In honour of today being the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia: Broad Comedy (Erin Roberg, Katie Goodman, and Maggie Garver) performs “The Homophobia Song”, aka “You’re Probably Gay”.
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FFFF: Probably Gay
No Homophobes Project Launches PSA
by Jarrah Hodge
Back in December I interviewed Dr. Kristopher Wells of the University of Alberta’s nohomophobes.com project, which uses a website tracking homophobic language on Twitter to act as a “social mirror” drawing attention to everyday homophobia.
This week the campaign started a new phase by launching a PSA that asks why homophobic language is still widely used and often accepted. The language could be considered NSFW, so fair warning:
Global TV donated the PSA production and the clip was created by No Homophobes partner Calder Bateman. Jeff McLean of Calder Bateman told Global News: “We thought the PSA or the TV spot would be a visual representation of the tweets that are coming in on the website…Hearing it from these people is quite shocking.”
In a statement Wells said, “We no longer tolerate racist language, weʼre getting better at dealing with sexist language, but sadly we still see and hear homophobic and transphobic language in our society. While this language might not always be meant to be hurtful, we must not forget that words like “faggot” contribute greatly to the continued alienation and isolation of sexual and gender (LGBTQ) people, especially our youth.”
The PSA has already started getting international attention and will hopefully contribute to raising awareness and increasing constructive dialogue about homophobic language use in Canada and around the world.
U of A’s “No Homophobes” Project Confronts Casual Homophobia
by Jarrah Hodge
The first time I visited nohomophobes.com it was an emotional experience. The site acts as a “social mirror”, capturing real-time use of homophobic slurs on Twitter, and it quickly becomes clear just how staggering a problem casual homophobia is.
I spoke to Dr. Kristopher Wells, Associate Director of the University of Alberta Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services, which started the project earlier this year, about how this relatively simple Canadian idea has had such a wide impact.
Wells told me that the idea for No Homophobes came out of research on casual homophobia and how it manifests in our public education system. EGALE Canada’s national national climate survey on homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in Canadian schools, for example, found that 70% of LGBTQ youth hear phrases like “That’s so gay” every day in their schools. 10% of the time the phrases are actually coming from teachers.
“Sadly, for many LGBTQ youth this kind of casual homophobia is part of their daily reality,” said Wells.
The challenge was to put something together to bring public awareness to the issue of casual homophobia – not just in schools, but also in our society as a whole. The idea was to create a website that compiles tweets, using our four key words (“faggot”, “so gay”, “no homo”, and “dyke”), in real time, from all over English-speaking world. Wells and the iSMSS turned to their community partners, getting help from Calder Bateman in Edmonton and Burnkit in Vancouver to set up the website graphics and technical aspects.
Wells explained: “We wanted to do something different that was actually going to target and speak not only to youth, but also to the broader community – and we figured out pretty quickly that we needed to do something with social media, which is where most youth seem to live.” Read more
AP “Homophobia” Decision Doesn’t Reflect Reality
by Jarrah Hodge
The Associated Press Stylebook sets a newspaper industry standard for grammar, language, and reporting principles. So when the AP makes changes, they can have a significant impact on the media we consume. That’s why a lot of LGBT writers and activists are upset at the recent move by the AP to ban the use of the word “homophobia”. The AP has chosen to read a very literal definition into the word “homophobia”, arguing any word ending in “-phobia” represents “an irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness” and that such words should not be used “in political or social contexts” (this also nixes “Islamophobia” and presumably “Transphobia”).
AP Deputy Standards Editor Dave Milthorn was quoted in POLITICO as saying:
“Homophobia especially — it’s just off the mark. It’s ascribing a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don’t have. It seems inaccurate. Instead, we would use something more neutral: anti-gay, or some such, if we had reason to believe that was the case.”
Even though when you take “homophobia” that literally it doesn’t seem like the most precise term, there are a couple of big problems with the AP’s move.
The first is that their definition doesn’t reflect common usage. Occasionally I’ll use the term “heterosexism” because I think it’s a better word to show that the privileging of heterosexual people and the subordination of LGBT people is systemic (e.g. it makes more sense to say a policy or institution is “heterosexist” than “homophobic”). But I still use “homophobic” more frequently and one reason for that is that people generally get it. People understand when you say someone’s homophobic that you’re not literally saying they need mental health care. They understand you’re not implying they aren’t responsible for their actions or attitudes. Read more
Surviving a Plague, Building a Movement
by Chanel DubofskyI have this memory of me, age 8, refusing for some reason to go to the bathroom before we left the house to go to the mall, and my mother saying, “Fine. You’ll have to go in the mall and you’ll get AIDS from the toilet and die in six months.”
I’m pretty sure I went to the bathroom only at our house from then on, and not in strange, unsupervised toilets, but I don’t actually remember. It seemed like a lot of people were scared then, an insane, unsubstantiated variety of fear. Maybe you got AIDS from kissing, maybe you got it from open sores, maybe from sharing glasses? Maybe it would kill you in six months, maybe in a year. I don’t remember knowing that gay men were getting it, I don’t think I knew what a gay man was. I just knew from the news that was filtered through my mother that people were dying.
Last week, I saw How to Survive a Plague, a documentary about the formation and work of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the international direct action advocacy group that formed in New York City in 1987 in response to AIDS, which was rampaging through the gay community without any response from the government.
I went to see the film largely because the hosts of my favorite independent political podcast raved about it, and because I imagined myself drawing all sorts of exciting parallels between ACT UP and Occupy Wall Street. ACT UP and Occupy have worked together and informed one another on issues of direct action and movement building.
FFFF: Mt. Allison Students on Heterophobia
Students at New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University show how ridiculous homophobia is by creating a sketch showing what heterophobia would be like. Created by Rachael Coon, Giacomo Vecia and Jen Boyce for the university’s Positive Space presentation during The Good, the Bad and the Ugly presentation for Orientation 2012.
-Jarrah
FFFF: It Doesn’t Get Better…For Homophobes
Happy Friday, folks!
Snarky Gay & Straight YouTubers Come Together 2 with FCKH8.com to make a “It Doesn’t Get Better” Video 4 the Forgotten Victims: homophobes! http://FCKH8.com will give 10¢ for every Facebook “Share” & Twitter tweet of this video – up to $10,000 – to http://H8Sux.com, a project to give out free “OK4U2BGAY” T-shirts to school kids.
Note: some NSFW language.
-Jarrah
