Ως γλωσσικό φόρουμ, ας εκμεταλλευτούμε την ευκαιρία να βάλουμε εδώ και την πρώτη εμφάνιση του όρου με τη σημερινή σημασία στο βιβλίο του George Weinberg
Society and the Healthy Homosexual (1983). Αντέγραψα τις πρώτες παραγράφους του πρώτου κεφαλαίου από το Amazon,
εδώ:
Homophobia
I would never consider a patient healthy unless he had overcome his prejudice against homosexuality. Of course if the person is himself homosexual, the prejudice he holds is barring the way to easy expression of his own desires. But even if he is heterosexual, his repugnance at homosexuality is certain to be harmful to him. In my experience, such a prejudice is more rife among heterosexual men than among heterosexual women.
The person who belittles homosexuals with evident enjoyment is at the very least telling me that he wants to establish his own sense of importance through contrast with other people—a tenuous business. He says with revulsion that someone he knows is “a faggot,” or he lowers his voice when describing a sexual advance that a man once made to him.
Do you know how certain female impersonation clubs survive? Nonhomosexual men, who want to convince themselves and their wives or girl friends of their masculinity, throng them.
They sit at ringside—or pay one of the transvestites to come over and sit with them. They pinch the lesbians and ask jocularly, “Are you a boy or a girl?” Some of them chew fat cigars. When the stage show begins and the drag queens come out, they whistle. The lion is allowing the lamb to live and bleat.
At three o’clock in the morning our so-called head of the household says raucously, “Check please!” and overtips the waitress. On the stairway he puts his arm around his woman's waist. He is assuring her by his firm hold that he is with her, that the time has come when he is to take her away from this sordid atmosphere.
On the street he mutters something to the effect that the people below are sick and “really sad.” He finds a cab immediately, since the customers in such places are known to be showoffs with money, and a line of cabs is waiting for people like him. In the cab he smooches with his woman and they feel like a normal couple.
This is the identity that the patient who slurs homosexuality assumes in my mind while he is talking. He is bracing himself and trying to bolster his relationship by presenting it against a contrast. But in so doing, he is increasing his fear of sordidness—and heightening his fear of witnessing human variety.
Moreover, he is inhibiting himself. He is depriving himself not of homosexual experiences, which he truthfully does not want, but of all else that he connects with homosexuality. For instance, he makes it impossible to have friends who are homosexual, and thus loses the possible benefit of a viewpoint that would have widened his. And if he regards even so natural an attitude as passivity as homosexual, he has sentenced himself to renouncing receptivity as an attitude for himself.
This last is a very severe loss. A fellow looked at a reproduction of Michelangelo’s painting of Adam on the wall of my office, and turning away, told me he hated it.
“Why?” I asked.
“He’s too passive. He’s not doing anything.”
“Well, he was just created, seconds ago. He’s got a good excuse,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said bluntly, and he turned away in disgust from perhaps the finest nude ever drawn, sickened because the character was delicate and lolling, doing nothing more than absorbing experience.
Most men who loathe homosexuals have a deathly fear of abandonment in the direction of passivity. The surrender of control signifies to them a loss of masculinity, and their demand for control produces narrowness. To condemn passivity is like condemning your eyeballs. We need passivity to see, to discover, to learn.
The person I am describing usually feels under tremendous pressure to be the aggressor in sex, and he expects conformity and passivity on the part of his woman. He is easily undone when he does not find it. He inflicts ludicrous role-expectations on his children. In some cases the fear of being in any way womanish has so invaded the crannies of the person’s mind that it affects his attitudes toward the use of color in his home and in his clothing. He has almost defined himself out of existence by the very contrast he is fighting so hard to establish.
If a son is homosexual, he goes berserk. To reassure himself that he himself has not also succumbed, and is still tough, he might take a punch at the boy. “That fellow is never coming into this house again!” he shouts at his wife, his eyes popping, after the boy has stormed out. It seems unmanning to him to have given birth to an unmanly son.
I am describing a clear-cut but prevalent form of phobia. It has not been identified as such by the experts because the sufferer’s viewpoint jibes with most experts’ opinions that homosexuals are disturbed. If we liken homosexuality to an illness, the father’s distress looks reasonable. We expect despair and hair-pulling when someone close to us is desperately ill. But why his assault? One does not assault someone merely because he is ill. One assaults him because one is mortally afraid of him.
What causes homophobia—the dread of being in close quarters with homosexuals—and in the case of homosexuals themselves, self-loathing? Volumes have been written—by psychologists, sexologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and physiologists—on homosexuality, its origins and its development. This is because in most western civilizations, homosexuality is itself considered a problem; our unwarranted distress over homosexuality is not classified as a problem because it is still a majority point of view. Homophobia is still part of the conventional American attitude.
Despite massive evidence that homosexuals are as various in their personalities as anyone else, the public at this time still holds many misconceptions which in some cases are thought to justify our discriminatory practices. Among these misconceptions are the belief that homosexuals seduce young children (child molestation is preponderantly a heterosexual practice); the belief that homosexuals are untrustworthy; that homosexual men hate women; that homosexual women hate men—all beliefs unsupported by evidence, but held unquestioningly by millions.
If there is any doubt of the existence of homophobia, consider that in England and the U.S., for hundreds of years, homosexuality was unmentionable. In the courts, homosexual crimes were alluded to in Latin, or implied by circuitous language, and judges have sentenced people to languish in jail for acts considered so vile that they should not be talked about. For this reason, homosexuality has sometimes been called “the crime without a name.”
