Homophobic Attitudes Likely To Be Stronger Among
Those Who Have Repressed Same-Sex Attraction: Report

From the Huffington Post courtesy of my facebook friend Scott:

Set to be published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the study reportedly comprised four separate experiments, each involving an average of 160 college students, conducted in the U.S. and Germany. The findings provide new evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that fear, anxiety, and aversion that toward gays and lesbians can grow out of a seemingly heterosexual individual's own repressed same-sex desires, co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who helped direct the research, told Science Daily.

"In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward," Ryan is quoted as saying. "We laugh at or make fun of such blatant hypocrisy, but in a real way, these people may often themselves be victims of repression and experience exaggerated feelings of threat. Homophobia is not a laughing matter."

And

Meanwhile, other scientists are reportedly skeptical of the findings. "This study is asking the right questions, but it's a pretty big leap to say it's revealing sexual orientation," Psychology professor Gregory Herek, of the University of California-Davis, told Opposing Views.

More here.

A few years back some commenter over at Daily Kos lambasted me for saying something to this effect about some conservative's homophobic remark of the day. I mean, I wasn't even one hundred percent serious, saying something to the effect of "Ah, he's probably gay himself." But whoever this DK liberal was, she or he had an axe to grind against people who brand homophobes as secretly gay.

But the idea's been around for a long time and it makes a great deal of sense. Remember the fascist father next door neighbor in American Beauty who ends up killing the Kevin Spacey character because he was the object of the neighbor's repressed homosexual desire? Yes, a movie, but with a sensible narrative. I mean, the article excerpted above even mentions disgraced anti-homosexual evangelist Ted Haggard's gay dalliances, and off the top of my head I could name three or four more prominent anti-gay figures who have ended up in the same boat.

Everybody is, of course, an individual, and one person's sense of homophobia is easily another person's devout religious sensibility, or strong attachment to patriarchy enforced gender roles. That is, I'm completely sure there are people out there who fear or hate homosexuals who are not themselves gay or bisexual.

But even without this study, you just have to know that some of those homophobes secretly love the cock. And that means they're in total hell.

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