Beyond "homophobia": Thinking more clearly about stigma, prejudice, and sexual orientation.

This article addresses the topic of homophobia. Recent events might make it seem as though it is dying out. Hate crimes based on a person's sexual orientation or gender presentation can now be prosecuted by the federal government, even when they occur in states lacking their own hate crime laws. Numerous states have changed their laws to permit same-sex couples to marry, some through the passage of legislation and others through ballot measures. Since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 decision overturning part of the Defense of Marriage Act, those marriages have been recognized by the federal government. With the dramatic and relatively rapid turnaround in public opinion, this article focuses on the changes in stigma and issues of sexual prejudice as well.

Community Cleavages: Gay and Bisexual Men's Perceptions of Gay and Mainstream Community Acceptance in the Post-AIDS, Post-Rights Era.

Changes in gay and bisexual men's connectedness to the gay community are related to the declining public visibility of HIV/AIDS and greater acceptance for homosexuality and bisexuality in mainstream society. Little work, however, has focused on perceived acceptance for subgroups within the gay community or broader society. Using interviews (n = 20) and a survey (n = 202) of gay and bisexual men in a mid-sized Canadian city, we find perceived hierarchies of acceptance for the various subgroups as well as an age effect wherein middle-aged men perceive the least acceptance for all groups. These differences are linked with the uneven impact of social, political, and institutional changes relevant to gay and bisexual men in Canada.

Floating call boys and agile homosexuals: homophobia/Venice/history.

Because works of nonfiction are always composed of literary tropes and metaphors, they have to be read critically for the ways in which their truth claims are potentially structured by ideologies and stereotypes. This essay reads passages from Richard Sennett's sociological analysis Flesh and Stone, The Body and the City in Western Civilization and Joseph Brodsky's memoir Watermark in order to demonstrate how these alleged works of nonfiction shore up some dishearteningly familiar literary stereotypes of male homosexuality and participate in a tradition, dating from the 19th century, of linking the city of Venice with homosexuality and death.

Destabilizing science from the right: the rhetoric of heterosexual victimhood in the World Health Organization's 2008 HIV/AIDS controversy.

This article examines the 2008 World Health Organization/Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS controversy through original reports and media coverage. Analysis reveals that discourse rhetorically exonerates heterosexuals from HIV/AIDS while reifying homophobic and morally righteous ideology about HIV/AIDS and homosexuality. Discourses of "fraudulent science," "heterosexual absence," and reverse victimization destabilize meaning of HIV/AIDS and heterosexuality. "AIDS," "heterosexuality," and even victimhood and minority status were destabilized and resignified in a rhetoric that benefited from its status as science even as it rendered past science suspect as ideological.

A systematic review of instruments that measure attitudes toward homosexual men.

Scientific interest in the measurement of homophobia and internalized homophobia has grown over the past 30 years, and new instruments and terms have emerged. To help researchers with the challenging task of identifying appropriate measures for studies in sexual-minority health, we reviewed measures of homophobia published in the academic literature from 1970 to 2012. Instruments that measured attitudes toward male homosexuals/homosexuality or measured homosexuals' internalized attitudes toward homosexuality were identified using measurement manuals and a systematic review. A total of 23 instruments met criteria for inclusion, and their features were summarized and compared. All 23 instruments met minimal criteria for adequate scale construction, including scale development, sampling, reliability, and evidence of validity. Validity evidence was diverse and was categorized as interaction with gay men, HIV/AIDS variables, mental health, and conservative religious or political beliefs. Homophobia was additionally correlated with authoritarianism and bias, gender ideology, gender differences, and reactions to homosexual stimuli. Internalized homophobia was validated by examining relationships with disclosing one's homosexuality and level of homosexual identity development. We hope this review will make the process of instrument selection more efficient by allowing researchers to easily locate, evaluate, and choose the proper measure based on their research question and population of interest.

Banned on Broadway but coming to a theater near you: the captive and rethinking the breadth of American anti-lesbian hostility in the 1920s and '30s.

While the 1927 Broadway closing of the lesbian-themed play The Captive has been treated as launching the homophobic culture that dominated mid-twentieth-century America, the show actually continued to play in cities around the country. It was regularly greeted by packed houses and critics who scoffed at the reaction in New York. The opposition that did emerge was often generated by publisher William Randolph Hearst, while leading civil libertarians fought against him. This demonstrates that the homophobic policies of the 1920s and '30s were not the product of a deeply homophobic society, but generated by smaller numbers of moralizing entreprenuers.