The overcompensation my gay friends say often gives away closeted men: A country pub conversation changed how I see certain blokes: JANA HOCKING

Last weekend, I heard a word that made me gasp. And dear readers, you know I don’t gasp easily.

It began with an ‘F’, rhymed with ‘maggots’, and was spat in the direction of the two handsome gay men I was sitting with in a tiny country pub.

They are married and run a farm nearby. They are also the kind of warm, fabulous couple who light up every room they walk into and are deeply involved in the community.

Now, this town is by no means stuck in the past. It has a thriving arts scene and even a famous – and delightfully eccentric – actor living nearby. But one loudmouth propped up at the bar had clearly missed the memo.

The venom in his voice stopped me in my tracks. I immediately turned around, ready to return fire, before being physically steered away. My personal motto has always been: fight a bully with a bully.

But when we sat down and unpacked what had happened, my friends revealed something interesting. 

The man who had just drunkenly hurled a homophobic slur at them had privately cracked on to both of them in the past.

Oh, and one of their gay friends who visited. 

Suddenly, his public performance of disgust took on a new meaning. 

It confirmed something I have long suspected: sometimes the men making the most noise about homosexuality are wrestling with desires of their own.

I said what I said.

As a fairly straight woman – and by that I mean, if Penélope Cruz offered me a wink and a nod, I would at least check my diary – I have never understood why anyone cares who another adult is sleeping with.

Gay men and lesbians living exactly as they please have absolutely no effect on my life whatsoever.

So whenever a man starts barking about homosexuality being ‘gross’ or ‘sinful’, my immediate thought is: why the f**k do you care?

Seriously, why does another man’s sex life provoke such a visceral response in you? Why are you spending so much time imagining what he does in bed? And why does it seem to make you so deeply uncomfortable? Could all that disgust be… a performance?

Indifference is quiet, but that level of venom usually has something simmering beneath it.

And this wasn’t the first time I had wondered.

Years ago, I worked with a man who thrived on homophobic humour. Oh, how he laughed as he made gay people the butt of jokes. He was especially fond of loudly asking one openly gay employee who he was ‘boofing’.

To say it created an awkward work environment would be an understatement. But this was the early 2000s, when that sort of behaviour was far more readily dismissed as ‘banter’.

He also loved telling a particularly salacious story about two men we knew in the industry. According to him, he had popped his head over a bathroom cubicle to surprise them (thinking they were ‘doing a line’) and discovered one performing a sex act on the other.

He told everyone.

It was only after he left our workplace that a very different account began circulating.

Another colleague claimed that he had been the one to look over the cubicle – and that our resident straighty-one-eighty wasn’t the shocked observer in the story. He was allegedly one of its enthusiastic participants.

Then other men began comparing notes. There were stories about wandering hands and late-night messages sent to gay colleagues.

But because he held a position of power, nobody felt comfortable questioning him while he was there. Only once he had left did people begin saying what they knew.

Suddenly, all those years of homophobic jokes seemed more like camouflage. And funnily enough, there is research that backs this up. 

In one controversial 1996 experiment, researchers divided 64 self-described heterosexual men according to their attitudes towards gay people and showed them sexually explicit videos – measuring their physical arousal.

I’ll give you one guess which group showed the greater response to footage of two men.

Yep. The homophobic group.

The researchers concluded that homophobia appeared to be associated with homosexual arousal that the men either did not recognise or denied. Now, before we declare every red-faced pub bigot a Grindr subscriber, this was one study conducted three decades ago. It found an association, not proof that every homophobe is secretly gay. But still… that’s a mighty big association.

A later series of studies in 2012 found something just as interesting. Some people who described themselves as ‘straight’ showed signs of same-sex attraction when researchers tested their automatic reactions.

Those with the biggest gap between what they said and what the test showed were also more likely to express anti-gay views.

This was especially common among people who had grown up with controlling, homophobic fathers. Researchers suggested they may have learned to bury any feelings they were taught were unacceptable, then lash out at other people for expressing them openly. Psychologists call this ‘reaction formation’.

In plain English: sometimes the loud performance is designed to drown out a quieter truth.

Now to be clear, not every homophobe is hiding a secret attraction. Sometimes a bigot is simply a bigot.

But the men who publicly condemn gay people while privately pursuing them deserve no protection from their own hypocrisy.

So, to the loudmouths who insist on policing what other men do in the bedroom: be careful how loudly you preach at the pub. The men you’ve messaged after midnight may be sitting close enough to hear you.