ABSTRACT
Despite research that has stressed the openness of human sexual capacity and erotic desire, the belief that sexuality is a key means for dividing people into fully coherent groups with their own separate forms of desire, practices and collective identities still persists. Contemporary concern about ‘homophobia’ has meant resistance to the repression of stigmatised sexual groupings. Yet the view that hostility and violence stem from a pathology founded on the repression of desire in a specific minority group of homophobes does not move beyond the notion that such violence is a minor group matter where the repressed victimise the sexually open.
