Is Homophobia Associated With Homosexual Arousal?

This is the classic 1996 paper which homophiles always cite when claiming that it's "proven" that "homophobes" are secretly gay themselves.

However, none of them seem to have actually read the paper, since it doesn't exactly say what they claim it does:

"Another explanation of these data is found in Barlow, Sakheim, and Beck’s (1983) theory of the role of anxiety and attention in sexual responding. It is possible 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. Furthermore, it would indicate that a response to homosexual stimuli is a function of the threat condition rather than sexual arousal per se. Whereas diff‌iculties of objectively evaluating psychoanalytic hypotheses are well-documented, these approaches would predict that sexual arousal is an intrinsic response to homosexual stimuli, whereas Barlow’s (1986) theory would predict that sexual arousal to homosexual stimuli by homophobic individuals is a function of anxiety. These competing notions can and should be evaluated by future research."


Interestingly, after this paper was published there were other papers mentioning that there was some support for the anxiety-arousal hypothesis. In a 2019 review:

A review of experimental research on anxiety and sexual arousal: Implications for the treatment of sexual dysfunction using cognitive behavioral therapy

"The idea that anxiety might facilitate sexual arousal is consistent with Zillman’s (1983) excitation transfer hypothesis (i.e., residual excitation from one stimulus creates enhanced excitation to a second stimulus, which a person misattributes as originating from the second stimulus). In addition, Kempeneers and Barbier (2008) proposed that anxiety may not only enhance attention to sexual cues, but that people may misinterpret anxious arousal as sexual arousal, thereby enhancing sexual responsivity through both cognitive and physiological mechanisms. This misinterpretation could be explained by the overlapping bodily sensations present during sexual and anxious arousal (e.g., increased heart rate, sweating, racing thoughts) and likely depends on the context in which the sensations occur...

An equal number of studies found that anxiety increased, decreased, or had no effect on men’s genital arousal...

There are a number of factors that may explain the variability in the results. First, in some studies, researchers induced anxiety simultaneously with erotic stimuli presentation (e.g., using shock threat, aversive conditioning, orally administered ephedrine sulfate, or audio narratives containing erotic and anxiety-inducing content), whereas in other studies, they induced anxiety prior to or following erotic stimuli presentation. In men, most studies that induced anxiety simultaneously found that genital arousal declined or was unaffected (Bozman & Beck, 1991; Brom, Laan, Everaerd, Spinhoven, & Both, 2015; Hale & Strassberg, 1990; Lange, Wincze, Zwick, Feldman, & Hughes, 1981), although Barlow, Sakheim, and Beck (1983) found that shock threat increased genital arousal in men...

In the few studies using a sequenced approach, researchers presented participants an anxiety-inducing stimulus (typically a film or audio clip), followed by an erotic stimulus (Fleischman, Hamilton, Fessler, & Meston, 2015; Hoon, Wincze, & Hoon, 1977; Palace & Gorzalka, 1990; Sipski et al., 2004; Wolchik et al., 1980). Only one study found that the anxiety induction increased genital arousal in men during the erotic film clip (Wolchik et al., 1980)."


Meanwhile, after scanning the 214 citations of the original paper on Researchgate, I have not found any experimental research directly replicating this 1996 paper (many papers are in Spanish and some are in Italian, both of which I cannot read, so maybe I missed something), but there is one that uses eye tracking:

Homophobia: An Impulsive Attraction to the Same Sex? Evidence From Eye-Tracking Data in a Picture-Viewing Task

"men high in homophobia looked significantly longer at homosexual than at heterosexual photographs, but only when they had a high impulsive tendency toward homosexual stimuli. This result indicates that some men high in homophobia have indeed a sexual interest toward homosexual stimuli whereas others do not"

The manikin task used to measure impulsive approach tendencies toward homosexual stimuli (IAHS) seems very strange, though.

Meanwhile, an earlier paper, In Search of the Defensive Function of Sexual Prejudice: Exploring Antigay Bias Through Shorter and Longer Lead Startle Eye Blink, concludes:

"Given these results, combined with those of our previous studies, we conclude that evidence for the existence of a group of men who exhibit antigay bias because of a hidden or unconscious attraction toward men is difficult to demonstrate using current methodology"

And other experimental research contradicts the claim:

Is Homophobia Associated with an Implicit Same-Sex Attraction?

"Some theorists propose that homophobia stems from underlying same-sex attraction. A few studies have tested this hypothesis, yet without a clear measure of implicit sexual attraction, producing mixed results. For the first time, we test this attraction-based account of homophobia among both men and women using an implicit measure of sexual attraction. No evidence of an attraction-based account of homophobia emerged. Instead, implicit same-sex attraction was related to positive evaluations of gay men and lesbians among female participants. Even in targeted analyses examining the relation between implicit same-sex attraction and homosexual evaluations among only those theoretically most likely to demonstrate an attraction-based homophobic effect, implicit same-sex attraction was not associated with evaluations of homosexuals or was associated with more positive evaluations of homosexuals. In addition, explicit same-sex attraction was related to positive evaluations of gay men and lesbians for male participants. These results are more in keeping with the attitude-similarity effect (i.e., people like, rather than dislike, similar others)."


So it is unclear that the claim that "homophobes" are secretly gay is better supported than the alternative - that they really are agitated by homosexuality.