ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses disgust as an analytic register to foreground how social aversions to gay sex are channelled and crystallised in cases that recoil from recognising queer intimacies and identities. It examines Disgust and queerness emerge together in laws criminalising homosexual activity. Following disgust exposes the visceral recoil, or turning away, from sexual intimacies and identities that queer the reproductive, matrimonial, monogamous imaginaries that sustain the social order of heteronormative life. Gay and lesbian activism has confronted the social disgust levelled at homosexuality to advocate for decriminalisation. Despite the majority’s use of disgust to render homophobia as an ordinary response, homophobia can be framed as an exceptional or unusual social bias. Activists and scholars must interrupt celebratory accounts of progress in cases that redirect disgust as a way to embrace gay intimacy and identity. Scholars, activists, lawyers, and judges have to confront and loosen emotional attachments to eliminate the circulation of homophobia more broadly.
