Homosexuality and homophobia have been the subject of increasingly prominent political debates in Western democracies over the last forty years, as activists and movements struggle for and against greater rights for gays and lesbians (Hardisty 1999, 97-125; Adam, Duyvendak and Krouwel 1999; Durham 2000, 63-83). The same period has also seen, according to a number of scholars, significant growth in and success for radical right political parties (Betz 1998, 1; Eatwell 2000, 407; Schain, Zolberg and Hossay 2003, 3). In this paper, I seek to examine the intersection of these two trends. Although it is widely observed that populist radical right political parties are characteristically homophobic, this is often qualified with suggestions of various exceptions or counter-examples (Bacchetta and Power 2002, 10; Mudde 2007, 67). I aim to explore and interrogate the connection between homophobia and the radical right and to think about how to do this systematically. How significant a presence is homophobia in radical right parties’ ideology and policies? And what hypotheses might be developed and tested to explain comparative patterns of homophobia across radical right parties? A treatment of these questions that is fully comprehensive in terms of data sources and relevant cases would be a major project beyond this paper’s scope. However, I believe that a careful and thorough but more limited initial investigation can be conducted