An elaborate and comprehensive study out of the University of Georgia confirms what many experts have suspected for quite some time: homophobic men are gayer than Carson Kressley at a Barney’s season sale. Sigmund Freud was the first to theorize that people often have the most hateful and negative attitudes towards things they secretly crave, but feel that they shouldn’t have — and now it’s been proven by the most in-depth study of its kind ever conducted. The scientific confirmation of this long-held suspicion was recently published by a leading group of scientists and Psychology Today gave the following breakdown of the results:

[The 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 each participant’s penis. 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.

The following is the study’s abstract from the University of Georgia which was published by the Journal of Abnormal Psychology , The American Psychological Association (Adams HE, Wright LW Jr, Lohr BA. Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens 30602-3013, USA), and by the NCBI (National Center For Biotechnology Information):

The authors investigated the role of homosexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who admitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men (n = 35) and a group of nonhomophobic men (n = 29); they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia (W. W. Hudson & W. A. Ricketts, 1980). The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes, and changes in penile circumference were monitored. They also completed an Aggression Questionnaire (A. H. Buss & M. Perry, 1992). Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. The groups did not differ in aggression. Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies. PMID: 8772014 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

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