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?

This seems kind of obvious to me honestly. Like if you weren't worried that you would 'turn gay', why would you give a single shit about what other men do in their bedrooms? It just goes to show how even in our 'enlightened' age that there is still a terrible stigma associated with being gay among certain groups. Ignorance and fear is part of it but religion plays a big part as well.

I have a friend who 'admitted' to me that he was gay as if he were telling me he was a pedo or a murderer. Of course I told him that I dgaf, but it mattered to him. He's a devout Catholic and has been tortured by his sexuality since before I knew him (30 years). He has even enrolled himself into a couple of those 'Pray the Gay Away' camps. It's amazing how willing people are to follow a God who would put them through something like that.

I used to work with a religious guy who started this whole "Homosexuality is a choice" bit. I said "You think you could just choose to be gay?" and to his credit he admitted that he could. He's more honest than a lot of closeted homophobes, usually that question makes them backtrack their position, but he's too devout to realize that homosexuality isn't always a boolean and he didn't have a choice in his sexuality anymore than my friend had.

Attraction to women doesn't make people not misogynist.

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.

Not sure what is up with this screenshot. Looks like someone erased something from the sides? I dunno, but the quality is not great. Here's a new one:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8772014/

Uuh that's a very difficult thing.

It's like wearing agressive perfume full of hormomes. It might cause somebody to get an erection but it's still hella uncomfortable and annoying. Not really consensual and i see why it pisses people off.

A sex worker friend told me that he had some homophobic (male) clients who didn't seem to be gay, but frequented male sex workers. This confused me, but he explained that it seems to be part of a convoluted humiliation kink thing, rather than attraction.

For example, I know a subby guy whose domme makes him kiss her feet. She does this because he finds feet gross, and thus ordering him thus is a humiliating and submissive act that he ultimately finds hot. This association has become strong enough that even outside of the specific context of scenes with his domme, he finds the prospect of footplay arousing, whilst simultaneously still being grossed out by feet. He finds the paradoxical vibes of this hilarious, and indeed, reports that it's one of the things he finds fulfilling about kink play.

In the case of homophobic straight men who have gay sex, it's far more psychosexually complex. However, one plausible angle of it is that some men may actually just want to be pegged, but conservative attitudes may mean that being fucked by a woman with a strap-on is perceived as more taboo and transgressive than being fucked by another man.

Another bizarre example my friend relayed to me was an instance of a man who engaged in gay sex as a form of self-harm that was felt to be deserved due to being insufficiently masculine. In this scenario, the homophobic client was topping. The guy apparently seemed to believe in a sort of "conservation of masculinity" in penetrative sex. For example, let's say that any act of penetrative sex (anal or vaginal, it matters not) contains a total of 10 arbitrary units of masculinity. In this guy's ideal of How Sex Should Be, the penetrative partner would contain all 10 units of masculinity, and his partner, with 0 units of masculinity, would be the mostly womanly woman to ever woman. However, this dude was pretty insecure in his masculinity, and he would probably rate himself as having only 6 units of masculinity. This is sufficient for him to feel comfortable being the one who penetrates his partner, but by the principle of conservation of masculinity, this would mean that "balanced" sex would involve a partner with 4 units of masculinity.

I don't intend to kink shame anyone, but frankly I find this bizarre, because it sounds like this guy is genuinely quite disgusted by having sex with another man (and likely not attracted to men either), but feels even more disgusted by the prospect of feeling insufficiently masculine and having sex with a woman. It's like the gay sex is a punishment for not attaining the impossible ideal of hegemonic masculinity. I asked my friend if it wasn't more likely that the dude is just gay and has a heckton of internalised homophobia to work through, but he was pretty sure of his assessment. I'm told that the job involves a surprising amount of "I'm not a therapist, but I'm the closest thing you have to one, so let's talk".

How did they measure "penile circumference" over time? Is there a guy standing next to them with a tape measure?

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.

35 people makes it a useless study.

Based study

Waitwaitwait... The homophobic men displaying arousal: Yeah, sure, of course.

But NONE of the non-homophobic men got even a little ruffled? That's the real surprise here.

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...

I think the more complete question is: Is sexual repression common among conservatives the root of their infantile lashing out against LGBTQ+?

As someone that used to be homophobic in highschool, I can confirm this is the case. My dad is super homophobic yet all of his kids, including myself, are at least bisexual.

I could also imagine that the causality is (partly) the other way around. Demonizing homosexuality makes it a taboo for them and taboos are the base for all kinds of fetishes.