A term used to describe anything that promotes anti-homosexual sentiment. For example, Section 28 is homophobic, Anne Widdecombe is homophobic. Some of the noders on E2 are homophobic and so are some of the nodes they write.

A homophobe isn't just a person who has an irrational fear of homosexuals. The word itself would connotate that, but homophobics are usually not scared, but are also carrying a big fat, sack of hate towards the group.

Way back in the day, psycho-psychia... people who fuck with other people's brains thought homosexuality was a disorder of sorts. There was a term for it, which was just another word jammed in front of homophobia, the certain letters in which I can't seem to remember how to place together right now, but a word for it was there none the less. This was a major starter down the road to homosexuals being homophobic themselves, scared of what their sexuality was, and loathing themselves for it, thinking something was wrong with them. What's worse is that stuff like this set the ground for other people to be homophobic. When you get a closed minded person with an idea in their head, you're only apt to see trouble ahead of you.

Anyway, eventually, with the advent of homosexuality being an 'accepted' (it's sad, but really, we still live in a sexual orientation biased, heterosexist society, so women and gay people and... basically every minority still has worse chances down on paper than other people... other people meaning pasty faced anglo saxon males}, we get the idea that it's okay. It is okay, homosexual is out of the psychoanalyst's cookbook, and homophobic is in. Here we are, poised to fix our society, to blend it right, and here we are, with people who're ready to fuck it up, because they're too stupid to understand what they're hurting by who they're hating.

A t-shirt of mine sums it up best. Homophobia is the state of being uncomfortable with being heterosexual. It seems totally cliche, but I have found in my random wanderings of this strange little planet that the people who are the most rabid homophobes are often those who are privately questioning their own sexuality. This level of self-doubt and questioning is often raised to almost pathological proportions. It's really unfortunate that these people can't be comfortable adressing such issues, but this is the side effect of being raised in a very close minded environment, where fear and hate of things unknown or not fully understood are hard wired into people's heads. Another possible genesis for this kind of behavior is hatred towards an entire community after being abused, and not understanding that homosexuality and pedophilia are like apples and pavement.

Certain clinical studies have used the same technology used to test convicted pedophiles for arousal when shown pictures of nude children in order to study homophobes. The device measures change in penis width. Apparently, people with proclaimed anti-homosexual beliefs showed signs of arousal when presented with video footage of homosexual activities. Some, however, have ascribed this not to latent homosexuality in the subjects but to nervousness on the part of the subjects when presented with the objects of their animosity. Nervousness tends to cause increased bloodflow to extremities, and can simulate sexual arousal. Incidentally, groups claiming to be able to cure homosexuality such as Exodus International refuse to use similar methods to test the effectiveness of their treatments on claimed ex-homosexuals.

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