Many reasons, I think. As has been mentioned, they are different, their behavior involves sex which people are often twitchy about, and they are perceived as hurting population growth. I’ll also add that they make great “witch hunt” material; they look like everyone else after all, so you can’t prove your innocence if accused.
Wow, I always thought the reason was simple, but no one has mentioned it here.
When I first learned about gay men, I asked my parents “uh… I’m not sure how the parts all fit together…” I was told that men used other men’s anuses or mouths.
I considered this so abhorrently gross, I would defiantly not feel comfortable around them. I mean, something must be messed up in their head right? They are plain out crazy!
Its not hard to get from there to hate.
I don’t really have any actual knowledge about this but I would guess that homosexual sex is a thing that has a fairly easy time disgusting people. Sex is integrated with a lot of emotions. And people tend to make negative moral judgments about things that disgust them. I’m able to separate my emotions and moral judgments to some extent so I don’t think that male homosexual sex is wrong but it still disgusts me. If I hadn’t thought about it a lot I would probably think it was wrong.
How can I get a one-way ticket to your planet?
Seriously, consider this: The Straight Dope has been fighting ignorance since 1973. It was roughly at the same time that gay people (and pro-gay people) began “fighting ignorance” on a large scale. In both cases, we’re headed in the right direction, but “it’s taking longer than we thought.”
Imho, the status of gays reflects the status of women in a society. Of course, “fear of gays” is only and always “fear of homosexual men.”
You can tell how homosexuals will be treated in a society by how women are treated. Are women equal in terms of income, behavior, status, etc.? Regardless of how you think women are treated, how they are really treated is reflected in attitudes towards gays.
For example, if you ask a man why they would be opposed to homosexual rights, the usual answer is that they don’t want to be approached by gay men on the street, propositioned, or even possibly raped. Why would a straight man have this fear from gay men? The reason, in essence, is that a man doesn’t want to get treated like a woman in that society.
Therefore, throughout history, women have had a lower status in society, and men have always feared being treated like women. In fact, being treated like a woman is just about the worst thing to do to a man.
From what I understand many gay men are not into anal at all, and it is all hands and mouth.
Although, it does boggle me, men are absolutely grosed out at the thought of giving a blow job but they will pretty much badger women into blowing them [and in many cases refusing to return the favor]
It’s fairly unknowable. According to the Bible, God just came down from outer space and told Moses the rules, without feeling any particular need to tell us his reasoning. That means that we’re left to guess what “his” (or the people who wrote the Bible’s) motive was.
Looking through the Bible though, it doesn’t seem to be so much that “gay” is bad so much as not doing your best to turn semen into babies is bad. Sex with men, sex with butts, sex with faces, sex with hands, etc. are all cases where it’s pretty darn certain that a baby isn’t going to be born. This could either descend from a philosophical view about life – that wasting your seed is equivalent to murder – or to a tribal view that more Israelites meant a stronger, safer nation and so it was the duty of every man to make as many babies as he could.
Is this really how you think at will heterosexual blow jobs with SO’s and girlfriends get accomplished in the everyday heterosexual man’s world, with “badgering” and lots of oral non-reciprocity?
Wow - Foolish myths about real world sexuality are everywhere.
Because most men find their sex life repulsive, and because humans are flawed that way.
I think that’s a stretch. In the Islamic world, although they lack many freedoms we deem important in the west, women (mothers and wives specifically) have a ton of influence in household matters and how interpersonal relationships are conducted, and they are often respected and venerated by their sons and husbands, and generally deferred to as the authority, in that specific context.
I don’t think gays hold any comparable status in Islamic society.
People are tribal and dislike things “not like them”. They are often ill-informed about these alleged things. Thus they can hate foreigners, republicans, people of a different color or gender, and people of a different sexual preference.
It’s not to do with “gays”; it’s to do with “not like me”.
Fortunately, people are coming to realise that people of a different color, nationality* or sexual preference are like them.
*Well, OK, not nationality. It’s the last acceptable prejudice.
Not at all. Societies have accepted gays while treating women like subhumans, and respected women while despising gays. And lesbians have been the target of plenty of fear and hatred; consider the practice of “correctional” rape, where men try to convert a lesbian to heterosexuality by raping her.
I don’t think that’s a specifically Islamic thing; I’ve heard the same about Asian cultures. That while in some women are just considered inferior, in others the custom is for women to be submissive in public but in charge at home. Which I understand comes to a shock to certain foreign men who thought they were getting a stereotyped “submissive Asian wife”.
Now that it’s brought up, I do think that the near-compulsive need many people have to fit everyone into neat gender categories is another reason for discomfort with homosexuality.
But don’t most kids think that oral sex/anal sex is gross between heterosexual couples? Hell, kids think that even regular sex is pretty gross before they become sexually mature.
i guess the various women i went to college with and sat around discussing men arent to be trusted …I know that because I have had TMJ all my life, BJs are very uncomfortable for me to perform, and without an exception for about the entire 4 years I was in college every guy I dated wanted to be blown, and despite my TMJ, they got really freaking snotty about it. When confronted with the ill do you if you do me, got an almost universal whinge of but you pee out of there I think I had 2 guys perform cunilingus on me voluntarily that were under the age of 30. The pressure to blow was pretty much universal to the female friends I had in school, and the pretty much universal reluctance to reciprocate as well.
Actually, I think the replacement rate theory has a lot of weight.
In a lot of societies- from modern Sub-Saharan Africa to ancient China- some level of homosexuality was accepted as long as one also had a family. You’d be surprised how many gay and lesbian people I met in remote African villages. But for small-scale farmers, each child adds to the family’s ability to work the land and raises the standard of living. Furthermore, parents count on their children to support them in their old age. So to “opt out” of a standard family life would endanger the well-being of the entire family. They don’t care if you are “fulfilled” or not- having and raising children is a duty, not a choice. But to some degree people are willing to turn a blind eye to what you do during your off time. I don’t think any society has not had a thriving informal gay scene…even modern Saudi Arabia.
For evangelical religions (which, if you think about it, is basically Islam and Christianity) it’s even more obvious. More babies means more followers,
One thing that may be a factor is that the few who can be openly gay and not go with the sham marriage must be fabulously wealthy by local standards. I know this caused a lot of confusion when I was in Cameroon. They saw that the few openly gay people were wealthy. They saw that their own corrupt politicians and gangsters were wealthy. They figured gay people must be doing something to get that much money, and since it was clearly a secret it must be something bad. The explanation they can up with is that gay people are members of secret cults.
Well aside from the whole rape thing, I’m not sure how true that is.
In some societies, shaman were frequently gay men or at least bisexual, the blend of masculine and feminine made them more attuned to the spirit world (or so people thought). Being homosexual was not a big deal in many Asian societies as long as you could perform your filial duties and provide your parents with grandchildren (preferably male children), if you were a lesbian then people generally didn’t even notice as long as you got pregnant. If your homosexuality interfered with producing children then it became a big deal.
I think the hatred people have of homosexuality is a combination of everything people have mentioned, but I will add one more thing, demagoguery.
We have seen people try to blame homosexuals for everything from 9/11 to Katrina to the earthquake in Haiti, there is nothing that strengthens a group more than a common enemy, we’re not really allowed to pick on Blacks and jews anymore so we blame everything on the gays.
When people ask why bad things happen to good people, someone comes along as says, its is God’s righteous anger at our permissive attitudes towards homosexuality (somewhere along the line it became too difficult to try and explain original sin or the lessons of Job and it became easier to blame the gays).
Well men are not as grossed out at the thought of licking pussy as they are at the idea of sucking cock. I think its one of the consequences of heterosexuality. I think the “not returning the favor” attitude is the result of being male. If a gay man could get away with having his cock sucked without sucking cock, wouldn’t he try, despite how much porn stars seem to enjoy the sucking of cock, how much fun could it really be to jerk your head back and forth like a chicken pecking for seeds while a penis stabs the back of your throat?
I jibes pretty well with my experiences through college. After college it was a routine part of foreplay… then I got married.
I can’t imagine that its very effective at converting lesbians into anything other than lesbians with kids. Incredible cunnilingus from blind man with a swimmer’s body is probably a better bet.
I don’t know. A lot of guys I know really like the idea of getting their cock sucked or sticking it in a girl’s ass and they are raging homophobes.
I am not a historian, but this is my understanding as well. Which makes the OP’s whole question somewhat anachronistic.
I think it goes beyond just being “different” and can’t be explained away by the “not like us” theory. We have an evolutionary drive to reproduce - the reptilian brain reasons that anyone lacking that drive must be damaged in some way and they are actually hurting our species’ chances of survival by failing/refusing to reproduce.
When you ask any question that starts with “why” and has “people” in it, you have to look at the reptilian brain theory. It usually contains the answer.