Gareth Thomas, Gay Sexuality and Social Control

The news that Gareth Thomas has ‘come out’ as a gay man means that the Sociology Blog has work to do, holiday time or no! See below for a few brief comments.

Several things struck me as interesting about Gareth Thomas’s announcement.

Firstly, Thomas’s reluctance to come out earlier, provides a good illustration of what sociologists mean by ‘social control’. Social control refers to the way our behaviour is socially constructed; we are encouraged or persuaded to act and behave in certain ways by the possibility of rewards - positive sanctions - or the threat of punishments - negative sanctions. In Thomas’s case, the negative sanctions applied to all gay people led him to keep his sexuality private for a long time. Thomas would no doubt have been concerned about the implications for his career and indeed for his family, were he to make it public that he is gay. There would also, no doubt, have been the possibility of some rather unpleasant chants at matches and indeed, muttered comments from players. These latter are just one example of informal negative sanctions - verbal appellations - name calling to you and me - but they can be remarkably powerful. Just think of the way (utterly repellent in my view) in which the word ‘gay’ has been taken up and used popularly to indicate something which is variously- ‘useless’ or ‘unnatural’ or ‘perverse’; something deeply negative and wrong.

Secondly, listening to the radio, I heard one commentator suggest that had Thomas not been an international level player, he might well have faced a rather less supportive and sympathetic public reaction. This can only be a hypothesis, but I tend to agree and there is a sociological reason why. It seems to me that as a top international player, Thomas benefits from a position of high status and it is hard for the public or commentators to validly deny his skill and ability. Therefore to some extent he is in a fortunate position which is in a way, a bit like a form of stratification. Thomas is famous and he’s famous because he’s good and has been a member of a winning (irritatingly from my English point of view) side. But that same privilege probably wouldn’t accrue to someone playing rugby in the lower divisions.

So yes, homophobia still exists and it is an example of social control. But maybe its also true that the rules don’t always apply to everyone in exactly the same way - maybe you could even say that homophobia is ‘stratified’. Another way of putting it might simply be to draw on the old, but very useful work by Max Weber, who pointed out long ago the way that class and status divisions in modern societies are multiple and cross-cutting.