Homophobia

Homophobia encompasses a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward homosexuality or people who identify or are perceived as being lesbian, gay or bisexual. It has been defined as contempt, prejudice, aversion, hatred, or antipathy, may be based on irrational fear, and may sometimes be attributed to religious beliefs. Homophobia is observable in critical and hostile behavior such as discrimination and violence on the basis of sexual orientations that are non-heterosexual.

Recognized types of homophobia include institutionalized homophobia, e.g. religious homophobia and state-sponsored homophobia, and internalized homophobia, experienced by people who have same-sex attractions, regardless of how they identify. According to 2010 Hate Crimes Statistics released by the FBI National Press Office, 19.3 percent of hate crimes across the United States "were motivated by a sexual orientation bias." Moreover, a Southern Poverty Law Center 2010 Intelligence Report extrapolating data from FBI national hate crime statistics from 1995 to 2008, found that LGBTQ people were "far more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be victimized by violent hate crime."

Etymology

Although prejudice against homosexuality and homosexuals has been recorded since antiquity—first appearing in Ancient Greece and growing notably during the Middle Ages, especially by adherents of Islam and Christianity—the term "homophobia" itself is relatively new. Scholars have used it to describe intolerance towards homosexuality throughout history despite the term's anachronism.

Coined by psychologist George Weinberg in the 1960s, the term homophobia is a portmanteau of (1) the word homosexual, itself a mix of neo-classical morphemes, and (2) phobia from the Greek φόβος phóbos, meaning "fear", "morbid fear" or "aversion". Weinberg is credited as the first person to have used the term in speech. The word homophobia first appeared in print in an article written for the 23 May 1969 edition of the American pornographic magazine Screw, in which the word was used to refer to heterosexual men's fear that others might think they are gay.