One doesn't really know. Sometimes loathing tells more about the loather than about the loathee, especially if the loathee is just being him or herself, leading his or her life, and the loather gets all rattled about this state of affairs and starts wanting to persuade a lot of other people to loathe the loathee, too, and and join in making him or her miserable.
Something is going on, and I don't buy for a minute that my aunt was, for any rational reasons, suppressed and controlled.
Maybe insulting gays, calling for them to be held in opprobrium and thus made miserable, is a common way fear manifests.
Maybe it's that the loather really wants some gay sex himself and fights the desire, or even the awareness of the desire, by making a big deal about what other people had just better not do, better not do, better not do, those dirty dirty people.
Maybe a gay guy in a clown mask said boo to him when he was five.
Who knows. All I know is that being all mean about what turns other adults on is silly.
I have one theory that is a rationalization for some homophobia: If one's child becomes gay, one's child is unlikely to produce grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc. This might be felt as a basic threat at an almost instinctual level. It surely accounts for the even greater rage I think I would feel if a son of mine were molested homosexually than heterosexually. The feeling I would have might be homophobia. The fear may be that the molestation might set the child on a path to non-reproduction. Something like that.
I just remembered something. We have a gay friend who used to visit us and stay over. When my son was maybe 15, this friend made a comment about him that contained undisguised sexual overtones. If an adult hetero male had spoken in such an inappropriate and crude way to us about a 15 year old daughter of ours, he wouldn't have spent another night in our home, and neither did this friend. I believe, though, that we were more appalled, even made "phobic," about the gay comment than we would have been about a hetero one; in the latter case, we would just have thought, "What a tasteless creep, to say such a thing to her parents." In the former, I think we might have felt some primitive fear relating to the imperative of reproduction rise in our souls.
Just speculatin'
I wonder if childless people are less homophobic than those with children who instinctually want them to reproduce. |
