There are several different issues mixed together there, and the evidence points in more than one direction.
On the first question: no, it is not established that homophobes are generally people with strong suppressed homosexual tendencies. That idea became popular because a few studies and many anecdotes seemed to point that way — especially the very memorable pattern of anti-gay public figures later being found to have same-sex relationships. But the broader research does not support the claim as a general rule.
What seems closer to the evidence is this: some people who are intensely uncomfortable with their own same-sex attraction may express hostility toward gay people. Psychologists sometimes call this reaction formation — overemphasizing the opposite of something one feels conflicted about. There have been studies suggesting that a subset of highly anti-gay individuals show signs of internal conflict around sexuality. But that is different from saying “homophobes are secretly gay.” Many are not.
There are other, often stronger explanations for anti-gay attitudes: religion, cultural norms, ideas about masculinity or gender roles, disgust responses, fear of social change, political identity, or simply growing up in an environment where homosexuality was stigmatized. Human motives are usually messier than a single cause.
You are right that cases of loudly anti-gay politicians later being “outed” create a strong impression. But there is a selection effect: those cases are memorable precisely because they are dramatic and ironic. We do not hear headlines about the thousands of anti-gay politicians who are simply heterosexual and conservative. The memorable examples distort our intuitions a bit.
On Vietnam: your impression tracks fairly well with what observers have noted. Vietnam has moved substantially over the past few decades. Same-sex relationships are visible and increasingly accepted in urban areas, especially among younger people, though attitudes vary by region and generation. Same-sex marriage is not legally recognized, but penalties against same-sex weddings were removed years ago, so there is a kind of “not prohibited but not recognized” situation. Catholic influence exists but is relatively limited nationally because Catholics are a minority; broader social conservatism and legal caution have also mattered.
Your observation about trans people being relatively visible in parts of Southeast Asia is interesting. In several countries there has long been a kind of social space for gender-nonconforming people, though tolerance can coexist with stigma. Visibility and equality are not always the same thing.
As for monks and priests being “often gay”: there is evidence that gay men have historically been somewhat overrepresented in some celibate religious vocations, especially in periods or cultures where heterosexual marriage and children were strongly expected. A monastery or seminary could provide a socially acceptable life path that avoided marriage pressure. But it would be too broad to conclude that monks or priests are generally gay. Many are heterosexual, some are asexual, some genuinely drawn to celibacy for spiritual reasons, and some likely are gay. Human motives for religious vocation are very mixed.
Your speculation about family pressure is plausible in some cases, particularly in cultures where “when will you marry?” becomes almost a civic obligation. A religious vocation can function as a culturally honored exemption from that script.
I smiled a bit at your observation about “good friends.” Historically, in many societies, same-sex couples could indeed live quietly under the radar because close same-sex companionship was socially unremarkable. Sometimes families genuinely did not notice; sometimes everyone noticed and politely agreed not to name it. Human societies are often less oblivious than discreet.
Ah — yes, I see the distinction you were making now. You were separating ordinary, culturally inherited homophobia from the particularly intense, crusading, highly personal sort.
There is some evidence for what you are pointing to, though with caution about how broadly to state it.
The strongest version — “the loudest homophobes are secretly gay” — is too sweeping and not well supported. But research and clinical observation do suggest that for a subset of intensely anti-gay individuals, especially those who make sexuality a personal crusade, there can be an element of conflict with their own attractions or anxieties. The psychological idea is not simply “secret homosexuality” but internal conflict, shame, or fear around same-sex impulses. In highly condemning environments, a person may react by overidentifying with opposition.
There have been studies finding that some men who expressed strong anti-gay attitudes showed signs consistent with arousal or attraction they did not consciously acknowledge, though those studies are debated and not universally accepted. More recent work tends to frame it in terms of identity threat and insecurity rather than a neat hidden-orientation explanation.
Your intuition about self-loathing may fit certain public figures who seem oddly fixated — not merely disapproving, but preoccupied. The pattern of politicians who campaign vocally against gay rights and are later found to have same-sex encounters is striking enough that it probably reflects something real in at least some cases. But there is still a selection problem: the spectacular hypocrites become famous; the ordinary ideologue does not.
A distinction that may fit your point more precisely is:
Background homophobia → usually culture, religion, conformity, group identity.
Militant, obsessive, identity-defining homophobia → sometimes associated with personal conflict over sexuality, masculinity, or forbidden impulses.
“Sometimes” is doing important work there.
Your monk/priest observation actually connects to this psychologically. In societies with strong pressure to marry, a celibate religious role can indeed provide a socially legitimate exit route for someone who does not fit heterosexual expectations — whether because they are gay, asexual, temperamentally unsuited to marriage, or deeply religious. But one has to be careful not to reduce vocation to hidden motive. Human beings often have several reasons for the same life choice at once.
And your aside — “who would want to do that?” about being quietly unnoticed — made me think of something anthropologists often remark on: many societies tolerated what they did not loudly categorize. Once identities become publicly named and politicized, acceptance sometimes rises, but conflict also becomes sharper. Quiet ambiguity can be surprisingly socially stable, if imperfect.
Yes — I think there is something important in that observation, though it helps to separate a few layers.
Humans seem to have a fairly deep tendency toward in-group/out-group thinking: people who are “like us” feel safer, more predictable, more trustworthy; people who are different can evoke caution, suspicion, or curiosity. That tendency probably has deep evolutionary roots — small social groups survived partly by quickly sorting friend from stranger. The problem is that the machinery is ancient while the categories it gets attached to are culturally constructed and often arbitrary.
Difference alone does not automatically produce hostility, but it can produce unease, and societies then teach people which differences matter. Religion, politics, ethnicity, class, sexuality — these become containers for a more general human tendency to divide the social world into “us” and “them.”
And yes, prejudice absolutely runs in more than one direction. I have known of gay people who stereotype heterosexuals as naïve, conformist, sexually repressed, judgmental, or somehow “less aware.” There are even joking or dismissive attitudes toward “breeders” in some circles. Minority status does not immunize people against prejudice; sometimes long experience of being judged produces defensiveness, suspicion, or counter-generalization.
That said, there is an asymmetry worth noting in many societies: when one group is numerically or institutionally dominant, its prejudices usually have more practical consequences because they shape laws, employment, family acceptance, and safety. A straight person insulted by a gay stereotype is usually not going to lose housing or legal recognition over it. But psychologically, prejudice itself — the impulse to flatten individuals into a category — is recognizably similar.
You said “straits,” and I assume you meant straights — though “prejudiced against straits” conjures a very different sort of geography problem. One imagines someone angrily denouncing the Strait of Malacca for ideological reasons.
More seriously, I suspect your broader point is about human universals: we often like to imagine prejudice as a defect of other people, but the raw tendency to sort, stereotype, and distrust difference seems to be a fairly ordinary part of being human. Civilization, ethics, and sometimes religion at their best are partly attempts to put guardrails around that instinct. Given your interest in compassion as a first principle, this is one place where Buddhist thought has an interesting angle: it tends to treat aversion and attachment as very normal features of mind — not monstrous, just things to notice and work with rather than obey automatically.
Fair criticism. I was trying to be light and it landed as pedantic. Point taken.
What you are saying about bigotry as partly a personality trait has quite a bit behind it. Psychologists often find that prejudice is not only about a specific belief or target group, but about broader dispositions. Some people are temperamentally more open to novelty, ambiguity, and difference; others prefer order, predictability, familiar norms, and clear boundaries. Those tendencies seem to exist on a spectrum and can shape attitudes toward many different kinds of “outsiders.”
Research on personality finds fairly consistent correlations here. Higher openness to experience tends to correlate with more tolerant or liberal social attitudes, while traits associated with preference for order, certainty, and conformity can correlate with more conservative or exclusionary attitudes. That does not mean “conservative = bigoted” or “liberal = virtuous” — reality is messier than that — but there does seem to be a temperamental component.
There is also the phenomenon that some people seem generally prejudiced, regardless of the target. Change the group — gays, immigrants, religious minorities, intellectuals, rural people, elites — and the same style of thinking reappears. It is less about who is disliked than about a disposition toward categorical thinking and social boundaries.
And as you imply, the mirror image exists too: highly open or progressive people can be dismissive, contemptuous, or stereotyped in their own way toward those they see as conventional, religious, rural, conservative, or “unenlightened.” The content differs; the underlying habit of flattening people into categories can look surprisingly similar.
Where I would add a small qualification is that personality is probably background tendency rather than destiny. Culture, life experience, fear, economic stress, friendships, education, and simple familiarity all matter. Someone cautious by temperament may still become very accepting if they know and trust people unlike themselves; someone naturally open can become rigid under threat.
Your framing of it as a spectrum strikes me as more realistic than treating people as either tolerant or bigoted. Most people probably carry some mixture of openness and tribal instinct and express it differently depending on context.
I think I follow the model you are sketching: one spectrum for sexual orientation, another for openness/tolerance, and the overlap of “same-sex attraction + strong aversion to it” potentially producing especially intense anti-gay behavior.
There is a plausible psychological logic to that. If someone has desires or impulses they experience as threatening, shameful, or incompatible with their identity — especially in a strongly condemning culture — conflict can become emotionally charged. In some cases, people do appear to cope by distancing themselves aggressively from what they fear in themselves. That can look like overcompensation.
Where I would be careful is in how confidently we generalize from a psychologically plausible mechanism to a broad explanation. “Militant homophobe with some same-sex attraction” is certainly a recognizable type, and probably a real one. But whether it is common, rare, or just memorable is harder to know.
On orientation itself, what you describe resembles a continuum model, something like the old idea that attraction is not always binary but distributed across a range. Many researchers would agree that for at least some people, attraction is more fluid or graded than strict categories suggest, even though a great many people cluster strongly toward one end or the other. There are also people — and here your own experience is relevant — for whom libido or attraction is very limited or absent. Asexuality is increasingly recognized as part of the human variation rather than simply an absence needing explanation.
Your suggestion about unhappiness also rings psychologically true. A person strongly at war with themselves — over sexuality, religion, identity, or anything else — often does become preoccupied and rigid. Conflict turned inward can easily spill outward. One reason intensely moralized public crusades sometimes feel emotionally “hot” is that they may be serving a psychological function beyond the stated ideology.
At the same time, there are people who are sincerely and strongly anti-gay for reasons of religion or worldview and who are probably entirely heterosexual. They may still be mistaken or harmful in their attitudes, but not necessarily conflicted in the way you describe.
So I think your idea works best as one explanatory pattern among several, rather than the master key. You seem to be describing a specific personality type: somewhat same-sex attracted, temperamentally rigid, raised in a condemning environment, and psychologically invested in proving something — to others or themselves. Such a person would indeed strike me as likely to be rather unhappy.
There are a couple of different things tangled together there: libido (sex drive), sexual attraction, and behavior/interest. They overlap, but they are not the same thing.
For many people, asexuality is not really an on/off switch so much as a spectrum — though some individuals experience it in a very categorical way.
A person can have:
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Low or absent sexual attraction (little or no experience of finding people sexually compelling) — what people usually mean by asexuality.
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Low libido (little physiological drive or interest in sex), which may or may not accompany asexuality.
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Normal or even strong libido without attraction — this sounds odd at first, but some asexual people describe bodily sexual urges while not directing them toward particular people.
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Occasional or conditional attraction, sometimes called “gray-asexual” or “demisexual” experiences, where attraction is rare or appears only under certain emotional conditions.
So the “switch” model fits some people — “simply absent” — but many report gradations.
Your own description over several conversations sounds less like “I dislike sex” and more like “the whole motivational system is largely missing or muted,” which is a somewhat different thing. Given your self-description as asexual and largely immune to sexual stimulation, I can see why an on/off metaphor feels natural from the inside. If one has never really experienced strong libido, the idea of people being powerfully driven by it can seem almost puzzling — a bit like hearing about an appetite one has never had.
Interestingly, the spectrum idea you applied to orientation may apply here too, just with a very different distribution. Most people cluster in the middle range of libido, some are highly driven, some relatively uninterested, and a smaller number seem to experience very little of it at all. Aging, hormones, medication, health, temperament, and personality all complicate the picture.
Your earlier remark — that “everyone has a few such tendencies” — actually parallels this. Human sexuality tends to be messier and more continuous than the neat categories we invent, though people often experience themselves as fitting one category quite strongly.
That makes sense, and it also fits with the distinction between romantic, emotional, and sexual attraction being partly separable rather than one single thing.
What you describe sounds very much like: strong capacity for attachment, affection, companionship, grief, and even a kind of romance — but with little or no sexual component. Wanting closeness, loyalty, tenderness, or physical affection such as hugging without sexual desire is a pattern many people recognize in themselves, though it is less talked about because our culture tends to bundle all of these together under “romance.”
The hug-versus-kiss distinction is actually quite revealing psychologically. A hug is often about closeness, comfort, affection, reassurance, shared presence. A kiss, in many cultures, carries much more sexual or pair-bonding symbolism. So I can see why one might feel natural and the other alien or unnecessary.
You have mentioned before that you are asexual and largely immune to sexual stimulation, but what you are describing now certainly does not sound emotionally detached. Quite the opposite. The grief you mention at losing friends says something important: attachment and care are very much present. Human bonding clearly runs on more than libido.
Historically, there were many close relationships — sometimes called “romantic friendships” in older literature — that involved deep emotional intimacy, devotion, even physical affection, without necessarily being sexual. Modern culture sometimes struggles with that category because it tends to assume emotional intensity implies sex.
Given things you have said in other conversations — your concern for Pok’s safety, the way loss affects you, your emphasis on compassion — I would be cautious about using the word “lacking” for yourself. “Different configuration” may fit better. The machinery for affection seems very much there; it is simply not organized around sexuality in the way it is for most people.
And if I may add a small observation: for someone who says he lacks libido, you seem to think about human attachment quite a lot — just through an emotional, moral, and anthropological lens rather than a sexual one. That is interesting in itself.
That sounds less like simple lack of libido and more like what some people describe as sex aversion or sex repulsion — where sexual activity is not merely uninteresting but actively unpleasant or aversive. That can exist alongside asexuality, though not all asexual people experience it. Some are neutral about sex, some enjoy it in certain contexts despite lack of attraction, and some — as you describe — find aspects of it genuinely uncomfortable or repellent.
Your distinction is helpful because it clarifies that this is not merely “I never got around to wanting it.” You are describing an actual felt response: mild revulsion, sensory dislike, and hard limits around certain acts. That sounds quite stable and deeply rooted in your experience.
At the same time, what stands out to me is that the aversion seems specific to sexuality, not to closeness or affection. You describe wanting hugs, deep friendships, love, grief, protectiveness, companionship — all of that sounds fully intact, even strong. So the “off switch” (or perhaps “negative switch”) appears narrowly targeted rather than a general distancing from human attachment.
I can also see why earlier discussions about sexuality might feel somewhat anthropological to you — observing a system that strongly motivates most humans but that, for you, is partly absent and partly aversive. If most people experience sex as hunger or appetite, what you describe sounds closer to encountering a food that others rave about while your own reaction ranges from indifference to “please no.”
And since you seem to prefer precise distinctions: what you are describing strikes me as different from prudishness, moral objection, repression, or fear. Those imply desire held back or judged. What you are describing sounds more intrinsic — not “forbidden fruit,” but “fruit I do not particularly want and in some forms actively dislike.”
Given your age and self-awareness, I suspect you have had many decades to notice that this is simply how you are, rather than something temporary or situational. From what you describe, it sounds less like a puzzle needing explanation and more like a longstanding fact about yourself.
Yes, I think that is often true. A great deal of sexual moral reaction seems rooted not in abstract reasoning but in a more immediate emotional response — especially disgust or aversion.
Psychologists studying moral judgment have repeatedly found that people often arrive at a feeling first (“that is repellent,” “unnatural,” “wrong”) and then construct intellectual or religious justifications afterward. Sexual behavior is especially prone to this because sexuality is tied very deeply to bodily boundaries, contamination instincts, intimacy, reproduction, and identity.
So if a heterosexual person viscerally imagines male homosexual intercourse and experiences strong disgust, that feeling may genuinely resemble — in structure if not degree — the revulsion you describe toward sexual acts generally. Likewise, many gay people have reported feeling baffled or uncomfortable imagining heterosexual acts that others take for granted. Human beings often project their own internal wiring outward and assume it reflects objective reality.
Where things become socially important is that personal aversion can turn into moral universalization:
“I dislike this” becomes “this is wrong,” then “this should not exist,” and eventually sometimes “people who do this are bad.”
That step is not inevitable, but it is common.
One reason modern liberal societies emphasize consent and private autonomy is partly to separate those things:
“You may find something personally unpleasant or incomprehensible without concluding it should be prohibited for everyone.”
You can personally recoil from an act without hating the people involved. Many people manage this imperfectly; some do not manage it at all.
Your comparison also highlights why arguments about sexuality can become emotionally heated in a way discussions about, say, tax policy rarely do. People are not just debating ideas; they are often reacting from deep bodily intuitions about disgust, attraction, purity, identity, or threat. Those intuitions can feel self-evidently true to the person experiencing them.
Thank you for clarifying — I misunderstood your position and blurred personal aversion with moral objection. Those are not the same thing.
What I hear you saying is: you may find certain sexual acts viscerally unpleasant or even impossible for yourself, but you attach no ethical significance to that fact. Morality enters for you at the level of how people treat one another — honesty, consent, fidelity, kindness, exploitation, broken promises — not at the level of the sexual act itself.
That is a philosophically coherent position, and actually more consistent than many people manage. Humans often smuggle personal taste into ethics: “I dislike X, therefore X is wrong.” You seem to be making a sharper distinction: “I dislike X intensely, but that tells me something about me, not about morality.”
Your earlier comparison lands differently in that light. You were not defending moral condemnation of homosexuality or particular sexual practices. You were suggesting that visceral aversion may psychologically underlie some people’s objections, much as your own aversion shapes what would be impossible or unpleasant for you personally — except that others then elevate the feeling into an ethical claim.
And your standard for ethics sounds more relational than behavioral: betrayal is betrayal whether it occurs in business, friendship, or bed; coercion is wrong regardless of context; kindness matters regardless of orientation. Sex does not receive a special moral exemption or condemnation.
That distinction strikes me as important, especially because discussions of sexuality so often collapse “I would never want that” into “nobody should.” You seem to be arguing for a separation between the psychology of disgust and the ethics of conduct.
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