What is homophobia?

Homophobia is an irrational fear and hatred for homosexuality and gay and lesbian people in general. It occasionally disappears when they discover that a close family relative is gay, but not always.

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This has been a growing question in my mind, after spending much time trying to understand homophobia in order to try to help end it.

One of the problems is that a 'phobia' is a fear, but 'homophobia' is generally understood as a hate. So supposing we do define it as a fear, then what do we have?

• People who are afraid of gay people (consequential questions: afraid of becoming gay or being gay? afraid of gay people? afraid of associating with gay people or being associated with gay people?...); and
  
• Gay people who are afraid of being gay (or ashamed of it), or afraid of the consequences (real or imagined) of admitting to being gay, or afraid of the real or perceived implications of being gay, fear of disappointing loved ones (in my experience, this is a really big part -- and on one level you could say it's self-inflicted)

Don't you think both parts of this 'fear' definition are really important?

Then, if we think about the 'gay hate' definition, I also find some difficult questions there. I mean there are very obvious parts - being beaten-up because of being gay or being perceived as gay (heterosexuals can also suffer homophobic bullying), or being ostracised (often by people in the name of their religion).

But there are also things that are said, that to one person may be classed as 'homophobia' and to another one (I offer myself as an example) could be taken as a compliment. Some illustrations:

• "You're gay!" - My reaction is sincere happiness - "I'm glad you noticed". Some people's reaction is that it's homophobia.
• "It's so gay!" - My honest reaction "hum, is it? Then I'll try to live up to the stereotype :)" But it's certainly stereotyping (which is not unique to any state of being at all). Some people would call it a form of homophobia. It's certainly often a non-malicious remark said as playground banter: perhaps ill-considered and even wrong, but anyway said with no hate-intent.
  
• "You're a queer!" - My genuine feeling is pride: "I am queer, queer I am, lucky boy am I." I would feel so even if it was said with malice.

So we have words which are sent with homophobic intent that may or may not be received as homophobic bullying; and we have words which could be logically statements of fact which may be received as homophobic bullying; and we have ill-considered statements of no homophobic intent whatsoever that may be received as homophobic bullying.

Of course, we can say things like "intention is important" and "how they are received may depend on whether someone is comfortable with their sexuality", but I've seen that people are being disciplined in schools as homophobic bullies for saying "That's so gay!". (I think that is as bad as allowing homophobic bullying.)

OK, do you see where I'm coming from? Whatever point of view you personally have about what constitutes homophobia and what doesn't, I guess you can see that it's quite difficult to arrive at a consensus. Without understanding (maybe reaching a consensus about) what is homophobia, it's quite difficult deal with it in the right way.