I was maybe eight. A scene came on the television with two men, close and tender, and my parents made a sound. A short, involuntary “ugh.” Disgust. I was watching the screen and found it interesting. Then I was watching them, and I understood that what I felt was wrong. This is where internalized homophobia begins. In a reflex, at the dinner table, on a Tuesday, from the people who tucked me in.
The Sound My Parents Made
The movie didn’t matter. I’ve lost the title. What stayed was the sound and the speed of it. It was disgust arriving before either of them decided to feel it. Neither said “that’s a sin.” and they didn’t reach for theology. A church can spend a thousand Sundays explaining why two men shouldn’t love each other, and none of it lands like a parent’s face folding in real time. I was small, studying them the way children study the weather of the adults who feed them. The verdict registered. I filed it away.
The part that lasted: I wasn’t disgusted. I leaned in. Something in that tenderness looked like a door. Then I saw the door was the thing they hated.
What Internalized Homophobia Actually Is
People talk about internalized homophobia like a belief or something you picked up and could, in theory, un-believe. But that’s not how it entered for me. No one sat me down and argued a case. It came through a reflex I witnessed and absorbed. Children are not empty vessels waiting for doctrine. They are surveillance machines, pointed all day at the people they can’t survive without, reading every micro-expression for the rules of staying loved. Developmental psychologists call it social referencing, which is the way a child reads a caregiver’s reaction to decide whether something is safe or forbidden. And the research is blunt about which signal carries hardest. The involuntary sound lands deeper than the face. My parents’ “ugh” was the most efficient lesson in the room.
Disgust is the most efficient teacher in that whole economy. It skips the reasoning step. A child can’t yet argue with a syllogism, but a child knows exactly what a curled lip means. Long before I could have defined desire, I had a body that knew which desires made my parents recoil. That is the engine of internalized homophobia. A sensation you inherit before it is ever a sentence you believe.
The Math a Child Does
What a child does with that information is arithmetic. If that is disgusting, and I am drawn to that, then there is something disgusting in me. The logic is airtight and merciless, and it runs in the dark, years before you have the vocabulary to challenge a single term in the equation. By the time I had words like gay, the verdict was already load-bearing. That is how internalized homophobia sets. Inherited shame doesn’t feel like an opinion someone handed you. It feels like a fact about your own body.
This is the cruelty of learned disgust aimed inward. A belief delivered as argument can be argued back. Self-disgust absorbed at eight has no author to confront. It feels like weather, like gravity, like the simple truth of how things are. You don’t rebel against gravity. You just live bent. This is the throughline of the book I’m writing about a religious childhood: the reflexes a religious childhood installs that young become the reflexes you carry into everything, including the voting booth.
Why Hiding It Proves the Point
Children should see every kind of relationship represented in the movies they watch, whether it’s two men, two women, or heterosexual relationships, every configuration of love that actually exists. Removing it does not protect anyone. Removing it is the instruction.
When my parents made that sound and the moment passed without comment, the absence taught more than any lecture could. The lesson was: we do not speak of this, except to recoil. So scale that household reflex up, and you get the politics of the present moment. Book bans. Curriculum laws that keep certain families invisible. And a whole apparatus that changes the channel on behalf of millions of children at once.
None of that runs on argument. It runs on disgust, because disgust is the only tool reliable enough to install a belief in someone too young to consent to it. At scale, erasure builds the same internalized homophobia. Remove the alternative, and the recoil fills the silence. A movement that had a case would make the case. A movement that removes the representation instead is telling you it has no case, only a reflex it needs the next generation to inherit. The hiding is the confession.
How It Still Lives in the Mirror
I’d like to tell you the equation dissolved once I named it. It didn’t. It lives now in the mirror. I pay close, constant attention to how I look. The cut of my beard, the fit of the shirt, the body I keep lean and deliberate. Some of that is vanity, sure. Most of it is older than vanity. Part of it is the eight-year-old still managing the room, still trying to be the version of himself that won’t make anyone’s face fold.
Still, two fears live underneath it. One is safety because it’s the real, unparanoid knowledge that visibly queer people are not safe everywhere, and that a controlled surface buys a margin. The other is the original wound of the dread that someone will see me as disgusting, that I’ll catch that “ugh” again, this time aimed at me.
If you have ever rehearsed your own face before walking into a room, or arranged yourself so no one could find the thing in you that someone once recoiled from, then you already know the residue of internalized homophobia better than any clinical definition could give you. It outlives the belief. It hides in the grooming routine, the second-guessed outfit, the laugh you soften. You can read more of these essays on identity and the systems that shape us if any of this is landing too close.
Becoming a Different Reflex
The surveillance never really stops. What changes is the direction it points. These days, when a child is in the room and a scene like that one comes on, I watch myself instead of the screen. My face stays open. The silence I keep says the opposite of the silence my parents kept.
In the end, that is the whole repair, as far as I’ve found it. I can’t erase what they put in me that young. What I can do is become a different reflex for the next kid doing the arithmetic in the dark. Living proof that the door they’re leaning toward is only a door, and that someone in the room is glad they found it.
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