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NYT Publishes ANOTHER Study Finding Homophobes are Secretly Gay

Posted by on Apr 30, 2012 in Health | 4 comments

The New York Times published the results of another study in this week’s Sunday Review which links homophobia with repressed, damaged homosexuals who were perhaps raised by parents who were “controlling, less accepting and more prejudiced against homosexuals.”

This is the third high profile study to come to the same conclusion using different methods in almost as many weeks. Homophobes, your card is up. We’ve all suspected you were gay all along, but now science is proving it over and over again.

It’s a compelling theory — and now there is scientific reason to believe it. In this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we and our fellow researchers provide empirical evidence that homophobia can result, at least in part, from the suppression of same-sex desire.

Our paper describes six studies conducted in the United States and Germany involving 784 university students. Participants rated their sexual orientation on a 10-point scale, ranging from gay to straight. Then they took a computer-administered test designed to measure their implicit sexual orientation. In the test, the participants were shown images and words indicative of hetero- and homosexuality (pictures of same-sex and straight couples, words like “homosexual” and “gay”) and were asked to sort them into the appropriate category, gay or straight, as quickly as possible. The computer measured their reaction times.

The twist was that before each word and image appeared, the word “me” or “other” was flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds — long enough for participants to subliminally process the word but short enough that they could not consciously see it.

…

Using this methodology we identified a subgroup of participants who, despite self-identifying as highly straight, indicated some level of same-sex attraction (that is, they associated “me” with gay-related words and pictures faster than they associated “me” with straight-related words and pictures). Over 20 percent of self-described highly straight individuals showed this discrepancy.

Over 20% of participants fell quite nicely into the Louder the homophobe, the bigger the homosexual rule.

Thanks, science!

Go read the entire thing!

Between the empirical evidence linking homophobia with closeted homosexuality piling up, and the father of the Ex-Gay movement recanting his entire body of research last week, the argument against LGBT rights and equality sure just got a whole lot less compelling.

It’s a good time to be gay, don’t you think?