Examining Attitudes Toward Homosexuality Among Young, Athletic BME Men in the UK

This article examines the influence of ethnicity on sporting men’s attitudes towards homosexuality. We employ Herek’s Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men, Revised Version (ATLG-R) scale to data collected 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 toward 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 toward 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.