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International Day Against Homophobia

By Senthorun Raj - posted Wednesday, 18 May 2011


Harvey Milk once said, we must "burst down those closet doors once and for all, and stand up and start to fight."

Decades on, his remarks remind us why we celebrate days like International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO).

Beginning in 2004, IDAHO aims to reflect upon the continued struggles that sexual and gender minorities across the world endure for recognition and acceptance. May 17 was chosen to commemorate the historic moment when "homosexuality" was depathologised and removed from the World Health Organisation's International Classifications of Disease.

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Despite a shift in the psychological and medical classifications of non-heterosexual people, the discrimination that attaches with being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex (LGBTI) still inheres today.

For some homophobia manifests in the moment of being labelled a "poof" or "dyke" in school or the workplace. For others it is experienced through physical violence, as was the recent case for a sexually assaulted teenage girl in South Africa, where "corrective" rape remains a widespread practice used to police lesbian sexuality.

Homophobia often works insidiously and intersects with other social prejudices. For intersex infants, for example, homophobia manifests in non-consensual surgical interventions, attempting to "normalise" their sex as either male or female, despite possesing anatomical, chromosomal or hormonal differences.

Homophobic fears or anxieties are not just reducible to a wounding punch or the statement "I hate fags".

How often do we ignore a man and a woman kissing or holding hands in public, only to glare or feel uncomfortable around a same-sex couple that does the same thing? Or when we joke about the oddity of a person who presents a gender role that we do not associate with their perceived sex?

Jason Akermanis made headlines this time last year when he wrote an article suggesting that players should remain silent about their sexuality sending out a troubling social message that being gay is not only disturbing but also something to be silent about.

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"Some footballers think there's something wrong with [gay] people, they have some kind of disease."

Sadly, the vernacular that associates diverse sexualities with disease or perversion is not confined to the odd footballer, it has social currency across a range of geographic and cultural contexts. Whether it is Exodus International in the USA attempting to provide reparative therapies to "cure" same-sex attraction, or the current proposals in Uganda for anti-homosexuality legislation to punish people with HIV in same-sex relationships with the death penalty.

Even some of our elected MPs here in Australia still consider homosexuality as a disorder. As Victorian MP Geoff Shaw recently implied in an email, freedom for sexual minorities, is analogous to speeding, theft and pedophilia.

With the stigmas of immorality and perversion continuing to attach to LGBTI people, is it any wonder why in Australia over 60 per cent of same-sex attracted or gender questioning young people are bullied at school and experience considerably higher rates of depression?

In a society that still demands people's sexual identity be placed on the table if they are not heterosexual, coming out has become a double bind. Either a person must be public about their sexuality (in order to be honest) and risk social marginalisation, or as gestured to by Akermanis' comments, shamed or coerced into remaining silent in order to fit with a particular culture or atmosphere.

If homophobia is, as many seem to think, a peripheral issue, why is there so much political, legal and cultural capital invested in policing non-heterosexual conduct?

Our own laws continue to give credence to homophobia. Provocation defences in NSW criminal law provide legitimation of the rhetoric that homosexuality, in public manifestations, is a threatening presence to an "ordinary person". The common law formulation of the "homosexual advance defence", as it is colloquially referred to, may reduce a charge of murder to manslaughter. Effectively, it mitigates culpability in circumstances where a person of the same-sex made an unwanted, non-aggressive, sexual advance.

If, as Justice Kirby opines, a similar defence extended to women in relation to unwanted heterosexual male advances, how many heterosexual men would be left in Australia?

Correspondingly, the Marriage Act continues to discriminate against same-sex or gender diverse couples. Maintaining a hierarchy of intimacy and recognition continues to legitimate the idea that same-sex relationships are still undeserving of the same legislative respect and dignity as those in heterosexual ones.

So as we celebrate IDAHO, we need to confront the reasons why sexual and gender minorities continue to struggle for the recognition and visibility that so many others take for granted.

Sexuality is not a burden that non-heterosexuals should be forced to manage, or an identity that ought to involve oscillating in or out of closets. To combat homophobia, we need to have dialogue and reform built on eroding stigma and discrimination, until we manage to obliterate the need for the closet itself.

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About the Author

Senior Policy Advisor for the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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