ANS -- Is Tucker Carlson Gay? The Psychology of Homophobia and the Right Wing Obsession with Manliness

This article is about Tucker Carlsen seeming to be gay and still in the closet.  I am sending this along in case you find yourself arguing with some person who needs to know that there are studies that show that people who are very anti-gay are often gay and in the closet/self-hating.

Find it here: https://medium.com/fuck-niches/is-tucker-carlson-gay-955f57e14af0 

--Kim

Apr 24

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5 min read

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Is Tucker Carlson Gay?

The Psychology of Homophobia and the Right Wing Obsession with Manliness

image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fox News clown Tucker Carlson has a "documentary" coming out (pun intended). It's called "The End of Men." In case you have not seen the trailer, imagine that Leni Riefenstahl tried her hand at making soft core gay porn. Every scene of the trailer depicts brawny men doing manly things, showing off their hard sweaty muscles to the music of Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra." (I assume the music was meant to evoke the ape-men in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey rather than the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.)

There is no way to describe the trailer other than pure homo-eroticism. I cannot imagine any straight males would want to spend an hour and a half gawking at half-naked bodybuilders wrestling and chopping wood. And straight women are typically not into the bulging muscles.

Most Fox News viewers will probably bristle at the suggestion that Tucker Carlson is gay. After all, he has a history of making hateful comments about homosexuals. He even once bragged about having a gay man assaulted. According to his own account, Carlson was propositioned by a gay man in a public park. In response, Carlson left and came back with a friend to beat the man. (Funny how someone who is so obsessed with machismo felt the need to fetch his boyfriend to defend his honor.)

Of course, Carlson is not openly gay. He might not even admit it to himself. But the fact that Carlson has used the hateful slur "faggot" on television, and then refused to apologize for it, does not mean that he is not gay. Some of the most strident gay rights opponents have turned out to be gay.

Evangelical preacher man Ted Haggard, for example, gave sermons decrying the sin of homosexuality and loudly supported bans on same-sex marriages. Then in 2006 it was discovered that he had been a regular customer of a gay male prostitute for three years. Former GOP senator from Idaho, Larry Craig, opposed gay marriage as well as legislation that would make what Carlson did (or claims to have done) to the man in the park a hate crime. Then in 2008 he was arrested for soliciting anonymous gay sex in an airport bathroom. Baptist minister George Rekers practice conversion therapy and lobbied for laws banning adoption by same-sex couples and allowing openly gay members in the Boy Scouts. In 2010 he was caught at an airport returning from a two-week vacation with a gay male prostitute.

Then there was conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who regularly expressed hostility towards gay and trans people on TV and described himself as a member of the Dan White Society, named after the man who murdered gay rights activist Harvey Milk. But then in 2022 he produced a gay porno film called "The End of Men."

Of course, these are only anecdotal cases. That does not prove that a large portion of those who express disapproval of same sex relations are repressing their own homosexuality. But there is solid empirical evidence that many homophobic men are secretly gay or are suppressing homosexual urges. One study tested whether homophobic men are turned on by movies like the one Carlson just produced. Volunteers, all self-identified heterosexual men, were divided into two groups — homophobic and non-homophobic — based on survey scores. The men were then shown various pornographic movies — some with men and women, some with only women, and some with men only — while wearing a device to measure physical arousal. 54% of the homophobic men got a hard-on watching the gay porn compared to virtually none of the non-homophobic men.

Not only are many homophobic men turned on by homoerotic imagery, but many of them also identify themselves, either unconsciously or consciously-but-secretly, with homosexual words and images. This was demonstrated in a study involving a computer-administered test of implicit sexual orientation.

Volunteers were shown a series of images and words on a screen — some representing homosexuality (e.g., a same-sex couple, a rainbow flag, the word "gay") and some representing heterosexuality (e.g., an opposite-sex couple, a bride-and-groom wedding topper, the word "straight"). Subjects were tasked with sorting the words and images into the categories of gay and straight as fast as they could while the computer measured their reaction times.

So far so easy. But here's the catch. Occasionally, just before the word or image appeared, the screen would show the word "me" or "other" for 35 milliseconds — too short for most people to register consciously, but long enough for the brain to process it. Heterosexual people will have quicker reaction times when "me" is paired with heterosexual words and images or when "other" is paired with homosexual words and images. Their reaction times are slower when there is a mismatch between me/other and homo-/heterosexual words and images. The reverse is true for homosexuals.

About twenty percent of test subjects who claim to be heterosexual had reaction times that indicated otherwise. And those individuals who showed a discrepancy between their explicit and implicit sexual orientation — i.e., those who were closeted homosexuals, in denial about their sexual preferences, or suppressing their gay tendencies — were significantly more likely to express hostility towards gays and to support anti-gay laws and public policies.

These studies show quite convincingly that many people who disapprove of homosexuality are motivated by shame about their own same-sex sexual preferences. The evidence is especially strong since it is confirmed by two very different kinds of experiments that give very different kinds of evidence. This makes it unlikely that the findings could be explained away by confounding factors.

Now, I do not have a problem with Tucker Carlson being gay (though Tucker Carlson might have a problem with Tucker Carlson being gay). I even wrote a book defending homosexuality and gay rights. What I do have a problem with is someone hating on others because of his own unresolved inner conflict.

Carlson has expressed some rather appalling attitudes toward gay and trans people over the years and has even tacitly encouraged violence against LGTBQ folks. Maybe all he needed was to get laid… by one of those burly he-men in that movie he just made.