QC FYI: OK With Gay PDA?... Are You Sure?

Are you OK with gay PDA? That is, same-sex public displays of affection? Would you hold hands or nuzzle with your beau in public? How about kissing in an unfamiliar city or foreign country?

Sure some gay couples may avoid PDA for fear of gay-bashers, but a recent study from Harvard University psychologist Yoel Inbar found that even those who believe gay PDA's OK may nonetheless harbor implicitly negative reactions to the actual act. That is, your pal, straight Bob may be OK with going to the gay bar but still feel a little freaked out when the bear bartender and Abercrombie jock start trading bunny kisses.

Scientific American breaks it down for us:

In one experiment, the researchers randomly assigned 44 undergraduate students from the University of California, Irvine, to one of two different conditions. Half of the participants were asked to read a brief story about the director of a risqué music video which turned out to have the side-effect of encouraging gay men to French-kiss in public. (Think Katy Perry's homoerotic "I Kissed a Girl" but, for this study, a male-on-male "I Kissed a Boy" equivalent.) The remaining participants read the same story, yet in this other version the video was said to have caused straight couples to French-kiss in public rather than gay men. It was stressed to participants in both conditions that the director knew the video was likely to induce public French-kissing but this was not his primary goal in making the video.

The participants were then asked the following questions: (1) Did the director intentionally encourage homosexual men [or straight couples] to French-kiss in public? (2) Is there anything wrong with homosexual men [or straight couples] French-kissing in public? (3) Was it wrong of the director to make a video that he knew would encourage homosexual men [or straight couples] to French-kiss in public? The second two questions in this list, the investigators reasoned, tapped into the participants' explicit beliefs about the "rightness" or "wrongness" of French-kissing in public. And as predicted, these mostly college-aged participants agreed that there's nothing wrong with either straight or gay couples displaying this type of affection in public, nor, for that matter, was it wrong for the director to encourage such behavior in either case. Intriguingly, however, in response to the first question, participants viewed the director's actions as being more intentional when he encouraged gays to kiss in public than straights.

This peculiar finding is interpreted in relation to the well-documented "Knobe Effect," a phenomenon first discovered by Yale philosopher Joshua Knobe whereby people are more inclined to say that a behavior was performed intentionally when they regard that behavior as being morally wrong... In other words, people who have a weaker stomach in general are more prone to find expressions of male-male sexual behavior morally wrong. However, because these implicit (often unconscious) moral judgments are often in conflict with social prescriptions of fairness and equality for gay couples, such individuals are usually completely unaware of their own prejudiced attitudes.

So the bad news is that people who are easily disgusted by things like poop maggots, dead babies, and rotten milk are much more likely to find gay kissing "immoral." But the good news is that another wacky psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, Paul Rozin, found that first-year medical students initially grossed out by corpses felt much less disgusted by them by the end of the year. That means that acquaintance softens prejudice and the more that other people are exposed to to "gross" daddies nuzzling, holding hands, and trading love pecks at the park, the more they'll loosen up over time.

Of course, medical students are forced to spend time with corpses in lieu of a well-paid degree. And we've seen how warm and squishy gay haters suddenly become when there's money involved. So next time you go necking in a park, bring along some bills. If someone bitches, give 'em a ten and tell 'em they have to watch.