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In his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual, psychotherapist George Weinberg defines the term as “the dread of being in close quarters with homosexuals.” The notion that homophobes-not homosexuals-were suffering from a psychological pathology was radical homosexuality wouldn’t be removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1974. To be sure, the term homophobia represented a significant and empowering shift in public discourse when it was first introduced. Any minority racial or ethnic group can be a victim of racism-and in the United States, most have. But while negrophobia does describe a specific phenomenon, the benefit of moving on to racism, the origin of which the Oxford English Dictionary locates in 1903, is that it isn’t limited to hatred of or discrimination against only black people. Its etymology is appealingly straightforward and gets at the heart of something the United States has been grappling with for most of its history: a fear of black people, which has often been expressed as violent hatred and discrimination. A Google Trends analysis in this case is, sadly, useless, though negrophobia did happen to resurface recently in the title of a controversial article in Time, on the occasion of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police. Dating from 1819 in the United States, it’s difficult to pinpoint when, exactly, negrophobia fell out of use. Luckily, there’s historical precedent for a prejudice graduating from phobia to -ism: In this country, what we now call racism used to be called negrophobia. When you think about it, homophobia feels insufficiently damning, at best. Both words share the -ism suffix with sexism, classism, and ageism, forming a foul linguistic family of social ills that contrasts sharply with personal foibles like a fear of spiders (arachnophobia) or heights (acrophobia). Gaycism is an obvious play on racism, one of the most pernicious and deeply rooted issues in American life. “No! Playdate suspended on account of your gaycism.”Īs goofy as the word appears in this context, it’s in many ways an improvement on the language we now use to describe anti-gay bigotry: homophobia, homophobe, homophobic.
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Just ’cause we didn’t get along doesn’t mean we didn’t have raging sex in a bus terminal.”
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Besides, some parts of the stereotype are true. “You think just ’cause Franklin and I are both friends of Elton, we’re just gonna pack it up, move to Vermont, and start selling antiques?” “You think all gays are the same,” Max counters.