- What is homophobia?
- Types of homophobia
- Homophobia in history
- Homophobia today
- Fight homophobia
- Homophobia and machismo
We explain what homophobia is, what types exist and their forms throughout history and today. Also, fighting her.
What is homophobia?
The word homophobia is composed of two Greek voices, which are homo, "Equal", and phobos, "afraid". At present it is used to give a name to the irrational manifestation of fear, aversion or anger towards homosexuality or persons homosexuals, provided that said feeling has its origin in the culture and not in past traumatic experiences.
Although there is the term lesbophobia, to refer to it Social phenomenon In relation to homosexual women, the word homophobia usually includes it, as well as the aversion to transsexuality and transsexuals, although for this the term transphobia was recently coined and preferred. This phenomenon is often anchored in religious, conservative or speeches Obsolete and outdated doctors.
Homophobia manifests itself in a set of attitudes of contempt and even hatred, which can be more or less open and frontal, and more or less violent and dangerous. Said attitudes start from the consideration that homosexuality is a conduct equivocal, morally reprehensible, when not a disease or a psychological problem.
Homophobic or homophobic people can be without realizing it, or they can have homophobic attitudes without necessarily considering themselves homophobic, or without agreeing with what is described in the previous paragraph, even being friends or relatives of homosexual people.
It is also possible to find homophobic attitudes in homosexual people, which further aggravates their suffering by adding guilt or contempt for themselves to the rejection they feel.
The motives behind homophobia can be very diverse. It is common for it to manifest as part of the speech of groups that are already violent, such as racial supremacism, or very conservative sectors of the society, like the religious fundamentalist.
There are, however, those who see in the attitudes of irrational rejection or obsessive persecution a hidden declaration of interest, so that in the heart of the homophobic there would be a strongly repressed homosexual impulse. In any case, there is much debate about it.
Types of homophobia
Without there being a single or universal classification, homophobia can be differentiated according to where it comes from:
- Institutional homophobia. The one that comes from institutions official, is the product of government decisions or is embedded in the discourse or practices of religious, social or cultural institutions.
- Learned homophobia. The one that is transmitted to us culturally and socially without anyone directly or directly enunciating it, but is fed passively from the roles established by gender that society as a whole imposes on the new generations. Even gay people get bliss education in which your preferences are not represented.
- Internalized homophobia. The one that comes unconsciously from homosexual people themselves and manifests itself despite not being formally assumed, but often quite the opposite. A person can even be openly homosexual, military in the LGBT + cause, and yet suffer from internalized or unconscious homophobia.
- Homophobia in heterosexuals. Perhaps the most common and manifest form in people of heterosexual orientation, has to do with the feeling of being threatened by the desire of the homosexual or by their gender choice. In addition, it is understood as a form of unnatural existence, because it cannot procreate, and therefore it is thought that it comes from some trauma, or even from the lack of "normal" sexual relations, which can lead in the case of women to "corrective" violations.
Homophobia in history
Writer Oscar Wilde was convicted of being homosexual.
Homosexuality is as old as the humanity same, or perhaps more, since it is common in higher primates and other animals. In addition, it was accepted and recognized as a form of love in cultures as important to the West as the Greco-Roman. However, homophobia also has a long history in culture.
For example, homosexuality is condemned in many of the ancient religious texts, such as the biblical Old Testament. It is thought that this could come from the prohibition of homosexual relations that the Assyrian king Tiglatpileser I (1114-1076 BC) imposed on the Assyrian Kingdom, of which both Judah and Israel, the Jewish kingdoms, were vassals.
In any case, the tradition Hebrew reproduced the prohibition. It was later inherited by Christianity, interpreting the Sodom and Gomorrah passages in the Bible as an explicit warning against relationships then considered against nature.
In fact, Saint Augustine (354-430) was the first to document the association of anal sex with the “sin of Sodom” or “sodomy”, although the latter term would appear much later, in the Liber Gommorrhianus of the Benedictine monk and ascetic Petrus Damianus (1007-1072).
But much earlier, in the 6th century AD. C., Already the Byzantine emperor Justiniano (483-565) and his consort Teodora (500-548) had expressly prohibited "unnatural" acts, taking refuge in different political and religious reasons. They promised the penalty of castration and public humiliation (public walk) for the guilty.
The persecution of the so-called “sodomites” in Christian Europe knew no borders. Both in Protestant England and inquisitorial Spain were crimes severely punished. In the first it was called buggery and was punished with hanging by the Buggery Act from 1533, for example. Just with the French Revolution In 1789 the laws that penalized with death the homosexuality.
However, in the Modern age homosexuality was not yet accepted. Famous people like Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) went to jail repeatedly in Victorian England.
The governments of the 20th century, inheritors of the same tradition, also punished homosexuality, especially in the dictatorships fascists of Spain and Germany, in which homosexuals were shot or locked up in concentration camps.
Similar measures had other subsequent regimes, such as the so-called Argentine National Reorganization Process or even in Chilean Pinochetism. Even in non-dictatorial countries, such as socialist Germany (the German Democratic Republic) or capitalist Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany), homosexuality was a crime until 1957 and 1969 respectively.
This panorama began to improve in the 1970s, thanks to the sexual liberation movements and the counterculture in the West. On the other hand, it had a significant setback when the AIDS pandemic became official, considered during the 1980s as a "disease of homosexuals".
Something curious to note is that female homosexuality, although frowned upon and also punished, was always less problematic for the established order than male homosexuality. Undoubtedly this is due to the subordinate role that women have played throughout history, and the little opportunity that she left them for experimentation and the pursuit of pleasures, considering how young they were selected for it. marriage.
Homophobia today
The laws they have become more liberal and tolerant of homosexuality in the West, and recent generations have been much more open about accepting and normalizing it. However, it is impossible to say that homophobia has disappeared. If anything, it has become an illegal affair, not formally recognized, but often carried out in practice.
Employment discrimination, harassment and violence, or simply the refusal to recognize certain fundamental basic rights, such as same-sex marriage (or civil union, depending on what you call it), are realities that homosexuals in the West must deal with.
At the same time, homosexuality remains a crime punishable by death in many nations in the Middle East or Asia Minor, especially those with theocratic or fundamentalist governments.
It is estimated that, in the year 2000, a homosexual person was murdered every two days in the world, due to violent acts of homophobia. According to Amnesty International figures, 70 countries are still formally persecuting homosexuality and in 8 of them they are coded to death.
Fight homophobia
Fortunately, many initiatives aspire to make homophobia visible and thus take the first steps against it. In fact, since 1990 every May 17 the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO) has been celebrated, to commemorate the elimination of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses of the World Health Organization.
In 2008, the French ambassador to the United Nations formally requested that homosexuality be decriminalized worldwide, through a joint resolution that, however, would be non-binding. The resolution was signed by 66 of the member countries, mostly Western, and rejected by countries such as the United States, China, Russia, El Salvador and nations with an Islamic majority.
Despite this, in the West more and more nations are legalizing same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples, thus taking giant and unprecedented steps in the matter.
Homophobia and machismo
Machismo and homophobia have a lot to do with it, as evidenced by the fact that homosexual men are traditionally accused of being "effeminate" or of wanting to be "the woman in the relationship." In fact, it is also traditional to consider the female sex - the "weak" sex - as passive compared to the activity of the male.
As will be seen, it is a system of valuation of people based on their biological sex or sexual orientation, which puts the "male" at the top of everything: the male Heterosexual. That is why, to combat sexism and homophobia, it is necessary to combat machismo at the same time.