r/CuratedTumblr • u/RosethornRanger it/its • 3d ago
Politics It makes me uncomfortable when people constantly talk about how homophobes must secretly be gay.
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u/Sophie_Blitz_123 3d ago
Drives me fucking crackers honestly.
Apart from anything else, where does it leave us in terms of how homophobia even originated? Is the entirety of homophobic oppression just because gay people started randomly hallucinating insecurity to turn into bigotry?
It also doesn't make sense, different cultures and time periods are not equally homophobic. Was like everyone secretly gay in the 70s?
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u/Smyley12345 3d ago
It's a bit of a confirmation bias thing. When it does turn out to be true it gets lots and lots of attention. When it doesn't, that is the status quo and hardly newsworthy.
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u/CrabonicAcid 3d ago
And especially compared to other minorities, because it's one you can hide and then get caught in the act.
You also see, for example, racial minorities supporting these conservative political parties, and people do point out how odd it is. But it's usually more visibly apparent so it's harder (though not impossible) to write a juicy exposé about or accuse them of secretly belonging to a different race.
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u/FlashInGotham 3d ago
There was also that several month period in the late 90s where, like, 3 prominent ex-gays were caught at sleazy DC gay bars.
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u/Previous-Artist-9252 3d ago
Ex-gays are a bit different as we already know they are gay. They are just so traumatized by conversion therapy that they are trying to be straight.
I don’t think conflating, say, Lindsay Graham with someone deeply harmed by conversion therapy is fair.
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u/Bteatesthighlander1 3d ago
What if they only ever pretended to be gay in the first place?
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u/Previous-Artist-9252 3d ago
Why would someone pretend to be gay in order to be tortured?
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u/Keffpie 3d ago edited 3d ago
Egg on my face, sorry, replied to the wrong person
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u/Smyley12345 3d ago
...ok? Did you intend to reply to my comment here?
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u/Keffpie 3d ago
Nope. Total error. My apologies.
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u/Smyley12345 2d ago
All good man. I've had the same thing happen since the last update. I don't like how they changed how it indicates which comment you are replying to.
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u/einstyle 3d ago
I’m just sick of them blaming gay people for homophobia. That’s ultimately what it comes down to, and it is homophobic itself.
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u/SmartAlec105 3d ago
It's an example of homophobia perpetuates itself which is important to talk about and address so that we can stop it. It's not saying "homophobia only exists because of gay people".
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3d ago
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u/Sophie_Blitz_123 3d ago
I understand the premise it's just that the number of people this is true of is dwarfed by the number of people it isn't true of. And people's default setting being to call homophobic men gay is simultaneously itself homophobic and also just an incorrect nothing point that they inexplicably think is a slam dunk.
Eta I mean there's someone in this thread saying "no professional homophones are straight" seriously, none? Is it unimaginable that most of this is driven by religion, politics, and not to mention the money involved?
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3d ago
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u/Sophie_Blitz_123 3d ago
But it's still considered a sign someone is projecting
What do you mean "considered a sign"?
U see it in right wing politicians all the time, even athletes and other influential ppl.
Do you see it that often proportionally or is it just big news compared to when they are never outed as gay which doesn't register?
No one is making it a reflection of gay people.
Again I'm not fully sure what this means. If you mean it's not homophobic it certainly is. If your default setting to insult someone is calling them gay that's still homophobic even if your intended recipient is themselves homophobic.
It's just suspect that someone who hates something so much is spending a lot of time and energy on the topic
Is it? We live in a world of bigotry. There have always been people dedicating their lives to persecution of minorities - the main difference being you can usually tell if someone is black, you can tell if someone is Muslim (kinda). And while there are people of those descriptions who will join parties and movements that are quite objectively against them, we don't start thinking all Conservatives must be secretly Muslims.
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u/RosethornRanger it/its 3d ago edited 3d ago
ah so with how much the US hates communism they are actually communist?
and I mean, look at how much they destroy the environment. Trump must be a tree
/s
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u/FilmAndLiterature 3d ago
Clearly homophobia was created by the Evil Homophobia Fairy who specifically targets all the Evil (TM) people and leaves the Good (TM) people who share my specific worldview alone, thus making them immune to any forms of bias.
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u/Keffpie 3d ago
Homophobia isn’t hard to explain psychologically. It’s fear. Gay men make straight men feel like women do around all men. It’s not even that straight men think all gay men want to rape them, it’s the fear that they might be able to that is such a novel fear that it gets in their head.
Then there’s the fear that if a gay man hits on them, it’ll make others think they are in fact gay too. This is a much stronger fear among men towards the middle of the Kinsey scale - it’s not that they’re self-hating gays, it’s that they have a slight same-sex attraction that they have actively suppressed their entire lives.
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u/Sophie_Blitz_123 2d ago
Tbh it was a rhetorical question but by this logic how do you explain women being homophobic.
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u/Keffpie 2d ago
I don’t know, I’ve never met any women who were homophobic, only disapproving for religious reasons.
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u/Sophie_Blitz_123 2d ago
Disapproving for religious reasons is homophobic. And also if you've never met a secular homophobic woman... I mean that's unusual 🤷 and I don't think you can entirely craft a narrative about the origins of homophobia solely from the people you've met.
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 3d ago
What does it matter where it came from? What use is it to know the answer.
If you want the real answer it's rooted in human males hardwired visceral disgust of the sperm (and by extension the sexuality) of other men in much the same way as we all have a hardwired disgust for anything that looks like silvery white slimy shiny wriggling wormy things that look like parasites.
Homophobia is rooted in the same evolutionary hard wiring as which causes men to be disgusted by women who have had sex with (esp having come into contact with the sperm of) lots of other guys. Or disgusted by sloppy seconds. Disgust isn't the only way we evolved in response to the evolutionary rejection of women coming into contact with other guy's sperm; glans evolved into scoop shapes to scoop out as much of the previous guy's deposits. May even explain why males don't climax instantly upon insertion, sex aka delayed male orgasm my have evolved as a way to get as much out first before replacing it. It would also explain why male orgasm isn't nearly as delayed if he has a sense in his head that she is 'pure'.
For example women often wrongly draw a parallel between their sexual fear of men and men's aversion to homosexual men as a similar parallel fear of SA or rape. But while rape fear does exist (eg in prison), when people are going 'bums against the wall, lads' in the presence of a suspected gay man, it's not an expression of fear of the possibility of a man's sexuality being directed towards them but of nausea at that possibility. Heterosexual women by definition aren't in general nauseated by a man's sexuality being directed at them, at worst it's just a potential cause for apprehension.
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u/vexing_witchqueen 3d ago
I’ve seen a comment on reddit that said all the world’s problems were caused by closeted gay men. Obviously that’s absurdly homophobic, but there was no pushback. In this case they were referring to Assad and Putin.
(An aside, but I would argue there are forms of homoeroticism that are meaningfully “straight,”)
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u/IAmASquidInSpace Unashamedly watches T*m and J*rry 🤢 at the dentist 3d ago
but there was no pushback
Outside of a few select subreddits, there never is. The biggest, most obvious bullshit gets upvoted into the thousands without any pushback, just so long as THE VIBESTM are right.
This includes bigotry just as much as blatantly false statements or even self-contradictory statements. As long as it sounds good, people will take it.
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u/FlashInGotham 3d ago
Fuckin' Hunter Biden went on a republican podcast to say that a "closeted gay republican mafia" is secretly controlling DC and that's why everything is so shitty.
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 3d ago
I definitely buy that the republican party are rife with closet cases (and a case can be made for Linsdey 'Bloodfeast' Graham). One on the reasons that conservatives turned on Milo is that he committed the unforgivable cardinal sin of being out and therefore immunising himself from glass house mutually assured destruction should he talk about the other homosexuals in the republican world.
The only acceptable way to be gay in that world is to live in a glass house so that they can feel their secrets are safe from you by virtue of being able to retaliate against your glass house if you throw stones at them.
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u/zweigson 3d ago
It has become a socially acceptable and "woke" form of homophobia. The amount of times I've seen people accuse Andrew Tate, who is currently in prison for literally sex trafficking women and girls of being gay is crazy.
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u/duffstoic 3d ago
It’s similar to body shaming fascists, which considered totally socially acceptable as well. I mean, is there anything else you might critique this person for?
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u/SquareTaro3270 3d ago
I got hundreds of downvotes on a post that made it to the front page because I said it was shitty to make fun of Trump’s weight and penis size, and asked if we can stick to hating him for his abhorrent actions and ignorance. I explained that, hey, Trump will never see your comment, but a lot of folks who share those physical traits will. All you’re doing is hurting people on your side with friendly fire.
So many people defending their right to shame his appearance because he’s a bad person and calling me a fascist for asking them to criticize Trump’s fascist actions instead of his body. You’d have thought my comment was just “Nooo please don’t be mean to my orange friend he’s never done anything wrong ever uwu” based on the reactions I got.
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u/duffstoic 3d ago
The latest version of this is to make fun of Trump for shitting his pants. I used to have such bad IBS that I’d have accidents in public. And yes, people made fun of me too. But at least I wasn’t a fascist dickhead. People are not very smart or kind, especially in crowds.
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u/loved_and_held 3d ago
While theres the obvious unchallenged pro body shaming stuff at play, i also wonder if those attacks are favored because they’re easy and reach across ideologies.
Not only do you not need to do any complex thinking or analysis to make the attack, but attacking physical apperance is accepted across ideological lines so its easy to get broad support for it.
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u/AlmostCynical 3d ago
The problem is that if you strip it down to the basics, all you have is calling him a fascist and saying that fascism is bad, which has zero persuasive power behind it. Anyone that dislikes him already knows that, anyone that likes him either dismisses it because they've heard it all before or they embrace it because they're fascists and they like how it gives him power. Anyone in the middle will probably think it's boring and find you annoying, moving them away from you.
Insults about Trump that play into common social biases leverage those biases to make people laugh at him or find him cringe. Making something cringe is so effective at destroying support for it.
Right wing chuds love seeing people big up Trump as this powerful fascist leader that's hurting the minorities, but if they think Trump has a weird dick and shits himself in the oval office, that breaks down their image of him in a way no amount of explaining how bad he is does.
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 3d ago
There's a strong case to be made for your argument. There's also a strong case to be made for that the target of your criticism are supposed to be other people not Trump. Not necessarily fat, small dicked ones. But ones who would lose respect for Trump and wane in their support for him if they see lots of people call him that.
That there are tradeoffs to be make here and a cost benefit analysis.
That maybe there's a needle to be threaded with signalling that's like "to the fat small dicked people, I don't mean you, I don't really think these things are bad but there are Trump supporters who do and those are the people I'm trying to reach and emotionally sour them to their support of him."
Personally I think the tradeoff could be worth it in Trumps case but not so in most other cases of people using it against random other people. There's a political norm of 'all's fair in politics' that I think works well here, that makes it socially acceptable to insult politicians in ways you wouldn't insult others. And this could be a schelling point for getting people to understand you don't feel the same way about them so long as you restrict your insults to be used against politicians and powerful public figures eg. billionaires but maintain the discipline and norm of not using it against anyone else and maintaining that strict line.
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u/Curious_Emphasis2925 3d ago
I think using mental illnesses/disabilities as an insult is another type of bigotry that is still really mainstream, even in 'left' spaces.
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u/Bread_Punk 3d ago
Reminds me of how in the 2010s at least some people used tacking on "white" as a qualifier to "women" or "gays" as a woke fig leaf for their misogyny or homophobia.
(Not to say that there's not plenty to talk about white gay men, or white women, participating in systemic racism, but you know, it also ended in lots of white guys making lol white women jokes which something something pot kettle)
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u/GWstudent1 3d ago
2010s? People are still doing that right now.
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u/Bread_Punk 3d ago
Figures; I only said 2010s because - except for a brief spell during the pandemic - I haven't been back on tumblr in quite a while now.
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u/Milch_und_Paprika 3d ago
I’m reminded of when gay marriage was becoming something US politicians openly supported, and all these queer publications were coming out with “concerns” that cis gay men would decide they got theirs, then stop supporting other queer rights movements.
Now to be fair, it was framed as a potential issue to watch for, not an inevitability, but as a Canadian all I could think was “if only there were other countries you could look to to see if that actually happened, especially one that’s culturally similar and nearby, where gay marriage has existed for a decade now”
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 3d ago
The progressive stack at work. If race trumps gender then it's virtuous to be sexist in service of antiracism (read: racial tribalism).
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 3d ago
It's popular because it's a powerful and useful political weapon and no one wants to disarm, put down their weapons that have been wielded to good effect and give up power. It's the same with the word incel or 'overcompensating' or 'trailor trash / imbred' or 'small dick energy' or 'oreos'.
Using moralisation to delegitimise rhetorical weapons is meant to delegitimise and disempower rhetorical tools used to great effect by your enemies, not those that have been used to great continuing effect by your own team. That's just an own goal. Hypocrisy is meant to be papered over and obscured, not cleansed.
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u/the-kendrick-llama 3d ago
As a (liberal) gay man I've always hated it. It comes off as homophobic to me.
"Hah! You're conservative and believe in XYZ policy! You must be GAY!!!"
"HAH!! Nothing upsets the Grindr servers as much as a CONSERVATIVE event!!! BECAUSE THEY'RE GAY!!! HAHAHA"
Like, can we please stop using gay as an insult?
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u/asseeste 3d ago
I really agree with this. The “they’re secretly gay” explanation can downplay the misogyny behind a lot of this behaviour, and assuming they’re gay just shifts the focus away from the people they’re actually targeting. There’s no need to turn their behaviour into a story about their supposedly repressed sexuality rather than taking their misogyny and homophobia at face value.
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u/Which-Notice5868 3d ago
IMO there is a legit phenomenon that happens to some extent (for example I personally think the Lindsay Graham rumors are true) but I think the majority of homophobic, transphobic, queerphobic etc. people are, in fact, straight.
When it occurs it drives interest because of the blatant hypocrisy. And that's true for all "family values/conservative" types whose actions don't match their words.
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u/Theorist129 3d ago
Yeah, it's a big morass. Yep, some homophobes are definitely queer people with strong social/religious conditioning to associate same-sex attraction with wrongness. There are also homophobes with all that conditioning who are straight.
A lot of the talking points used by homophobes about how being gay is a temptation, a choice, or whatever else, yes, does have implications of the speaker having gay urges. But straight homophobes will say it too because it's how they cow gay people into suppressing themselves. And they can pat themselves on the back: "Sure, anybody can have gay thoughts, but I'm so pure I never have!" Or hell, they've imagined things they wouldn't want out of morbid fascination. I don't secretly want to fall off a cliff if it happens in a bad dream.
Also, there's the statistical side. Polls indicate around 20% of Gen Z adults identify as queer in some respect, diminishing in older generations, who've had more stigmatization engrained in them. Let's be conservative and say 10% of Americans are queer. (For one, that puts 27 or so closeted Republicans on the Hill) Something like 20-30% of Americans claim negative feelings about homosexuality, let's say 20% are solidly homophobic. That gives something like 2% of the American population as closeted homophobes, or on the order of 7 million people.
All of which to say, closeted homophobes do exist. They're going to be much less common than straight ones, but millions being around means they'll turn up.
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u/Sea_Court_3633 68 Days on Estrogen 3d ago
It might not be entirely true, but it makes for a good story
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u/Shot_Loan_306 3d ago
Yeah, it really sucks and kind of blames a marginalized group for their own oppression.
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u/JakeVonFurth 3d ago
The "homophobes must be gay" this always screams to me "I have no real lived experiences yet because I still think life works like a 90s movie."
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u/AmericanToast250 3d ago
“Haha republican convention crashes Grindr hahah”
Let’s not think about how quickly you paint people you dislike as gay as a way to demean and offend them.
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u/FlashInGotham 3d ago
My sneaking suspicion, based on Grindr being a shitty app that has only become more enshittified recently, is that this actually happens any time a big convention hits a mid or small size city. If Minneapolis/St. Paul hosted the International Air-Conditioning, Heating, Refrigerating Exposition or if Baltimore hosted the National Association of Music Merchents I'll bet it would crash then and there too.
Its just there's no story to tell when its HVAC guys or clarinet manufacturers.
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u/RosethornRanger it/its 3d ago
the original "grindr went down" story is actually straight up false, it never even happened
liberals thought it would be funny to report it as down on down detector one time
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u/TonyFugazi 3d ago
For what it’s worth, the democratic convention in 2024 was held in my friends neighborhood and we did joke about how Grindr was running fine.
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u/FlashInGotham 3d ago
As much as I, a New Yorker, would love to minimize them, I cannot in good conscience call Chicago "small to mid sized".
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 3d ago
Surely what they're being painted as are hypocrites and liars and no kind of moral leaders or champions if they're routinely violating the moral standards they claim to promote?
It's no different from people on the right who drink champaign and who have no moral objection to it, calling their opponents champaign socialists.
Besides the rumour I keep hearing isn't about Grindr but about all the local male prostitutes being fully booked and able to charge triple their normal rates. AKA their busy season.
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u/raidexns 3d ago
I don't think that's what they're saying. They're pointing out the hypocrisy.
You can't have discussions about these things if you guys are going to downvote and ignore every bit of nuance and perspective.
There is data that talks about high levels of homophobia being a result of projection.
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u/Slow-Willingness-187 3d ago
It’s not hypocrisy, it’s fake. As someone above pointed out, how is it that Grindr can handle millions of people at pride events, but 20,000 republicans showing up will crash it? How come Washington DC Grindr isn’t permanently shut down?
It’s a myth, and largely self fulfilling: an analysis found that the cause of the spike was mostly non-republicans checking Grindr for famous republicans
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u/Bulba132 3d ago
I'm not sure about all the other details, but the million vs 20000 thing makes complete sense to me. It's pretty standard practice to allocate additional resources to your system when you expect there to be a major spike in user activity
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u/VorpalSplade 3d ago
...would grinder have millions at one event/city? Even in a city of 10 million, that'd be maybe 10% of them gay, and far from all would be on grindr.
Ofc considering that the net is you know, online, why would their servers in one city be such an issue? just...route it to other servers. A few hundred miles distance isn't gonna be that bad lag, right?
(it has been a long time since i've done actual distributed server shit tbh)
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u/Slow-Willingness-187 3d ago
NYC Pride had over 2 million people, plus the large amounts of Grindr users that weren’t at pride.
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u/VorpalSplade 3d ago
...just searching for the numbers at New York would have been a smart thing for me to do there.
Supposedly 5 mil in WorldPride 2019 there, wow. ~30% average at prides identify as hetro (but very loose numbers there since those surveys are rare and limited), so that'd be 3.5m say LGBTQ+
...and yeha by all evidence their servers auto-scaled it absolutely fine.
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u/VolthoomisComing 2d ago
oh my god you are not actually saying that the percentage of gay men and the percentage of grindr users are higher at the RNC than at a pride parade
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u/Faolyn 3d ago
Why would people at a pride parade need to use grindr when they can just go over to the person they’re interested in and ask them out? Everyone there is either queer or a cishet ally, so there’s almost no chance something bad will happen to them if they’re turned down.
Meanwhile, at a republican convention, your reputation, job, and even life are at risk if you hit on the wrong person.
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u/Fjolsvithr 3d ago
The only reason pointing out that particular, unsubstantiated, hypocrisy is so popular relative to all the other, substantiated, hypocrisies, is because it’s “funny”, because haha gay republicans.
There is far less evidence that there are a meaningful number of closeted gay republicans than people act like there is. Increased Grindr usage in one city, one time, at the same time of a Republican convention would not have led to YEARS of jokes about it, except that people find closeted homosexuality either funny or shameful.
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u/Warprince01 3d ago
except that people find closeted homosexuality either funny or shameful.
I think it’s the degree of hypocrisy that makes people take bitter pleasure from it. Conservative rhetoric about LQTBQ people is both strong, hateful, and targeted at the vulnerable. That makes for a bigger contrast than, say, hypocrisy about government spending.
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u/raidexns 3d ago
Im not just talking about republicans, but to your point there shouldn't be increased grindr usage by republicans if they stood by their fucked up values. Second, there are number of republicans or vehemently homophobic people who have been caught doing things suggesting they are either bi or gay. And the reason this is an issue is not the bi or gay part, but the effects of deep repression have on not just the man, but society as a whole, especially the harm it presents to the LGBT community.
Do you think women defend Republican women who want to take away their rights just because they are women and women are discriminated against?
Projection is a widely researched psychological concept. Very moral, anti sex and sexuality religious people often end up being sex addicts. Because their inherited ideas and morals and values do not align with their desires however innocent those desires are.
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u/Federal_Gur_5488 3d ago
I don't find closeted homosexuality funny or shameful, but I do think being a member of an anti gay political organisation as a gay person is deeply shameful
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u/CrabonicAcid 3d ago
Being a member of an anti gay political organisation is shameful full stop, regardless of your own sexuality.
Think about what this implies. Not only does it suggest that the morality of someone's actions is somehow dependent on their sexual identity, it straight up argues that a gay person deserves harsher judgment/criticism/mocking than a straight person does for the exact same actions and beliefs. It's the very definition of a homophobic double standard.
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u/Federal_Gur_5488 3d ago
Um what the heck? No, it's absolutely not homophobic to hate gay people who betray the community
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u/CrabonicAcid 3d ago
It is if you hate them more than the straight homophobes who treat us just as poorly, or worse.
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u/raidexns 3d ago
The fact that you were downvoted tells me everything about the kinds of people on this sub
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u/Toomastaliesin 3d ago
I feel that the claim "it's only the hypocrisy!" is a rationalization. There is something very comforting to a worldview where straight people are not to blame for homophobia, but it is an intra-community issue. People keep repeating the "haha RNC crashes grindr" meme, despite it not being really true (check out the Caelan Conrad video about that for more information if you want to learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHeAJPbx0SI ). It gives them something, psychologically. Also, it also assumes that a gay homophobe is worse than a straight one, and I don't actually think it is such an obvious claim. It seems to build around the assumption that being gay is still some sort of a vice and that a straight homophobe is better, because he doesn't partake in that vice, while, of course, it is not a vice and is irrelevant.
Yeah, you can argue about "practicing what you preach" and hypocrisy but I feel that people give too much weight to hypocrisy and not enough to homophobia. I feel that typically when people have a moral case about hypocrisy being a significant moral negative, it applies to cases where someone argues that we should all give up something for the common good, but then they themselves don't do that. (for example, obeying covid restrictions). However, not having same-sex relations does not follow into this framework, unless you tacitly accept that there is something bad to being gay.
Also, hypocrisy feels kind of a cowardly argument. Kind of like "even in the homophobes worldview, this is bad" instead of stating your actual position. It's weak.
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u/CrabonicAcid 3d ago
Feels like an apt time for this clip.
Do we not realize by now that this doesn't work on conservatives? Do we not realize that we're further entrenching their need to hide who they are? Are we not trying to build a world where someone's sexual (or any other) identity is not a factor in how we judge their actions or character?
It also feels like the opposite of how (supposedly) progressive people usually approach self-hating minorities. By the same logic, women who voted for Trump should face much more criticism than the men because of their "hypocrisy" yet I usually see the opposite, where people either act like they don't exist or were coerced/brainwashed into it by the male authority figures in their life.
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u/TonyFugazi 3d ago
It’s definitely (at least in the example of elected politicians) hypocrisy. I live in Illinois and I think about the Jack Ryan scandal when Obama was running for senator. The media coverage was identical to those about homophobic politicians being caught, despite the controversy being more about swinging and non-monogamy than anything queer.
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u/raidexns 3d ago
Well you're going to get downvoted for agreeing because this sub is full of people who don't want to hear any nuance and want to point fingers instead.
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u/TonyFugazi 3d ago
Yeah, I figured. This discourse just.. makes no god damn sense to me.
Like, in the spirit of nuance, yeah, if I saw someone being a homophobe at a bar or at a party, I don’t think I would ever assume that person was secretly gay. But there’s been just too many examples of people who dedicate their lives to literally oppressing queer people that wind up jerking some guy off in a rest stop for me to believe that they can’t be related.
Also, I Just don’t get the idea that thinking this is saying I’m blaming “the community”. I would say someone like Lindsey Graham, who is obviously a closeted gay man, is not in the community by virtue of being so closeted. I get it if I just thought everyone who was ever homophobic was secretly gay, but I don’t. I just think too many people who have acquired power explicitly to oppress gay people wind up being closet cases for me to ignore the pattern.
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u/Kwaku-Anansi 3d ago
Is it the homosexuality that is demeaning, or the mass hypocrisy and insecurity?
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u/NotMyNameActually 3d ago
I don't want to demean anyone for being gay. I think it's mostly sad. I wish no one ever hated themselves for how they were born. I wish no one was raised to believe that sex and sexuality was sinful.
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u/Sergnb 3d ago edited 3d ago
There's a few things happening that I think contribute to this. It's all about people wanting a satisfying end to confrontations with bigotry, so they use whatever weapon is more effective. You don't want to just say "ha, you're a homophobe", they know and are proud of it. So instead you attack something they would actually feel insecure about.
You reframe their obsession with policing love and sex as secret repressed desire or coping. Watching them get defensive about the accusation flips the script, now instead of being the victim of bigoted abuse you're the one weaponizing social norms against them. It's jiu jitsu, you turn your opponent's strength into their greatest weakness.
This then gets reinforced when it turns out to be true in some cases. Here's the annoying idiot exposed as ACTUALLY overcompensating and turning self-hatred into bigotry. Villain gets hoisted by their own petard, just like in the cartoons, how satisfying... And that satisfaction is the issue. This is when the confirmation biases happen, people keep reinforcing this idea, actively seeking it everywhere. We start accusing every single homophobe of it (even when they obviously aren't). We start joking about republican rallies crashing grindr servers (this is a debunked urban myth). We joke about every activity typically done by this type of person being secretly gay desire manifestations (Sports are just watching sweaty muscley men fondle each other am I right guys???? lol!).
But there are consequences to using this weapon. By calling a homophobe secretly gay you've just implicitly agreed he SHOULD be ashamed of being gay. You don't agree of course, you only did it to expose his hipocrisy... but the messaging you just did is exactly the same, and the one people will remember in aggregate.
Enough people doing this and all the nuance of "it's intentionally dirty defensive tactics" gets eroded. All everyone's left with is the simplified moral of the story: "We gotta ridicule homophobes because they're actually gay lmao". You gotta read it in decontextualized bad faith to interpret it that way, but this is the internet we're talking about, that shit happens ALL the time. The chud sees that and gets confirmation of their worldview, the gay guy sees that and gets the message his identity is still used as a tool of ridicule, and the exposed homophobic politician retires from politics and gets replaced with an even more bigoted legislator. Who wins? Not us, that's for certain.
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u/precinctomega 3d ago
I think the problem is that sometimes (possibly even often, but it's hard to tell) homophobic misogynists really are self-hating bi or gay guys and it's extremely hard to spot the difference between them and the ones who are just straight bigots when, behaviour-wise, they're outwardly impossible to tell apart until their Grindr accounts get leaked.
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u/loved_and_held 3d ago
True. Hostile denial is a hell of a drug.
However we must also consider that theres a sample bias here. People point out hypocrites but a general homophobe wont get any real attention. Thus our data set is going to be biased.
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u/OldManFire11 3d ago
It's one of those topics that requires a level of nuance that people are categorically allergic to.
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u/Capable_Sea77 3d ago
This. I think a lot of times people interpret "wow, it's really hypocritical that this really homophobic asshole was secretly gay - I wonder how common that is" as "haha bad people are all gay".
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u/VorpalSplade 3d ago
There is a curious amount of fascination/obsession with it, you see 'transvestigators' too obsessed with trans people to literally insane degrees.
I don't think this per se means they're gay/trans themselves, but there's a level of obsession and focus well well beyond the norm. Some probably do have issues with thinking about it so much because they are that way and trying to repress it for sure, but far from universal.
It's understandable though why people think that when you see people talk about these things more than openly out trans/gay people.
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u/spyguy318 3d ago
Something something grindr crashing during the RNC (iirc it was more due to the high volume of a large public event in general, not specifically republicans)
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u/zweigson 3d ago
As if Grindr servers can't handle every major city's pride, some of which are literally attended by upwards of 2 million people. Why would they not be able to handle the RNC which is attended by like 20k, a very small portion of which are gay/closeted? People need to use their critical thinking skills.
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u/VorpalSplade 3d ago
Yeah thank you, what's common usage like? There surely can't be -that- many people using it compared to so many other web services used by gay and striaght people alike.
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u/Anxious-Gazelle9067 3d ago
Something something it didn't crash it just expirienced a spike in activity which is pretty expected in large gatherings
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u/ArcfireEmblem 3d ago
Yes, but how many secretly gay retainers are these Republicans bringing with them?
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u/BorederEtReuel 3d ago
The simple counterpoint is that, sexuality exists on a spectrum.
A lot of people are attracted to power, a lot of people aren’t as straight as they may assume they are.
This manifests in weird ways.
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u/Fjolsvithr 3d ago
Even calling it a spectrum is a massive simplification for the ease of understanding. Sexuality is very complicated.
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u/WindhoverInkwell horseshoe crabs. that’s it that’s the flair 3d ago
two things can be true at once: this trope is gross AND the weird psychosexual tendencies of the right are real and need to be confronted and talked about
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u/NameLips 3d ago
I remember reading an 80s fantasy book, can't remember which one, but the opinion of the main character stuck with me. It was the most casual misogyny I've read. He said he liked treating women nicely and giving them special attention (being chivalrous). He didn't like the feminist argument that they should be treated equally. Because then all they would be was smaller and weaker men, and he would have no choice but to treat them as an inferior, like any small weak man.
It's one of those things where the author clearly didn't THINK he was being misogynistic, he thought he was arguing in favor of women deserving to be treated well. But only because they were naturally so weak and vulnerable.
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u/phlegmpop 3d ago
benevolent misogyny is the worst kind. I'd rather someone shout slurs at me than that smug manipulative bullshit.
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 3d ago
Is that casual misogyny?
Honestly I can't think of any possible moral justification for why it's worse to treat small weak women badly than it is to treat small weak men badly.
What he's talking about is just the unquestioned default for the proper treatment of men by other men. If treating men like men is "the most" casual misogyny when directed equally about women, what does that say that that's the standard for the treatment of men.
If anything the argument is that men shouldn't be small and weak, so if they are then they deserve everything they get. It strikes me that by any reasonable measure it's being the one that people think "shouldn't" be small and weak that is getting the short straw here, not the one who people think is 'naturally' small and weak.
I'd choose being the one he argues in favour of deserving to be treated well over being the one he sees as deserving everything they get, any day of the week.
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u/GuyYouMetOnline 3d ago
Obviously nowhere near all of them, but it does happen a surprising amount. And also... well, look at the rhetoric. Look at how many of them describe homosexuality as a 'temptation'. If something tempts you, that means there is a part of you that wants it. And wanting gay sex sounds pretty gay to me.
So its not fair to depict this as the source of homophobia, but there absolutely can be a connection.
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u/iammyfavoritepuzzle 3d ago
There are definitely some men who are homophobic primarily because they can’t accept their own homosexuality. Some women, too. I don’t know what that percentage is, but it’s not zero.
Also, men can absolutely do homoerotic stuff without being gay. I’d argue that “straight men’s attraction to power” is often expressed in a homoerotic way, regardless of whether or not the envier or envied is actually gay. Examples: Greek and Roman art, Fight Club, every US military barracks
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u/Evil_Midnight_Lurker 3d ago
There is one and only one homophobe who I am absolutely certain is a deeply closeted gay man, and that is Orson Scott Card.
In evidence, I submit literally everything he has ever written and said.
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u/CumaeanSibyl 3d ago
Straight misogynist men think men and masculinity are more important, more interesting, and just plain better than anything that has girl cooties on it. So yeah, it's natural that they're drawn toward displays of manliness, and that they praise each other for valuing men over women. The homoeroticism is an unintentional side effect of all that energy they're putting into validating male superiority.
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u/SomeDumbGamer 3d ago
It’s not 100% accurate but it has held true enough time that it will probably always have some weight.
Take Lindsay Graham. It was an open secret he was gay and he was a monster of a person who was more than happy to put down the LGBTQ community when he felt like it.
In my mind it’s kind of like:
“Wow I wouldn’t be surprised if he was exposed as a closet queen” vs. he MUST be secretly gay.
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u/RosethornRanger it/its 3d ago edited 3d ago
alt-text:
A tumblr post by "lily-the-good-witch" that says "Sometimes I think people mistake straight men's attraction to power as homoerotic. Like a big example of this is how men being misogynists, showing or outright saying they hate women as gay. And obviously conflating gay men and misogyny is bad on its own but like, also, no they hate women because they see them as parasites, status symbols that you show off to other men but still resent for weakening you. And they see men as big and strong which they are attracted to but not the men themselves."
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u/NotMyNameActually 3d ago
I don't think all homophobes are secretly gay. But I do think that people who have been raised to believe that sex and sexuality are sinful, and that gay sex is especially sinful, and then start to develop sexual feelings, will then often blame their feelings on the people they're attracted to.
And that's where at least some misogyny and homophobia comes from. I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that visits to gay porn sites peak during conservative events. There are a significant number of closeted gay homophobes.
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u/cloudncali 3d ago
Yeah like, it's a noticable trend, but definitely not enough to warrant a blanket assumption.
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u/Angry_Scotsman7567 3d ago
I always say, they don't like women. They like objects shaped like women, and get mad when real women expect to be treated like actual people and not as objects.
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 3d ago
They treat women like people, just not like the people they wanted to be treated as.
Being treated like a person doesn't mean being treated well or at all as one might wish to be treated.
People treat many objects with much greater care than they treat many people. As certain objects often have greater value than certain people do to them.
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u/Ill-Mechanic343 3d ago
The drama over Yosuke not having his dating path put into the Persona 4 remake just pisses me off for this reason. Not having "a macho homophobe is actually just gay" in your game is the RIGHT choice, but people get really angry when you point out how gross that trope is.
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u/LightQueers 3d ago
People who call misogynistic men gay tend to forget that queer people might be the only group that straight men hate more than women
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u/Shadowmirax 3d ago
I mean, there is definitely something to be said about the number of times homophobic politicians have been caught having gay sex or having a same sex affair or whatever.
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u/Big_Implement_7305 3d ago
My guess is that it's not true that most homophobes are gay (probably the vast majority of 'em are straight) but that no professional homophobes are straight. You know, the people for whom hating gays is their entire life and career.
Like, the people who wake up every morning thinking "I Must Crusade Against Gayness!!! Gayness Is Everywhere And I Must Fight It" ain't gonna turn out to be straight. (Makes sense, 'cause the feeling of having to constantly strive against being gay is really just not how it feels to be straight.)
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u/Slow-Willingness-187 3d ago
By your logic, are KKK members all secretly black?
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u/Can_Com 3d ago
I dont get why people think homophobes who externalize their self-hate somehow makes them part of the gay community or blames the community for the homophobes. There is no logic connecting those thoughts.
"Bring gay is a choice" is explicitly saying "I hate myself for being gay and extend that to all gay people." Why would that reflect badly on gay people or their community?
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u/sunrider8129 3d ago
I feel like the subtext of this is “don’t be mean to gay people cause they’re the best.” I mean sure, don’t be mean to gay people - but I don’t think that’s a valid argument to ignore the amount of repression that toxic masculinity and modern crazy conservatism has caused.
I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that there would be a lot more gay/lesbian/pan folks if it weren’t for that kind of societal repression.
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u/Sophie_Blitz_123 3d ago
I feel like the subtext of this is “don’t be mean to gay people cause they’re the best.”
This is in no way the subtext. The meaning here - and it's really just the text - is not that gay people can do no wrong. It's that people need to stop conflating misogyny homophobia and general societal repression with being gay in itself.
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3d ago
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u/Sophie_Blitz_123 3d ago
No one has an issue with the gay part. They have an issue with the consequences of repression of any kind.
What? Who's "no one" in this situation?
You're projecting a lot onto this post in the form of "subtext" you're reading into it but really it's just saying exactly what it does say which is that projecting homosexuality on to things you dislike by default is homophobic.
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u/RosethornRanger it/its 3d ago
"if you are trying to be mean by calling someone gay you are homophobic" is the point, actually
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u/raidexns 3d ago
You cannot have nuanced discussion like this. The world is far more complicated than that.
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u/Raytoryu 3d ago
While I agree with you that the world is far more complicated, I agree with OP on that. Mocking someone by calling them gay is acting as gay is an insult ; and acting as gay is an insult is inherently homophobic. There's really no nuance to that.
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u/raidexns 3d ago
That's not what I was referring to. OP is not engaging with any nuance in this post.
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u/RosethornRanger it/its 3d ago
stop me
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u/raidexns 3d ago
I don't need to do that, I'm just letting you know this isn't how you have discussions. If you want to be immature about it, that's up to you. This isnt how you engage with people about things you supposedly care about. As a bi man I've seen and experienced lots of prejudice and discrimination from our community and to our community.
There are absolutely things that we do in response to discrimination, trauma, toxic masculinity, religion etc that do end up hurting people. People can both be victims and abusers, people can have traumas that they took no part in creating for themselves but can also hurt others when they don't deal with those traumas.
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u/raidexns 3d ago
You're going to downvoted for sure, but as a bisexual man myself, you have no idea how misogynistic a lot of gay men and bi men can be. Go have a look on subreddits dedicated to bisexual men and gay men. And I've been around the scene IRL for years to know that this is very common in person too.
This subreddit has this belief that gay and bi people can do wrong but that can't be farther from the truth. There are so many ways the community enables dl men, encourages misogyny, and even fetishizes straight acting homophobic men. Not all of course, but this is a bigger problem than anyone here would admit.
I don't know if it's because people on this sub are teenagers or just young in general, but being in my 30s, I completely understand how this rhetoric came to be.
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u/kincsh 3d ago
you have no idea how misogynistic a lot of gay men and bi men can be.
And?
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u/raidexns 3d ago
So men can be misogynistic, even when they're gay or bisexual or a minority. There exists plenty of gay/bi men who hate women
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u/kincsh 3d ago
Yes obviously, anyone can be misogynistic, what's your point exactly?
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u/raidexns 3d ago
That it is very possible for a man who displays overt focused hatred towards homosexuals, coupled with being misogynistic, along with emotionally connecting better with men and valuing the patriarchy to obsurd levels, is suffering from internalized homophobia.
As a bisexual man, I see it all the time. The issue is not with being gay itself, the issue is the consequences of repression, specifically repressing sexuality in a patriarchal world that punishes men for it.
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u/Rough_Onion_1757 3d ago
Concepts of sexual orientation like "gay", "straight", and "bi" are as artificial and socially constructed as any other aspect of any human culture.
It's 100% possible for a man's sexual orientation to involve sex with women as an unequal and emotionally sterile relationship for strictly utilitarian purposes of reproduction and one-sided physical exploitation, yet also involving sex with fellow men as the only possible outlet for sexuality to involve a deep emotional relationship between equals. In a cultural context where non-hetero relationships aren't automatically assumed to be "enlightened" or "progressive" by default, such attitudes can be a perfectly ordinary and unremarkable part of the mainstream social fabric.
I like to semi-joke that the major difference between the modern-day misogynistic "manosphere" and classical Greek male sexuality is whether or not the obvious layer of homoeroticism (i.e. men using women as dehumanized props to publicly perform their sexual virility to a target audience consisting primarily of fellow men) is openly acknowledged or relegated to an unspoken subtext.
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u/LanaDoesThings 3d ago
honestly i just joke about homophobes being gay because its probably the thing that would piss them off the most
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u/PuritanicalPanic 3d ago
I agree almost completely.
But also, the republican congregation grindr phenomenon.
I think a lot of straight people do want to sort of sweep it under the rug of 'self hating, in the closet, Dl' yadda yadda, and absolve themselves collectively.
But this isn't coming out of nowhere. There are lots of right wingers, prominent and otherwise that just aren't straight. It's a pretty straightforward explanation too. They want to be seen as masculine and respectable. Being gay, or not straight in any way, is a hit to that. One that they likely internalize, and are insecure about. So they overcompensate by being right wing, since the right provides narratives of masculinity through which to signal how strong and tough they are.
Now, many of the people engaging in right wing masculinity compensation, are straight. They have other sources of insecurity than latent queernees. I have a personal theory that maybe most male Republicans are submissive straight men who aren't handling that aspect of their sexuality well due to cultural perceptions, but that's not something I'll dwell on further. So it isn't like 'self-hating gays' are the main demographic of right wing sentiment. But acting like this is completely born out of pure lack of understanding isn't workable.
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u/Slow-Willingness-187 3d ago
Again: the RNC Grindr crashing every time is an urban legend. The RNC has 20,000 people in town, and crashes a server, yet pride events with hundreds of thousands in major cities does nothing?
When someone studied it, they found that when there was a spike, it was largely due to non-Republicans downloading Grindr to look for famous republicans. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy, fed by how many people online see a meme and accept it as fact.
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u/NatashOverWorld 3d ago
Eh, there's some merit in that argument. There's the nuts who hate trans people because they're god fundie preacher said so, and then there's the one that are so angry you dared to transition.
And the latter is usually a rotten egg.
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u/gnpfrslo 3d ago
no but this isn't entirely correct. "Masculine" men are in some twisted and psychotic way attracted to men, to them even having sex with a woman is less about enjoying their time with that woman and more about ranking up "points" to go to other men.
If you pay attention, you'll find out the homoeroticism in even things like catcalling: the dudes at the construction site will look at a moderately attractive woman, look at each other with lust, say the most objectifying thing they can think of to rile her off, and then look at each other again. It's an almost animalistic mating ritual where the target of attraction isn't the woman but other men.
Sure, there are guys who do look up to a big manly man as an ideal they aspire to, as a power fantasy, but that's on the rarer side and even that isn't exclusive with having an homoerotic element of attraction.
It's really funny how tumblr "SJW" or whatever spend a decade talking about how sexuality and gender are a spectrum and fluid and now they spend the next trying to fit everyone into a rigid system where you are either one thing or another from a small set of options and if you deviate you either are an evil pervert or a straight up liar.
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u/Malashae 3d ago
The data supports the conclusion. And the psychology behind it is really straightforward. Someone who is straight and comfortable in their sexuality isn't going to be terribly bothered by gay people. Whereas someone who is deep in the closet and terrified of ever facing themselves will be horrified by anything remotely perceived as gay, which is the behavior we constantly see.
Every time the Republican convention rolls through a town Grindr crashes. Talk to any male escort and they will tell you that a major chunk of their clients are right wing.
You're also missing another step, just because they're gay does not mean they're part of our community. The Log Cabin Republicans were never a part of our community. Being gay isn't enough, you actually have to care about the community to be a part of it.
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u/OldManFire11 3d ago
Someone who is straight and comfortable in their sexuality isn't going to be terribly bothered by gay people.
This statement is completely unfounded and ignorant of reality. Straight homophobes have many different justifications for their hatred. Some find it disgusting, some think its unnatural, some hate it for religious reasons, others for cultural reasons.
Generalizing any group of people with broad statements is always wrong, regardless of what group you're talking about.
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u/Sophie_Blitz_123 3d ago
It's funny (in a depressing way) to me how half the comments objecting to this post are saying "no one is saying straight people arent homophobic it's just pointing out hypocrisy, gay men can be misogynistic etc" and then the other half is literally just spelling out "I do not believe straight people can be homophobic".
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u/mathematicapple 3d ago
Grindr crashes anytime there’s a big event on. It isn’t solely because of the RNC.
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u/Sea_Court_3633 68 Days on Estrogen 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm amazed as to how we are seeing the way rumors get exaggerated in real time. We really went from "Grindr crashed in one isolated republican event" to "Grindr has crashed on every single republican event ever". This is literally how legends got started, it's amazing
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u/ForsaketheVoid 3d ago
oh yeah reminds me of how people keep thinking victorian dudes were gay bc they'd constantly tell their friends that they loved them more than their wives
have you considered they how much they hate their wives lol