Why is gay an insult?

Answer 1

In every culture there are behavior expectations based on gender. For instance, in Scotland it is very normal for a man to wear a kilt. In the United States, if a man chose to wear a kilt (basically a plaid skirt), he would be considered extremely odd by people who are ignorant about Scottish tradition.

These expectations based on gender are called "gender norms". When someone behaves in a way "outside" the boundaries of normal behavior, the social group responds negatively to those people. (Sociologists believe that people began enforcing conformity because conformity creates a group identity that helps cement people together so that they can be more effective at survival.)

If the identity of the "misbehaving" individual is not obvious, the group will attempt to "tag" them with a label of some sort. (This is the idea at the center of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter.)

There are two reasons why it is considered "bad" to be identified as homosexual in the United States:

1. Homosexuality is deemed an "abnormal" trait in United States culture, and therefore potentially dangerous. Being tagged as gay is an attempt to push the tagged person out of the community, and in the US it is very often successful. In cultures that consider homosexuality as normal as heterosexuality, this accusation is not used to insult people because they would find no insult in it. (Imagine if someone attempted to insult you by calling you "Blue Eyes" or "Left Handed". In our culture we would think they are ridiculous because neither having blue eyes or being left-handed are negative traits.)

2. The issue at hand is sexual identity, and to young people who are not yet sexual the "norms" are what they relate to the term sexuality (in other words, we learn about the boundaries of "acceptable sex" long before we discover what our own sexuality is). Therefore, the young person can feel pushed out of the community even before they know what they are "guilty" of.