Abstract

This study attempts to examine whether attitudes of cisgender heterosexuals toward lesbians, gays, and bisexuals (LGB) differ depending on their gender and sexual orientation and whether contact experience, religious fundamentalism, and essentialist beliefs are related to attitudes of cisgender heterosexuals toward LGB. To address these questions, we conducted an online study of cisgender heterosexuals aged from 19 to 39 years and analyzed data from 308 participants. Participants responded to the attitudes toward lesbians and gays scale, attitudes regarding bisexuality scale, direct/indirect contact experience questions, multi-dimensional fundamentalism inventory, essentialist beliefs about homosexuality scale, and other demographic questions. As a result, participants showed a more negative attitude toward men sexual minorities compared with women sexual minorities and bisexuals compared with homosexuals. In addition, indirect contact experience-parasocial interaction, a subscale of religious fundamentalism-worldly rejection versus worldly affirmation, and subscales of essentialist beliefs about homosexuality-discreteness, immutability, and universality were significant predictors of attitudes of cisgender heterosexuals toward LGB. Specifically, attitudes toward LGB were found to be more negative if participants perceived LGB characters in the media less socially attractive and realistic, if they supported religion over secularity, and if they believed that there was fundamental psychological difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals, that sexual orientation was a category that can be changed throughout a lifetime, and that homosexuality was historically and culturally limited. In addition, we conducted separate hierarchical multiple regression analyses on attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual women, and bisexual men and found that attitude predictors were somewhat different. This study is meaningful in that it examined cisgender heterosexuals toward LGB in various ways. Finally, the study’s limitations and directions for future research were discussed.