It is victim blaming, we are not the reason homophobia exists or that people become extremely homophobic. It is not oppressed people that cause their own oppression, we don’t in some way “deserve” it.
Some aspects of the identity of sexuality may be related to physical and things we cannot control, but at the end of the day it is an identity. If they do not see themselves as gay, they are not. It is not for you to assign an identity to someone, even someone you don’t like. Even if someone might identify as gay outside of these power structures, in here they aren’t. Even if they would be gay, they participate in our oppression because being straight is beneficial to them, not because they “are secretly gay”. If they did homophobia because they were “ashamed” it wouldn’t be helping so many of them get into positions of power
i have some vague recollection of studies finding that homophobic school bullies were significantly more likely than the background rate to be gay, but that would’ve been 90s data or earlier and never should’ve been applied to adults.
why not? we do this across time and space when we’re reclaiming our history while understanding that other societies had different frameworks. obviously a malicious closet case isn’t part of the community, but someone exclusively sexually attracted to their own gender is definitionally gay.