A comparison of African American and White college students' affective and attitudinal reactions to lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals: an exploratory study

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2005 by Charles Negy, Russell Eisenman

That notwithstanding, other empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that anti-gay sentiments may be more prevalent among African Americans than among Whites. One of the primary reasons for conducting the current study was to explore how religiosity and enculturation toward the African American culture may underlie some, if not much, of African Americans' negative reactions to LGBs. With that goal in mind, we explored if sociodemographic and religiosity variables would significantly predict homophobia and homonegativity. For both African Americans and Whites, gender and religious commitment predicted homophobia. For African Americans, gender and frequency of church attendance predicted homonegativity (for Whites, gender and religious commitment predicted homonegativity). In essence, it was African Americans' commitment to their religious faith that correlated most with how they respond affectively toward LGBs: the more they attended church, the more negative their attitudes were toward LGBs. Knowing the fallacy of assuming causality with correlational data, we can only speculate that, for African Americans, repeated church attendance possibly reinforces negative attitudes about LGBs.

We also found that the more African Americans were immersed and socialized into the African American community or culture, the more they expressed homophobia and homonegativity. As a means to disentangle the influence of religiosity from enculturation on reactions to LGBs, we conducted stepwise regressions in which the three religiosity variables (frequency of church attendance, religious commitment, and the one AAAS-R subscale that assessed religious beliefs and practices) were partialed out of the regression of the enculturation subscales on homophobia and homonegativity, respectively. The results indicated that, after controlling for religiosity, none of the enculturation subscales predicted homonegativity. However, after controlling for religiosity, one enculturation subscale, Family Practices, persistently predicted homophobia.

The items constituting Family Practices warrant closer examination in order to possibly glean some understanding of what aspects of African American culture might be involved with homophobic sentiments. The Family Practices subscale consists of 4 items assessing participation in traditional African American family practices. Specifically, the items ask if respondents shared a bed with siblings or other relatives when they were children, if they stayed with relatives for days or weeks and then returned home to their parents, if they had extended family members living in their home while growing up, and if, as children, they bathed with siblings, parents, or other relatives. At the surface, it seems difficult to understand the linkage between such practices and subsequent homophobia. A psychodynamic explanation for this finding is that early childhood experiences that include sharing a bed and bathing with others, particularly of the same gender, may arouse unwanted sexual impulses of a homoerotic nature. Such experiences might evoke negative emotions in response to LGBs later in life as a defense against earlier impulses (Christopher, 2004; Garnets & Kimmel, 2003). Another possible explanation, more cognitive-behaviorally based, is that such intrafamilial experiences might reflect a closeness within the family in which children are highly socialized by parental and family values, including their parents' biases. Stated more directly, parents who maintain close relationships with their children likely are more successful at transmitting their personal values and prejudices to their children (Baker, 2002; Holden, 1997; Sheinberg, 2004). Additional studies are needed to explicate the correlation between Family Practices and homophobia.