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The study paints a pitiful portrait of the typical homophobe: often socially marginalised and personally frustrated, left behind by Denmark's neoliberal residual welfare state. These individuals are statistically more likely to possess lower educational attainment, grapple with economic insecurity, report poorer health, and suffer unemployment or loneliness. Their intimate lives reflect a pattern of dissatisfaction and constraint, marked by later sexual debuts and fewer partners. Homophobic men are more likely to report having bad sex lives while homophobic women are more likely to be virgins.

Education, or rather the lack of it, goes hand in hand with bigotry. Many homophobes report never receiving sex education in school and never having discussed sex with their parents.

Homophobia correlates with a broader landscape of restrictive sexual puritanism. A striking 79% of homophobic men and 73% of homophobic women also condemn sex outside marriage, a view shared by only 8% of non-homophobic men and 12% of non-homophobic women. Similar correlations exist for views on topics such as pornography, sex on the first date, and multiple partners. Homophobia as a stand-alone belief among otherwise permissive opinions on sexuality, so-called selective homophobia, the study notes, is vanishingly rare.

Urbanisation, too, plays a role with homophobia being more prevalent outside the cosmopolitan cocoon of the Capital City Region.

Religious affiliation unsurprisingly acts as a reliable friend to intolerance. Among Muslims in Denmark, only 17 percent of men and 26 percent of women find same-sex relations morally acceptable. Among other religious groups, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and fundamentalist Christian groups like "Inner Mission", the darkness is similar. However, even among supposedly enlightened secularists, 19 percent of men and 8 percent of women harbor homophobic views.

State media, reporting on the study, has conveniently amplified the Muslim angle. One might cynically anticipate Denmark’s political elite wielding these findings primarily as a cudgel for islamophobic attacks, deftly sidestepping the pervasive rot within broader society.

Meanwhile, LGBTQ Danes continue to pay the price. Queer individuals face markedly higher rates of loneliness, anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide. A recent string of violent attacks on gay men in the city of Odense provide brutal evidence that homophobia is not some abstract difference of opinion but a daily, lingering threat to life and limb.

Since homophobia is so clearly tied to educational neglect, the researchers behind the study recommend strengthening sex education and ensuring that all students in primary and secondary schools receive comprehensive, mandatory sex education.

Denmark may continue to drape itself in rainbows but beneath the self-congratulatory phrases, something old and sour still lingers, a stark reminder that bigotry does not simply evaporate because a society closes its eyes and proclaims itself tolerant.

Source:

• Ny undersøgelse: Mere end hver femte dansker har homofobiske holdninger, press release from the Danish State Serum Institute, July 11th 2025