You thought like i did, Tom Jones but then the male side of my brain kicked in. He was reffering to The only Gay in the Village which i thought was very clever.

I have spent many months convincing you I am not male and finally it's paying off

If I can offer an overly intellectual opinion, I did make an interesting note from Randall Collins' book on the micro-sociology of violence recently:

'Despite the use of sexist epithets to insult men they do not like, the hooligans of the 1980s were ardent admirers of Margaret Thatcher and the queen—presumably because these could be used to assert English solidarity and superiority, and to put down respectable educated liberals and leftists; although in Italy they chant ‘f*** the Pope!’, at home they defend the Catholic church, out of hostility to the Anglican establishment (Buford 1993: 95). The pattern is much like that analyzed by Katz (1999) in his study of freeway road rage: curses are brought to one's lips because they fit the particular target one is confronting at the moment; they need not be based on deeply held beliefs, and the repertoire can be inconsistent and contradictory from occasion to occasion.'

I'd suggest that homophobic taunts are a similar phenomenon: those chanting mostly aren't deep-seated homophobes, but instrumentalise a background convention of homophobia, as Anthony King has argued in the case of most racist chanting.

So I don't think that most people joining in with these chants are particularly hateful; but intent is somewhat irrelevant when the effect is chanting that equates homosexuality with all sorts of negative traits. There's no room for subtlety in a crowd.