Because homophobia is, as I noted, a prejudice of categorization, a good deal of it is directed by homophobic people against heterosexuals. That is, a good deal of it is baiting. A group of boys keep one of their peers in terror by threatening to tell everybody he is a queer. A heterosexual woman is told by a man who wants to dominate her or punish her that he thinks she is a lesbian. The common denominator among the homophobic types is, then, that homosexual acts represent, and homosexuals embody, identity trespassing or transgressing.
Homosexuals shake up the gender boundaries.
Researchers using questionnaires and interviews have developed a profile of the homophobic person. He or she is authoritarian, status conscious, intolerant of ambiguity, and both cognitively and sexually rigid. At the opposite pole, those who are least homophobic support equality between the sexes. In short, the new strand of authoritarian personality research suggests that the homophobe is a sexist and the nonhomophobe is an antisexist. This kind of empirical work, though interesting, perpetuates the bias in the study of homophobia toward concentrating on the sexism variety and ignoring all the many other functions that homophobias may fill.