier they will soon encounter when they enter the US military, one who represents the traditionally homophobic attitudes of the old military in contrast to their more enlightened selves. This “metronormative” narrative has been critiqued elsewhere as inadequate for understanding the relationship between sexuality and place; this article contributes to that critique by taking a new approach. Rather than deconstruct narratives of queer rurality, as the majority of metronormativity scholarship has done, I deconstruct these narratives of urban queer liberation. I find that such narratives mask the murkier realities of LGBTQ attitudes in urban contexts and allow residents like the ROTC cadets in this study to displace blame about anti-gay prejudice to a distant Other, outside of their own ranks.

The ‘obnoxious mobilised minority’: homophobia and homohysteria in the British national party, 1982–1999

ABSTRACTThis article examines the British National Party (BNP)’s opposition to gay men during the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the sociological concept of ‘homohysteria’, it examines written material from BNP publications during those decades, looking specifically at the AIDS crisis, the party’s belief in a ‘queer conspiracy’, and the role which homosexuality played in the decline of the National Front and the birth of the BNP. The first study dedicated to British fascism’s anti-gay prejudice, this article argues that the existing scholarship fails to understand the degree and nature of anti-gay sentiment in the BNP, concluding that the party was homohysteric from its inception.

The ‘obnoxious mobilised minority’: homophobia and homohysteria in the British national party, 1982–1999*

This article examines the British National Party (BNP)’s opposition to gay men during the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the sociological concept of ‘homohysteria’, it examines written material from BNP publications during those decades, looking specifically at the AIDS crisis, the party’s belief in a ‘queer conspiracy’, and the role which homosexuality played in the decline of the National Front and the birth of the BNP. The first study dedicated to British fascism’s anti-gay prejudice, this article argues that the existing scholarship fails to understand the degree and nature of anti-gay sentiment in the BNP, concluding that the party was homohysteric from its inception.

Religious Quest Orientation and Anti-Gay Sentiment: Nuancing the Relationship Between Religiosity and Negative Attitudes Toward Homosexuality Among Young Muslims and Christians in Flanders

Public opinion research has repeatedly shown that religious people generally report more prejudice against homosexuality. However, previous research exploring the general mechanisms that underpin this relationship mostly relied on Christian samples in North America. Studies outside North America are few in number and limited in the forms of religiosity they address. Of all indicators that have been studied so far, a religious quest orientation was found to be the only one negatively related to anti-gay sentiments. This leaves open the question whether the mechanisms for different forms of religiosity can also be found outside North America. Against that background this research note assesses how religious quest orientation, self-rated religiosity, religious behavior, and authoritarianism are related to prejudice against homosexuality among Christian and Muslim youth aged 14–23 in Flanders (N = 2,834). This study is the first that investigates the relationship between religious quest orientation and anti-gay sentiments among Muslims. For both Christians and Muslims, we found that even taking into account a wide range of social background and religious characteristics, having a religious quest orientation is related to less prejudice toward homosexuality.

“Bury Their Hearts”: Some Thoughts on the Specter of Homosexuality Haunting Russia

Abstract Russia’s anti-gay propaganda laws and anti-gay sentiment have shocked many in the West. They shouldn’t have. In Soviet Russia, the homosexual was seen as a sign of foreign pollution, a temporary aberration—like a criminal or a disease—that will disappear in a more socialist future. As a result, queer Russians were not so much the stable homosexual species that they have been in the past 150 years in the West as much as momentary communities of desire. In the post-Soviet era, this history of the homosexual as foreign is now confronted with American understandings of gays and lesbians as “born this way” as well as American homophobia that posits the homosexual as a threat to children and the “traditional” family. By examining the clash between Russian and American histories of sexuality, we can see that the current anti-gay politics in Russia was not predetermined by its history, but certainly shaped by it. With the confluence of an insecure state, growing nationalism, and the increasing importance of conservative Orthodox Christianity, Russia’s history of sexuality has shaped the homosexual into its current form as a threat from outside, akin to Central Asian immigrants in the nationalist imagination, and a threat that must be eliminated.

‘Aid for gays’: the moral and the material in ‘African homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi

ABSTRACTIn recent years, ‘African homophobia’ has become a spectacle on the global stage, making Africa into a pre-modern site of anti-gay sentiment in need of Western intervention. This article suggests that ‘homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi is an idiom through which multiple actors negotiate anxieties around governance and moral and economic dependency. I illustrate the material conditions that brought about social imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion – partially expressed through homophobic discourse – in Malawi. The article analyses the cascade of events that led to a moment of political and economic crisis in mid-2011, with special focus on how a 2009 sodomy case made homophobia available as a new genre of social commentary. Employing discourse analysis of newspaper articles, political speeches, the proceedings of a sodomy case, and discussions about men who have sex with men (MSM) as an HIV risk group, I show how African homophobia takes form via interested deployments of ‘cultural’ rhetoric toward competing ends. This article lends a comparative case study to a growing literature on the political and social functions of homophobia in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Size of the LGBT Population and the Magnitude of Antigay Sentiment Are Substantially Underestimated

We demonstrate that widely used measures of antigay sentiment and the size of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population are misestimated, likely substantially. In a series of online experiments using a large and diverse but nonrepresentative sample, we compare estimates from the standard methodology of asking sensitive questions to measures from a “veiled” methodology that precludes inference about an individual but provides population estimates. The veiled method increased self-reports of antigay sentiment, particularly in the workplace: respondents were 67% more likely to disapprove of an openly gay manager when asked with a veil, and 71% more likely to say it should be legal to discriminate in hiring on the basis of sexual orientation. The veiled methodology also produces larger estimates of the fraction of the population that identifies as LGBT or has had a sexual experience with a member of the same sex. Self-reports of nonheterosexual identity rose by 65%, and same-sex sexual experiences by 59%. We conduct a “placebo test” and show that for nonsensitive placebo items, the veiled methodology produces effects that are small in magnitude and not significantly different from zero in seven out of eight items. Taken together, the results suggest antigay discrimination might be a more significant issue than formerly considered, as the nonheterosexual population and antigay workplace-related sentiment are both larger than previously measured. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2503 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Slash Manips: Remixing Popular Media with Gay Pornography

Slash Manips: Remixing Popular Media with Gay Pornography

Adolescent Masculinity in an Age of Decreased Homohysteria

Adolescent masculinity in the 1980s was marked by the need to distance oneself from the specter of “the fag.” In this homohysteric culture, compulsory heterosexuality and high rates of anti-gay sentiment necessitated that adolescent boys distance themselves from anything associated with femininity. It was this zeitgeist that brought Connell’s hegemonic masculinity theory to the vanguard of masculine studies. However, homohysteria has diminished among adolescents today. Accordingly, in this article, I foreground research extracts from multiple ethnographies on groups of 16-year-old adolescent boys in order to contextualize the repeated and consistent data I find throughout both the United States and the United Kingdom. In explaining how the diminishment of homohysteria promotes a “One-Direction” culture of inclusive and highly feminized masculinities, I suggest that new social theories are required.

“Kids Not Rights, is Their Craving”: Sex Education, Gay Rights, and the Threat of Gay Teachers

In July 1977, the Ontario Humans Rights Commission recommended adding sexual orientation to the Code. This move was generally supported but Toronto newspapers and evangelists sought assurances that school boards could still dismiss homosexual teachers. They demanded children be shielded from gay teachers, who they accused of sexual predation. I historically link this to a reenergized fear of homosexuals which emerged during Toronto sex education debates in the 1970s. Later, influenced by Anita Bryant's Save the Children crusade, Toronto newspapers and evangelists argued gay teachers were the dangerous effect of gay rights. After the 1977 murder of Emanuel Jaques and the publication of Gerald Hannon's "Men Loving Boys, Loving Men" article, anti-gay sentiment in Toronto exploded, temporarily halting the progress of gay rights.

Anti-Gay Sentiment Among Adolescents in Belgium and Canada: A Comparative Investigation into the Role of Gender and Religion

Previous research has indicated that opposition toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trangender (LGBT) rights remains prevalent among Western populations. In this article, we investigate the determinants of anti-gay attitudes among adolescents in two liberal democracies, Belgium (n = 6,330) and Canada (n = 3,334). The analysis indicates that hostile feelings toward LGBT rights are particularly widespread among boys, while the effects of socioeconomic status and parental education remain limited. Various religious denominations proved to have a strong and significant negative impact on tolerance, with especially high scores for Islam. Religious practice, too, contributes to a negative attitude toward LGBT rights. The consequences of these findings with regard to tolerance for gay rights among Islamic youth in Western democracies are discussed.

Homophobia and hostility: Christian conservative reactions to the political and cultural progress of lesbians and gay men

American society has witnessed a steady rise in anti-gay sentiment and activity among many Christian conservatives. While other issues, such as abortion and school prayer, also capture their attention, homosexuality seems to produce increasingly intense reactions from them. In this article, I offer an explanation for this phenomenon. Rather than attributing this increase to a rise in homophobia among Christian conservatives, I argue that an important explanation lies in the ways Christians perceive hostility from the general culture. In contrast to earlier years, a greater proportion of the hostility that Christians currently perceive is filtered through the general culture’s often positive reactions to the gay and lesbian rights movement. I illustrate this argument by using numerous sources of data: secondary analyses of national opinion datasets, a content analysis of newspaper editorials, and in-depth interviews with Christian conservatives.