When Shame Turns Inward: Internalised Homophobia and Sexual Shame
Some things settle into the body long before they have a name. It is not the weight of something that happened yesterday. It is not a crisis, or a diagnosis, or a loss you can point to. It is something older and more diffuse — a low-grade, persistent hum running beneath ordinary life. A conviction, usually unspoken and often unexamined, that something about who you are is fundamentally wrong.
In the previous article in this series, I wrote about men who carry same-sex attraction in silence — the texture of that experience, how it shows up in a therapy room, what happens when the pressure finds its way out. If you have not read it, it is worth starting there.
This article goes further. It looks at what is happening underneath that silence — not just psychologically, but neurobiologically, relationally, sexually, and culturally. Because one of the things I have found most valuable in this work — for my clients, and for myself as a clinician — is understanding the full architecture of what we are dealing with.
Internalised homophobia is not simply low self-esteem. It is not a bad attitude. It is a complex, multi-layered process that gets into the body, the nervous system, the brain’s threat-detection circuitry, and the most intimate parts of how a person relates to themselves and others. Understanding it does not fix it. But it changes the conversation — from what is wrong with me to what happened to me, and what has it cost.
Let’s Start With the Term Itself
The phrase internalised homophobia is one that many people resist — often the very people to whom it most applies. I want to sit with that resistance for a moment, because it is important.
For many men, particularly those who do not identify as gay, the word homophobia carries connotations they find alienating. Phobia implies fear. Homo implies an identity category they have spent considerable effort not claiming. The phrase can feel like an accusation, or a label that demands acknowledgement of something they have not yet been willing to acknowledge. Some researchers now prefer the term internalised sexual stigma — defined by Herek (2004) as the personal acceptance of society’s negative evaluations of same-sex attraction as a part of one’s own value system. Others use internalised homonegativity, or simply shame around attraction. I think the terminology matters less than the thing it is pointing at.
What we are describing is this: when a culture — a family, a religion, a schoolyard, a nation — consistently communicates that same-sex attraction is shameful, sinful, dangerous, or simply not real, and a person absorbs that communication deeply enough, those messages do not stay outside. They become part of how the person relates to themselves. Not as a conscious belief. Not as a choice. But as something structural — baked into the architecture of how they see themselves, how they feel in their own body, and what they allow themselves to know.
Brown (2012) makes a distinction between guilt and shame that is useful here: guilt is I did something bad, shame is I am bad. Internalised shame around attraction is not about behaviour. It is about being. And that makes it both harder to locate within oneself and harder to shift. You do not have to identify as gay. You do not have to have come out, or acted on anything, or even have a clear sense of what your attraction means. The term is useful to the extent that it helps explain something that has been shaping your inner life — often for decades — without a name.
The Architecture of it, How Shame Gets Built
This is one of the things I explain most often — because a lot of the men I work with assume that shame like this only comes from really bad experiences. An abusive family. A childhood where desire or pleasure was treated as dangerous. Being directly hurt, humiliated, or rejected.
Sometimes it does happen that way. But more often, it doesn’t.
More often, it arrives quietly. Through what was never said. Through the people and relationships you never saw represented. Through the silence around any version of male desire that wasn’t clearly, obviously straight. Sexual shame affects everyone, but the way it settles in men has its own particular weight — shaped by the very narrow version of manhood we’re all expected to fit.
You don’t learn what kind of man is acceptable because someone sits you down and tells you. You learn it through the jokes that get laughs and the ones that don’t. Through what gets called weak. Through what gets called wrong. Through the quiet cost of not fitting the shape everyone expected you to be (Connell, 1995). The lesson gets absorbed without anyone needing to say it out loud.
And the stress of carrying something like this — of always being a little on guard, always monitoring what you say or how you come across, always bracing for the moment someone might see the thing you’ve kept hidden — is not dramatic. It’s constant. Low-grade. Background noise (Meyer, 2003). But constant stress, over years, does something real to your nervous system. We’ll come back to that.
The messages you grew up around — from your dad, your family, your mates at school, your footy club, your church, the wider culture — slowly become the messages you carry about yourself (Hatzenbuehler, 2009). Sometimes it’s obvious: a parent saying that being gay is wrong or disgusting. A joke at the dinner table. A slur yelled at someone on TV. Sometimes it’s quieter: a family that never mentions queer people at all. A school where some kids are out and others stay silent. A setting where only one kind of relationship is ever talked about as “normal.”
Over time, those external messages turn inward: If I’m like that, something is wrong with me. The shame that follows isn’t a character flaw. It’s a completely understandable response to the world you grew up in.
What Shame Does: The Psychology
Shame is a particular kind of emotional experience. Unlike guilt, which is oriented toward a specific action, shame is a global self-evaluation — a felt sense that the entire self is deficient, inadequate, or unacceptable (Tangney & Dearing, 2002). Where guilt prompts repair, shame typically prompts hiding — withdrawal, concealment, and the preemptive avoidance of situations in which the shameful thing might be seen.Kaufman (1993) describes internalised shame as shame that has become structural rather than situational — no longer tied to specific events, but embedded in the self-concept as a baseline condition. For a man who grew up absorbing the message that same-sex attraction is wrong, shame does not arise only in moments of noticing the attraction. It becomes part of how he inhabits himself. A background frequency. Something that does not need to be triggered because it is simply always present.
Research is very clear about the emotional cost of turning this kind of stigma inward. When people learn to see their own same‑sex attraction as wrong or unacceptable, they are much more likely to struggle with depression, anxiety, using alcohol or other substances to cope, and thoughts of not wanting to be here at all (Meyer, 2003; Newcomb & Mustanski, 2010). A large review of many studies found that the link was especially strong for depression and for people who had been living with this for longer. Other work on minority stress suggests a common pattern: hiding who you are, carrying shame, and then over time feeling more and more distressed and hopeless (Meyer, 2003).
It can also show up in subtler ways that matter just as much — perhaps more — in lived experience. A flatness of affect that a person stops noticing because it has become baseline. A chronic quality of self-monitoring in which nothing can quite be relaxed into. A sense of being a little behind one’s own life — present in body, somewhere else in feeling. A vague, persistent sense of imposture: that the person others see is not quite real, or not quite complete.
This is not about labels or diagnoses. It is the day‑to‑day feel of carrying something you have never really been able to name.
What Shame Does: The Neuroscience
This is where I find the research genuinely extraordinary — and where I think it offers something important to the men I work with. Because one of the hardest things about internalised shame is that it can feel like character. Like this is just who I am and can’t change that. Understanding what is happening neurobiologically does not dissolve the shame, but it begins to locate it differently. This is a nervous system response to a social environment. It is not evidence of who you are.
Meyer’s (2003) minority stress model has increasingly been integrated with neurobiology, particularly the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis — the body’s primary stress response system (Miller et al., 2018). The HPA axis operates through a cascade of neurochemical signals that ultimately produce cortisol, calibrating the body’s response to threat. In a healthy, low-threat environment, cortisol levels follow a predictable pattern — high in the morning, declining across the day. This diurnal rhythm is associated with good psychological adjustment, healthy sleep, and effective immune functioning.
Research consistently shows that chronic minority stress disrupts this rhythm. Sexual minority individuals who experience higher levels of minority stress — including internalised stigma — show flatter diurnal cortisol slopes: less variability across the day, elevated evening cortisol, and less effective overnight physiological recovery (Miller et al., 2018). This is not a trivial finding. Disrupted cortisol patterns are associated with depression, impaired immune function, sleep disturbance, and accelerated biological ageing.
There are many men moving through ordinary life with this kind of internalised shame who will never appear in any research paper or statistic.
And the neurological findings go further.
A recent review of brain‑scan studies found that long‑term minority stress seems to leave a mark on three key brain networks (Nicholson et al., 2022). One network is the one we use to think about ourselves and our place in the world. Under minority stress, this “sense‑of‑self” network appears to go quiet, which fits with the feeling many people describe of being cut off from who they are. A second network is the “alarm system” in the brain — the parts that scan for danger and help us notice threat in our bodies. In sexual minority samples this system often looks overactive, as though it has learned to stay on high alert. The third network helps with focus, problem‑solving and calming ourselves down. Here, too, there are signs of disruption. Taken together, these patterns look very similar to what is seen in post‑traumatic stress, which supports the idea of minority stress as a form of ongoing, insidious trauma (Nicholson et al., 2022).
What the review authors noted, and what I find important to say clearly, is that these patterns are strikingly similar to the neurological profiles observed in PTSD. That is not an accident. It reflects the degree to which chronic minority stress — including internalised shame — functions neurologically as a form of trauma. Not a single catastrophic event. But the accumulated neurological cost of living inside a persistent social threat.
More recently, researchers have started asking a different question: does living with this kind of ongoing stress for years actually change how our bodies read and use our genes — in other words, how our biology switches certain processes “up” or “down”? Early findings suggest that sexual minority individuals with lower internal and external affirmation of their identity show accelerated epigenetic ageing — meaning that chronic stress may get under the skin at a molecular level, contributing to real physical health problems and longer‑term health inequalities through biological pathways that go well beyond psychology (Christian et al., 2025).
None of this is shared to scare anyone. It is shared because it changes how we see people who live with this, and what kind of care they deserve. There are many men moving through ordinary life with this kind of internalised shame who will never appear in any research paper or statistic. They go to work, have families, are in same sex relationships, show up for others, and quietly carry this alone, and often without awareness. I meet many clients whose stories carry some version of this.
What Shame Does: Sex and Intimacy
Internalised shame around attraction does not stay neatly compartmentalised in the domain of identity. It finds its way into the bedroom — into how a person inhabits their body sexually, what they can receive and give, what they can allow themselves to feel.
Sexual intimacy — with ourselves or with a partner — asks for a particular kind of presence. It asks for a willingness to be seen, to be known, to be wanted, and to let that wanting actually reach us. Shame is built around concealment and the fear of exposure, so it sits directly across the doorway of this kind of connection. It does not disappear when clothes come off. It quietly shapes what parts of us are allowed into our sexual experiences — wherever they happen — and what parts stay out of reach, both from ourselves and from the people we are with.
Studies with gay and bisexual men show a clear pattern: the more a man has learned to turn homophobic messages against himself, the harder it is to feel settled in his sexual life. Higher internalised homophobia is linked with more sexual anxiety, more sadness about sex, more fear of his own sexuality, and more worry about how he looks or performs sexually — and with less sexual confidence, less pleasure, and less sense of choice and control (Dupras, 1994). Another study on sexual quality of life found that internalised homophobia was one of the two strongest factors linked with poor sexual quality of life, right alongside erection difficulties (Castellanos‑Torres et al., 2019). Men who felt ashamed of their sexual orientation were much more likely to say they felt no pleasure during sex, or that they avoided sex altogether.
All of this points to the same thing: shame is not just a feeling that shows up after sex. It shapes what is possible during sex, and it pulls the whole body into a state of tension and self‑protection.
For men who carry same-sex attraction in the context of a predominantly heterosexual life, this can surface in particular ways. Sex with a female partner — which may have been possible, even satisfying, for many years — can begin to feel like something being performed rather than genuinely experienced. A man may be present in body and absent in spirit. He may notice that he can function, but cannot feel. He may discover, as the concealment work increases, that his sexual self is becoming increasingly inaccessible — not through any external factor, but because the part of him that holds real desire has been too thoroughly hidden.
It pulls the whole body into a state of tension and self‑protection.
It is also important to say that not every man who feels confused about his attractions is gay or bisexual. Some men have histories of sexual trauma, coercion, or other painful experiences that leave them feeling shut down, reactive, or uncertain around sex. Trauma can shape how safe sex feels, how much desire comes online, and how easy it is to trust someone else with your body. What the research is clear about, though, is that trauma does not create a sexual orientation or “turn” someone gay or straight. Attraction is a multifaceted part of who a person is — involving body, emotion, history, and meaning — and trauma can interfere with how freely different parts of that attraction can be lived. Careful, affirming therapeutic work can help create the safety needed for those parts to come forward.
There is something else worth naming here. When a man’s sexuality has to live in secret — when the part of him that is attracted to men can only come out anonymously, in tightly separated sexual situations that have no continuity and have to be pushed out of awareness afterwards — it becomes almost impossible to bring that part of him into real connection. The secrecy and the shame are not just side‑effects of those sexual situations; they are built into the way they have to happen for him to feel even somewhat safe (Stokes & McKirnan, 1997). Over time, the repeated pattern of acting on desire and then shutting it down tends to deepen the internal split, widening the gap between the public self and private experience in ways that are costly for everyone involved — including partners who do not know what is happening and therefore cannot give informed consent to the emotional or sexual risks they are carrying.
What Therapy Might Look Like
I want to be careful with language here. Words like healing can sound like there’s a finish line — a day when shame is gone and everything is neatly resolved. For most men I work with, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not a straight line, and it doesn’t feel like arriving at a final destination.
And none of this is pathological. Coming to therapy doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It means you’ve been carrying something heavy for a long time, often without support, and you’re making the decision to look at it with someone who understands the territory — and who can help you see it from different angles, through lenses you might not have had access to before. That’s not weakness. That’s clarity.
What I see instead, in men who stay with this work over time, is a gradual softening. The part that feels desire, the part that’s terrified of what that means, the part that polices and shames — all of them become a little less rigid, a little less at war with each other. The system spends less energy hiding and managing. There’s more room simply to notice, “This is what I feel,” without the immediate attack.
That said, every man is different. What works for one person might not land the same way for another. Some men benefit from naming and working through specific shame-based thoughts. Others need more body-oriented work — tracking what happens in the nervous system when shame shows up, and building capacity to stay present with it. Some men need the structure of clear therapeutic tasks. Others need a slower, more relational process where the focus is less on fixing and more on being genuinely known.
What the research does support — and what I hold as foundational — is starting from an affirming stance: naming same-sex attraction as a valid part of who someone is, and locating the distress in the shaming messages absorbed over time, not in the attraction itself (Pachankis et al., 2015). The approaches that work best are the ones that start from a simple premise: there is nothing wrong with same-sex attraction. The distress comes from the messages you’ve absorbed, not from who you are. Working with those shame-based beliefs, gently making space for what’s been hidden, and reducing the need to avoid parts of yourself — that’s where the research shows real change happens (Pachankis et al., 2015). I use those tools, adapted to what makes sense for each man I work with.
Thought work on its own is usually not enough when shame has been there for years and is tied to identity. When shame is “built into the architecture” of the self, change tends to come through new relational experiences — not just new thoughts. Sitting with someone who holds your sexuality as fundamentally valid, and who stays steady when you bring the most hidden material, creates a live counter-example to the old belief that these parts are disgusting or unlovable.
From a trauma lens — which is often where I work — this makes sense. Chronic minority stress and shame operate less like a simple “belief problem” and more like a trauma response, involving real brain-body changes and a nervous system that has learned to stay on high alert under ongoing social threat (Nicholson et al., 2022). So the work is slower and more relational. It involves mind and body (van der Kolk, 2014). And it asks me, as the therapist, to hold the full picture: the cultural context that built this shame, the neurobiological weight it carries, and the very specific question of what “a bit more ease between parts” can realistically look like for this particular man, in this particular life, right now.
A Word to Anyone Reading This
If you have found your way here because something in this article is speaking to your own experience — I want to say something directly to you. You do not have to have a clear answer about what your attraction means. You do not have to know what you want to do with it, where it fits in the life you have, or who you need to tell. You do not have to identify with any label, or disidentify from any life you have built. You are allowed to simply start with the acknowledgement that something is there. That something has been costing you. That the weight of carrying it has been real, even if no one around you has known it was there.
That is enough to begin. This is not about dismantling your life. It is about having more access to the parts of you.
If this territory is something you are navigating — privately, quietly, or in a state of considerable confusion — I work with people in exactly this space. At Polysoma, my practice in Goodwood, Adelaide, I offer psychotherapy and sex therapy that is affirming, trauma-informed, and deeply confidential. This conversation does not require you to be anywhere other than where you are. You just have to be willing to start.
This article is for general information and is not a substitute for personalised therapeutic advice. If you are experiencing distress, please connect with a mental health professional or your GP.
For immediate crisis support in Australia, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or text 0477 13 11 14. For LGBTQIA+‑specific peer support, you can contact Rainbow Door on 1800 729 367 (10am–5pm) or QLife on 1800 184 527 (3pm–midnight). If your mental health emergency is life‑threatening, call (tel:000).
References
Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Gotham Books.
Castellanos-Torres, E., Ramos-Montes, J., Sala-Llinàs, E., García-Romero, A., Pereira-Pérez, A., Saz-Leal, P., Garriga, M., & Seguí-Díaz, M. (2019). Sexual quality of life in homosexual and bisexual men. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 16(8), 1175–1180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2019.05.014
Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. University of California Press.
Dupras, A. (1994). Internalized homophobia and psychosexual adjustment among gay men. Psychological Reports, 75(1), 23–28. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1994.75.1.23
Hatzenbuehler, M. L. (2009). How does sexual minority stigma “get under the skin”? A psychological mediation framework. Psychological Bulletin, 135(5), 707–730. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016441
Herek, G. M. (2004). Beyond “homophobia”: Thinking about sexual prejudice and stigma in the twenty-first century. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 1(2), 6–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/srsp.2004.1.2.6
Kaufman, G. (1993). The psychology of shame: Theory and treatment of shame-based syndromes (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.5.674
Meyer, I. H., Frost, D. M., Hammack, P. L., & Wilson, B. D. M. (2015). Minority stress, mental health, and suicidality among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. In P. Goldblum, D. Espelage, J. Chu, & B. Bongar (Eds.), Youth suicide and bullying: Challenges and interventions for schools and communities (pp. 177–190). Oxford University Press.
Miller, G. E., Cohen, S., & Bhargava, S. (2018). Integrating the neurobiology of minority stress with an intersectionality framework. In P. A. Frazier & C. R. Berntson (Eds.), Psychological and neural mechanisms of minority stress. Society for Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1177/1179573517744997
Newcomb, M. E., & Mustanski, B. (2010). Internalized homophobia and internalizing mental health problems: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(8), 1019–1029. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.07.003
Nicholson, J., Spooner, R., Ng, T. H. S., D’Souza, M., Bhale, P., & Blum, D. (2022). A systematic review of the neural correlates of sexual minority stress: Towards an intersectional minority mosaic framework. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 13(1), Article 2002572. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.2002572
Pachankis, J. E., Hatzenbuehler, M. L., Rendina, H. J., Safren, S. A., & Parsons, J. T. (2015). LGB-affirmative cognitive-behavioral therapy for young adult gay and bisexual men: A randomized controlled trial of a transdiagnostic minority stress approach. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 83(5), 875–889. https://doi.org/10.1037/ccp0000037
Sexton, R. E., Stein, A. D., Noppert, G. A., & Needham, B. L. (2025). Sexual minority stress and epigenetic aging. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2025.01.020
Stokes, J. P., & McKirnan, D. J. (1997). The life history of the bisexual community. In B. Greene & G. Herek (Eds.), Lesbian and gay psychology: Theory, research, and clinical applications (pp. 239–259). Sage.
Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and guilt. Guilford Press.
