Alternatives to Silence in Face-to-Face Encounters with Everyday Heterosexism: Activism on the Interpersonal Front

Abstract

Two studies explore assertive responding to everyday heterosexism. In Study 1, gay and bisexual men described their responses to heterosexism through diaries and focus groups. Negotiating interpersonal and social implications of their choices, participants favored a range of assertive responses with minimal expression of hostility. In Study 2, various confrontations (styled after diary descriptions) were delivered by an openly gay actor in a task group that included one heterosexual male participant (self-selecting as bystander or perpetrator). The actor's confrontation style (nonassertive, nonhostile assertive, hostile assertive) had no differential impact on participants' subsequent expressions of heterosexism; however, the nonhostile assertive actor did receive the best interpersonal ratings from participants. Results highlight the impactful interchange between targets and perpetrators in the context of everyday discrimination.

KEYWORDS:

• heterosexism
• activism
• everyday discrimination
• prejudice
• prejudice reduction
• intergroup relations
• targets' perspective

Support for this research was received from the Florence Geis Memorial Award through the Psychology of Women Division of the American Psychological Association. Additional support was provided from the Pennsylvania Psychological Foundation, and the Research and Graduate Studies Office of the Pennsylvania State University. Thanks goes to the participants and research assistants at Penn State and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga who kindly volunteered their time to make this study possible, Dr. Janet Swim for her continued support, and Ms. Susan Ritz for her helpful editorial assistance.

Notes

1. For this analysis only, perpetrator status was not tested as an independent variable because it is redundant with the prejudice level of the pre-confrontation comment. The MANOVA enables the effects of multiple predictor variables to be examined on multiple participant response variables, so that changes in the prejudice level of participants' remarks before and after hearing the confrontation could be examined.