When I've looked into the research they tend to be mostly disgusted by homosexuality. Disgust sensitivity and Homophobia correlate whereas neuroticism and homophobia don't which you would predict if homophobes were literally afraid of gay people.

Homophobia is just a nice spin though. For the most part I couldn't care less about who people are dating or boning.

And hydrophobic substances do not express the emotion of fear against water.

Many of them are afraid of a spectrum of things between being thought of as gay to actually being gay, to being afraid that their kids are/will be gay.

It wasn't that long ago that they were claiming that gay marriage and acceptance would cause society to collapse, and believing that God would punish everyone for it. I had a neighbor who claimed that hurricane devastation is God's doing because gay marriage was legalized.

I kind of disagree. To me, there does seem to be an element of fear behind homophobia, and homophobes often act as if "the gay" is something they can catch like a disease, or be talked or tricked into. It's practically a stereotype for homophobes to present as hypermasculine in order to avoid doing or saying anything that might be perceived as "gay." Some men won't even wipe themselves out of fear that the sensation of toilet paper on their buttocks will turn them gay.

And that's not even getting into political and culture fears like male-to-female transgender people "trapping" men into having sex with them, or using the "wrong" bathrooms, or the extreme right-wing fears of a "gay agenda" to undermine traditional Christian-oriented culture, or "feminizing chemicals" being added to the water (the whole "gay frogs" thing) to increase the homosexual population and emasculate male aggression and military readiness. People even argue that homosexuality presents a threat to human evolution itself, despite being present in many known (and not extinct) animal species and likely humanity's own evolutionary ancestors as well as humanity itself.

This whole trope of recasting "anti-X" as "X-phobic" is something that really irks me. Maybe there's a group of closeted X who doth protest too much, but there's generally a much larger group of people who are just assholes to X, and trying to spin it as "they're just afraid of you" smacks too much of the old "the bullies are just jealous". No, often it's not jealousy, it's just people being assholes to targets they think can't fight back.