Over at the Associated Press, they’ve eliminated “homophobia.” David Minthorn, co-editor of the AP Stylebook, the vade mecum of the journalism world, says that the word—and others like it such as “Islamophobia”—ascribes “a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don’t have.”
The AP says “homophobia” is inaccurate and instead suggests “anti-gay,” a term both more neutral and more pointed: it labels people and policies as being against gays, for whatever reason, and implies a prompt to explain those reasons.
“Homophobia” was first coined by psychologist George Weinberg in the 1960s and popularized in his 1972 book, Society and the Healthy Homosexual. Weinberg—who isn’t gay—wanted to push back on the centuries-old idea that homosexuality was a disorder by putting the problem not on queers but on those who opposed us. The year after his book was published, homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
There is, to be sure, something a little ridiculous about the AP’s logic. In common usage, “homophobia” no longer holds the clinical connotations it once had.Surely the AP doesn’t really believe that readers assume a psychiatric diagnosis is being made when they read that someoneor something is homophobic. These days, “homophobia” is rarely read that narrowly, in the same way that “xenophobia,” for example, might enter into an article about foreign policy without any clinical connotations. Instead, “homophobia” has become a catch-all term for anti-gay sentiment, heterosexism, or hate (fear-based or otherwise) directed at LGBTQ people.
Who’s Afraid of Homophobia?
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Seeded on Wed Dec 26, 2012 9:19 AM

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