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The editors at the Associated Press Stylebook have announced that they are “discouraging” use of the word “homophobia.” The AP Stylebook is the widely used guide that media use to standardize terms and general usage.
Why should the LGBTQ community be in a kerfuffle about it? Because the editors made their decision without consultation with the nation’s leading LGBTQ organizations, leaders, activists, and newspapers. That is a problem.
With an estimated 3,400 AP employees in bureaus around the globe, its suggestion could have a tsunami-like effect on how the world comes to understand, be informed about or dismiss discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people.AP’s online Stylebook defines “phobia” as “an irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness” and therefore should be expunged from political and social contexts, including words such as “Islamophobia” and “homophobia.”
Preciseness in language is important, yet language is a representation of culture. How we use it perpetuates ideas and assumptions about race, gender and sexual orientation. We consciously and unconsciously articulate this in our everyday conversations, about ourselves and the rest of the world, and it travels generationally.
What’s in the word “homophobia”? A lot. The history and culture of not only discrimination, violence, and hatred toward LGBTQ people but also an irrational fear of us. It’s this irrational fear that may not need psychiatric or clinical intervention but should nonetheless be aptly labeled as none other than a “phobia.”
For example, the infamous bogus legal argument called the “gay panic defense.” It’s simply an excuse for murder in which a heterosexual defendant pleas temporary insanity as self-defense against a purported LGBTQ sexual advance.
Another example, the “ick factor.” It’s the revulsion some heterosexuals feel toward the way we LGBTQ people engage in sexual intimacy.
Altering the hearts and minds of these folks will take a while, if not a lifetime.
According Dave Minthorn, AP Deputy standards editor, who shared with POLITICO the word “homophobia… (is) just off the mark…it’s ascribing a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don’t have. It seems inaccurate. Instead, we would use something more neutral: anti-gay, or some such, if we had reason to believe that was the case.
It is of my opinion that by keeping the word “homophobia” narrowly used and confined within a medical context is controlling. I feel that only a homophobic word police would utter such absurd advice. Moreover, it’s also absurd for AP to think that their discouragement of the use of the word with absolutely no consultation with the LGBTQ community demonstrates hubris and insensitivity. It also raises queries about AP’s political and social motives for doing so.
Just ask George Weinberg, the psychologist who coined the word “homophobia” in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual.
“It made all the difference to city councils and other people I spoke to,” Weinberg told journalist Andy Humm, who shared the quote with The Advocate and other media. “It encapsulates a whole point of view and of feeling. It was a hard-won word, as you can imagine. It even brought me some death threats. Is homophobia always based on fear? I thought so and still think so…We have no other word for what we’re talking about, and this one is well established. We use ‘freelance’ for writers who don’t throw lances anymore and who want to get paid for their work. … It seems curious that this word is getting such scrutiny while words like triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13) hang around.”
The word “homophobia” derives from a particular history and struggle for civil rights of LGBTQ people across the world. And it has become part and parcel of a universal LGBTQ lexicon that speaks truth to our reality.
The word has power and unfortunately deleterious effect. And part of our liberation is in our strength to call acts of homophobia out.
To suggest the press eliminate the word can not only diminish the scope of people understanding homophobia’s wide range, but it can also diminish our scope of LGBTQ activists in our continued efforts to effect change.
AP now has control of the word “homophobia” yet it’s not theirs. Several mainstream newspapers are pushing back. (Newspapers, and media, are under no order to follow AP guidelines.) John E. McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun wrote in his column “Sorry, AP, can’t go along on ‘homophobia” that the AP “ruling on this point in reasoned, principled, and wrong-headed.” McIntyre points to the 40 year usage of the word “homophobic” and makes a practical point—“If the editors of the AP Stylebook wish to discourage the use of certain words simply because they can be misused or misunderstood, there ought to be a great many in line ahead of homophobia.”
9 Comments
I agree wholeheartedly with your point about the AP having done this without consulting the LGBTQ community. That said, I have also long disliked the term homophobia for precisely the reasons the AP gave. Had they asked me, I would have reminded them that I speak only for myself and then told them that I would prefer that they use heterosupremacy, cissupremacy, etc. as appropriate. Somehow I doubt that they would take me up on the offer …
Also known in the UK as “The Guardsmen’s Defense.” (Courtesy of Rumpole of the Bailey)
Great post.
The power of labels is a thing to be feared in a totalitarian, fascist or plutocratic gov’t. Linked to the police and security state it could lead to all sorts of abuses like illegal wire taps, late night break-ins, political paybacks, incarcerations and other serious and harmful mischief. Or, you just turn up as ” missing and presumed dead “. Good thing we live in America. Ya know, a country where nothing like this could ever happen as long as your a good zombie. Nice column.
Ah yes, the Associated Press…..the McDonalds of news.
Like this.
The terms have different meanings and uses. “Phobia” suggests that there is something pathological about their antagonism, turns the tables on rhetoric that suggests the same about gay people. Given that there often is a hysterical element to their antagonism. . . (Hysterical: good word to apply to men. Their wombs tend to be a lot less grounded than women’s are.
) Signed, a Dude with some feminist training.
P.S. If you historicized this in terms of the AP and its record. . . not the people’s friend, to say the least. Pretty much leading the charge in filtering our ugliest overseas activities through the CIA’s lens for half a century, maybe more.
Of course, “Jet” magazine was also a tool of the CIA and black bourgeoisie, too. (See their reporting on Grenada after we invaded.) None of that African Nationalism for them; high society weddings and good PRODUCTS for a rising Black middle class to drool over.
Sorry, starting to rant!
The AP is obsolete and a servant of the 1%. It’s long past time it left the stage as an influential player in media discourse or practices.
Since we’re discussing labels – may I ask what defines ‘queer’ as distinct from the rest of that series?