Homophobia

• 1. Introduction

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  Homophobia is the word George Weinberg coined in the 1960s to name something far older than the word itself. Prejudice against homosexuality has been recorded since antiquity, first appearing in Ancient Greece and growing sharply during the Middle Ages. But the term itself did not appear in print until the 23rd of May 1969, in the American magazine Screw, where it described heterosexual men's fear that others might think they were gay.

  Weinberg built the word from two roots: the Greek phóbos, meaning fear or aversion, and the existing word homosexual. He was also the first person to speak the term aloud. Three years later, in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual, he gave it a clinical shape: a fear he described as tied to contagion, to the threat against home and family, to religion, and to a brutality that fear reliably produces.

  What the documentary ahead examines is how a single word became a lens for understanding institutional power, personal psychology, economic cost, and the long argument about whether the word itself is even the right one to use.

• 2. A Word Under Dispute

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  Professor David A. F. Haaga pointed out a tension at the heart of homophobia: contemporary usage covers a wide range of negative emotions, attitudes, and behaviors, which do not match the clinical definition of a phobia as an intense, illogical, or abnormal fear of a specific thing. In other words, the word promises precision it cannot quite deliver.

  The pushback came from multiple directions. In 1980, LGBTQ historian John Boswell suggested the alternative homosexophobia, arguing that the etymology of homophobia wrongly joins homos with phobos. That same year, Hudson and Ricketts coined homonegativism specifically to avoid a term they considered unscientific in its presumption of motivation. Researcher Gregory M. Herek at the University of California, Davis, preferred the phrase sexual prejudice: descriptive, free of assumptions about why someone holds the view, and carrying no judgment about irrationality.

  Behavioral scientists William O'Donohue and Christine Caselles argued in 1993 that as the word is usually used it makes an illegitimately pejorative evaluation of certain open and debatable value positions. Herek himself observed that homophobia was "probably more widely used and more often criticized" of all the competing terms.

  Despite all of this, the term gained acceptance over time. In 2017, the Associated Press Stylebook added an entry for homophobia and homophobic for the first time, describing them as acceptable in broad references or quotations to the concept of fear or hatred of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. The AP had excluded the terms as recently as 2012, making the reversal a span of just five years.

• 3. Internalized Conflict

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  In 1996, a controlled study at the University of Georgia enrolled 64 heterosexual men, half of whom self-reported as homophobic. Researchers measured erectile responses when participants were exposed to homoerotic images. Men scored as homophobic by the Index of Homophobia showed considerably more arousal than non-homophobic men. Weinstein and colleagues arrived at similar findings, identifying students from controlling and homophobic households as the most likely to carry repressed same-sex attraction.

  One co-author of the Weinstein research described the pattern this way: "In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward." A 2016 eye-tracking study added another layer: heterosexual men with high negative impulse reactions toward homosexuals gazed for longer periods at homosexual imagery than other heterosexual men. Cheval and colleagues concluded that these findings reinforce the need to consider that homophobia might reflect concerns about sexuality in general, not homosexuality in particular.

  Internalized homophobia also takes the form of a person with same-sex attraction directing negative stereotypes and stigma inward. The clinical term ego-dystonic sexual orientation describes a condition where sexual orientation conflicts with a person's idealized self-image, producing anxiety and a desire to change. That internal struggle has measurable consequences: up to 30 percent of non-heterosexual youth have been reported to attempt suicide, a rate attributed in part to this conflict between religious or social beliefs and sexual identity.

  Researcher Iain R. Williamson acknowledged that he finds the term homophobia highly problematic, but retains its use for continuity with the existing literature, while noting that internalized sexual stigma is sometimes preferred as a replacement.

• 4. The State as Enforcer

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  As of May 2016, homosexuality was illegal in 74 countries. The International Lesbian and Gay Association published a report in 2009, State Sponsored Homophobia, based on research by Daniel Ottosson at Sodertorn University College in Stockholm. It found 80 countries treating homosexuality as a crime, with seven carrying the death penalty: Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Brunei.

  Since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the Iranian government had executed more than 4,000 people on charges of homosexual acts. In Saudi Arabia, the maximum punishment is public execution, though the government uses alternatives such as fines, jail time, and whipping unless it perceives LGBTQ social organizing as a challenge to state authority. In Afghanistan under Taliban rule, homosexuality carries the death penalty, whereas during the Islamic Republic period the punishment had been a fine or prison.

  Historical state enforcement runs deep. In medieval Europe, homosexuality was classified as sodomy and was punishable by death. In 1307, accusations of sodomy and homosexuality were among the central charges in the Trial of the Knights Templar. The Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin decriminalized homosexuality in 1922, earlier than most European countries, but Joseph Stalin reversed that policy and it remained illegal under Article 121 until the Yeltsin era.

  Robert Mugabe, the former president of Zimbabwe, delivered his first major public condemnation of homosexuality in August 1995 at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, telling the audience to arrest gay and lesbian people and hand them to police. The following September, Zimbabwe's parliament introduced legislation banning homosexual acts. In 1997, a court found Canaan Banana, Mugabe's predecessor and Zimbabwe's first president, guilty of 11 counts of sodomy and indecent assault.

  In Russia, a federal law criminalizing the distribution of materials among minors in support of non-traditional sexual relationships was enacted in June 2013 as an amendment to an existing child protection law. In 2023, Russia's Supreme Court declared the international LGBTQ rights movement an extremist organization.

• 5. Religious Foundations

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  Leviticus 18:22 states: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." Leviticus 20:13 adds a prescribed penalty. These passages, alongside the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and Romans 1:26-27, form the core scriptural basis cited by those who oppose homosexuality within Christian and Jewish traditions.

  Scholarly debate over these passages has centered on historical context. Writing in Religion Dispatches magazine, Candace Chellew-Hodge argued that the six or so verses most often cited to condemn LGBTQ people refer instead to abusive sex, and that Jesus was silent on the subject. That reading is contested by a number of conservative evangelicals, including Robert A. J. Gagnon.

  The Catholic Church's Catechism states that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered, contrary to natural law, and cannot under any circumstances be approved. A February 2025 Pew Research Center poll found that 70 percent of American Catholics support gay marriage, up from 46 percent in 2010.

  All major Islamic sects forbid homosexuality, which is a crime under Sharia law and treated as such in most Muslim countries. The 2009 ILGA report found that the overlap between religious authority and state law is most visible in territories governed by Islamic authority, where the boundary between religious and state-sponsored homophobia is unclear.

  Queer theology developed as a direct counterpoint. Queer religions have also emerged, dedicated specifically to serving the spiritual needs of LGBTQ people. The American Psychiatric Association's 1992 statement called on international health organizations to urge the repeal of legislation that penalizes homosexual acts by consenting adults in private, a position reaffirmed by the APA's Board of Trustees in July 2011.

• 6. The Economic Reckoning

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  M. V. Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, presented findings to the World Bank in March 2014 on homophobia's cost to India. Health expenses alone, caused by depression, suicide, and HIV treatment attributable to homophobia, amounted to an estimated additional 23,100 million dollars. When violence, workplace exclusion, family rejection, and school bullying were factored in, her estimate for total losses in 2014 reached up to 30,800 million dollars, or 1.7 percent of India's GDP.

  A 2018 study covering 158 countries placed the worldwide economic cost of prejudice against gay people at 119.1 billion dollars. Losses in Asia reached 88.29 billion dollars. The Middle East and North Africa accounted for 16.92 billion dollars. Latin America and the Caribbean registered 8.04 billion dollars. The same study found that a 1 percent decrease in the level of homophobia is correlated with a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita, though the researchers specified this does not imply causation.

  LGBT tourism tells part of the story from the other direction: LGBTQ tourists contribute 6.8 billion dollars every year to the Spanish economy alone. A 2005 New York Times editorial connected the United States military's don't ask, don't tell policy to the loss of approximately 20 Arabic translators since 1998, creating a backlog of roughly 120,000 hours of untranslated Arabic documents during a period when the US was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law published a 2018 study concluding that a one-point increase in its LGBT Global Acceptance Index correlates with an increase of 1,506 dollars in GDP per capita, and that each additional legal right is associated with an increase of 1,694 dollars per capita.

• 7. Resistance and Countermeasures

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  The International Day Against Homophobia, known as IDAHO, was first celebrated on the 17th of May 2005, with related activities in more than 40 countries. The date was chosen deliberately: it marks the day in 1990 when the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its classification of diseases.

  Since 1994, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has ruled that laws criminalizing homosexual relations between consenting adults violate the right to privacy guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In March 2010, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted what its Secretary General described as the first legal instrument in the world dealing specifically with discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity.

  In schools, researchers have found that teaching students about historical figures who were gay, or who suffered discrimination because of their sexuality, has been an effective preventative strategy against homophobic bullying. Warren J. Blumenfeld argued that anti-LGBTQ prejudice functions beyond the harm it causes to LGBTQ people directly: he described it as a tool for extreme right-wing conservatives and fundamentalist religious groups, and as a factor that restricts gender expression for everyone.

  A 2016 article published in the Journal of Homosexuality, drawing on research by Arizona State University Professor Elizabeth Segal, proposed a three-part model for reducing homophobia: exposure to LGBTQ experiences, explanation of the distinct challenges LGBTQ people face, and direct experience by working alongside or volunteering with LGBTQ communities. The four largest countries of Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, began coordinated mass media campaigns against homophobia as early as 2002.