I've always assumed this (and assumed that other people assumed this), because if you talk to homophobes they'll eventually say something like "it's a choice!" because it's a choice for them. It's not a choice for me because gay porn doesn't turn me on -- and if it did I wouldn't care anyway because that's how I was raised. But it DOES turns them on, AND they were raised in an environment where this is THE WORST THING EVER, so it upsets them and they get all irrational and punchy (lesson learned: DO NOT discuss this theory with a homophobe.)

TLDR; IMHO Homophobes who think orientation is a choice are closeted gays because logic.

It would be nice to see a better study. Interesting if one hasn't been done in all this time...

1996 sub 100 participants

Data quality is shit, and should be discarded.

That aside, I feel bad for my extremely closested buddy. We went to a rather homophobic highschool, and a mildly homophobic college, and he always tried too hard for ladies for how dedicated he was to his certain type of looks.

Funny, but the sample size? Would like to see a larger study (probably would show the same results).

I also wonder if they considered bi individuals in the non-homophobic group.

If these are easily answered by reading the paper, I'll see it now, when I actually read it.

35 people makes it a useless study.

Shit, you could go through the political news and find more than 35.

It's always important in science to do the experiment or study, even if you're pretty sure you already know the answer.

Sometimes, the result will be surprisingly counter-intuitive. And other times, like in this study, it confirms what seems blatantly obvious.

What could it possibly mean when a man who identifies as heterosexual feels threatened by the mere existence of homosexual men? What could it mean???

Homophobes: resist those evil urges, don't give it to the gay sex, you can do it just say no...

The rest of us: uh, who's gonna tell them

So interesting thing here: both groups were aroused at heterosexual and lesbian stimuli.

The homophobic ones responded to the homosexual stimuli.

The guys were bi. Sort of explains why they argue "everyone chooses to be gay or straight." Because they have decided they have to.

This also explains the more-frequent-than-i-enjoy conversation about how "no, there really isn't a celebrity I'd go gay for."

Most of what I learned about LGBTQ came from homophobes. The ones who would not shut up about it.

For example when I didn't know that rainbows were associated with the community. I had friend school over one time. He saw a blanket with a rainbow stripe pattern. He basically had a gay panic meltdown. He was so certain we were a family of closeted gays.

So anyways later on he got a degree from a bible college or something. And he joined an evangelical church. One where they travel around to city streets around preaching from megaphones. Kind of like that Westboro Baptist thing.

In our early 20s he sexually assault me. I found out later from another guy we went to school with that he also forced himself on that guy too.

He's not the only person I've known like this but certainly the most crazy one.

If there's any true to the saying that gays rub their identity in everyone's face. Then it's the homophobe ones. It's got to be a massive projection. It's like they're trying to tell the world but it manifests as some kind of self-hate in denial or something.

I really don't like the idea of citing this study. It's always this same one from the 90s, and if it were acurate I expect the results would have been reproduced more. It's also not clear that the results indicate what the paper says. There's other reasons than sexual arousal that could explain the results. It could be they're imagining the scenario and are axious or disgusted by it. There's this paper that indicates homophobia is usually caused by fear or hate.

I don't like the idea of putting the blame for homophobia on closeted queer people. It's seems extremely likely to me that most homophobic people are straight, since most people are straight. Also we should respect other people's own identification instead of trying to force labels on people, even if they're bigots.

IIRC, this hasn't been debunked per se, but it was a very small, very limited study, and doesn't really do a great job of explaining homophobia in a broader population. (I mean, you're talking about 64 people in total; depending on your inclusion criteria, that could be a meaningless sample size.) Penile plethysmography is a proxy for sexual arousal; it's useful in some instances--like predicting whether or not someone will commit more sexual offenses in the future--but isn't even that great in those instances. If I remember correctly, there's strong evidence that disgust is a trait strongly associated with conservatism, and homophobia is a an extreme disgust reaction.

FWIW, I was casually--but quite virulently--homophobic when I was younger. I'd been raised in a very conservative, evangelical religious group, and I believed all the bullshit that I'd heard about gay people. That changed once I lost religion, and actually met people that were gay. That, of course, is only anecdotal evidence, and does assume that I'm neither gay nor bisexual (and I don't believe that I am), but it fits with what I've seen from conservative thought.

Is this why Republican senators keep getting caught kissin' with other men in public restrooms?