Robo2010 opened this issue on Sep 22, 2006 · 268 posts
Phantast posted Fri, 22 December 2006 at 5:15 AM
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well i have to say most, in fact all the those i know who were anti gay and this includes most of those guys i knew are still hetro. some of these guys were or are so anti gay if you went with a flat chested woman they branded you gay. don't get me wrong i'm not saying some anti's aren't gay. just that i find it hard to belive the whole anti gay movement is and was mainly made up of latent homosexuals. it's a bit like saying all the anti hetro gays (and there are more than many people think) are secretly straight. as for the flawed logic phantast isn't that what was said. all those opposed to x (homosexualty) are secretly in favour of x (homosexuality) if not what was said...
I'm not saying that all homophobes are latently gay; I'm saying that it is not uncommon for homophobes to turn out in the end to have been gay themselves.
In addition, there is a logic in this case which is not present in your comparisons. In every person there is a mixture of animus and anima, male and female. The balance is different between individuals. It's clear that in some cases, where the balance is rather even, that person incurs anxiety about their true sexual identity, and attempts to repress it by intolerance. The question is, what proportion of intolerant people are so motivated? I don't know the answer to that and neither do you.
You don't know which of your homophobic acquaintances are suppressing their female feelings. They certainly aren't going to tell you. Either they subsequently come out, in which case you know, or they don't come out, and you never know. The fact that they behave in an overtly hetero style means nothing, since you don't know what they may be concealing.
The opposite case you cite, of anti-hetero gays being secretly straight, has no such logic, and no examples that I've ever encountered.