How much of homophobia is just generic macho stupidity?

I fear that Stonewall are turning into those old colonels who used to write to the Telegraph complaining that the word ‘gay’ had been taken up by homosexualists. Viz had a letter to that effect a few years back lamenting that the kids have taken a perfectly good word, ‘gay’ as in homosexual, and now use it to mean ‘rubbish’.

Stonewall have a point, of course; however much people might argue that gay in its tertiary sense is entirely separate from its secondary meaning, it’s still clearly going to be hurtful when kids use it as an insult. You can make all the semantic arguments in the world about how words evolve, but even as they do they still carry a legacy. It would be as if ‘Ed West’ came to mean ‘utterly sh** in every way’, and people using it said ‘oh, it has nothing to do with you, Ed, we’re meaning it in an entirely differently way, language changes etc’.