Lauren Drain, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church,
thinks there is a distinct possibility that Fred Phelps' particularly virulent form of homophobia resulted from a gay experience in his youth:
I never understood why, when [the media asked him], "Why are you so against the homosexuals? Did you have a homosexual experience? Do you have homosexual tendencies?" And he would get so mad, he would shut down. And he'd be like, "I can't talk to this person anymore, they're stupid." His reaction to that was stronger than any other question you can ask him. So I always wondered that - why does he get so mad? If I'm not gay, I'll just say I'm not gay. And I'm not going to freak out, like, "Why are you calling me gay?" I always thought that was super strange. … I don't know what happened there, so [speculation] is all that I can leave it at. But something happened, and something made him change his mind about the military, and in turn have kind of a crusade against sexual immorality and homosexuals.
Of course this is only speculation, though there are some studies that purport to show that at least some people who crusade against homosexuality are
secretly repressing same-sex attraction. And in spite of the flaws from those studies, we at least have anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon: Roy Cohn, Terry Dolan, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Roy Ashburn, George Rekers and Eddie Long, for example. All I know for sure is, anyone who can devote that much of their life to the cause of bashing LGBT people certainly triggers
my gaydar...
