Content Warning: This section discusses anti-gay bias, including instances of hate crimes and conversion therapy. It also references racism and domestic abuse.

Harsh and violent anti-gay bias is a major theme in Mr. Loverman, as it forms part of the heteronormative societal context that prevents the protagonist and his lover from coming out. Heteronormativity is an ideology that privileges heterosexuality as an ideal and considers anything outside of it abnormal or unacceptable. By considering the different forms that anti-gay bias can take, Mr. Loverman teases out the connections between societal and individual prejudice.

Barry fears being exposed as gay because he associates it with violence. Barry recalls that he lived in fear in Antigua, stating, “I was afraid I’d be up before a judge on some trumped-up charge of indecent exposure; or end up lying on an operating table with a bar of wood between my teeth and electric volts destroying parts of my brain forever”(38). Notably, the violence in this passage is institutional; it refers to shock therapy, implying that the legal and/or medical establishments would treat Barry’s orientation as a disease in need of fixing and respond with force.