A Serious As Your Life, But I Often Laugh At Bigots

Given Uganda’s homophobia, why does it lead the way in Googling gay porn? by Giles Fraser

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Last year, Google published statistics about the places in the world where their search engine was most used to find gay porn sites. The results were extraordinary. According to its figures, Uganda is third on the list of counties where "man fucking man" is most searched for, behind Kenya and Pakistan, both of which are countries where homosexuality is illegal. These figures also demonstrate a high degree of correlation between places of conservative religious practice and internet searches for gay porn.

Is there a connection, then, between homophobia and suppressed homosexuality, along the lines of "me thinks he protesteth too much"? Is it that homosexual desires, when shut out because of some sense of shame, can easily express themselves as a form of homophobia? When the US conservative evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, well known for his anti-gay preaching, was discovered to have been paying a masseuse for gay sex, he explained that "I think I was partially so vehement because of my own war". Freud coined the description "reaction-formation", in which anxiety-generating feelings are masked by an exaggerated reaction in the opposite direction. There is some experimental evidence to back this up, with one study showing that 20% of those who self-described as "highly straight" indicated some level of same-sex attraction. This discrepancy is often put down to highly controlling parents who do not allow their children room to explore their sexual identity.

Yes, of course, there are many people who do not experience same-sex attraction who are anti-gay.

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My first literary hero was a homosexual, James Baldwin (wikipedia Link). A person who contributed to the human nature more than anyone I know, and certainly more than any homophobic idiot.


Either you have a shitty sex life or you are a closeted homosexual for you to be a homophobic, to care about anyone’s sexual activities, it seems.
Well, you could just be stupid.