The War Within: Pride, Projection, and the Cost of Hiding

The War Within: Pride, Projection, and the Cost of Hiding

...why some of the loudest anti-gay voices may be fighting something much closer to home...

Every Pride Month, somewhere between the rainbow flags, corporate logos, community events, drag brunches, solemn memorials, and inevitable online arguments, someone asks the familiar question: “Do we still need this?”

It is usually asked as though history has been settled and everyone has simply forgotten to update the calendar. Surely, the argument goes, we have moved past all that now. Surely, if LGBTQIA+ people are visible in public life, on television, in workplaces, in families, and in law, Pride has done its job and can quietly retire to a tasteful archive somewhere between disco and protest posters.

And then, almost on schedule, another story appears.

A public figure who built a career opposing LGBTQIA+ rights is caught in a same-sex scandal. A pastor who preached against homosexuality is accused of paying men for sex. A politician who voted against queer protections is found using the very apps, spaces, or services they publicly condemned. The public response is usually swift and predictable: accusation, mockery, outrage, comedy. Hypocrisy is easy to name, and in these cases, often fair to name.

But hypocrisy is rarely the whole story.

Sometimes what we are seeing is not just a gap between public morality and private behaviour. Sometimes we are watching a human being split themselves in two, then spend years trying to make one half destroy the other.

That does not excuse harm. It does not soften the impact of anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric, policies, sermons, or campaigns. People who use public power to shame, restrict, or endanger others remain responsible for the damage they cause. But if we are interested in the psychology underneath these patterns, and as counsellors, clinicians, and curious humans we probably should be, then we need to look beyond the cheap thrill of exposure.

Because the question is not simply, “Why are some anti-gay men caught doing gay things?”

The more useful question is: what happens to a person when they are taught that a part of themselves must be hated in order to belong?

That question takes us away from gossip and toward psychology. It asks us to consider not only the scandal, but the emotional architecture that may sit behind it. It asks us to think about secrecy not merely as deception, but as adaptation. And for many LGBTQIA+ people, or for those living with unaccepted parts of themselves, that adaptation often begins in the place we commonly call the closet.

The closet is not just a secret; it is a survival structure

For many LGBTQIA+ people, the closet is often described as a place of hiding. That is true, but incomplete. The closet is also a structure of survival. It is built out of the emotional materials available at the time: family expectations, religious teaching, cultural stigma, fear of rejection, fear of violence, fear of losing work, status, love, or God.

People do not always hide because they are dishonest. Often, they hide because honesty has been made dangerous.

This is where the psychology becomes complicated. If a young person grows up in an environment where same-sex attraction is described as sinful, disgusting, weak, perverted, shameful, or politically threatening, then any emerging desire may not simply feel confusing. It may feel like an existential threat. Not merely “I like someone I should not like,” but “if this is true, I may lose everything.”

The human mind is very creative when faced with unbearable conflict. It does not always respond by calmly accepting the truth and booking a counselling session. That would be lovely. It would also make human beings far easier to work with than they currently are.

Instead, the mind defends.

Anna Freud’s work on defence mechanisms helped establish the idea that the ego uses unconscious strategies to reduce internal conflict and emotional distress. One of those defences is often described as reaction formation: when a thought, desire, or impulse feels unacceptable, the person may unconsciously adopt and display the opposite position with unusual force. Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence remains one of the classic texts in this tradition, and contemporary clinical summaries still describe defence mechanisms as unconscious ways people reduce internal stress.

This does not mean every person with anti-gay views is secretly gay. That would be lazy psychology wearing a party hat. But it does mean that, in some individuals, the loudest public rejection may serve a private defensive purpose. The aggression becomes armour. The certainty becomes camouflage. The performance of disgust becomes a way of keeping desire at a distance.

When a person cannot safely say, “this may be part of me,” they may instead become very invested in saying, “this must be destroyed.”

That is the emotional logic of reaction formation at its most painful. What cannot be held inwardly is attacked outwardly. What cannot be integrated becomes projected, punished, preached against, or politically organised. But psychological conflict does not always remain abstract. Sometimes the body itself complicates the story.

When the body tells a different story

One of the most frequently cited studies in this area is the 1996 paper by Henry Adams, Lester Wright, and Bethany Lohr, titled Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal? The study involved men who identified as exclusively heterosexual and were divided into homophobic and non-homophobic groups based on their scores on a measure of homophobia. Participants were shown heterosexual, lesbian, and male homosexual erotic videos while researchers monitored changes in penile circumference.

The study found that both groups showed arousal to heterosexual and lesbian material, but only the homophobic group showed a significant increase in physiological response to male homosexual stimuli. The authors concluded that homophobia was “apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.”

Now, this is where we must be careful. The study was relatively small. It involved a specific sample. It cannot be stretched into a universal explanation for anti-gay prejudice. It also leaves open the possibility that anxiety, threat, attention, or emotional arousal may have contributed to physiological response; the authors themselves noted competing explanations and called for further research.

But even with those cautions, the study remains important because it demonstrates a pattern clinicians understand well: people are not always transparent to themselves. What someone consciously reports, what they publicly perform, and what their body responds to may not always align.

Later research added another layer. A 2012 study by Weinstein, Ryan, DeHaan, Przybylski, Legate, and Ryan examined discrepancies between explicit and implicit sexual identity and found that low parental autonomy support, particularly in environments experienced as controlling or homophobic, was associated with greater discrepancy between self-reported and implicit sexual orientation measures. These discrepancies, in turn, interacted with anti-gay responding in ways the authors interpreted through the lens of self-acceptance and defence.

Again, this is not a parlour trick for outing people. It is not a tool for saying, “Aha, you protest too much, therefore you must be gay.” That kind of accusation can itself become cruel, reductive, and oddly homophobic. The point is more humane and more disturbing: when identity is not allowed to develop safely, it may reappear as conflict.

The body remembers what the conscious mind cannot yet tolerate.

If the body can reveal one kind of dissonance, public life can conceal another. The private conflict may be buried beneath moral language, community approval, religious certainty, or political performance. This is where individual psychology begins to meet social theatre, because shame rarely survives alone. It often recruits an audience.

Moral performance and the permission structure of public virtue

This public/private split also points toward another useful psychological concept: moral credentialing, sometimes discussed as part of moral licensing. In 2001, Benoît Monin and Dale Miller published research on “moral credentials” and the expression of prejudice, showing that when people establish a prior record of non-prejudiced or morally acceptable behaviour, they may feel more permitted to express views that might otherwise threaten their self-image.

The original research is not about closeted sexuality as such. It is about moral self-regulation and prejudice. But it offers a useful frame for understanding how public identity can become a kind of psychological cover.

When someone builds a life around being a defender of “family values,” a church leader, a protector of moral purity, or a campaigner against LGBTQIA+ rights, that public identity can do more than communicate belief. It can stabilise the self. It can reassure the person, and their community, that they are firmly on the “right” side of the line.

For someone experiencing private sexual conflict, this public moral performance may become a psychological alibi. The person is not simply saying, “I believe this.” They may be saying, “Please see me this way, so I can keep seeing myself this way too.”

This helps explain why some public scandals feel so theatrical when they collapse. The issue is rarely just private behaviour. It is the collapse of an entire moral identity structure. The person has not merely been caught doing something they condemned. They have been caught needing the very thing their public life was built to reject.

We have seen this pattern in public figures. Ted Haggard, once president of the National Association of Evangelicals, resigned in 2006 following allegations involving a male sex worker and drug use; reporting at the time emphasised the contradiction between his public anti-gay marriage stance and the private allegations. George Rekers, a psychologist and anti-gay activist associated with conversion therapy advocacy and the Family Research Council, was reported in 2010 to have travelled with a male escort; he denied sexual misconduct, but the incident became widely cited as another example of public condemnation colliding with private behaviour.

These examples are not proof of a universal rule. They are case studies in the cost of public certainty when private truth is unresolved.

And when a person has invested so heavily in public certainty, visible queer freedom can become more than disagreement. It can become provocation. It can become mirror, threat, invitation and accusation all at once. This is why the ordinary presence of LGBTQIA+ life can provoke reactions far beyond what the actual situation warrants.

Why public queer visibility can feel threatening to some

There is a particular intensity to some anti-LGBTQIA+ reactions that is difficult to understand if we assume the person is simply disagreeing with another person’s life.

A flag in a window. Two men holding hands. A same-sex couple kissing at an airport. A teenager using a different name. A drag performer reading a children’s story. A Pride crossing painted on a road.

For some people, these are ordinary expressions of public life. For others, they are treated as civilisational collapse with glitter.

Clinically, disproportionate emotional reaction often tells us something. Not always something hidden sexually, but something emotionally activated. The visible existence of LGBTQIA+ people can become a mirror for those who have been taught that such existence is dangerous, shameful, or impossible within themselves.

If someone has spent years suppressing a part of their own desire, then another person living freely may not simply look “different.” They may look unbearable. Their freedom becomes evidence that the prison was not inevitable. Their joy becomes threatening because it raises the possibility that all this suffering may not have been necessary.

That is a hard mirror to face.

This also explains why Pride Month remains so psychologically important. Pride is not merely a celebration. It is a public correction to private shame. It says, in community form, what many individuals were never told in childhood: you are not broken, you are not alone, and your existence does not require apology.

That public correction matters because shame is not only an inner feeling. It is often socially taught, socially maintained and socially reinforced. To understand why Pride can feel so necessary, we need to understand the cost of living under that pressure for years, sometimes decades, sometimes a lifetime.

Minority stress, shame, and the mental health cost of concealment

Ilan Meyer’s minority stress model remains one of the most influential frameworks for understanding LGBTQIA+ mental health disparities. Meyer argued that sexual minority individuals experience stress not because their orientation is inherently pathological, but because stigma, prejudice, concealment, and expectation of rejection create additional psychological burdens.

This distinction is essential. LGBTQIA+ people are not more vulnerable because they are LGBTQIA+. They are placed at greater risk when environments become hostile to who they are.

Concealment is not emotionally neutral. Living with constant monitoring; who knows, who suspects, what can be said, what must be edited, consumes psychological energy. Shame narrows the self. It makes connection difficult because intimacy requires some degree of being known.

Research into sexual orientation change efforts reinforces this point. The American Psychological Association’s 2009 task force found insufficient evidence that such efforts can change sexual orientation and recommended that mental health professionals avoid misrepresenting their efficacy. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists similarly states that there is no scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed and that such efforts risk significant harm.

This is why Pride matters beyond symbolism. Pride is a mental health intervention at the cultural level. It does not replace therapy, family acceptance, legal protection, or good policy, but it does something psychologically profound: it reduces the oxygen available to shame.

But when shame is not reduced, when it is intensified and given nowhere safe to go, it does not simply sit politely inside the person. Shame often becomes movement. It turns inward as depression, numbness or self-punishment, or it turns outward as judgement, aggression and control. This is where another psychological lens becomes useful.

When frustration becomes aggression

One useful psychological lens here is the frustration-aggression hypothesis, first developed in 1939 by John Dollard, Neal Miller and their colleagues. At its simplest, the theory suggests that when people feel blocked, powerless or unable to move toward something they need, that frustration can spill outward as aggression. Not always toward the real source of the pain, of course. That source may feel too big, too abstract or too protected to confront. So, the anger travels sideways into traffic, politics, workplaces, comment threads, family conversations, and the nearest person who feels safe enough to blame. The theory has been refined over time, but the core insight still matters; when people cannot reach the thing they need, or cannot challenge the force that is hurting them, they may release that anger where they can, rather than where it truly belongs.

Applied carefully, this can help us understand some forms of anti-LGBTQIA+ hostility. If someone’s deepest blocked goal is self-acceptance, and if that acceptance feels impossible because of religion, family, politics, culture, or internalised shame, then the frustration has to go somewhere. Some people turn it inward and become depressed, anxious, self-punishing, or numb. Others turn it outward.

The target becomes LGBTQIA+ people who are visible, proud, or protected by law. The anger may be framed as moral concern, religious conviction, parental protection, or defence of civilisation. Sometimes those beliefs are genuinely held. But in some cases, the intensity of the reaction suggests that the public argument is carrying a private emotional load.

This is why we must be careful with the phrase “closeted homophobia.” It is useful, but not complete. Some anti-LGBTQIA+ hostility is fuelled by hidden same-sex attraction. Some is fuelled by misogyny, patriarchal control, disgust sensitivity, authoritarianism, religious literalism, political opportunism, or fear of social change. These mechanisms can overlap.

Human prejudice is rarely polite enough to have a single cause.

And because it rarely has a single cause, we need ethical discipline in how we speak about it. It is possible to understand these psychological patterns without turning them into accusations. It is possible to name harm without making queerness the punchline. That distinction matters, especially for clinicians and practitioners who are required to hold complexity without using it as a weapon.

Why clinicians should not weaponise this idea

There is a temptation, especially in queer communities exhausted by public hostility, to respond to anti-gay rhetoric by saying, “Well, he’s probably gay himself.”

Sometimes the observation may be psychologically plausible. Sometimes it may even be true. But as a public response it can become ethically messy. It risks using queerness as an insult. It can turn gay identity into the punchline or punishment. It can imply that the worst thing about a homophobe is that they might be gay, rather than that they are harming gay people.

For clinical practitioners, this distinction matters.

We should be able to recognise reaction formation, repression, shame, moral licensing, identity conflict, and displaced aggression without turning them into weapons. The aim is not to diagnose politicians from a distance or mock closeted people for being unable to live openly. The aim is to understand how shame operates, how it harms individuals, and how it can be converted into harm toward others.

A person in the closet deserves compassion.

A person using the closet as a bunker from which to attack others still deserves accountability.

Both can be true.

Held in that tension, Pride becomes easier to understand. It is not simply a cultural event or identity celebration. It is a response to the very conditions that make these divided lives possible. It challenges the shame that keeps people hidden, the silence that keeps families frightened, and the social conditions that turn private conflict into public harm.

Why Pride Month is still here

So, when someone asks why Pride Month is still necessary, perhaps one answer is this: because shame still recruits people.

It recruits them into silence. It recruits them into self-denial. It recruits them into loveless marriages, secret lives, double lives, public performances, and sometimes into campaigns against the very freedom they secretly desire.

Pride exists because hiding has consequences.

It exists because the opposite of shame is not arrogance; it is dignity. It exists because many people still grow up in homes, schools, churches, cultures, or political systems where they learn to fear themselves before they have even had a chance to know themselves.

And it exists because visibility saves lives.

Not always dramatically. Sometimes it saves lives quietly. A teenager sees two women holding hands and realises life might be possible. A married man in pain sees another man speak honestly about coming out later in life and realises truth may still be survivable. A parent sees a Pride event and, perhaps for the first time, begins to understand their child not as a problem to solve but as a person to love.

That is not culture war. That is public health.

Which brings us back to the larger point. The recurring public contradiction of anti-gay figures caught in private same-sex behaviour is not only a story about hypocrisy. It is a warning about what happens when shame becomes a structure, when fear becomes a doctrine, and when identity is forced to survive by attacking itself.

A last moment final reflection

The recurring spectacle of anti-gay public figures caught in private contradiction should not merely entertain us. It should sober us. It should remind us what shame can do when left unexamined, and what societies create when they make authenticity unsafe.

Some people will always call Pride excessive because they have mistaken visibility for vanity. But Pride did not begin as decoration. It began as resistance to humiliation. It remains a refusal to let shame be the organising principle of LGBTQIA+ life.

The lesson here is not that every loud homophobe is secretly gay. The lesson is more complex, and frankly more useful.

Human beings suffer when they are taught to hate themselves.

Some collapse inward.

Some perform righteousness outward.

Some turn their private war into public policy.

And that is why Pride Month still matters.

Not because everyone needs to agree on every slogan, every float, every corporate campaign, or every glitter-related decision made in June. Reasonable adults may survive those differences.

Pride matters because nobody should have to become a stranger to themselves in order to be loved.

And nobody should be harmed by someone else’s unfinished battle with their own reflection.

References

Adams, H. E., Wright, L. W., Jr., & Lohr, B. A. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105(3), 440–445.

American Psychological Association. (2009). Report of the APA Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation. 

Dollard, J., Doob, L. W., Miller, N. E., Mowrer, O. H., & Sears, R. R. (1939). Frustration and Aggression. Yale University Press.

Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. 

Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697.

Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 33–43.

Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. (n.d.). Sexual orientation change efforts. 

Weinstein, N., Ryan, W. S., DeHaan, C. R., Przybylski, A. K., Legate, N., & Ryan, R. M. (2012). Parental autonomy support and discrepancies between implicit and explicit sexual identities: Dynamics of self-acceptance and defense.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(4), 815–832.

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