The word homophobia first reached print in a 1969 New York sex tabloid
Psychologist George Weinberg coined homophobia in the 1960s and is credited with first saying it aloud. Its first printed appearance came on 23 May 1969 in Screw, an American pornographic magazine, where it described straight men's fear of being mistaken for gay. Within months Time magazine was using it too.
The word joins homosexual, itself built from neo-classical parts, with phobia, from the Greek phobos for fear or aversion. Time's October 1969 article used it for a mix of revulsion and apprehension that some called homosexual panic. In 1971 Kenneth Smith applied it as a personality profile, and Weinberg developed it in his 1972 book Society and the Healthy Homosexual, a year before the American Psychiatric Association voted to drop homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Weinberg framed it as a fear linked to ideas of contagion and threats to home and family.
The term spread quickly into mainstream use. The Times of London first printed it in 1981, reporting that the Church of England's General Synod had declined to condemn homosexuality. Activists and allies adopted it as a tool. Yet it is an awkward fit if read literally. Psychologist David Haaga has pointed out that everyday use covers a broad range of hostile emotions, attitudes and behaviour, which does not match the clinical meaning of a phobia as an intense, irrational fear.
Scholars apply the word to history despite its anachronism, since prejudice against same-sex relationships is recorded from ancient Greece and grew markedly in the Middle Ages. Researchers now speak of several varieties, including institutional forms rooted in religion or state policy and internalised homophobia felt by people with same-sex attractions themselves. There have even been proposals to classify it, alongside other bigotry, as an intolerant personality disorder.
Attitudes can shift fast. A February 2025 Pew survey found 70 percent of American Catholics backed same-sex marriage, up from 46 percent in 2010, even though official church teaching has not changed. In 1992 the American Psychiatric Association urged health bodies worldwide to oppose stigma, a statement its trustees reaffirmed in July 2011. FBI figures for 2010 attributed 19.3 percent of American hate crimes to sexual orientation bias.
Source: Homophobia
