How Stigma Works

Interesting programme from R4’s Thinking Allowed on how stigma works. See below for an interesting anecdote from Laurie Taylor - print out and it could be a useful classroom resource.

Just suppose you could go back and change one single decision in your life. What would it be?’

I have something of an aversion to these retrospective parlour games. Somehow the idea of admitting a mistaken relationship, an erroneous career move, sits uneasily with my idea of myself as a relentless optimist. And in any case isn’t there a positive side to wrong moves? Don’t we learn from our mistakes?

But if pressed I’d have to admit that there was one path which I should not have taken, one decision I should not have made.

It concerns a young man called Tony who I met many years ago at teachers training college. We were both first year students at the time and seemed to have lots in common. We both loved modern jazz and contemporary American fiction. We both fancied ourselves as amateur philosophers and spent at least one term rather pretentiously discussing A J Ayers ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ and Colin Wilson’s ‘Outsider’.

But half-way through my second term at the college I was told by another friend called Paul that fellow students had been talking about how close Tony and I had become. ‘What’s the matter with that’, I asked. ‘We have lots of shared interests. And Tony’s a good guy. A great friend’.

‘Yes’, said Paul. ‘I don’t doubt it. I reckon he’s a good guy as well. But he’s also something else. He’s a queer.’

Even in those illiberal days I was still radical enough to protest that such news about my friend’s sexual predilections made no difference whatsoever to my feelings for him. If Tony was queer that was his business. It had nothing to do with my friendship with him.

But, to my shame, what Paul had said did have an effect upon my view of Tony. I suppose I’d suspected that he was gay before Paul’s intervention but he’d never referred to it at any time during our long conversations about the meaning of life. And he’d certainly never made any advances towards me.

Now, though, everything was suddenly explicit. I couldn’t get away from the knowledge that Paul, and no doubt all his friends, spent part of their time talking about the fact that I spent hours and hours with a known homosexual. This was not a pleasing prospect. In those days, homosexuality was still a deviant practise. It was a subject which prompted a great deal of conversational stereotyping and lots of malicious laughter. And the idea that I might become the object of such conversation and such laughter because of my mere association with Tony was hardly one to relish.

I decided to act. One day as I was walking with Tony I announced – I nearly blush as I write the words – that I had decided it would be best if we stopped being friends. I gave no reason. Just that brutal announcement.

We walked back to college in silence. I knew that he knew why I’d done what I’d done. But neither of us could speak about it. And we never did afterwards. To all intents and purposes the matter was closed.

Paul was less inhibited. When he noticed that Tony and I no longer ate our lunchtime sandwiches together, or sat side by side at the edge of the lake talking philosophy, he chose to congratulate me on my decision and re-assure me about my status. ‘No one ever really though you were queer’, he told me. ‘But, you know, you can’t play with fire’.

It was, I now realise, not only a shameful episode in my life but also an example of how stigma can spread. Tony was a homosexual. I was his friend. Ergo, I was also contaminated.