The Daily Beast fabricated scientific findings to pathologize "homophobia"

They even called people "diseased"

Ten years ago, the Daily Beast published an article headlined Are Homophobes Mentally Ill? Science Says ‘Maybe’:

According to findings recently published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, if you harbor homophobic views it’s likely you may also endorse some of the following dysfunctions: misogynism, psychoticism, uber-religiosity, immature coping mechanisms, [discomfort] with close relationships, and above-average levels of anger, aggression, hostility, and hyper-masculinity.

Of the nine claimed associations, seven are false. In fact, five of the listed variables do not exist in the study. Here are the study results:

Look at the significance column on the right. Psychoticism and immature coping style were the only true effects. At least in the desired direction – as you can see, neurotic coping style and depression were negatively correlated with “homophobia”, meaning that the higher people were in “homophobia” the less depressed and neurotic they were. Daily Beast withheld these two findings.

Discomfort with close relationships (see RQ – Relationship Quality) and hostility exist in the study, but they were not associated with “homophobia”. The author fabricated these effects.

Misogynism, “uber-religiosity”, anger, aggression, and “hyper-masculinity” do not exist in this study. The author fabricated these variables outright, and their association with “homophobia”.

I emailed the Daily Beast twice shortly after this article was published and explained the false claims, that most of the variables didn’t exist in the study, etc. They never responded or corrected. I contacted author Zachary Siegel on Twitter – he didn’t respond.

Ten years later, the article is still up, uncorrected. Not only that, they slapped “Diseased” in the title bar, explicitly trying to evoke a disgust and dehumanization response toward these purported “homophobes”.

The study is also false

The study didn’t find any “homophobia”.

It’s not just that “homophobia” doesn’t exist — it’s an Orwellian leftist smear word that asserts an irrational or clinical fear of homosexuals that is not evident in the population.

No, I’m saying that even if we take the researchers’ measure seriously, they didn’t find any homophobia.

This was a 2015 study of 551 Italian college students. The researchers translated the Homophobia Scale published by Wright, Adams, and Bernat in 1999. It has 25 items using a 1-5 scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree.

The researchers said they summed the scores on the 25 items. Higher scores mean more “homophobia”. Here’s their table of basic stats:

See the problem? The average score for women is impossible¹, because the minimum possible score is 25 — that’s if you answered 1 to every item. This is an error of some kind, which potentially invalidates the study.

And the men are near the floor. The possible score range is 25 - 125, so a 35 means answering 1 to most items.

Let’s pause and clarify what the responses mean. The options are:

1. Strongly agree

2. Agree

3. Neither agree nor disagree

4. Disagree

5. Strongly disagree

(I’m not sure why the scale is pointed in an atypical direction, with max agreement set to 1 instead of 5.)

An example item is “Homosexuality is immoral.” (This would be reverse-coded when computing the score — a 1 becomes a 5 and so on, so that higher scores denote more “homophobia”.)

That’s a philosophical, moral, possibly religious position. It does not describe any sort of fear of homosexuals.

But note also that you could answer Disagree (would be converted from a 4 to a 2) and this would count as an increment of “homophobia” using their linear correlation method — simply because you didn’t choose Strongly disagree.

And if you answered “Neither agree nor disagree”, you’d be hit even harder.

Consider another item: “I enjoy the company of gay people.”

If you don’t answer Strongly agree, you’ll jack up your “homophobia” score. I’d probably answer “Neither agree nor disagree”, netting me two “homophobia” points.

(The scale makes no distinction between gay men and lesbians, making it less useful since people tend to view them differently.)

Now reconsider the men’s average score of 35. Can you see how easy it would be to score 35 even while never endorsing a single “homophobic” belief? Just being the kind of person who avoids the extremes on surveys, who chooses normal agreement/disagreement instead of “strongly” will net you at least a 50.

A tendency to endorse “homophobic” views would get you up around 100 out of the 125 max. Again, the men averaged 35 — there was no “homophobia” here.

Data

I emailed lead author Emmanuele Jannini and asked for the data.

He replied with one word: “Why?”

A bit annoyed, I replied “So I can analyze it.”

No response. He never sent the data.

That’s common in academic “science”. Social psychology in particular is full of fraud, false claims, and secret data.

The trick

The researchers used a trick — arguably a form of fraud — common in academic psychology research.

They used linear correlation to link X and Y even though there was no X (“homophobia”) and there might not have been any Y — the “mental health” variables in the table, for which they didn’t provide the averages, which could’ve been as low as the “homophobia” scores.²

They were able to do this, to link “homophobia” with these other things, because correlation only requires variance, not substantive standing. So you can have scores clustered at the bottom, as in this study, but the variance from say 25 to 45 on a 25-125 scale is enough to get you some significant correlations if you try lots of variables, as they did.

Just create a response scale with “strongly agree” and “agree” and voila!, you now have variance, even though it’s the same substantive position. Same with “strongly disagree” and “disagree”.

Adding a midpoint like “neither agree nor disagree” allows you to treat confusion or no opinion as a chunky increment of whatever you’re claiming this is — in this case “homophobia”.

Academic social psychologists love to defame and harm conservatives and non-leftists, and this is a key trick they use.

For example, they often falsely link bizarre caricature scales like Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism to conservatives. Critically, conservatives don’t tend to endorse the crazy items, but they might endorse mundane items like “The "old-fashioned ways" and the "old-fashioned values" still show the best way to live” from the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale. So they cluster around the midpoint, but since leftists cluster at the floor, there’s enough variance to drive correlations.

The end result is that false claims that conservatives are high in “social dominance orientation” or “authoritarianism” are reported in major media outlets, even though conservatives do not in fact score high on those scales and do not endorse views matching the labels — they just score higher than leftists.

Biased social psychologists can call these scales and constructs whatever they want, so they choose names like Social Dominance Orientation to defame and pathologize conservatives and associate them with views that are alien to them.

Mental health

Just as there was no “homophobia”, there might not have been any psychoticism, hostility, etc. The researchers didn’t provide the scores for the mental health variables. The first table I showed you included only inferential statistics and p-values. The second table included descriptive data — average scores and standard deviations — but only for the “homophobia” scale.

Nowhere do they disclose the scores on the mental health scales. This means that their sample might have been clustered at the bottom of some of those scales, just as they were for “homophobia”.

And what were these scales? Well, an example item from the psychoticism subscale³ is “In the previous week, how much were you bothered by the idea that something serious is wrong with your body.”

The bolded part was the stem for every item. The response options were a 5-point range from Not at all to Extremely.

If you answered A little bit, that gets you a point of psychoticism. Choosing Moderately nets you two points.

Now’s a good time to remind you that the sample here was college students, like so much of the junk that academic psychology researchers publish. College students are a terrible choice — a terrible phase of life — to be asking about body anxiety and treating it as a component of “psychoticism”.

The researchers didn’t disclose the mental health scores. Also, they didn’t provide any of the scales, not even the “homophobia” scale. You cannot read the journal article and know what they did, what they measured. This too is a common issue with academic psychology research — they don’t fully disclose their methods. If you can’t see the scales — every single item and the response options — how can you possibly assess or interpret what they found? (The reason I was able to cite specific items from the various scales is that I dug them up — they’re not in the journal article.)

The upside down

It’s disturbing that Daily Beast slapped “Diseased” in the title bar, and it highlights the malevolence of so much of leftist media culture. These are extraordinarily bad people, and remember, the effects were not only false, but Daily Beast fabricated most of them!

Jannini, the lead researcher, told the media: "The study is opening a new research avenue, where the real disease to study is homophobia.”

Unbelievably unethical and unscientific, especially since he didn’t find any “homophobia” and refused to share his data.

His comment highlights something we missed — concocting the term “homophobia” was the initial step in pathologizing normality. It’s a clinical-sounding pathology term, but no one discovered a clinical fear of homosexuals in the population (at least not in, say, even five percent of the population). It’s a fake label, and it’s unethical for journalists to use the term descriptively.

Labeling someone’s views as a phobia is insulting, and leftists likely landed on this smear because they thought it was especially insulting to normal, masculine men to say that they were terrified of gays, that they were scared of something. They quickly broadened this tactic by concocting more fake phobias — Islamophobia, transphobia, and even fatphobia.

During the Biden administration, major officials like Secretary of State Anthony Blinken posted scolding reminders of the “International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia”. Not wanting to look it up, I assume that “biphobia” is supposed to be a pathological fear of bisexuals, as opposed to having been diagnosed with two distinct phobias. (Picture people fleeing bisexuals like a Godzilla movie.) I have no idea what “interphobia” might be. This in your face obsession with sex, self-absorption, and forced valorization of abnormal sexual behavior and mental illness is a historically unprecedented debasement of American culture.

Something dark is happening with efforts to make normal people feel like they’re mentally ill or defective, and hostile strangers telling them what they feel inside — usually fear and “hate”. A key element of “woke” is to invert the normal and abnormal, beauty and ugliness, health and disease. This subversion is what it means to “queer” something in leftist parlance.

I’m particularly worried about boys and young men who are inundated with psychologically invasive propaganda about homosexuality.

They’re told there’s something wrong with being disgusted by homosexuality. There’s nothing wrong with it — the large majority of men are repulsed by the idea of being with a man, and humans are naturally disgusted by feces and therefore anal sex. We wouldn’t be here today if men weren’t drawn to women and if humans didn’t have a disgust response to feces and similar pathogen threats.

Now, we can choose to build a higher-order ethical framework such that we’re not morally disgusted by gay men, and are tolerant and benevolent toward them. That will depend on our core ethical framework. In any case, I’m not endorsing hostility toward gays here.

Boys are also told that natural feelings of disgust or expressing “homophobic” views are signs of suppressed homosexuality. False. (One or two cases of prominent Christian leaders being exposed as having gay affairs energized this narrative — people missed that this was a tiny percentage of such figures.)

In the ten years since the Daily Beast article, gender ideology has swept our institutions, and we’ve seen efforts to gaslight straight men into thinking they should be willing to have sex with other men if those men “identify as” women (and to pressure lesbians into performing oral sex on men who “identify as” lesbians, as The Australian reports). For example, see the ABC drama Big Sky, the most Orwellian thing I’ve seen on TV. A straight US Marshal in Montana faces a romantic dilemma — should he be with this beautiful woman or… a man.

The hitch is that the Marshal perceives this trans-asserting man to be a woman. Everyone on the show does. Note that the Marshal wants a serious relationship, potentially marriage, and he’s acting like he doesn’t know the man is a man, like he’s got a nail stuck in his head. It’s a complete mind wipe, like an episode of The Twilight Zone. He’s looking at this man and seeing a woman. What would happen in the bedroom? Would he see the other man’s penis and understand that he’s a man, or would he just redefine “woman” to include the penised? Who knows?

To really rub it in, the writers made the other man a truck stop prostitute… The Marshal met him in the course of an investigation. It’s a perfect “queering” of the norms of civilization, Christians, baseline humans, and of straight US Marshals in Montana. Leftist media and academics want you to think you’re mentally ill if you see that man as a man and if you’re aghast at the idea of the Marshal settling down with this man and former prostitute who he’s made himself think is both a woman and marriage material.

It’s obvious what’s happening here. These attempts to pathologize normal people and their attitudes toward homosexuality and trans ideology are driven by insecurity. These people are deeply insecure in themselves and their behavior. That’s why they have to flood every institution with their propaganda, even indoctrinating elementary school children to think they have a “gender identity” separate from their sex — they want to create more of themselves, and in so doing, legitimize themselves.

They want acceptance, validation, even valorization. Nothing doth protesteth as much as a “pride” parade. And maybe we should give them acceptance, but we shouldn’t tolerate lies and fraud used to gaslight normal people into thinking they’re mentally ill.

I’m especially concerned about boys and young men being brainwashed and tormented by this sort of propaganda. Parents — this is another reason to keep your kids away from screens, social media, and public schools (and some private schools). Let your boys grow up healthy, and in peace.

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Joe Duarte grew up in small copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. You can contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.

1. It’s possible that they used a 0-4 scale instead of 1-5 (though they said 1-5). If so, the possible range would be 0-100. The men’s average of 35 would still be well below the midpoint.

2. Though given the Italian sample, it’s more likely that they clustered at the top of the mental health scales, not the bottom. Using Italians to study mental health is like using Mexicans to study the effects of family size — too top heavy.

3. The SCL-90-R scale.