Why homophobia against straight men matters

Owen Jones, a Guardian columnist, writes - Homophobia cast a long shadow over Callum’s childhood. “Gay”, “bender” and “faggot” were spat at him by classmates with abandon; beaten up in the changing rooms before PE, he was forced to change in the cleaner’s cupboard instead. But the thing is, Callum isn’t actually gay at all: he’s a straight man. That didn’t matter to his assailants – most of Callum’s friends were girls or those also treated as “outcasts”, some of whom were “exploring their sexuality” as teenagers; he hated sport, and loved performing arts.

Now, discussing homophobia in the context of straight men may seem like a distraction. “I feel really conflicted about it now – even though I’m absolutely over the bullying, I always feel like I was the victim of homophobic bullying,” Callum tells me. “But how can a straight, cis man be a victim of homophobia?” Indeed, he fears “invalidating the experiences of those who are actually gay whenever I talk about this”. But there’s nothing invalidating about his story at all, because Callum was the victim of sustained homophobic bullying, and the same goes for countless other straight men, too. Their experiences aren’t outliers: they are key to understanding what homophobia actually is.

The 2010 Equality Act included “perceptive discrimination” for a reason: that is, when people are “treated unfairly” on the grounds they have a protected characteristic, whether they actually do or not. And it is these examples that expose the reality of the bigotry in question. For example, a staple response from apologists for Islamophobia is that hatred of Muslims does not qualify as racism, because Muslims are not a race. Yet witness how many Sikh men – on both sides of the Atlantic – have been victims of Islamophobic hate crimes, underlining that anti-Muslim bigotry is based on racialising minorities.

Homophobia is the bastard child of misogyny: a means of conditioning men into embracing and glorifying traits that menace women and “unmanly” men alike. Eliminating homophobia will principally liberate queer people, but it will free straight men, too, to be themselves. It will mean a society with less violence and more love. And that’s why the homophobic persecution of straight men isn’t a tasteless distraction: to ignore it is to fail to understand homophobia at all.