MAGA is Obsessed with Other Men

This week, Donald Trump stood on stage at a rally in North Carolina and told the crowd he’d been studying Jon Husted’s body. He described the senator’s backside as “like a pile of muscle.” He went through his shoulders, his jawline, his legs, his hands. He said tapping Husted’s shoulder actually hurt his hand. A few days before that, at a rally in Kentucky, he told the audience he’d “examined his ass.” At another rally in Georgia, he spent time comparing how attractive one male candidate was compared to another. This has been happening at rally after rally all month. The New York Times called his fixation on male bodies “puzzling.” Anderson Cooper aired a montage of all of it back to back. Seth Meyers looked into the camera and asked him directly, “Why are you so weird?” And not a single Republican said a word about any of it. In 1996, psychologist Henry Adams at the University of Georgia designed one of the most uncomfortable experiments in the history of psychology. He recruited 64 men who all described themselves as exclusively heterosexual, meaning they reported no homosexual arousal and no homosexual experiences. He then divided them into two groups based on their scores on a standardized homophobia scale. One group scored high in homophobia. The other scored low. Then he showed both groups three types of sexually explicit videos: heterosexual, lesbian, and gay male. He measured their physical arousal using a penile plethysmograph, a device that measures changes in penile circumference with clinical precision. There was no ambiguity in the data. There was no room for interpretation. The device measured what the body did regardless of what the mouth said. Both groups responded similarly to the heterosexual and lesbian content. The difference showed up only when the gay male content played. In the non-homophobic group, 66% showed no measurable arousal to the gay male video, and less than 25% showed a significant physical response. In the homophobic group, those numbers flipped. Over 54% of the men who scored highest on the homophobia scale showed a significant physical response to the gay male content. Only 20% of the homophobic men showed no arousal at all. And here’s the part that makes the study devastating: when the men were asked afterward to rate how aroused they felt during each video, the homophobic men significantly underestimated their arousal to the gay male content. Their bodies responded. Their conscious minds denied it. The data didn’t care. Adams published his findings in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, one of the most respected journals in the field, under the title “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal?” The answer, according to the plethysmograph, was yes. **The defense mechanism that explains everything** The concept that explains Adams’ findings is not new. It was first described by Anna Freud in her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. She called it reaction formation, and it works like this: when a person experiences a feeling or impulse that produces intense anxiety or shame, they don’t just suppress it. They attack the opposite. They become the loudest, most aggressive opponent of the very thing they feel inside themselves. Reaction formation is not the same as simple disagreement or discomfort. The hallmark of reaction formation is disproportionate intensity. A person who is simply not attracted to the same sex doesn’t spend their career crusading against it. They don’t draft legislation about it. They don’t bring it up in every speech. They don’t think about it at all, because there is nothing to defend against. Reaction formation reveals itself through obsession. The volume of the outrage is the tell. What makes reaction formation so effective as a disguise is that it looks like conviction. It looks like moral clarity. The person performing it often doesn’t know they’re doing it. The defense mechanism works precisely because it operates below conscious awareness. The man who stands at a podium and delivers a passionate speech about the threat of homosexuality to the American family may genuinely believe every word he’s saying. His body, as Adams demonstrated, may be telling a completely different story. **The study that connected it to childhood** Adams’ 1996 study established the physical link between homophobia and homosexual arousal. Sixteen years later, a team of researchers led by Netta Weinstein at the University of Essex and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester went deeper and asked a follow-up question that Adams never addressed: where does this internal conflict come from? In 2012, Weinstein, Ryan, and their colleagues published a series of six studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the most rigorous journals in the field. They recruited 784 college students across the United States and Germany, measured their explicit sexual orientation by simply asking them, and then measured their implicit sexual orientation using a reaction-time computer test. In the test, participants sorted images and words associated with heterosexuality and homosexuality, and the speed of their sorting revealed unconscious associations that their self-reports might not. What they found was a population of people whose explicit identity and implicit identity didn’t match. People who described themselves as straight but whose unconscious reactions revealed significant same-sex attraction. And those people, the ones with the biggest gap between what they said and what the test revealed, were significantly more likely to express hostility toward gay people, support anti-gay policies, and assign harsher punishments to people they believed were homosexual. But the most important finding had nothing to do with sexuality itself. It had to do with parents. Weinstein and Ryan found that the participants who grew up with controlling, authoritarian parents were far more likely to show a discrepancy between their implicit and explicit sexual orientation. These were the people whose internal conflict was the deepest and whose homophobia was the most intense. Participants who grew up with supportive, accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit orientation, whatever it was, and showed significantly less anti-gay hostility. The implication is that reaction formation doesn’t begin in adulthood. It begins in childhood, in homes where certain feelings are made so dangerous that the only option is to bury them and build an identity on top of the burial site. The louder the parents’ rejection, the deeper the child buries. And the deeper they bury, the harder they attack what they see in other people, because other people walking freely in the world with the same feelings they were forced to destroy is unbearable. **The pattern that keeps repeating** If reaction formation only existed in laboratories, it would be an interesting finding and nothing more. But the real world keeps producing evidence that no laboratory could replicate. In 2007, U.S. Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, who had spent his entire career voting against gay rights and earning praise from organizations like the American Family Association, was arrested in a Minneapolis airport bathroom after an undercover officer reported that Craig had solicited sex from him through a series of signals in an adjacent stall. Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. In 2006, Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and one of the most prominent anti-gay voices in American Christianity, was accused by a male escort of paying for sex and methamphetamine over a three-year period. Haggard initially denied everything. Then he admitted to some of it. His church removed him. George Rekers, a co-founder of the Family Research Council, one of the most powerful anti-gay lobbying organizations in the United States and a man who built a career publishing research claiming homosexuality was a mental illness, was photographed in 2010 returning from a European vacation with a male escort he had found on Rentboy.com. In Indiana, state representative Phillip Hinkle, who voted for an amendment banning same-sex marriage, was caught in 2011 responding to a Craigslist ad from an 18-year-old man looking for a “sugga daddy.” In North Dakota, legislator Randy Boehning, who voted against anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, was caught sending explicit photographs of himself on Grindr. And in October 2026, the President of the United States is standing on stage at campaign rallies describing how he examined a senator’s backside, praising his muscles, studying his jawline, and telling crowds of thousands that another male candidate looks like he came from “central casting.” He’s been doing it at rally after rally for weeks, and the party that has built its entire brand on traditional masculinity and opposition to LGBTQ rights can’t bring itself to say a single word about it. In each case, the pattern is identical. A public identity built on opposing or ignoring homosexuality. A private fixation that contradicts the public position. And a reaction so disproportionate, so sustained, so obsessive that in hindsight, it reads as the most obvious confession imaginable. These are not isolated incidents. They are the documented behavioral output of a psychological mechanism that was described in 1936, measured in a laboratory in 1996, traced back to childhood in 2012, and keeps showing up in the news because the conditions that create it have never changed. **Why this matters beyond the scandals** It would be easy to treat this as a punchline. It would be easy to laugh at the hypocrisy and move on. But the research tells a story that is more damaging than funny. Weinstein and Ryan’s 2012 findings suggest that many of the people driving anti-gay policy and rhetoric in this country are not cynical manipulators who know exactly what they’re doing. Some of them are people who were raised in homes where their own feelings were made so shameful that they built an entire identity around destroying what they couldn’t accept in themselves. They are not protecting traditional values. They are protecting themselves from the terror of being seen. This does not excuse the damage they do. Anti-gay legislation, conversion therapy, discrimination in housing and employment, and the social stigma that drives LGBTQ youth to disproportionately higher rates of suicide are all real consequences caused by real people who made real choices. Understanding the mechanism behind those choices doesn’t soften the impact. It explains why the choices keep getting made. The conservative movement in America has spent decades building a political infrastructure around the idea that homosexuality is a threat. The research suggests that for at least some of the people building that infrastructure, the threat was never external. It was always inside them. And the more they fought it in public, the more it proved it was there. Adams put men in a lab and measured what their bodies did when their mouths said no. Weinstein and Ryan traced the conflict back to the homes those men grew up in. And right now, in October 2026, the President of the United States is standing on stage at his own rallies telling crowds he’s been studying another man’s body, and the only people who won’t say what they’re watching are the ones standing behind him. The mechanism is always the same. The shame is always the same. And the tell is always the same: nobody fights that hard against something they don’t feel, and nobody talks that much about something they’re not thinking about. Sources Adams, H. E., Wright, L. W., & Lohr, B. A. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105(3), 440-445. 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. Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Hogarth Press. Baumeister, R. F., Dale, K., & Sommer, K. L. (1998). Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projection, displacement, undoing, isolation, sublimation, and denial. Journal of Personality, 66(6), 1081-1124. Balk, T. (2026, October 17). In Campaign’s Final Stretch, Trump Can’t Stop Praising Men’s Bodies. The New York Times. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe