Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is a Professor at Haverford College and a psychotherapist at the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. She has written two well-known biographies, one of Hannah Arendt, one of Anna Freud, as well as Freud on Women, Creative Characters , and a collection of essays, Mind and the Body , and a novel, Vigil.
Homophobes try to seize the power of definition.
Homophobia is mainly a category accusation because it is primarily directed at acts and what acts represent in fantasy, and only secondarily at the people who commit those acts, even though this century has given those people a distinct name. This is the one ideological prejudice that aims at doing, not being. In other words , homophobes hate acts that they themselves can and usually do engage in, so, to repudiate these acts they must assign them clearly to another category of people. The category is all that stands between them and those acts. When the differences between themselves and certain types of homosexuals are clear, homophobes are less strident about categories.