First published in the Chicago Free Press, October 4, 2006
Not long ago I was cleaning out some old files and ran across one labeled "Homophobia--Internalized." Into it I had stuffed articles that purported to analyze why gay men engaged in such risky harmful activities as heavy drinking, crystal meth use, and unprotected receptive anal sex.
After a good deal of tut-tutting about the irrationality of putting oneself at risk for physical and mental deterioration and sometimes death, the articles often suggested that the explanation was "internalized homophobia" a supposed hatred of oneself as homosexual.
"Self-hating homosexual" was also used by gay leftists to describe gays who support conservative politicians and could equally have been used by moderate gays to refer to far-left gays whose main goal was to push gays into working for "the worldwide socialist revolution" (remember that?). Both, of course could have retorted that they supported gay equality but there were other political goals they valued more.
But "internalized homophobia" is a little too pat, too readily invoked, too all-encompassing. What disadvantageous or harmful behavior could it not purport to explain? I have to say, too, I don't think I have ever met a real instance of internalized homophobia. I think it is a label that doesn't refer to anything real--like "the ether" or "phlogiston."
I know of gay men who wished they were not gay. They say being heterosexual would make their life easier. They wish they could marry and sire children, or please their parents, or please their god. But none of them hate his whole self. Sadly, a few gay men do kill themselves, but they seldom if ever engage in typical "risk behaviors" as a way to do it gradually. They do it and get it over with.
It seems to me that people engage in so-called "risk-behaviors" for a simple reason: They are enjoyable; they feel good now. It is only in the long run that most risky behavior turns out to be harmful. And the further off the future, the more the consequences are discounted in our calculations about whether to do something enjoyable in the here and now.
Consider too that some heterosexual men also regularly engage in risk behavior. They use crystal meth and heroin, they drink heavily, they have sex with girl friends without a condom (risking unwanted paternity or the costs of an abortion). They parachute jump, race automobiles on city streets, get into fights. All these entail risk but the potential costs are uncertain or somewhere off in the future--and the pleasures are in the present, some of them very intense pleasures. No one diagnoses them with "internalized heterophobia" or calls them "self-hating heterosexuals." Instead, people look for other reasons for their behavior: they are fun, they are exciting, they provide an adrenaline rush, they are totally absorbing.
Show me an instance in which gay men engage in behavior with potentially harmful consequences but no benefit in terms of present pleasure or cessation of physical or emotional pain, an instance that cannot be found among heterosexual men, then I will reconsider "internalized homophobia."
At this point we could wonder whether explaining gay men's behavior with an easy and dismissive "internalized homophobia," without carefully examining the specific reasons or motivations of individual men involved is itself a kind of de facto homophobia. No doubt many of these people in the so-called "helping professions" would deny that emphatically. But failing to treat gay men the same way they would treat similarly situated heterosexual men amounts to heterosexism at least.
But instead of just condemning writers who fall back too easily on "internalized homophobia," it would be helpful to have a more satisfactory alternative explanatory model. "Time preference"--the relative weight anyone gives to present costs or benefits (pleasures) versus longer term costs or benefits--provides a clearer explanation. But time preference is part of the tool kit of economists while homophobia is in the tool kit of sociologists and psychologists and the disciplines seldom talk to each other.
The issue of "time preference" is particularly important in assessing gay men's behavior. Most heterosexual men marry and eventually produce dependent children. Because they now have other people who depend on them they have a greater incentive to think about the longer term. Not coincidentally, it is young single males who most engage in high risk behavior.
Since gays are denied marriage or civil unions, society fails to provide them with this incentive to develop a similar long-term perspective. In significant ways, most gay men remain single males all their lives. And because they do not have access to the ceremonies and other markers that bolster an internalized sense of socially certified adulthood (marriage, the birth of children), they remain in some sense young. This may have good effects as in preserving the free play of youthful creativity, but it also fails to promote that lengthening of a person's time preference which would discourage these much discussed risk-behaviors.