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Internalized Homophobia Influences Perceptions of Men’s Sexual Orientation from Photos of Their Faces

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Abstract

Although researchers have explored the perceiver characteristics that make people accurate at identifying others’ sexual orientations, characteristics of the targets remain largely unexplored. In the current study, we examined how individual differences in internalized homophobia among gay men can affect perceptions of their sexual orientation by asking 49 individuals to judge the sexual orientations of 78 gay men from photos of their faces. We found that gay men reporting higher levels of internalized homophobia were less likely to have come out of the closet and were, in turn, less likely to be perceived as gay. Thus, internalized homophobia and the concealment of one’s sexual minority status can impact perceptions of sexual orientation.

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Notes

  1. We did not collect information about the sexual orientation of the raters judging the straight targets.

  2. We centered the Outness scale at 1 (Out to None).

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to NOR. The authors would like to express their gratitude to Simone Valade, Seth Watt, and Jerri Clout for their help with data collection.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G3, Canada

    Konstantin O. Tskhay & Nicholas O. Rule

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  1. Konstantin O. Tskhay
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Correspondence to Konstantin O. Tskhay.

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Tskhay, K.O., Rule, N.O. Internalized Homophobia Influences Perceptions of Men’s Sexual Orientation from Photos of Their Faces. Arch Sex Behav 46, 755–761 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-015-0628-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-015-0628-8

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