What Did Henry Adams Find Out About Homophobes?
Henry Adams is a psychologist at the University of Georgia who conducted an experiment looking into the psychology of men who felt a strong dislike of homosexuals. The results of the experiment were published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1996. He compared two groups, both consisting of heterosexual men, one of which was strongly homophobic, and the other of which took a more relaxed attitude to homosexuality, adopting a “live-and-let-live”-style attitude to it. Adams showed both groups of men various kinds of pornographic videos, which included representations of sex between males and females, males and other males, and females and other females. As they watched, Adams monitored the extent of their sexual arousal by measuring the circumference of their penises. Adams found that men in the strongly homophobic group showed significantly more sexual arousal when viewing homosexual pornography than did men in the other group. He concluded that homophobia is often associated wit
