Sexual Prejudice and Gender: Do Heterosexuals' Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men Differ?

Journal of Social Issues, Summer, 2000 by Gregory M. Herek

Gregory M. Herek [*]

This article explores the question of whether and how heterosexuals' attitudes toward lesbians differ from their attitudes toward gay men. Data from a 1997 national survey are presented to show that heterosexual women generally hold similar attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, whereas heterosexual men are more likely to make distinctions according to gender. Moreover, men 's attitudes toward lesbians are susceptible to situational manipulations. Nevertheless, the underlying unity of attitudes toward lesbians and gay men is demonstrated by the fact that they are highly correlated for both heterosexual men and women. It is suggested that heterosexuals' attitudes toward gay people are organized both in terms of minority group politics and personal sexual and gender identity and that attitudes toward lesbians are most likely to be differentiated from attitudes toward gay men in the latter realm.

For much of the 20th century, homosexuality's stigmatized status in the United States went largely unquestioned. By the 1970s, however, as the gay and lesbian movement began to effect significant changes in society, heterosexuals' hostility toward gay people became an object of scrutiny in both lay and scientific circles. The turnabout from treating homosexuality as a disorder to considering antigay hostility a problem was crystallized in the term homophobia, coined by psychologist George Weinberg and introduced to the American public in his 1972 book, Society and the Healthy Homosexual.

Weinberg (1972) defined homophobia as "the dread of being in close quarters with homosexuals--and in the case of homosexuals themselves, self-loathing" (p. 4). In the nearly three decades since Weinberg's book was published, homophobia has entered the popular vernacular and can now be found in major dictionaries. It has also become widely used in the social and behavioral sciences. A computer search of the PsychINFO database in May 2000 yielded more than 1,500 citations containing the keyword homophobia.

However, the term has also been criticized, especially for its implicit assumptions that antigay attitudes and behaviors emanate mainly from fear and are best understood within an illness model (e.g., Haaga, 1991; Herek, 1984, 1991, 2000). As an alternative, I have recently proposed that the phenomenon usually labeled homophobia instead be called sexual prejudice, defined simply as negative attitudes toward an individual because of her or his sexual orientation (Herek, 2000).

Empirical study of sexual prejudice has necessarily entailed developing methods to assess it, and these methods reveal implicit assumptions about its nature. Most measures in this domain have defined their object of study in nongendered terms, that is, as attitudes toward homosexuals or homosexuality. Lesbians have not been differentiated from gay men as a distinct target of prejudice (Kite, 1984; Kite & Whitley, 1996, 1998). This choice of operational definitions precludes the discovery of differences between heterosexuals' attitudes toward lesbians and their attitudes toward gay men. Moreover, because terms such as homosexual may be interpreted by many research participants as referring exclusively to males, this approach may yield little information about heterosexuals' attitudes toward lesbians.

A second operational strategy has been to measure heterosexuals' attitudes toward lesbians separately from their attitudes toward gay men (e.g., Herek, 1988; Herek & Capitanio, 1995, 1996; Kite & Deaux, 1986). Although it is clearly an improvement over the earlier practice of ignoring attitudes toward lesbians, this approach also reflects an assumption, namely, that heterosexuals' attitudes toward lesbians and toward gay men are fundamentally part of the same phenomenon, that is, sexual prejudice. Individuals might vary in their attitudes toward the two groups, but these are assumed to be differences in direction or degree, not qualitative differences.

My goal in the present article is to reflect on the validity of these operational assumptions and to consider how and why heterosexuals' attitudes toward lesbians and gay men might differ quantitatively or qualitatively. It is my hope that this discussion will suggest insights into the nature of sexual prejudice and will generate hypotheses for future research.

The Nature of Sexual Prejudice: Two Paradigms

The history of the contemporary gay and lesbian movement in the United States reveals two competing political strategies for changing the status of homosexual people in society. Each strategy suggests a different paradigm for understanding the roots of sexual prejudice.

The dominant strategy today is based on a reformist, minority group politics model and focuses on demands that homosexual people be accorded civil and human rights on a par with heterosexuals. This gay rights approach achieved dominance in the United States in the mid-l970s, although many of its themes were anticipated by the post-World War II homophile movement (Epstein, 1999). The gay rights framework emphasizes the fact that lesbians and gay men (along with bisexuals and transgendered individuals) now constitute visible communities with cultural traditions, physical boundaries, and political interests that are increasingly recognized by society at large. In other words, gay men and lesbians comprise a discrete minority much like an ethnic group. The gay rights framework suggests a minority group attitudes paradigm for contemporary sexual prejudice. By this I mean that attitudes toward gay people are psychologically similar to majority attitudes toward racial, ethnic, and other minority groups.