Examining attitudes towards homosexuality among young, athletic BME men in the UK

Abstract

This article examines the influence of ethnicity on sporting men’s attitudes towards homosexuality. We employed Herek’s Attitudes Towards Lesbians and Gay Men, Revised Version (ATLG-R) scale to collect data with British undergraduate sports students, as well as interview data with the players of an English Premier League (EPL) football academy, to show that black and minority ethnic (BME) men espouse more conservative attitudes towards homosexuality than their White counterparts. This, we theorize, is attributable to multiple factors, such as socialization into a fundamentalist version of Christianity by family, and the influence of immigration from countries where attitudes towards homosexuality remain more conservative in comparison to the UK. In documenting these findings, this research is consistent with other studies which document higher rates of intolerance among groups of BME men.

Keywords:

• Homophobia
• homosexuality
• race
• sport
• higher education
• religion
• ATLG

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘Widening participation’ refers to governmental attempts to increase the number of students entering higher education from under-represented groups (e.g. BME communities, working-class communities, and so on).

2 Despite being passed in British Parliament, this legislation only affected England and Wales. Scottish and Northern Irish legislation permitting same-sex marriage was passed in 2014, 2020, respectively.