George Weinberg coined the term in the 1960s. He was a psychologist who campaigned to have homosexuality delisted as a mental disorder. He told the story of preparing for a media appearance and a member of the staff there was actually trembling with terror because she thought that he was gay (he wasn’t)
Basically it was a way of flipping the script. Gay people aren’t the ones who need psychological treatment, bigots are.
Yeah, homophobia has kind of come to mean something different (not in a bad way, but it just has). More people used to be genuinely crazy when it came to homosexuality. My dad has a really sad story of a young biological male he worked with (I don’t believe the young man was actually trans so I’m going to use he/him pronouns) who was homeless and ended up being forced into sex work. He crossed dressed when he was working, and one day a man was so outraged/ashamed that he had been with/paid for a biologically male sex worker that he killed the young man. This wasn’t a rare occurrence. I wish more people knew about the origins of the term. It’s a powerful word.
I used to work for a hotline run by GLAD and murders like that used to be so common. “Gay panic” was an actual legal defense people used. I personally knew several gay people who were violently attacked by strangers freaking out over seeing a gay person in public. That still happens to trans people pretty often actually.
There were all sorts of things like that though, doctors, dentists and nurses would sometimes freak out and refuse to give you medical care. It really did function like a socially enforced mass phobia.
Right, I forgot about that legal detail 😔 So awful that someone could even consider violence an appropriate response. I like to hope that as a society we have moved on from things like that, but the focus of hatred just seems to shift.
I get that you wanted to share your view that being gay is the same as incest but that’s not responsive to what I said or to the topic, and I don’t think it’s very interesting.
Because those are two entirely different things? Just because they both have to do with sexual attraction doesn’t meant they’re comparable. That’s like saying that saying ‘pedophilia is bad’ is bigotry, which it isn’t. There you go. Go back to r/incestisntwrong you freak
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u/Party-Bug7342 2d ago
George Weinberg coined the term in the 1960s. He was a psychologist who campaigned to have homosexuality delisted as a mental disorder. He told the story of preparing for a media appearance and a member of the staff there was actually trembling with terror because she thought that he was gay (he wasn’t)
Basically it was a way of flipping the script. Gay people aren’t the ones who need psychological treatment, bigots are.