In the late 1960s a psychologist named George Weinberg gave the world a word, homophobia, and it stuck. It pulled attention onto anti-gay hostility at a time when few people were looking. But a word that frames bigotry as a fear can mislead, and one American scholar has spent a career arguing that point.
Gregory M. Herek, now a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis, took Weinberg’s term apart in a 2004 paper in the journal Sexuality Research and Social Policy, titled “Beyond Homophobia.” His complaint was specific. The word assumes that anti-gay attitudes come mainly from fear, and it cannot explain how societies have changed their view of homosexuality and heterosexuality over time. Weinberg’s contribution mattered, Herek wrote, yet scholarship needed a new vocabulary.
Three terms instead of one
He offered three. Sexual stigma is the shared knowledge of society’s negative regard for any nonheterosexual behavior, identity, relationship or community. Heterosexism is the cultural ideology that keeps that stigma going. Sexual prejudice is the individual’s own negative attitude based on sexual orientation.
The split matters in practice. Prejudice held by a person can be studied like any other social attitude. Stigma and heterosexism sit in institutions and habits, which means the remedy is not therapy for individuals but changes in how society treats people. Herek later wrote a review of the field titled simply “Sexual Prejudice” with K. A. McLemore, published in the Annual Review of Psychology in 2013.
From the lab to the witness table
Herek earned his Ph.D. in social psychology at UC Davis in 1983. His research has centered on prejudice against lesbian, gay and bisexual people, the mental health toll of hate crimes, and the stigma that attaches to HIV and AIDS. He co-edited the 1992 volume Hate Crimes with K. Berrill, wrote Stigma and Sexual Orientation in 1998, and co-wrote Out in Force, a 1996 study of sexual orientation and the military.
He also took the work into rooms where policy gets made. In 1986 he testified for the American Psychological Association before a House Criminal Justice Subcommittee hearing on antigay violence. In 1993 he spoke for the APA, the American Psychiatric Association and four other professional groups at House Armed Services Committee hearings on lifting the ban on homosexuals in the military. In 1997 he took part in President Clinton’s White House Conference on Hate Crimes, and in 2011 he gave testimony to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on bullying and harassment of students.
The courts drew on him too. He has helped the APA prepare amicus briefs in more than 30 major cases, including the APA brief cited by the Supreme Court in its 2015 Obergefell opinion on same-sex marriage. He served as an expert witness in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the challenge that ended in California’s Proposition 8 being declared unconstitutional, and in Pickup v. Brown, where a California law barring licensed therapists from trying to change a minor’s sexual orientation was upheld.
Recognition and reach
From 1995 to 2007 Herek chaired the scientific review committee for the American Psychological Foundation’s Wayne F. Placek Award. In those years more than $1.4 million in direct support and matching funds went to scientists working on sexual minority issues. He also served on the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine committee behind the 2011 report on the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
The honors piled up. The APA gave him its 1996 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest. The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues gave him the 2006 Kurt Lewin Memorial Award. In 2010 the UC Davis Academic Senate and the California Psychological Association each recognized his public service. Herek is the only person to receive APA Division 44’s award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Lesbian and Gay Psychology twice, in 1989 and 1999.
He retired from UC Davis in 2016. His blog, “Beyond Homophobia,” named for the 2004 paper, is on indefinite hiatus.
Sources
- Gregory M. Herek, Ph.D.
- Prof. Gregory M. Herek, Ph.D.
- Gregory Herek | Psychology (UC Davis)
- Beyond Homophobia: Thinking About Sexual Stigma and Prejudice in the Twenty-First Century (SSRN)
