Glossary /
Homophobia
Formalhomophobia · anti-gay prejudice
Prejudice, aversion, or hostility toward gay people; it can be institutional, or internalized into how LGBTQ people judge themselves.
Homophobia is prejudice, disparagement, exclusion, or hostility directed at gay people (and, more broadly, sexual minorities). It isn’t always outright hatred — more often it’s everyday: “don’t make it so obvious,” a hesitation while hiring, a joke at the dinner table. The intensity varies; the direction is the same — treating being gay as something to be corrected, hidden, or avoided.
It can be institutional (inequality baked into law and policy) and it can be internalized: LGBTQ people, steeped in these messages from childhood, absorb them into judgments of themselves — one of the sources of minority stress.
About the word itself: the “-phobia” ending can suggest a pathological fear, but this is learned prejudice, not innate terror — which also means it can be reconsidered and loosened. The parallel prejudice against trans people is transphobia; against bisexual people, biphobia.