Yeah, that’s actually kind of true. When you’re working, you can shut off a lot of that stuff for a while, and power through. Then that’s nine hours that you don’t have to think about X, Y, or Z. It gives you space, so that emotions aren’t as raw, and it gives you a structure. I would never suggest work instead of therapy, but I know a lot of people that went to work the day after their spouse died because they couldn’t stand to be alone with just their thoughts.

Getting fired for being in a ‘bad mood’ when my ex-spouse told me that they wanted to separate took me from deeply depressed to suicidal, and I got to spend the next four days, three nights in a hospital. If I hadn’t been fired, I would have… Coped. Not well, but I wouldn’t have tried to taste-test a shotgun.

IIRC, this hasn’t been debunked per se, but it was a very small, very limited study, and doesn’t really do a great job of explaining homophobia in a broader population. (I mean, you’re talking about 64 people in total; depending on your inclusion criteria, that could be a meaningless sample size.) Penile plethysmography is a proxy for sexual arousal; it’s useful in some instances–like predicting whether or not someone will commit more sexual offenses in the future–but isn’t even that great in those instances. If I remember correctly, there’s strong evidence that disgust is a trait strongly associated with conservatism, and homophobia is a an extreme disgust reaction.

FWIW, I was casually–but quite virulently–homophobic when I was younger. I’d been raised in a very conservative, evangelical religious group, and I believed all the bullshit that I’d heard about gay people. That changed once I lost religion, and actually met people that were gay. That, of course, is only anecdotal evidence, and does assume that I’m neither gay nor bisexual (and I don’t believe that I am), but it fits with what I’ve seen from conservative thought.

It depends on how you’re looking at homosexuality; are you looking at it as sexual attraction, or as behaviour? If you’re talking about behaviour, then a lot of that is certainly environmental, e.g., if you’re raise a non-permissive location, you’re much, much less likely to engage in homosexual behaviour. But if you’re talking about sexual attraction, then it seems very unlikely that it could be anything other than primarily genetic.

I think that the fact that there’s a difference between how people act, versus how people feel, is what confuses so many people about being straight, gay, bisexual, transgender, etc., and why conservatives feel like there’s a ‘gay agenda’ to make kids gay (or trans) when a permissive society allows more people to act freely on the way that they feel.

If you need to regularly scratch your anus, you probably have parasites. That’s one of the prime ways for some species of parasites (roundworms, I think?, probably tapeworms too?) to spread.

I named a black cat Svartur. I also had a cat named Potet. (“Black” and “Potato” respectively.)

I had a cat that my partner nicknamed pants. He answered to it.