I’m not homophobic anymore, but my father still is & I still remember my backward thinking from my teenage years.

1. Anal sex is something I found disgusting. I still have less than 0 interest in it, but I don’t give a flying f. about others doing it, apparently hetero anal it’s extraordinarily popular in my country, to the point that people wouldn’t believe it.

2. The smell, as a teenage boy I found the odor of other teenage boys disgusting. Thinking about someone smelling like that touching me or me touching them made me shiver. Now as an adult maybe my nose is worse, or adults just smell better, but I don’t get disgusted by such thoughts anymore.

3. The silliest point of them all is that I was afraid of a gay guy hitting on me or even courting me. (I know now it’s ridiculous, but in my defense kids are stupid)

4. The most important point of them all is learned behavior, just hate who or what your friends and family hate, the be social within your tribe.

I’ve watched grown-ass men bark “f@gg0+,

Oh yeah, I’ve gotten that a lot myself. (well in my early twenties at least) Mostly as a criticism to my fondness of certain genres of music & romantic movies. The real wakeup call had been actually interacting with openly gay people on a daily basis for a while.

I’m not a homophobe, you can do whatever the hell you want with other consulting adults as far as I’m concerned, but the thought of two men boning is still weird af to me. Like repulsive weird. But I’ve heard a similar thing about hetero intercourse and hetero PDA from a lesbian, so… I don’t think it’s abnormal to feel this way?

I’ll do my best. I can vaguely remember some of the words that came out of my mouth when I was around 13-18 years old. Most of which were slurs rather than deep thoughts.

The slurs were more to do with what was typical/acceptable talk at the time (late 90s-early 2000s) in combination with teenage boys love nothing more than being assholes to each other (typically to my straight friends) because they think it’s funny.

Some of my “deeper thoughts”, for as well as a teenager can articulate, were to do with not understanding and frankly not actually trying to understand any other perspective. I believe I was simply trying to boost myself by stepping on others. I don’t think there was ever a point in which I hated gay people, but I do remember saying how I thought it was disgusting (gay sexual acts)and I had opinions on gay couples raising children even though I had no evidence to support those opinions.

I don’t think any of it ever scared me, none of what I said was out of fear. I was never worried about liking it, as some other comments suggested. Instead, It was an easy way to safely feel superior to cope with my lengthy list of insecurities.

As my brain began to mature, my thoughts quickly changed.

So… Immaturity, insecurity, ignorance.

Nowadays… regret. Sorry everyone.

That they would get dehumanized and treated the way they/other men treat gays and women.

Themselves.

Nobody is completely heterosexual. They see homosexuality as a weakness because they’ve been taught that it is. So when they feel it, they lash out.

It’s always personal insecurity. Every time. Weak people attack things that are outside their comfort zone, and twice as hard when they see themselves in those uncomfortable things.

Mean fear being treated they way they treat women

The “I find it fucking disgusting, bro!” fraction probably isn’t here. Or if they are, they are probably smart enough not to walk into this wood chipper.

There is a strong correlation between shame people feel for having tried it before or for not being able to admit to themselves that they feel this way and then how loud they get. Pair that with religiosity or just a very conservative environment and upbringing and you get the aforementioned bros. It’s more about how they feel, how insecure they are, than about anything physically off-putting. And as somebody who once reacted poorly to being hit on by a lovely Aussie, I think it’s also the somewhat unexpected element of it. We are pattern recognisers. Heterosexual is the majority. We can easily get freaked out by something that’s different. And a lot of the LGBTQ+ folks are still not living their romance in public (if there is some and they also want to) because they avoid wood chippers society has an unfortunately abundant supply of for them.

i doubt you’ll get a meaningful response from those you’re asking. this platform, lemmy, is in particular not going to expose your question to people like you described. ask it on the big platforms, you’ll get a much wider range and within that, an insanely wide range of bs. but as is obvious, it’s cultural and educational

Like someone already said in here,
I would say that the type of people that are “terrified” are the type that are “hyper-competitive”.
They’re extremely status minded and constantly want to tear people down to pull themselves up.
It’s also why they’re disgusted with non-manliness, which is not the same as gay in my opinion.
You can have a manly man who is gay and a girly man who is heterosexual.
Even making fun of acting tough behavior gets them into disgust.
You can’t have fun with these people.

I do have to say, before I was in a relationship,
I would get annoyed if mistaken for gay and thus prefer to avoid any confusion.
I consider the dating market to be skewed in favor of women simply by the numbers
and anything to further pull down those chances was the last thing I needed.

The knowledge that they have thought about sucking dick many times in their life.

I know this is a semi serious question. But my first thought was “the penis”.

Straight men who fear homosexuality are afraid of discovering that they secretly like the cock.

Seems reasonable to me that it’s a network effect. Hating gay people is a thing their community does, so they do it to fit in with the community, at first, and then it becomes part of who they are after they’ve done it for a while. Their “culture” in a sense. But if their community sees them as gay, or gay enough, they’ll be targeted by their own discrimination and lose their community and be outside the pack, which is what they actually fear. And if one of their friends starts getting too close to gay, they may have to hate them and cut them loose just to make sure the target doesn’t spread by association and cause people to start hating both of them.

As acceptance of gay stuff increases, they see their community shrinking. Their “culture” has fewer and fewer people, which means their pack is getting smaller, and all they want with all their hearts is to be firmly in the biggest safest strongest group. So their group gets smaller, but can they change? Can they just give up hating at this age? Can they honestly see themselves forming community with those people? They still have some people in their community, the ones closest to them, that they’d still have to give up if they changed. Maybe their uncle and brother and mom, people important to them, and so as uncomfortable it is to be on a shrinking island, they’d rather that than to be alone with no one they knew. So they keep fighting, but with a new discomfort, the knowledge that they’re fighting for a losing side.

This makes them all the more dangerous, as they’re more willing to do anything to overcome their worsening odds…

Read “whipping girl” by Julia Serano, she goes into the idea of social stigma driving bigotry

I suspect it is somewhat similar of women looking at each other and judging each other about "giving out free milk. Biggest slut shamers are women, tho men are right after them lol.

So from a purely guessing point of view:

Place in society, and perceived safety of norm enforcement and the fact, that historically being gay was (almost/mostly) a death sentence.

Raising yourself up by hating someone else “at least I am not XYZ” or “it would suck to be XYZ I’m so much better” is an easy copium.

And distraction also: if you hate someone else, you won’t have time to hate yourself.