This presentation offers a radically reframed understanding of male suicide prevention by exposing a pervasive driver of psychological distress, relationship dysfunction and suicidality in males of all sexual orientations: male homophobia—not just a prejudice against gay men, but a disciplinary force policing the lives of boys and men in ways harmful to themselves and those in their orbit.
Drawing from my frontline work providing training on this throughout the NZDF, ADF, NZ Police, NZ Customs Service and educational institutions, as well as from groundbreaking research, I will demonstrate how homophobia acts as a psychological straitjacket. I will show how from primary school onwards, boys are taught—often brutally—that to be “a real man” is to be the opposite of ‘gay.’ Any deviation from characteristics that are deemed to be sufficiently ‘masculine,’ for example, showing disinterest in team sports, can result in being targeted with powerful homophobic labels as a way of enforcing rigid masculine norms. Thus, the vast majority of males who are directly targeted or negatively impacted by homophobic dynamics are neither gay nor trans.
This conditioning forces many males into performative hyper-masculinity and hyper-heterosexuality as a defence mechanism. This self-policing isolates men from each other, stifles emotional expression, destroys relational intimacy, contributes to a culture of suppressed pain, anger, and suicidality, and drives behaviours that not only impact upon men’s suicidality, but upon the suicidality of those caught up within men’s efforts to prove their manhood.
I will present testimony and data to show how confronting homophobia not as a gay issue siloed within ‘Queer suicide prevention,’ but as a whole-of-society issue:
Homophobia is not a ‘gay’ issue. And if we’re serious about reducing men’s suicidality, we must reckon with how homophobia, when left in darkness, quietly kills our brothers, our fathers and grandfathers, our mates, and so many others who don’t have a gay bone in their body.