Homophobia is a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward homosexuality or people who are identified or perceived as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT). Definitions refer variably to antipathy, contempt, prejudice, aversion, and irrational fear. In a 1998 address, author, activist, and civil rights leader Coretta Scott King stated that "Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood."

Homophobia is observable in critical and hostile behavior such as discrimination and violence on the basis of non-heterosexual orientations. According to the 2010 Hate Crimes Statistics released by the FBI National Press Office, 19.3 percent of Hate Crimes across the United States "were motivated by a sexual orientation bias." Moreover, in a Southern Poverty Law Center 2010 Intelligence Report extrapolating data from fourteen years (1995-2008), which had complete data available at the time, of the FBI's national hate crime statistics found that LGBT people were " far more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be victimized by violent hate crime."

Maajid Nawaz (ماجد نواز, born 1978 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex) is a British Pakistani and former member of the Islamic political group Hizb ut-Tahrir. He holds a B.A. (Hons) from London University's School of Oriental and African Studies and a M.Sc. in Political Theory from the London School of Economics. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of Quilliam (think tank), the world's first counter-extremism think tank. He is also the co-founder of Khudi, a counter-extremism social movement working towards the promotion of social democratic change in Pakistan.

Nawaz cites racism whilst growing up and feeling divided between his Pakistani and British identities as important factors in his struggle to find his own identity. The Nation of Islam and genocide in Bosnia also influenced him. Maajid's experience of Islamism began at the age of 16 when he left home to pursue a design course in London - it was then that he was recruited to Hizb ut-Tahrir (The Liberation Party). Maajid very quickly became a national speaker and international recruiter for the party, travelling first to Pakistan and then to Denmark to export the party's ideology and set up cells from London. He resigned from Hizb-ut-Tahrir in May 2007.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.

Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club.

After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from a number of schools and eventually spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, he was able to secure a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English Literature.

He first came to public attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also included Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. With Hugh Laurie, as the comedy double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and took the role of Jeeves (with Laurie playing Wooster) in Jeeves and Wooster.

As an actor, Fry played the lead in the film Wilde, was Melchett in the BBC television series Blackadder, starred as the title character Peter Kingdom in the ITV series Kingdom, has a recurring guest role as Dr. Gordon Wyatt on the Fox crime series Bones and appeared as rogue TV host Gordon Deitrich in the dystopian thriller V For Vendetta. He has also written and presented several documentary series including the 2008 television series Stephen Fry in America, which saw him travelling across all 50 US states. Since 2003 he has been the host of the quiz show QI.