Puritan’s Pride theatricality: whose benefit is it really for? The performer? The beholder? Maybe both?

It’s the long bandied-about open secret the gays have long given the side-eye to: the bigger the manly displays of anti-homo swagger, the gayer the self-defensive motivation behind it.

Frankly, the term “homophobia” has never really worked for me because it can’t hope to encompass the range of insecurities that heterosexuals — not just men, but the ladies too — harbor not from without when it comes to…the gay, but from within when reacting to their own same-sex impulses.

To coin a more apt new phrase: Heterodysphoria, noun, as in the intense and emotionally exhausting fixation on clinging to cliche gender reductivism, antiquated myths about marriage and procreation, and the perpetuation of wildly over-exaggerated displays of faux-heterosexuality for the purposes of concealment and self-denial.

If you’re like me and despise the word “flamboyant,” then you’ve probably observed that there’s no shortage of flamboyant hets in the world who cloak themselves in absurd straight drag and dazzle us all with shameless plays at what appear to be garish minstrel shows. All that’s missing are the buckles. Natch, heterosexuality and morality are synonymous in this arena, so if falls from grace don’t involve gay hustlers or various tricks, then some other moral lapse comes into play.

There’s not a Narnian wardrobe big enough to house all the gay Republicans forced out into a seemingly never-ending series of perp walks. If televangelists aren’t frequenting whores of either persuasion, then they’re scoring meth or embezzling from God’s quarterly gross. All the “born again” actors, pundits, and talking heads just ran out steam when it came to fucking, snorting, and/or swilling everything in sight. And why are we so cynical about accepting the hysterical marital rhetoric from demagogues who are either multiple divorces, aging spinsters, single parents, or curiously confirmed bachelors?

It’s the surly young bucks of the world who so often are the most virulently heterodysphoric, so who can blame us about being the most wary about what makes them tick?

1996’s much-debated study conducted by the University of Georgia’s Henry Adams, Lester Wright, Jr., and Bethany Lohr called into question just how externalized their gut-level response to gays really is. At first blush sounding like something dreamed up by a fraternity or a McCarthyite panel, their research involved sixty-four self-identified male hets — divided into two control groups of homo-tolerants and admitted homo-negativists — being fitted with penile plethysmographs designed to measure erectile changes in girth and length spurred by visual pornographic stimuli depicting straight, lesbian, and gay intercourse.

As expected, both groups sprouted wood when presented with traditional guy-on-girl and girl-on-girl scenarios, but only the homo-negative control experienced spontaneous arousal when it came to all anal action, with 26 percent going half-mast while more than half (54 percent, to be exact) produced full rod. The researchers’ conclusion: “individuals who score high in the homophobic range and admit negative affect toward homosexuality demonstrated significant sexual arousal to male homosexual erotic stimuli.”

To be fair, the study doesn’t seem to take into account certain variables that every man is familiar with, namely that erections are not always sexual. You can be anxious, enraged, terrified, cold, or just be feeling the intense need to urinate. This is the reason I suspect why so few male-on-male rape cases ever come to light: arousal doesn’t necessarily mean compliance, but I imagine a did-I-enjoy-it? self-doubt has to come into play in the way that it might not tend to with a female victim.

Still, fifty-four percent is a pretty compelling number, and of the variables I mentioned above, only anxiety arising from being placed in an unfamiliar setting and having your dick leashed seems likely, but not to the degree of more than half the time. I also have trouble imaging the converse: gay guys might be turned on by straight couplings, but would upwards of half raise their flags for a pair of klieg light-blonde, cantilevered porn starlets going at it?

As for rage, that’s a question of whether aggression toward homosexuals is itself a product of arousal. A later experiment conducted at the University of Georgia lends credence to that hypothesis. At issue was whether homo-negatives placed in a competitive scenario would exhibit more aggression toward an opponent based on his sexual orientation. Again, homo-tolerant and homo-negative young men were the basis of the experiment focusing on the effect of pornographic stimulus and aggression. Participants were misled to believe that they would be subjected to random erotic stimuli, but all were exposed only to gay pornography.

The objective was to then push a button when a red light flashed on the console before them, the rouse being that not only were half of the trials randomly rigged to result in a loss, but the opposing player purported to be sitting in the next room and competing at the same task did not actually exist. The phantom opponent — introduced after the porn footage and portrayed in a video by the same actor with or without hackneyed gay traits– is key here: half the players were told they were vying against a straight opponent, while the other half were led to believe they were battling a gay foe. A winning round allowed the victor to administer (or simply opt not to) a graduated scale of electric shock to the loser.

Upon completion, it was found that the most jarring and extended jolts were delivered by homo-negatives against their non-existent gay competitors, their levels of hostility spiking even further after being presented with a gay adversary in the wake of witnessing a pornographic pairing. Simply replace the controlled conditions of the experiment with your average city block, substitute an actual gay man for a rhetorical other, and add a pair of fists or bat in place of an electric shock directed at an invisible punching bag and you have all the elements for a potentially deadly gay-bashing.

So what does it all mean in a 21st Century landscape of enacted and proposed gay Jim Crow Laws that are presumably just the opening salvo in putting sodomy laws back on the books? At issue is whether you can truly legislate morality, and whether we the public should even be granting any credence to the people pushing the claim. Our pillars of the community are looking a little wobbly.

The national divorce rate is estimated to hover around fifty percent, with forty-three percent of marriages likely to end within a fifteen-year span If marriage is indeed a test of character, then it would seem that heterosexuals are failing at a discipline we’re supposed to believe they’ve mastered through natural and divine right. Divorce rates are higher in the Bible Belt than in gay union-tolerating states like Connecticut, Massachussets, or New York.

Even porn — that demon vice long-sought to be outlawed by the self-appointed moral arbiters of the nation — doesn’t appear to be as anathema in Middle American as its pulpit-thumpers would claim. A recent study of credit card trails provided by a major online adult entertainment site suggests there’s little or no variation in online porn consumers’ frequenting of the medium based on location or a state’s political affiliation, with the theocracy Utah — banner of every other vice-form entertainment — leading the list, while eight out of the ten states with the highest online porn consumption gave the nod to John McCain in the election. The implication is that porn makes both a great anti-smut rallying cry and a behind-closed-doors obsession for its opponents. No moral relativism there.

If Prohibition, which resulted in an exponential increase in all the illegal/immoral activities it was intended to curb, has taught us anything, it’s that repression has deep roots in personal demons that can’t be exorcized on a national level. The contemporary Morality Police still has its poster girl in Carrie Nation — the radical temperance zealot whose failed marriage to an irredeemable alcoholic put her on her way to campaigning to stamp out liquor across the board. The ultimate irony: hatchet-bearing and hatchet-faced Carrie could only have benefited from the beer goggle effect.

Were that America’s Neo-Puritans — all the crusading Carries of-the-moment — could soberly look at themselves in the mirror without the self-effacing need to be drunk on their own piety.

The opening photograph for this entry is from Associate Press photographer Mike Groll, and was featured on BAGnewNotes. It shows a gay rights activist at a NY State capitol rally, right, “faced off” with a man opposed to gay marriage.