They're Not Seeing You: The Internal Violence Behind Homophobic Rage
Why the men who hate us most are actually fighting ghosts, and what that changes about how we carry their violence.
The man at the pub kept glancing over. Not cruising. Calculating.
When he finally approached, his opening line wasn’t what I expected:
“You know what’s wrong with you people?” His voice had that timbre, not quite anger, more like an accusation searching for evidence. “You make everything about sex.”
I didn’t respond. Wasn’t meant to, really. He needed me to be a screen, not a person.
What struck me wasn’t the hostility. I’ve logged enough hours navigating straight spaces to recognize garden-variety bigotry.
What lodged itself somewhere between my ribs was how desperate he seemed. How the intensity of his disgust felt less like certainty and more like maintenance work. Like someone checking the locks on a door they installed years ago, terrified of what might happen if they stopped.
The volume isn’t proportional to conviction. It’s proportional to internal pressure.
The Surgery No One Talks About
After a decade of therapeutic work with gay men trying to make sense of why certain strangers seem personally offended by our existence, here’s what I’ve come to understand:
The men who react to gay existence with the most visceral disgust aren’t responding to us at all. They’re responding to ghosts. Internal ones.
Psychology has elegant terms for this. Projection. Reaction formation. Displacement.
But clinical language sanitizes something brutal: some people had to perform psychological surgery on themselves to become acceptable, and our mere presence reminds them what they cut away.
A client once described his father’s homophobia like this: “It’s like he built his entire personality out of what he refused to be. And I became the walking catalog of everything he threw out.”
An entire self constructed from absences.
The boys who become the most hostile men often started as children who were taught that certain internal experiences (softness, uncertainty, fluidity, tenderness) represented existential threats. Not character flaws to overcome, but contagions to eliminate.
When you grow up learning that crying is weakness, that expressing affection between men is suspicious, that any deviation from a narrow bandwidth of “acceptable” emotion will result in social death, something inside gets severed.
The capacity to tolerate internal complexity. The ability to recognize vulnerability in others as human rather than threat.
They learned to hate inside themselves first, long before they learned to hate us.
What It Costs Them
Here’s what I used to get wrong: the surgery worked. The boys who successfully performed this emotional amputation got rewarded. They fit. They passed. They became “real men” in the eyes of their fathers, their coaches, their peer groups.
But the surgery never stops requiring maintenance.
The energy required to police those sealed rooms is staggering. Every interaction becomes a potential exposure event. Monitor your voice. Police your gestures. Calculate how much warmth is “too much.” Check the locks. Check them again.
Many gay men recognize this exhaustion intimately. We performed it for years.
The hypervigilance about how we sit, how our voice sounds, whether we’re “too much” in any direction.
The difference is we eventually got to stop, or at least ease up. We found spaces where the monitoring wasn’t necessary for survival.
The rigidly masculine man never gets that reprieve. He’s performing for an audience that includes himself, and he’s the harshest critic.
And then he encounters us. Not just different, but living proof that the surgery was optional. That you can contain contradictions, express tenderness, exist in the fluid middle, and still survive.
We’re evidence that the boundaries around acceptable manhood are arbitrary, and what he cut away might have been the most human parts.
That’s an unbearable reckoning. The decades of monitoring. The relationships he couldn’t access because accessing them would require opening sealed doors. The grief he never processed. The tenderness he learned to weaponize or destroy because he never developed the infrastructure to simply hold it.
So instead of looking inward, he looks at us. Projects onto our bodies all the internal violence he can’t afford to acknowledge in himself.
You can feel the difference between casual prejudice and compulsive hatred. One shrugs. The other spirals.
Why Some Men Escape This
Not every boy raised in traditional masculinity becomes violently homophobic. What makes the difference?
Sometimes, one relationship permitted full humanity. Sometimes, due to temperament, some kids refuse the surgery outright. And sometimes they found ways to become the “exception”: the sensitive guy in the group whose emotional expression got coded as an individual quirk rather than a collective threat.
But the men who react to gay existence with that desperation?
They’re the ones who performed the full surgery and convinced themselves it was necessary. Who built their entire identity on what they refused to become. Who never got permission for even supervised access to their sealed parts.
We don’t remind them they’re different from us. We remind them they’re different from who they could have been.
What This Means for How We Move
Understanding the mechanism doesn’t make it hurt less. Doesn’t make us responsible for their healing. Doesn’t mean we owe them patience while they dismantle the architecture they spent decades building.
But it changes something about how I hold their violence in my body.
When someone attacks you for existing, they’re not seeing you. They’re seeing their own severed parts and trying to destroy the evidence that the surgery was optional.
You are not the problem. You’re the reminder that wholeness was always possible, and they chose otherwise, or had it chosen for them.
That knowledge doesn’t protect you from the violence. But it stops the violence from lodging in the place where it used to live: the part of you that wondered if maybe they were right. If maybe your existence was the problem.
Their hatred isn’t information about your worth. It’s information about their interior architecture.
Does this change anything strategically?
Not much. You still navigate the same hostile spaces, make the same calculations about safety, carry the same exhaustion of existing in a world where some men have organized their entire selfhood around your elimination.
But it might change how that exhaustion sits. Whether it calcifies into shame or stays fluid enough to release.
Many of us tried to seal parts of ourselves away, too. Coming out eventually forces the door open. We learned to hold contradictions because we had to: “I am this AND the world says I shouldn’t be.”
The volume isn’t proportional to conviction. It’s proportional to internal pressure. That’s advanced psychological work, and most of us did it without choosing to.
The rigidly masculine man never had to do that inventory. He got to match his culture’s expectations and never look back.
But the cost of skipping that work doesn’t disappear. It just gets externalized. Onto us. Onto anyone who represents the roads not taken, the rooms not opened, the surgeries not necessary.
Where do you feel their projected violence living in your body? Not metaphorically. That familiar tightness in your jaw when you’re about to enter certain spaces. That split-second calculation before you use a particular word. The way your spine still remembers how to make you smaller.
That’s your nervous system keeping receipts on every interaction where someone needed you to be less whole so they could maintain their fiction of what “man” means.
With you in this,
Gino xx
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This Substack is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any mental health condition.
Client and personal examples may have been altered to safeguard privacy and maintain confidentiality.
What a powerful piece. I have to own the fact that I grew up in a homophobic home. Pansy, sissy, f•••t, those were words my father, and even my mother used all the time. It's no wonder I grew up homophobic, because I had to hide myself from them. You wrote in a previous piece "Coming out wasn't brave, it was exhaustion." And by the time I came out in my late teens, I was exhausted, and tired not only of hating myself, but hating others I knew were like me. I told my parents first--out of spite. "haha mom and dad, guess what, I'm gay." First thing my mom said was "you don't blame us do you?" The scars are still there, and sometimes the wounds open up, and although I may still hate myself, I never project that hatred on others like me. I treasure them. They are living the lives of self-acceptance and self-awareness that I hope to have some day. Thank you Gino! --mike