When men can't speak man to man

Defined by the dictionary, "homophobia" means a fear ofhomosexuals. For men, however, it may also mean something else: a fear of intimacy itself. Michael Monroe, Ph.D., asked 75 heterosexual men to think of a secret and then either tell it to a man, tell it to a woman, or write it down. The intimacy of each disclosure was then rated by independent judges. Monroe, of the Forensic Mental Health Division of the County of San Diego, had expected to find that telling a secret to another man would stimulate feelings of homophobia and so result in less revealing messages. Instead, he found that the men divulged relatively little about themselves no matter whom they were speaking to--perhaps because they associate being vulnerable with being gay. In fact, the higher the men scored on an index of homophobia, the lower they rated on a measure of social intimacy. Monroe comments: "It may be that homophobia involves a fear of anything that appears to be remotely `unmasculine,' a fear of feelings."