You know how often you hear about some rabidly homophobic person getting caught in a compromising situation with someone of the same sex? It happens often enough that a lot of people suspect that a significant percentage of ardent homophobes are actually trying (consciously or not) to cover up their own feelings of attraction toward members of the same sex.
As it turns out, there's some
evidence to support this suspicion.
"Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates."
and ...
"The paper includes four separate experiments, conducted in the United States and Germany, with each study involving an average of 160 college students. The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires, Ryan says. The results also support the more modern self-determination theory, developed by Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester, which links controlling parenting to poorer self-acceptance and difficulty valuing oneself unconditionally."