I thinks it's something to do with 1) the Church and 2) not being part of the whole collective psyche thing that experienced Stonewall, etc.

Considerable lionising of the male physique?  What's more gay than that?  

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

I suspect that for many former Soviet states the dissolution of the Soviet Union presented an opportunity for large segments of the population to revert to pre-Soviet social and religious norms, and that these norms turned out to have been frozen by suppression since the outbreak of WW II.  So, for many in these countries, on social issues, it is as though the last three quarters of a century never happened.  Free at last--to be the homophobic, misogynist folk they had always wanted to be.  

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Not all of them... remember Sparta?

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

Israel doesn't seem to have any problem with gays in the military. Maybe you should refine it to "highly militarised nationalist states which don't really need the military", so that they can afford to kick gays out. Any figures for whether gays were more tolerated in the U.S. military when they had conscription? I remember (from the early 80s) fellow students describing  the tricks people used in the U.S. to try to convince the army that they were gay...