A “Very Real Threat of Danger”: Homophobia during Tom Oddo’s Presidency
Over the past several months, I’ve met numerous people who knew or worked with Father Tom Oddo during his presidency at the University of Portland—people I hadn’t been connected with before writing Against the Current: Father Tom Oddo and the New American Catholic. Their stories have been fascinating time capsules of that “Camelot” era on the Bluff (1982-1989), and they’ve compelled me to write more about it. This is one of those stories.
Father Chris Johnson and “A Study of Homophobia”
In February 1988, Father Chris Johnson completed and submitted his thesis for a Master of Arts in Education, later becoming a fellow graduate of UP’s School of Education. His thesis, titled “A Study of Homophobia Among Male and Female Undergraduates at a Small Catholic University in the Northwest,” tackled dual questions about the extent of homophobia in American society and its direct correlation with what we would now describe as toxic masculinity and stereotypical gender norms: the innate feeling of either masculinity or femininity and its possible relation to negative feelings about gays and lesbians. At the time, Father Johnson was also the Director of Campus Ministry and an institutional leader in the fight against AIDS in the mid- to late eighties, promoting public education, health resources, and supportive reflections on the liturgy. During Tom’s presidency, he was a notable on-campus voice, speaking out about LGBTQ+ issues, and a major partner in cultivating the kind of university Tom wished to build.
Neither the existence of this thesis nor Johnson’s study was known to me at the time of printing. What it provides is a fascinating look at the cultural life of a Catholic institution from the student perspective, and a new dynamic with which to consider Tom’s presidency; according to at least one attendee of my latest reading, in the Oscar Romero Room of Portland’s St. Andrew Catholic Church, the study surveyed the very students Fathers Oddo and Johnson served at UP.
“A Study of Homophobia…” does not name its sample institution, instead describing it as a “small, Catholic university in the western part of the United States” with five schools: a College of Arts and Sciences and Schools of Business, Education, Engineering, and Nursing. The study’s methodology involves the administration of two assessments to undergraduate students in required philosophy courses. To this day, the University of Portland fits all of these descriptors: It is still—for undergraduates—a Western university with five schools that requires philosophy coursework. That Johnson was able to train someone to administer these forms to a total of 190 undergraduate students seems to confirm that the university in his study was, in fact, the University of Portland. Such context is important when considering his findings.
The study relied on two assessments taken by students across all four academic years, though respondents were primarily freshmen (41%), sophomores (31.4%), and juniors (23.6%), with an average respondent age just above 19 years old. 90 female and 88 male students’ assessments were collected, while 12 were eliminated for having a respondent 25 years or older. Johnson’s reasoning for excluding older students was simple: “older students are likely to be in a different psychological development stage than that of the more typical undergraduate age group.” He wanted to capture a true sample of college students’ feelings, instructing his examiner to “answer subjects’ questions in as neutral a manner as possible,” and students responding that (as was written on the appended forms in Johnson’s thesis), “[This] is not a test so there are no right or wrong answers.” Of these, 59% identified as Roman Catholic, followed by 14.1% from an Evangelical or Fundamental Christian denomination, 13.5% from a Mainline Protestant denomination, 7.9% with no religious affiliation, and 2.5% from a non-Christian faith. About two-thirds of respondents reported attending at least 3-10 church services per year, with 23.6% reporting near-to-weekly attendance.
Students received the Bem-Sex Role Inventory (BSRI)—“a tool designed to identify masculinity, femininity, androgyny, and asexuality in individuals” that had respondents rank 60 different items on a 7-point scale regarding their perception of the items’ stereotypical masculinity or femininity—and the Index of Attitudes Towards Homosexuals (IAH)—a series of 25 “I feel” statements that respondents would rank between “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree” on a 5-point scale. To test attitudes towards gay men vs. lesbian women, Johnson slightly modified the IAH with gendered language and divided his respondent pool: half of male students received IAH Form M, about their perception of gays, and half received IAH Form F, about their perception of lesbians; female students received the same nearly-50/50 split between these forms. Johnson hypothesized that:
(1) Men who score masculine [on the BSRI] will be more homophobic in their attitudes towards gay men than men who score feminine or androgynous and (2) women who score feminine will be more homophobic in their attitudes towards lesbian women than women who score masculine or androgynous.
Johnson’s Results and Analysis
The results of the study were somewhat surprising: Only 10.5% were considered “non-homophobic” by their IAH answers. This group’s mean score on a scale of 0-100 (0 being absolutely non-homophobic) was 39.842, with most respondents in the non-homophobic group coming from urban areas in the West, being less likely to attend church services, and who usually knew at least one gay or lesbian person (78.9%). Simultaneously, the “homophobic group” of the other 90% of respondents—over three-quarters of whom were freshman and sophomore students—had mean scores between 66.1 and 70.5 on the IAH (with at least one reported score of 100). Only one respondent out of 190 total scored less than a 25, categorized as “high grade nonhomophobic.”
The results slightly invalidated Johnson’s hypothesis of a more intrinsic link between masculinity, femininity, and resulting homophobia. “In order of mean scores,” Johnson wrote, “masculine men were the most homophobic group followed by masculine women, feminine women, and feminine men,” possibly hinting at internalized homophobia among some of the responding students.
More importantly, Johnson observed a deeply homophobic undertone from the majority of undergraduate students: the overall mean score of the IAH was 69.1, the high end of the assessment’s “low grade homophobic” designation. Johnson noted a few possible factors for this outcome, such as the upbringing of students in more conservative, hardline Catholic households, a less-than-favorable diversity of respondents, societal favorability of masculine traits, and the possibility that his modified IAH (to include gendered language) may have skewed how respondents answered. But he also mentioned the impact of something much graver: the AIDS epidemic, something still considered a “gay disease.” In his ending discussion, Johnson notes how the number of AIDS-diagnosed people doubled in the course of his research, showing the escalation of the disease and its growing impact on the public consciousness as students filled out their forms. Johnson, from his work combating the myths and disinformation around AIDS at UP, would’ve known this impact well.
Whatever its source, the remarkable amount of homophobia he observed made Johnson admit, “…the university itself is quite conservative. It is possible that the extent of conservatism was underestimated by this researcher.” But all was not lost. He recommended several ways for the study to be improved for future iterations, with ideas for new questions to ask and different approaches to developing a sample population, and encouraged future study on the growth and development of his respondents’ beliefs. Johnson also observed that those with a personal connection to at least one gay or lesbian person were far less likely to be homophobic—an idea we may take for granted today—and that education on gay and lesbian issues was necessary to reform the behavior of those who were. Education, too, meant both unlearning harmful behaviors and learning new, healthier ones. And education could take several forms—a few examples Johnson provided were the changing of classroom attitudes through offering human sexuality classes on homosexuality, and the changing of behaviors in real-life settings: “to work directly with the traditional understanding of heterosexual masculinity,” and “to use respected role models and public figures who are willing to publicly admit that they are not homophobic,” reminding us how important Tom and his colleagues were to combating it on the Bluff.
To reflect on the history of the Tom Oddo years is to review a period of serious contrasts: a gay priest leading a Catholic university, teaching human sexuality and theology courses to a student population still deeply entrenched in homophobic tendencies. It underlines the importance of the contributions of priests like Father Oddo, Father Johnson, and others like them to serve LGBTQ+ people inside and outside their church when, even on the Bluff, they faced strong currents of disdain and prejudice. Yet, Johnson ended his thesis on a positive, if somewhat ominous note:
This paper began by relating the very real threat of danger which is posed by homophobic attitudes taken to an extreme. The results of this study suggest that homophobia is a reality, at least among this particular group of subjects and that education to combat homophobia is needed. To fail to educate is to insure [sic] that homophobia and its consequences will continue for a long time to come… With education, a follow up study five or ten years from now may show a marked change in the attitudes of these subjects towards gays and lesbians.
Author’s Note: Christopher Johnson left the priesthood over his disagreements on church doctrine towards gay Catholics. He became a health educator for the Multnomah County HIV Outreach Program. He later ran the county’s home renovation lead abatement assistance program and served as a diversity trainer in his latter years. He was committed to his husband Rex Bills in 1994, and they married in 2014. Christopher passed away in September 2023, six months after Rex, and a few days before I conducted my first interview for Against the Current.
