New research lends considerable credence to the psychoanalytic theory that repressed homosexual urges may be at the root of homophobic behavior by heterosexual men.

Using a scale that measures traits of homophobia--fear, anger, anxiety, or aversion in response to interactions with gay men or lesbians--University of Georgia researchers compared 35 men who exhibited homophobic traits with 29 men who do not. Both groups identified themselves as exclusively heterosexual.

Each participant viewed videotapes showing three categories of sexually explicit activities--heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian. (The researchers explained that they included a lesbian videotape because it has proven to be "highly sexually arousing to heterosexual men and is a better discriminator between heterosexual and homosexual men than other stimuli.") The order of the tapes was varied to avoid any effects that might be linked to the sequence in which the subjects viewed them.

Before and after each type of videotape, which subjects watched individually in a soundproofed room, arousal was measured using penile plethysmography. In addition, subjects provided a subjective rating of their sexual arousal using a 10-point scale following each of the three tapes.

The men in both of the groups had similar degrees of arousal after viewing the videos showing the heterosexual couple and two women having sex. A significant difference between the two study groups appeared, however, following the video depicting male homosexual acts.

According to researchers Henry Adams, Lester Wright Jr., and Bethany Lohr of the psychology department at the University of Georgia, the men in the homophobic group displayed significantly greater increase in penile circumference after the all-male videos, while the nonhomophobic subjects showed dramatically lower arousal levels. They report that 24 percent of the nonhomophobic men, but 54 percent of the subjects who scored high on the homophobia scale showed some degree of tumescence in response to the homosexual video. In addition, 66 percent of the nonhomophobic group showed no significant increases in tumescence after this video, but only 20 percent of the homophobic men failed to display any arousal.

Arousal Level Denied

Adams and his colleagues, who describe their research in the August issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, also point out that the homophobic men were either unaware of or unwilling to admit the level of arousal engendered by the homosexual male video. When asked to give their subjective assessment of the degree to which they were aroused by watching each of the three videos, men in both groups gave answers that tracked fairly closely with the results of the objective physiological measurements, the authors note, with one notable exception--the homophobic men significantly underestimated their degree of arousal by the male homosexual video.

The scale used to assess the degree to which subjects possessed homophobic traits was the 25-item Index of Homophobia, which yields a score between 0 and 100 that indicates the level of "dread" a person experiences "when placed in close quarters with a homosexual," the authors note.

To evaluate whether aggression is a component of homophobia, the researchers also administered the self-rated Aggression Questionnaire, but no link between aggression and degree of homophobia was found.

Competing Theories

The researchers offer competing explanations for the arousal experienced by the homophobic men in response to erotic videos of male homosexual acts. The psychoanalytically oriented theory would view homophobia "as one type of latent homosexuality where persons either are unaware of or deny their homosexual urges," they point out.

An alternative hypothesis, which they attribute to Barlow, Sakheim, and Beck, focuses on the role of anxiety in sexual responsiveness. It postulates that "viewing homosexual stimuli causes negative emotions such as anxiety in homophobic men but not in nonhomophobic men. Because anxiety has been shown to enhance arousal and erection, this theory would predict increases in erection in homophobic men." Thus, the homophobic men's increased arousal is a response to a perceived threat rather than to stimuli they find sexually arousing.

Evaluating the validity of either theory requires further research, the authors caution.

(Psychiatric News, September 20, 1996)