There was a study done by Rice University in the 1990s. The researcher thought that this very topic would be easy enough to confirm if true. So he sent questionnaires to hundreds of college men asking them their views on a variety of topics. One of those topics was homosexuality.

The answers were sorted out and the men who expressed the most vehement hatred towards gays and homosexuality were asked to come in for further research. Many of them did.

The researcher then hooked up electrodes to the men’s penises, who were left alone to watch a variety of pornography. They were shown heterosexual porn, gay men porn and lesbian porn.

Turns out that for the vast majority of the men, they got erections by watching gay porn but not other types of porn. So the researcher concluded that there is a strong correlation between men who claim to hate gays and the fact that they are aroused by gay porn, which indicates they are likely homosexual themselves.

In an interview with PBS’s POV program, the researcher said that near the end of the study, they realized they should ask these men whether they were aware that they were aroused only during the gay porn. It seemed such an obvious follow up. However, they quickly decided this would NOT be a good idea. The reason? The researcher was concerned for the safety of his staff if brought to the subject’s attention. IOW, their hatred of homosexuality was so strong, being confronted with the fact that they are gay might have engendered violence.

Later, some researchers in England went further. They took a sampling of several hundred teenaged boys in schools and told them that they would be given a test to determine their masculinity, whether they were highly masculine or not.

The purpose was to put them in a state of anxiety — what if a person took the test and found out that they were of low masculinity? The actual test tested nothing of the sort — it was just a random set of questions.

Then the students were divided randomly — about half were told they were highly masculine, and the other half were told they were low. (You can imagine how the lows felt! But again, it was all bogus).

THEN, the reseachers asked the boys a series of questions, and some of the questions were what they thought of gay men.

The results? Those who were told they were highly masculine mostly said that they didn’t care, wasn’t a concern of theirs, and basically had a live and let live attitude. Those who were told that they were low exhibited express hatred for gay men.

The conclusion? Whether you hate gay men is dependent on how you view yourself as a man. If you are secure in your manhood, you are probably okay with gays, but if you are anxious about it, then you will likely hate gay men, as they are the living embodiment of your anxieties.

The researchers, armed with this knowledge, took this further and then went to high schools around England and Scotland, identifying those schools that had a high degree of abuse towards gay students. They held assemblies to explain the research and their conclusion, that those who abuse gay students are likely gay themselves.

The results? Abuse towards gay students dropped significantly. Why? Researchers logically concluded that now that everyone knows what’s up, a students abusing a gay kid is practically admitting that he views himself as low on masculinity, something NO high school boy would ever want others to think about him.