Words Hurt
By Robert-Jay Green, Ph.D.
March 19, 2007

Who will be the next national figure to say something derogatory about gay people?
     First it was basketball player Tim Hardaway, who told a radio station that he hated gays and didn’t want to be around them. Next it was conservative commentator Ann Coulter, who picked a major speaking engagement to use hostile schoolyard slang to belittle presidential candidate John Edwards. Then it was Gen. Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who shared with a newspaper reporter his personal opinion that gays are immoral and should be excluded from the military because “we should not condone immoral acts.”
      These comments, and the reactions to them, speak volumes about where gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons stand in this nation. There is a chasm of public opinion still waiting to be bridged and widespread failure to appreciate the pernicious effect of spiteful words on the psychological well-being of millions of Americans.
     The swift reaction to comments by Hardaway, who lost endorsements and was shunned by the NBA, and by Coulter, who was dropped from several newspapers that carried her column and was roundly criticized by the current flock of presidential candidates, might lead one to think that the nation has finally taken a stand against antigay speech. Even General Pace quickly backed off, saying he regretted not limiting his comments to military policy.
     On the surface it seems no longer OK for public figures to bash gay people in the media. Yes, that is progress. But there is a huge gap between the polite language of tolerance and genuine openness to differences. While some anti-gay remarks by public figures are condemned, their continued frequency sends an unmistakable message – hate speech is alive and well even among highly-educated and powerfully-positioned adults. And when adults model this kind of smug attitude of superiority toward a small minority group, children follow.
     A 2006 study by Anthony R. D’Augelli and Michael Starks of Pennsylvania State University and Arnold H. Grossman of New York University examined victimization related to the sexual orientations of more than 500 New York metro area gay, lesbian, and bisexual youths.  Over three-fourths of the young people reported receiving verbal taunts, some beginning as early as age six. More than 70 percent experienced their first verbal harassment while at school. Fourteen percent were physically attacked.  For nine percent, the form of victimization was sexual assault by an adult or peer.  These experiences left their mark – nine percent of the students met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the same condition that affects many soldiers returning from a war zone. For these children, their schools were a war zone
     But it is not only children who suffer.  A 2004 policy report by psychologist Glenda Russell reviewed a number of research studies on the psychological effects of state referenda to ban same-sex marriage. She found the hostile rhetoric of such political campaigns created high levels of psychological stress for lesbian and gay adults, and sharp divisions in many families and communities that previously had managed their differences more constructively.
Antigay attitudes, whether directed at vulnerable children in the schoolyard, targeted to voters in state ballot initiative campaigns, or conveyed to an entire citizenry by public figures in the national spotlight, are harmful. They remind gay people that their physical safety is fragile. They provide cover for schoolyard bullies to intimidate others who are different. And it demonstrates that as a society, we haven’t even mastered civil discourse, much less attained wisdom, about the normal variations in love orientations and gendered behavior that have always existed among human beings and always will.

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Robert-Jay Green is executive director of the Rockway Institute, a think tank for GLBT research and public policy, and Distinguished Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology, a graduate division of Alliant International University.

Contact by telephone at 415-955-2121. Contact by email at rjgreen@alliant.edu