Fall 2000
Volume 27, Number 1

The purpose of examining the history of a keyword is to open up both changes and continuities in a set of cultural meanings that lie beyond the narrow reference or surface meaning of the word itself. This is only possible, however, if we recognize that a keyword takes on cultural significance when it becomes something more than a narrowly technical term within a limited and specialized discourse. The broad cultural appeal of the term homophobia indicates the way in which the technical and clinical language of a specialized psychological discourse contributes to a more casual, everyday domain of language use. In fact, twentieth-century liberal thought and language is deeply indebted to psychology and the social sciences for a set of terms--stereotype, role model, dysfunction, lifestyle, identity, multiculturalism--that have been formulated in fairly narrow fields of study but have taken on a broad cultural salience. Any attempt to reconstruct the history of a keyword such as homophobia necessarily involves moving across the cultural boundaries that separate the technical from the vernacular, the clinical from the casual, the specialized from the popular.

[...]

The development and popularization of the idea of homophobia in the 1970s and 1980s reveals not so much a turn away from structural explanations to psychological ones in the liberal worldview as a making explicit of what had been latent or implicit in postwar liberalism. Homophobia pushed the psychological worldview out of liberalism's closet. A close examination of the chronology of the concept of homophobia, its generalized advocacy, and some of the criticisms that have been leveled at it by both psychologists and those on the left reveals two things. In the first place, the figure of the homosexual was prefigured by the image of the Jew in the left-liberal imagination, thus making the concept of anti-Semitism the precursor of homophobia. Second, the concept of homophobia is itself indebted in almost all its particulars to the foundational texts of postwar liberalism, written in the early 1950s, despite the fact that the issue of prejudice against homosexuals is almost entirely absent from these texts and is in fact at odds with them.

Daniel Wickberg, assistant professor of the history of ideas, University of Texas at Dallas, is the author of The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (1998). He is currently working on a history of the idea of sympathy and a study of the keywords of modern American liberalism.