homophobia: noun, fear of homosexuals, usually linked with hostility towards them

The word homophobia was coined by psychologist George Weinberg in the late 1960s. Weinberg observed that many straight people at that time had a deep seated aversion to homosexual people, one that was irrational, and evidence of emotional or psychological flaws, as he explained in a recent interview on GayToday. (See bottom of page 3 for link to interview).

I realized that something else was going on - more than simple mis-education. This was some deep emotional misgiving these people had, some phobic dread. It seemed to me the problem was theirs, not the homosexual's. I knew a landlord who had two lesbians living on the 5th floor of his brownstone and he couldn't sleep at night at the thought they were up there making love, and obviously the problem was his, not theirs.

Today, though, the word homophobia has been thoroughly absorbed by gay rights and gay community rhetoric, and has come to have a far broader meaning. For example, when a friend of mine was unsuccessful in a recent job interview, he blamed the interviewer for being homophobic. Another time, when the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade was lashed by torrential rain, I overheard a spectator lament that God and/or Mother Nature were obviously feeling homophobic that day.

On a more serious note, though, a couple of gay murder trials in Sydney over the past few years have gone in the guilty defendants' favour when judges have sympathised with the "irrational response" (that is, hacking people limb from limb with a blunt knife after bashing them to death with a stone) generated by unwelcome homosexual advances.

Homophobia exists, but like a lot of buzzwords, seems to get over used by anyone and everyone - straight or gay, casual or official - who wants a quick, generally accepted excuse for anything.

Real homophobia - the kind described by Weinberg before most of us were born - is hard to get around, and it can be dangerous. We're all familiar with the basic assumption that a great many people have that gay people are a little "less" than straight people. Even if they don't have a strong sense of hatred that is expressed in moments of fatal violence, a big chunk of the general population consider all things gay to be totally left-of-centre, and something that's able to be "tolerated", but not much more.

Even in sophisticated, culturally progressive Western Europe, marriage and insurance rights for gay couples are brand new, and received with a schizo-mix of relief and scepticism. In Australia, the afore-mentioned Mardi Gras is a hugely popular, out in the open money-spinner, but equal civil rights for gays are still in the "developmental" stage. Gay culture has yet to establish a stable position within mainstream society - so it remains on the fringe - a suspicious, misunderstood thing.

As a result, around the world, homophobia is institutionalised - endorsed by governments, the education system, and the mainstream media. It creates an endless and impenetrable cycle of misinformation and "bad press", that gives people a badly biased view of a lifestyle they have otherwise little contact with, and at the same time denies them any access to imagery or information that may balance out their points of view.

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For example, when Bangkok's Babylon sauna was raided in December, armed soldiers, acting on behalf of the government's new, fabulously named Ministry of Social and Moral Order, entered the premises accompanied by television news crews. When Thais sat down to that night's TV news, they were shown how committed their elected leaders, who they trust know about these things, were to cleaning out Thai society from the bottom up.

Never mind that across town in Patpong, straight pimps drive their houses of prostitutes with iron fists, exploitation and unsafe sex, while the Babylon is an opulent sauna, with no organised prostitution, but plenty of condoms and positive information, present. Walk down Silom Road, the main road that feeds the Patpong district, and you get offered girls and drugs every other step. Go into the gay bars, and you do so of your own volition - no one drags you there, and once you are there, all the patrons kind of mind their own business. Nothing was mentioned about this contradiction on the news that night. Around the country, grandparents watching have their homophobic views confirmed, while children looking on have their first exposure to homosexuality, and it's negative and scandalous. If the police need to be called, and if the national media cover the event unblinkingly, who at home can argue with the serious need to bust the Babylon?

I was present at Babylon on the night of the raid, and at the time the Social and Moral army arrived, I was having a lemonade and a quiet conversation with a German airline executive by the landscaped, chlorinated pool. A couple of other people were there, sunbaking and chatting. A previous raid the week before had closed the upstairs cruising section, but even before that, Babylon never struck me as being a cesspool of vice and drugs, on the contrary, it resembles a five star Koh Samui resort for gays. If you've ever been to a Club Med, you've seen the rampant cruising and one night stands that go on amongst the heterosexual guests at "places like that". Babylon isn't much different, except that instead of Club Med's limbo contests, it has a pianist and a jazz singer in the coffee lounge, and plays movies like Before Night Falls instead of Star Wars: Episode II. Nevertheless, everyone at Babylon that afternoon was rounded up and made to give a … urine sample!

It's not being overly dramatic to compare this to fascist Europe before and during the Second World War - the process is, fundamentally, the same. Continue to drive home the message that a certain group of society needs to be monitored for their subservience, deviance and threat to the good of the nation, and the bulk of the population will believe that group is really like that. Worse, that group will itself start to fray at the edges, unsettled by its poor treatment, lack of welcome, and collective self-doubt. This is what institutionalised homophobia is - an established and at times unnoticed deep-seated prejudice that has a staggeringly negative effect.

Why am I lined up and made to provide a urine sample? I've never done that before, except at the doctors, where I've paid for a voluntary examination. Do they urine test the thousands of johns fucking their way through a hundred girls a week in Patpong? (Just in case you're wondering - no, they don't.)

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And this is where things, in my opinion, start to get nasty, with gay people themselves believing, from the earliest age, that they deserve this kind of disproportionate official treatment. I mean, when I go home for Christmas, and I sit around the dinner table with my family, I know that my straight brother has never been busted at a sauna and made to give a urine sample, and that people don't stare at him like a freak when he shows affection to his date in a public place. It's not that I feel like I don't have a place at the dinner table, but I do classify myself as a more sexually suspect person - my sexuality is more significant in my life than my brother's is in his, and for all the wrong reasons.

Whether I like it or not, and whether my sex life is more ribald and active than his (it is, by far, I must admit), people think of me, and other gay and lesbian people, as more "sexual" people than others. In turn, I expect - or maybe I'm just used to it - to be treated with moral suspicion, or negative attention. So when they come for the urine sample at the sauna, I don't kick up a storm and become outraged, as much as I roll my eyes and think, "this is kind of interesting", and share a giggle with the gay guy lined up next to me, knowing what a story it'll make for my friends back home.

This kind of understated reaction doesn't have to be a problem, but at its worst, can turn into the dreaded "internalised homophobia", where gays and lesbians doubt their own worth, and live with the assumption that their sexuality places them at a dubious moral and social place. Does internalised homophobia exist, and if it does, how many of us suffer from this kind of lower self worth, without, often, even realising it?

If you work a meaningless job through the week then party all weekend on drugs (and sometimes have unsafe sex with a bunch of strangers), a lifestyle familiar to many gays and lesbians, is this just cool city living, or evidence that your expectations of yourself and your life are pretty low? If you end up in lousy relationships all the time, or never end up in a long-term relationship at all, scuttling most opportunities of monogamy and permanent partnership that come your way, is this evidence of your carefree, independent ways, or are you convinced on some subconscious level that you don't deserve a partner, or that no partner in their right mind would want you? How do you have a successful partnership anyway, when the law prevents you from marrying, and social mores prevent you from showing affection in public? You end up with a "lover" not a spouse, and you can only show affection behind closed doors, where it won't offend anyone.

However, plenty of straight people have low self-esteem, and train wreck lives, and they don't - can't - blame it all on homophobia. Neither, in my opinion, can gays and lesbians. There are other influences at work, and we all need to take responsibility for our adult selves, and see how we are implicated in our own fortune/misfortune. Institutionalised homophobia is a dangerous pain in the ass, but fighting for respect is only successful when you believe you really, really deserve it, not when you know you can invoke "homophobia" as the devil behind every problem. When you do that, you do the same as the Ministry of Social and Moral Order, simplifying an idea, and creating a demon out of nothing, and that doesn't get anybody anywhere.