Perhaps most homophobes are homosexuals

Wrestlers with sex minorities would be happy to plunge into the charm of unconventional sex, if not for the childish fear of parental anger.

In the ongoing struggle between homophobes and representatives of sex-minority there is a well-known comic story, when the most ardent enemies of homosexuality are caught on homosexual contacts. This, of course, causes a general malevolence, and for such fighters of the homophobic front the label of liars and hypocrites is forever fixed. Scientists from the University of Rochester (Great Britain), together with colleagues from the University of California at Santa Barbara (USA), found the psychological underpinnings of such contradictory behavior. The obtained results, on the one hand, help to understand those who fight for the "purity of sexual orientation", and on the other, even more disavow their efforts.

The hypothesis of scientists was that active rejection of homosexuality occurs because of the displacement of "abnormal" sexual desires during puberty. What repression usually happens in families with an authoritarian "management style". The study involved 160 students from several American and European higher education institutions. First, psychologists assessed the difference in sexual preferences, which the participants of the experiment consciously demonstrate to others and who are present in them in an unconscious form. Students were shown words or photographs that they should have been classified as homosexual or heterosexual. But before that everyone was shown the word "I" or "others", flickering with an interval of 35 milliseconds. It was not enough for a person to consciously read what was written, but after that he associated words and photos with himself or with another. The program noted the speed of the reaction: if after the "I" the subject reacted more quickly to a same-sex couple or the word "homosexual" and slower - to heterosexual photos, this indicated a hidden non-traditional orientation.

At the second stage, the participants of the experiment were asked about their families, and the emphasis was not on open rejection of sex minorities in the family, but in general on the nature of family relations. It was necessary to answer how much you felt free, how much you were controlled in your thoughts and actions, how much respect your opinion, etc. Finally, at the last stage of the experiment, its participants were shown the degree of homophobia. Subjects had to answer questions that directly addressed their opinion about the social danger of sex minorities, and also undergo another "unconscious" test. During this test, students were shown the word "gay" in the same way as before the words "I" and "others" showed: so that it was perceived unconsciously. After that, the subjects had to write any three words that they immediately came up with: in this case, the number of aggressive words was estimated.

As researchers write in an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a high level of homophobia, family authoritarianism and hidden homosexuality were closely related to each other.

Here, an expanded interpretation of the results should be prevented: rigid family orders do not provoke non-traditional sexual orientation at all. Its origin in this case is taken out of brackets. But if it so happens that a person begins to draw to the people of his gender, then in a family with a rigid attitude toward upbringing, declaring his unconventional preferences means causing anger and rejection from the parents. As a result, people suppress their orientation in favor of the generally accepted. But in the future any contact with sex minorities will threaten him with the fact that his secret attraction will come out. Fearing the exposure (and loss of parental love), he will behave towards non-traditional orientations more aggressively. It is known that many clashes between straight and gay men are justified by the fact that a representative of sex minorities "first started". But it often turns out that the unfortunate victim of gay harassment simply, as they say, seemed. Psychologists believe that there is no evil intent. The internal conflict between the debt before the elder and the depressed drive is transferred outward, and it seems to the person that the other in reality is threatening him, although the threat is rooted solely in one's own psyche.

As for those who grew up in families with democratic orders, they did not conflict with their internal and external sexual preferences, and they treated the sex minorities calmly, regardless of their own orientation. It should be emphasized once again that it is not a question of the specific attitude of the family to some issues of sexual life, but of the general lifestyle. That is, you can imagine an authoritarian family of gays or lesbians who adopted a child and by common efforts convinced him that traditional sex is bad, and if the child meets a person of the opposite sex, the family will stop loving him. In this case, you can expect that the child will grow a LGBT-fundamentalist, no matter how hard it is to imagine it. All this, of course, once again speaks about the questionable effectiveness of the rigid style of education: sexual orientation is only the most colorful and hardly too widespread a case. It is enough to think, for example, about how many people secretly hate their school or their work, which parents chose for them, who knew, of course, "how it will be better." If we turn to the realities of our country, it remains only to regret those who have to fight their own heavy childhood as much at the federal level, developing well-known bills on the "ban of propaganda themselves-know-what."