Very often my students haven't known anyone who is gay; others haven't even seen anyone portrayed as gay in the movies.

But they have a lot of ideas, from Eddie Murphy routines, and impersonations, and caricatures and stereotypes. They have virtually no set of embodied images at all, and when they actually meet someone who is gay, they're almost always shocked, by how ordinary, how "normal" he or she seems.

Gay bashing is a convenient way to prove that you are a real man. I think teenagers are particularly susceptible to homophobia, because this is a time when young men are vulnerable to questions about their own masculinity and identity. So homophobia becomes a way of men defending themselves against their own fear, that they aren't masculine, or they aren't manly.

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