Gay marriage protester (source).
It’s a little strange to be a gay American who was born in 1999. The gay marriage debate peaked right as I was developing political consciousness, and I’m just old enough to remember a time when most Americans opposed it. Gay marriage was the first political issue that I seriously cared about; I read articles from queer news outlets, argued with strangers on Facebook, and frequently discussed LGBT politics with my friends, almost all of whom were also gay, bi, or trans. If Obergefell had happened a couple years earlier, it would have totally rocked my world, but as it happened I was sort of bored with gay marriage when the time finally came in June 2015. I’m among the first gay people to come of age at a time when gay marriage is boringly easy to like.
It’s also strange to know
that, by the numbers, many straight people who have been kind and respectful
toward me must have held homophobic views for much of their adult lives. I’ve
discussed my work about gender identity with numerous philosophers who were between twenty and
fifty years older than me, and their comments have been almost universally kind
and supportive. (I assume that philosophers who strongly disagree with my work
self-selected out of talking to me.) Given that pro-LGBT views were quite unpopular
until recently, it’s practically guaranteed that some of these people
held anti-LGBT views well into adulthood. Philosophy professors are absolutely
farther left than the US population, but I don’t think the gap is big
enough that you would expect a huge majority of them to be pro-gay
decades before those attitudes became nationally popular (if you’re a professor
who started working in the 90s or earlier, let me know if you agree with that impression).
I’m left noticing that people who held homophobic views for years, probably well past middle age in some cases, are nevertheless capable of conveying perfect respect and kindness toward me while we are discussing queer politics. Contrast this with sexist and racist bias, which are apparently so powerful that they afflict people who have never held explicitly sexist or racist views. I agree with the common feminist line of thought which says, roughly, that we acquire sexist bias by engaging with a sexist culture, and that this bias subtly shapes the ways that we judge and interact with other people (and likewise for racial bias). Some people might be completely free of racist and sexist bias, but nobody should be totally confident that they are; if there’s some reason to suspect that my thoughts or actions are the result of implicit bias, then I should take that possibility seriously rather than dismissing it out of hand. If my observations are on the right track, then homophobia is not usually like this. As far as I can tell, a lot of people are free from implicit homophobic bias, or at least their bias is at such a low level that it makes no practical difference. My experience repeatedly confirms that even people who held explicitly homophobic beliefs for much of their lives often show no sign at all that they are biased against gay people. I don’t perceive the slightest condescension or disgust when they speak to me, whereas I do sometimes perceive those responses in people who are currently homophobic.
My best guess is that homophobic bias is easier to root out because it’s less tied to our immediate perceptions of other people. It’s difficult to even perceive another person without forming an impression of their race and gender, but the same is not true of sexual orientation. Gay people think about sexual orientation a lot, but straight people, and especially homophobic straight people in the 1980s, probably don’t think about it very much at all. When I was an undergraduate, many of my classmates could tell that I was gay because of my voice, but when I worked for a moving company over the summer, my coworkers were shocked to learn that I was gay (this happened at two different moving companies, both in the same region as my university). I doubt that my coworkers actively perceived me as straight very much of the time; rather, I think that they invisibly assumed that I was straight in the same way that I invisibly assume that other people are literate. I would be surprised to learn that it’s not true, but the question never even enters my mind.
Bias is by far the best explanation for certain patterns of behavior, such as the well-documented tendency for employers to discriminate against applicants with recognizably black names, but it’s usually much harder to determine whether a specific judgment is the result of bias. If a woman perceives her boss as persistently condescending, then it’s a good starting hypothesis that her boss is biased against women. The hypothesis will become stronger if she learns that her female coworkers have similar experiences, and it will become weaker if she learns that the boss is also condescending toward men. My point is that, regardless of what she learns, her initial suspicion is a reasonable guess—implicit sexism is very common, and it would be unsurprising if her boss were condescending toward women specifically.
(That said, bias is not always the right explanation even in cases that seem unambiguous. At one of my summer jobs, an older male coworker repeatedly told me that I should smile more. If I were a woman, then I’m sure I would have thought he was being sexist, and in fact I think that would have been a very reasonable guess. Since I’m not a woman, though, that can’t possibly be the explanation in this particular case.)
When we have a phenomenon to explain—men condescending to women, white students patronizing a black professor—implicit bias is an immediately plausible explanation. If I’m right about my experiences, though, then we should be much slower to posit implicit homophobia as an explanation for someone’s behavior than we are to posit implicit racism or sexism as an explanation. If a straight person is condescending and rude to me, then the best explanation is that he’s a condescending person, and not that he subconsciously perceives me as lesser because I’m gay. This interpretation spares me the moral injury of feeling that I’ve been singled out for abuse, and it also gives me a better understanding of my social environment.
***
My argument might stumble on a few points. First, my experience certainly isn’t representative of all gay people. I am a white college graduate, and my observations are based on my discussions with college professors. Since these professors have treated me with respect, it’s very easy to rule out the possibility that they are biased against me because I am gay or because I have a gay voice. It would be much harder to be sure about this if I were in a social group where many people are explicitly homophobic—in that case, how would I tell the difference between implicit bias and deliberate hostility? It's also possible that, even if it's not so bad to be a gay, white (perceptual) man, implicit homophobia could exacerbate other forms of bias—for example, I wouldn't be particularly surprised to learn that queer black professors suffer more condescension than straight ones. I don't know whether that's true, but my experiences certainly don't provide evidence either way. Despite these limitations, I think that my experiences provide some reason for optimism: Homophobia is not as endemic as racism or sexism, and it’s relatively easy to create social groups where it basically doesn’t exist.
What do you think? I’d really like to hear about your experience. Understanding this problem will require us to integrate multiple limited perspectives, including the experiences of queer people in different social networks, queer people at different levels of social privilege, and even straight people. The goal of this post has been to lay out the problem and to contribute my own experiences as a data point, but I fully expect that I've overlooked points that will seem obvious to other people.
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