So I’m suggesting that it could be their rejection of the idea that causes the arousal, and not the other way around.

Interesting idea, indeed. And I think this:

Well why don’t I find X arousing, when I definitely regard X as being forbidden?

can be answered by saying that homophobes regard homosexuality as something particularly forbidden and taboo – it is more than something they find distasteful or unpleasant or unappealing (the latter presumably being what defines a non-homophobic straight person), they find it actively abhorrent in some way.

So they might also find a Troy McClure-style obsession with fish distasteful, but they aren’t fixated on it so it has no special power as a taboo.

Hmm. Good thoughts.

Consider the proposition that for some people, the element of the ‘forbidden’ or slightly perverse is in itself arousing.

Since homophobes were specifically selected because they reject the notion of homosexuality, they are likely to feel that homosexual sex is ‘forbidden’.

If my earlier proposition is accepted, they may become aroused by the homosexual stimuli not necessarily because of its homosexual nature, but because they associate it with being forbidden or perverse.

So I’m suggesting that it could be their rejection of the idea that causes the arousal, and not the other way around.

I realise this theory opens a whole range of questions, such as: ‘Well why don’t I find X arousing, when I definitely regard X as being forbidden?”. I don’t know the answer to that, but I also don’t know what would happen if you were sat down and exposed to it while someone had a tape measure wrapped around your wang.