Talk like a Man. Walk like a Man, My Son: Straight-identified Individuals’ Experiences of Homophobia

• In Event: 035 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 20. Masculinized Spaces

Abstract

While there is evidence of decreasing social acceptance for explicit expressions of homophobia, surveys show that significant numbers of LGBT individuals have experienced discrimination and exclusion because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Surveys, public discourse, and social science research about homophobia tends to focus exclusively on the experiences of individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Yet researchers who study gender point to the ways that homophobia is directed not only at LGBT people, but is also directed at straight-identified individuals who are not gender normative as a means of policing gender. Drawing on life history interviews with straight-identified people who claim to be perceived as gay, I explore the ways that straight people experience and make sense of being targets of homophobia. In my interviews I found that most respondents experienced homophobia raging from the explicit and overt to more subtle forms of homophobic microaggressions on account of being gender non-normative. For my interviewees, their parents, in particular, expressed anxieties that they were, or would become, gay. In this paper, I explain why some straight individuals did not utilize the concept of homophobia to categorize negative social interactions that stemmed from being perceived as gay. I also show how even gender non-normative straight people draw on heterosexual privilege to mitigate negative social consequences that result from being read as gay. These findings illustrate how homophobia impacts people who self-identify as straight and provide a nuanced understanding of how heterosexual privilege operates in social interactions.

Author

• Travis Beaver, Colgate University