Measurement of internalized homonegativity in gay and bisexual men in Uganda: Cross-cultural properties of the internalized homonegativity scale

Internalized homonegativity (IH) measures the internalization of homophobia in gay and bisexual men. We obtained data on Ross and Rosser's 26-item IH scale from 216 gay and bisexual men in Kampala, Uganda and used confirmatory factor analysis to compare the structure of the Ugandan responses to those of a large US sample of gay and bisexual men. The data indicated that the structure of a reduced 8-item version of the scale was closely matched between the US and Ugandan samples. The three factors that consistently emerged were personal comfort with being gay; social comfort with other gay people; and public identification as being gay. Men who experienced violence or abuse for being gay had significantly higher scores on the personal discomfort with being gay subscale. These data indicate that the structure of IH in gay and bisexual men in East Africa is congruent with that in equivalent western samples and that the IH scale is cross-culturally robust.