Study: Homophobia is caused by latent homosexuality [updated]

Pictured: If you’re anti-gay, you secretly dream of this

How’s this for interesting (and revealing, and amusing): A study conducted on both regular and homophobic men seems to indicate that a homophobe is really just a repressed homosexual at heart. From Psychology Today:

If Freud is right, then perhaps men who are the most opposed to male homosexuality have particularly strong homosexual urges for other men.

One study asked heterosexal men how comfortable and anxious they are around gay men. Based on these scores, they then divided these men into two groups: men that are homophobic, and men who are not. These men were then shown three, four minute videos. One video depicted straight sex, one depicted lesbian sex and one depicted gay male sex. While this was happening, a device was attached to the male participant's penises. This device has been found to be triggered by sexual arousal, but not other types of arousal (such as nervousness, or fear - arousal often has a very different meaning in psychology than in popular usage).

When viewing lesbian sex and straight sex, both the homophobic and the non-homophobic men showed increased penis circumference. For gay male sex, however, only the homophobic men showed heightened penis arousal.

Heterosexual men with the most anti-gay attitudes, when asked, reported not being sexually aroused by gay male sex videos. But, their penises reported otherwise.

Homophobic men were the most sexually aroused by gay male sex acts.

Now, as if I had to put up such a disclaimer, I am no expert in human psychology or sexuality, and nor do I have any ability to assess the validity of such a study. The abstract itself at PubMed is painfully limited in data, not even giving any information regarding the sampling numbers or methodology. Personally, I’m hoping for a timely examination by our favorite scientifically minded fag hag to let us all know whether this study is worth more than mere gleeful snickering.

Still, though, assuming they used a sample size that included at least ten anti-gay bigots, it’s still quite schadenfreudelicious that all of them got hard(er) at seeing full-on gay sex – and doubly more amusing that they were all significantly more aroused than their non-intolerant counterparts.

Oh, homophobes. Whether it’s being superficially repulsed or secretly aroused by it, they do seem uncharacteristically interested in gay sex.

(via The Agitator)

---

UPDATE: (06/16/11 2:25 PM) – Thanks to CalliopeJane in the comments for posting some more information about this study.

Tags: homophobia • gays • homosexuality