Estructura curricular y áreas de aprendizaje

Sexual orientation describes an enduring pattern of attrac-tion—emotional, romantic, sexual, or some combination of these—to the opposite sex, the same sex, both, or nei-ther (“Sexual Orientation,” 2020). The varying forms of these attractions are generally divided into the following categories:

• heterosexuality, or attraction to members of the opposite biological sex

• homosexuality, or attraction to members of the same biological sex

• bisexuality, or attraction to members of both bio-logical sexes

• asexuality, or attraction to neither biological sex Some individuals have tried to avoid these categories of sexual orientation by not describing themselves as het-ero-, homo-, bi-, or asexual and preferring the umbrella term “queer.” Part of the opposition to the gender binary is that it creates heteronormative assumptions that mark het-erosexuality as normal and homosexuality deviant merely because it is the opposite of heterosexuality.

“The pill.” The landmark Supreme Court case Griswold v.

Connecticut affirmed women’s right to use birth control.

(Photo a Day Project: February 2006: Birth Control by Jenny Lee Silver is used under CC BY-NC 2.0.)

1950s contributed to the sparking of the sexual revo-lution, or the loosening of sexual mores demanding sex between heterosexual married partners that occurred in the 1960s. While other sexualities were still stigmatized in most post-Kinsey environments, the sexual revolution was marked by popular acceptance of premarital sex. Studies have shown that between 1965 and 1975, the number of women who had had sexual intercourse prior to marriage showed a marked increase. The social and political climate of the 1960s was a unique one in which traditional val-ues were often challenged loudly by a very vocal minority (“Sexual Revolution,” 2020; “Sexual Revolution in 1960s America,” 2019).

Kinsey’s 1950s study of sexuality contributed to the sexual revolution of the 1960s in two ways. First, prior to the Kinsey Report, no one had interviewed and pub-lished such an exhaustive and comprehensive analysis of Americans’ sexual desires and practices. Kinsey’s report reached the conclusion that few Americans are com-pletely heterosexual in desire or practice as indicated by the Kinsey Scale, or a numeric scaling of individuals along a continuum from complete heterosexuality to complete homosexuality. Though the Kinsey Report was published in the popular press, it was a scientific study conducted by a biologist at an academic institution. Pop-ular readers of the Kinsey Report imbued the findings with a sense of scientific authority and professed faith in their accuracy. While other sexual orientations and acts were still marked as non-normative, society began to accept that other sexualities existed. The Kinsey Report was one step towards non-heterosexual orientations and behaviors becoming accepted by society as normal. Sec-ond, one cannot underestimate the significance of the mere publication of the Kinsey Report, independent of its findings. Prior to its publication, sexuality was consid-ered uncouth to include in conversation. Kinsey’s pub-lication initiated a national environment more tolerant to conversations about sexuality, which in and of itself loosened the grip of normalized, marital heterosexual relations (“Kinsey Reports,” 2020).

Another scientific product had a profound impact on the development of the sexual revolution: the devel-opment of oral contraception. “The pill” provided many women a more affordable way to avoid pregnancy. Before the pill, there was a lack of affordable and safe options for contraception, rendering unwanted pregnancy a serious risk of premarital sexual activity. In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration licensed the drug, enabling its legal sale. However, many states still outlawed the use of contra-ceptives in order to reflect and enforce an ethic in which sexual activity was only acceptable for reproduction. The

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religiously motivated; 79% of men who said that they had changed their sexual orienta-tion said that they had done so for religious reasons, while 93% indicated that religion was “extremely” or “very” important to them (“Sexual Orientation Change Efforts,” 2020).

Sexual Reorientation

A significant amount of professional and academic doubt exists about the efficacy of these reorientation programs. No major mental health professional organization has sanctioned efforts to change sexual orientation and virtually all of them have adopted policy statements cautioning the profession. These include the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psy-chological Association, the American Counseling Associ-ation, the National Association of Social Workers in the USA, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. According to the American Psychological Association and the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Gay and Lesbian Mental Health Special Interest Group, there is no sound scientific evi-dence that sexual orientation can be changed (“Sexual Orientation Change Efforts,” 2020).

Though they obviously disagree with the conceit that homosexuality needs to be treated, many major gay rights advocacy groups mirror the underlying assumption that homosexuality is a static sexual orientation. The idea that sexual orientation is not a choice, but that rather one is born with an assigned orientation, is pervasive in popu-lar conceptions of sexual orientation. This idea runs up against studies that demonstrate how widely sexual ori-entation varies in light of cultural and historical circum-stances, indicating that one’s environment and cultural context play significant roles in determining one’s sexual orientation (“Sexual Orientation,” 2020).

HOMOPHOBIA

Homophobia is a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards homosexuality or people perceived as homo-sexual. Homophobia is observable in critical and hostile behavior like discrimination and violence. Much like Significantly, sexual orientation does not only refer

to one’s sexual practices, but also includes a psychologi-cal component, like the direction of an individual’s erotic desire. Sexual identity and sexual behavior are closely related to sexual orientation, but they are distinguishable.

Sexual identity refers to an individual’s conception of their own sexuality, while sexual behavior limits one’s under-standing of sexuality to behaviors performed (Figure 7.1).

People may or may not express their sexual orientation in their behaviors (“Sexual Orientation,” 2020).

Development of Sexual Orientation

The primary tension in conversations about sexual orienta-tion addresses whether sexual orientaorienta-tion is static or fluid, whether one is born with an immutable sexual orientation, or whether one develops sexual orientation. Each inter-pretation of sexuality manages our understanding of what sexual orientation means in different ways, particularly when combined with political debates about homosexu-ality. Organizations that subscribe to the static interpreta-tion of sexual orientainterpreta-tion fall on both sides of the political divide. Some organizations are socially and politically con-servative, advancing the view that sexuality, left untreated, is static. These organizations tend to pathologize non-het-erosexual orientations, or conceive of them as an illness that must be corrected through medical or therapeutic means. Some of these institutions offer sexual reorienta-tion therapies in which individuals who are attracted to members of the opposite sex but do not want to have those attractions can try to become solely attracted to members of the opposite biological sex. Many of these programs are

FIGURE 7.1 Venn diagram depicting the relationships between assigned sex and sexual orientation. Androphilia and gynephilia are preferred terms for some populations, because homosexual and heterosexual assign a sex to the person being described.

(Sex-Sexuality Venn by Andrea James/Wikimedia Commons is used under CC BY-SA 3.0.)

Party itself were murdered. Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, of whom some 50,000 were officially sentenced to imprison-ment. Most of these German men served time in regular prisons, but an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 were forced to serve their time in concentration camps. Like Jews and the disabled, Hitler labeled homosexuals as defective and sys-tematically persecuted them (“Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany,” 2020).

Current Institutional Persecution of Homosexuals Today, homosexuality is still punishable by death in some countries around the world. Uganda, for example, crim-inalizes non-heterosexual sex acts and most Ugandans consider non-heterosexuality to be taboo. In October, 2009, a member of the Ugandan Parliament introduced the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill to broaden the crim-inalization of same-sex relationships and apply the death penalty to repeat offenders (“LGBT Rights in Uganda,”

2020). Under the statutes of the bill, individuals convicted of a single act of non-heterosexual sex would receive life imprisonment. Additionally, individuals or companies promoting LGBTQ rights would be nationally penalized.

The bill also created a public policing policy under which Ugandan citizens would be required to report any homo-sexual activity within 24 hours or face a maximum penalty of three years in prison. Additionally, if Ugandan citizens were found to be engaging in same-sex sexual or roman-tic activities outside the country, Uganda would request extradition. The bill was signed into law in February 2014 but annulled just five months later (“Uganda Anti-Homo-sexuality Act, 2014,” 2020).

Homophobia and the United States

Although non-heterosexual sex acts are legal in the United States, LGTBQ people still face institutional discrim-ination because they are not afforded the same rights as heterosexual couples. Most evidently, same-sex couples are not allowed to wed in most states. Gay marriage has become a sensitive political issue over the past decade, partially due to the fact that the federal government and state governments have different laws about gay marriage.

Until 2015, the federal government did not recognize gay marriage, but individual states could choose to recognize it (Figure 7.2). In 1996, the federal government passed the Defense of Marriage Act. According to this act, the federal government could not recognize gay marriages, and a state that did not recognize gay marriage did not have to accept the marriage license given to a same-sex couple in a differ-ent state that did recognize same-sex marriages (“Defense of Marriage Act,” 2012). Supreme Court decisions in 2013 racism or sexism, homophobia involves the targeting of

a specific population of individuals with certain traits.

Homophobia, or the fear of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-der, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals, is often the impetus for discrimination, which can be expressed through either institutional or informal means (“Homophobia,” 2020).

Institutional discrimination involves the state apparatus.

If homophobic discrimination is institutional, it means either that non-heterosexual sex acts are criminalized or that LGBTQ individuals are denied the same legal rights as heterosexuals (“Discrimination,” 2020; “Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” 2020; “Homophobia,” 2020).

Informal discrimination is not necessarily sanctioned by the state, but involves social pressures against LGBTQ individuals, behaviors, and identities.

In the United States, the social disapproval of homo-sexuality is not evenly distributed throughout society. That being said, it is more or less pronounced according to age, ethnicity, geographic location, race, sex, social class, educa-tion, political identificaeduca-tion, and religious status (“Societal Attitudes toward Homosexuality,” 2020). Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to have negative attitudes about people who are LGBTQ. Likewise, people who con-sider themselves to be religious are more likely than secular individuals to hold negative views about LGBTQ people.

Historical Institutional Homophobia: Holocaust On many occasions in Western nations in the twentieth century, LGBTQ individuals have been stigmatized because of homophobia. After the rise of Adolf Hitler, homosexuals were one of the many groups targeted by the Nazi Party and became victims of the Holocaust. Beginning in 1933, gay organizations were banned, scholarly books about homo-sexuality were burned, and homosexuals within the Nazi A homophobic protest in the united States. Frequently, homophobia is prompted by religious beliefs. (04.WBC.

MarriageEqualityRally.SupremeCourt.WDC.26March2013 by Elvert Barnes is used under CC BY-SA 2.0.)

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men and lesbian women could meet other homosexuals with whom they could form romantic and sexual relation-ships. Moreover, they were early sites of political action on behalf of gays and lesbians. Homophile organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis lob-bied politicians and business owners to create gay friendly establishments. The efforts of these types of clubs led to a growth in the number of gay-friendly bars and social clubs, making it easier for homosexual individuals to find other homosexuals to associate with. Homophile organizations, however, did not lead to any large-scale demonstrations or protests, and did not result in widespread legal or social changes for LGBT people.

Prior to the 1970s, most states in the United States had laws against sodomy, generally defined as any sexual con-tact other than heterosexual intercourse (“Sodomy Laws in the United States,” 2020). Thus, homosexuality was essentially illegal. The surge in the number of gay-friendly bars in the 1950s led to police crackdowns against estab-lishments that were frequented by gays and lesbians in the 1950s and 1960s. One such crackdown was the raid on the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village, New York City that was frequented by gay men, drag queens, and male cross-dressers. When police raided the bar in June 1969, the customers resisted arrest. Neighborhood resi-dents joined in the resistance, resulting in several nights of rioting. The Stonewall Riots are often cited as the first major protest by LGBT people against the criminalization of homosexuality. The riots gained much media attention and served as visible evidence that there was a large popu-lation of homosexual people that could be organized into a politically active group (“Stonewall Riots,” 2020).

and 2015 ruled the act’s provisions unconstitutional and unenforceable (“Defense of Marriage Act,” 2020; “Same-Sex Marriage in the United States,” 2020).

Informal Homophobia

Prejudices do not have to be institutionalized to be harm-ful. Many instances of homophobia and discrimination occur by informal means. Homophobia can occurs when heterosexual individuals feel anxiety about being perceived as gay by others. This phenomenon is most commonly experienced by adolescent boys. The taunting of boys seen as eccentric, many of whom are usually not gay, is said to be endemic in rural and suburban American schools. At times, this abuse can lead taunted individuals to take dan-gerous risks in efforts to prove a normative masculinity.

Adolescents in the United States often use phrases like

“that’s so gay” in a pejorative sense.

THE MOVEMENT FOR GAY AND