People with homosexual or bisexual orientations have long been stigmatized. With the rise of the gay political movement in the late 1960s, however, homosexuality's condemnation as immoral, criminal, and sick came under increasing scrutiny. When the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality as a psychiatric diagnosis in 1973, the question of why some heterosexuals harbor strongly negative attitudes toward homosexuals began to receive serious scientific consideration.
Society's rethinking of sexual orientation was crystallized in the term homophobia, which heterosexual psychologist George Weinberg coined in the late 1960s. Weinberg used homophobia to label heterosexuals' dread of being in close quarters with homosexuals as well as homosexuals' self loathing. The word first appeared in print in 1969 and was subsequently discussed at length in Weinberg's 1972 book, Society and the Healthy Homosexual.
The American Heritage Dictionary (1992 edition) defines homophobia as "aversion to gay or homosexual people or their lifestyle or culture" and "behavior or an act based on this aversion." Other definitions identify homophobia as an irrational fear of homosexuality.
Around the same time, heterosexism began to be used as a term analogous to sexism and racism, describing an ideological system that denies, denigrates, and stigmatizes any nonheterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationship, or community (Herek, 1990). Using the term heterosexism highlights the parallels between antigay sentiment and other forms of prejudice, such as racism, antisemitism, and sexism.
Like institutional racism and sexism, heterosexism pervades societal customs and institutions. It operates through a dual process of invisibility and attack. Homosexuality usually remains culturally invisible; when people who engage in homosexual behavior or who are identified as homosexual become visible, they are subject to attack by society.
Examples of heterosexism in the United States include the continuing ban against lesbian and gay military personnel; widespread lack of legal protection from antigay discrimination in employment, housing, and services; hostility to lesbian and gay committed relationships, recently dramatized by passage of federal and state laws against same-gender marriage; and the existence of sodomy laws in more than one-third of the states.
Although usage of the two words has not been uniform, homophobia has typically been employed to describe individual antigay attitudes and behaviors whereas heterosexism has referred to societal-level ideologies and patterns of institutionalized oppression of non-heterosexual people.
By drawing popular and scientific attention to antigay hostility, the creation of these terms marked a watershed. Nevertheless, they have important limitations.
Critics have observed that homophobia is problematic for at least two reasons.
First, empirical research does not indicate that heterosexuals' antigay attitudes can reasonably be considered a phobia in the clinical sense. Indeed, the limited data available suggest that many heterosexuals who express hostility toward gay men and lesbians do not manifest the physiological reactions to homosexuality that are associated with other phobias.
Second, using homophobia implies that antigay prejudice is an individual, clinical entity rather than a social phenomenon rooted in cultural ideologies and intergroup relations. Moreover, a phobia is usually experienced as dysfunctional and unpleasant. Antigay prejudice, however, is often highly functional for the heterosexuals who manifest it.
As antigay attitudes have become increasingly central to conservative political and religious ideologies since the 1980s, these limitations have become more problematic. However, heterosexism, with its historic macro-level focus on cultural ideologies rather than individual attitudes, is not a satisfactory replacement for homophobia.

Scientific analysis of the psychology of antigay attitudes will be facilitated by a new term. Sexual prejudice serves this purpose nicely. Broadly conceived, sexual prejudice refers to all negative attitudes based on sexual orientation, whether the target is homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Given the current social organization of sexuality, however, such prejudice is almost always directed at people who engage in homosexual behavior or label themselves gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
Like other types of prejudice, sexual prejudice has three principal features:
* It is an attitude (i.e., an evaluation or judgment).
* It is directed at a social group and its members.
* It is negative, involving hostility or dislike.
Conceptualizing heterosexuals' negative attitudes toward homosexuality and bisexuality as sexual prejudice – rather than homophobia – has several advantages. First, sexual prejudice is a descriptive term. Unlike homophobia, it conveys no a priori assumptions about the origins, dynamics, and underlying motivations of antigay attitudes.

A variety of motivations underlie sexual prejudice. One way to understand those motives is to ask how a particular heterosexual's antigay attitudes benefit her or him psychologically.
This functional approach has been used to understand attitudes in many different domains. Its basic assumption is that people hold and express particular attitudes because they derive psychological benefit from doing so. For any individual, attitudes toward different objects can serve different functions. Moreover, different individuals can express attitudes toward an object that appear to be identical but actually serve different functions. A final assumption of this approach is that attitudes are dynamic and are affected by situational variables. Different situations make different psychological needs salient, which can affect the extent to which a particular attitude is functional or not in that situation.
Thus, a functional perspective assumes that heterosexuals have different motivations for their attitudes toward lesbians, gay men, and homosexuality. Four principal psychological functions have been identified that underlie those attitudes.
First, attitudes serving an experiential function assist heterosexuals in making sense of their previous interactions with gay people. They do this by helping the individual to fit those interactions into a larger world view, one that is organized primarily in terms of the individual's own self interest. Some heterosexuals accept gay people in general on the basis of pleasant interaction experiences with a specific gay man or lesbian. Others hold negative attitudes toward the entire group primarily as a result of their unpleasant experiences with particular gay men or lesbians.
Sexual prejudice can only serve an experiential function when the heterosexual has had personal contact with gay men or lesbians. For those who have not had such contact, homosexuality and gay people are primarily symbols. Whereas attitudes toward people with whom one has direct experience function primarily to organize and make sense of those experiences, attitudes toward symbols serve a different kind of function. Such attitudes help people to increase their self-esteem by expressing important aspects of themselves – by declaring (to themselves and to others) what sort of people they are. Affirming who one is often is accomplished by distancing oneself from or even attacking people who represent the sort of person one is not (or does not want to be).

Three different attitude functions have been identified that serve these symbolic purposes.
* Attitudes serving a value-expressive function enable heterosexuals to affirm their belief in and adherence to important values that are closely related to their self concepts.
* When attitudes serve a social expressive function, expressing the attitude strengthens one's sense of belonging to a particular group and helps an individual to gain acceptance, approval, or love from other people whom she or he considers important (e.g., peers, family, neighbors).
* Finally, attitudes serving an ego defensive function lower a person's anxiety resulting from her or his unconscious psychological conflicts, such as those surrounding sexuality or gender.

It is important to recognize the nexus between individual attitudes and cultural heterosexism. A particular manifestation of sexual prejudice can serve one or more of these functions only when the individual's psychological needs converge with the culture's ideology about homosexuality. Antigay prejudice can be value-expressive only when an individual's self-concept is closely tied to values that also have become socially defined as antithetical to homosexuality. It can be social expressive only insofar as an individual strongly needs to be accepted by members of a social group that rejects gay people or homosexuality. It can be defensive only when lesbians and gay men are culturally defined in a way that links them to an individual's own psychological conflicts.

By the way I am not heterosexual... I m am not homosexual... if you Must classify me use the term pansexual

Fuck Your Binary Viewpoint!
I don't fit in your little fucking box
You might feel safe and secure there
but it feels like a cage for me.

Guy? Girl? FTM? MTF?
I don't care
beauty is beauty
Love is about people
why the limits?

You may wonder where all this neo identity politics is coming from let's just say that I had a few bad experiences this weekend.
Not the least of which was a particularly nasty exchange with a drunk friend concerning my sexual identity. I don't feel the need to have to validate myself or my views to anyone. If you don't accept me for who I am and what I am about then by all means get the fuck out of my life. Why push your prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness on me? Contrary to popular belief I do have emotions and your words wounded me deeply.

I don't need to be the center of attention but I know that some people like it, and while it been amusing and sometimes quite insightful to the workings of other peoples mindsets. It pains me to to see the suffering that those around me experience.

Tags: dolce & gabbana, heterosexism, homophobia, sexual prejudice