Thank you very much for removing the post in question. However, there are still some remaining posts with my name in them, Post number 35, and 40 from Jack restating my name. Thank you again for taking care of this.

Regards,
Jason

Anyway, for those of you who want more details about the study posted on Queerty, along with some follow-up stuff, here’s a fuller treatment of it that appeared earlier this year in Scientific American. The author also addresses the issue of anxiety impacting the sexual arousal, and correctly points out the apparent need for the subject to be within a sexual context when anxiety is induced for it to be relevant in the context of this study. People with a phobia of water don’t tend to become sexually aroused looking at a bathtub. I’m also pleased to see an openly gay psychologist is now doing a regular column for the SA. The original SA article is 4 web-pages, so rather than cut and paste the whole thing, I’ll just stick the url on at the end if anyone wants to continue reading it…

January 30, 2009 | 60 comments

Single, Angry, Straight Male… Seeks Same?
A classic study reveals that young homophobic men have secret gay urges
By Jesse Bering

Jesse Bering

From the In-Depth Report
The Science of Love

I wish I could say that I decided to come out of the closet in my early twenties for more admirable reasons—such as for love or the principle of the thing. But the truth is that passing for a straight person had become more of a hassle than I figured it was worth. Since the third grade, I’d spent too many valuable cognitive resources concocting deceptive schemes to cover up the fact that I was gay.

In fact, my earliest conscious tactic to hide my homosexuality involved being outlandishly homophobic. When I was eight years old, I figured that if I used the word “fag” a lot and on every possible occasion expressed my repugnance for gay people, others would obviously think I was straight. But, although it sounded good in theory, I wasn’t very hostile by temperament and I had trouble channeling my fictitious outrage into convincing practice.

I may have failed as a homophobe, but unfortunately, many people succeed. And it turns out we may have something in common—many young, homophobic males may secretly harbor homosexual desires (whether they are consciously trying to deceive the world about them as I was or not even aware they exist). One of the most important lines of work in this area dates back to a 1996 article published in The Journal of Abnormal Psychology. In this empirical paper, researchers Henry Adams, Lester Wright, Jr., and Bethany Lohr from the University of Georgia report evidence that homophobic young males may secretly have gay urges.

In this study, 64 self-reported straight males with a mean age of 20.3 years were divided into two groups (“non-homophobic men” and “homophobic men”) on the basis of their scores on a questionnaire measure of aversion to gay males. Here, homophobia was operationally defined as the degree of “dread” experienced when placed in close quarters with a homosexual—basically, how comfortable or uncomfortable the person was in interacting with gay people. (There is debate in the clinical literature about the semantics of this term, with some scholars introducing other constructs such as “homonegativism” to underscore the more cognitive nature of some people’s antigay stance.)

Each participant then agreed to attach a penile plethysmograph to his, well, “lesser self.” According to the authors, this plethysmograph device is “a mercury-in-rubber circumferential strain gauge used to measure erectile responses to sexual stimuli. When attached, changes in the circumference of the penis cause changes in the electrical resistance of the mercury column.” Previous research with this apparatus (the plethsymograph, not the penis—well, actually both) confirmed that significant changes in circumference occur only during sexual stimulation and sleep.

Next, the participants were placed in a private chamber and presented with three 4-minute segments of graphic pornography. The three video snippets represented straight porn (scenes of fellatio and vaginal intercourse), lesbian porn (scenes of cunnilingus or tribadism), and gay male porn (scenes of fellatio and anal intercourse). Following each randomly ordered video presentation, the participant rated how sexually aroused he felt and also his degree of penile erection. Can you guess the results?

Both groups—non-homophobic and homophobic men—showed significant engorgement to the straight and lesbian porn and their subjective ratings of arousal matched their penile plethsymograph measure for these two types of video. However, as predicted, only the homophobic men showed a significant increase in penile circumference in response to the gay male porn: specifically, 26 percent of these homophobic men showed “moderate tumescence” (6-12 mm) to this video and 54 percent showed “definite tumescence” (more than 12 mm). (In contrast, for the non-homophobic men, these percentages were 10 and 24, respectively.) Furthermore, the homophobic men significantly underestimated their degree of sexual arousal to the gay male porn

http://www.scientificamerican......ailconfirm

kinda turned me on.

Pure class.

Mike
http://www.last.fm/music/Mike+Andrews/Sex

Yeah, it all seems rather intuitive… homophobes are scared of something within themselves. Shocking.

The guy is studying boners…recreational drug use is an on-the-job hazard.

Please don’t speak in sweeping generalizations.

That’s a spurious citation that is irrelevant to the argument as it is unrelated to homophobia. Further, the paper does not support your argument, as this difference was not reported to be statistically significant.

Recent research has shown that HETEROSEXUAL males become more aroused by gay porn (men only) than gay men do by lesbian porn (women only).
http://www.psychologicalscienc.....erence.pdf

Video tape????

Video Tape, grandad??

I personally find it quite interesting, but not very surprising.

Just fyi, the source of the clip is an HBO documentary called “Middle Sexes: Redefining He And She” http://www.hbo.com/docs/progra.....opsis.html Well worth watching :-)

Probably yes as to my knowledge there is no scientific proof that homophobes actually secretly are sexually aroused by homoerotica. Only a oft common hypothesis until proven.

But, this is a joke, right?

Agree that there was no control group. However, I would suggest that the control group….one for each (homophobe straight, non homophobe straight and homosexual) should have been shown straight porn in order to compare the results.