Why is "homophobia" the term for hatred of homosexuals, rather than fear of homosexuals?
The person who's credited with coining it in roughly the modern sense is George Weinberg, and one of the things he meant to include by it in his 1972 book is a "dread of being in close quarters with homosexuals". That's the only sense mentioned in some accounts, e.g., glbtq >> social sciences >> Homophobia. But in fact his own usage was all over the map and he used it for that "_as well as_ irrational fear, hatred, and intolerance by heterosexual individuals of homosexual men and women." (Page on Landman-psychology, my emphasis.) So as Jaap Weel surmises, from the beginning it was as much or more akin to xenophobia than claustrophobia. And by 1975 it was standardly used in parallel to racism: "There is no such thing as the homosexual problem any more than there is a black problem—the problems are racism and homophobia." Toronto Globe and Mail via OED.Update: I tracked down the original book, Society and the Healthy Homosexual - Kindle edition by George Weinberg, and sure enough, he starts out with examples of extreme, phobia-like reactions, but then pivots explicitly at the end of the first chapter:But here the phobia appears as antagonism directed toward a particular group of people. Inevitably, it leads to disdain of those people, and to mistreatment of them. This phobia in operation is a prejudice, which means that we can widen our understanding of it by considering the phobia from the point of view of its being a prejudice and uncovering its chief motives.(Kindle Locations 198-201. St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.)