Very true. I think for many people of that ilk, they either need to feel a sense of power from being in the majority and having an "out group" they can hate and derive pleasure from denying them rights, or else these sort of people have a need to feel persecuted and oppressed, and to revel in it.
I think you see the same dichotomous behaviour from Islamic religious fanatics. Either they are acting as a very overbearing majority, or else they depict themselves as being oppressed and persecuted, a martyr for the cause.
But I do know most right-wingers aren't like this. Probably a majority of my friends are broadly on the centre-right (though socially liberal and come from a more atheistic, classical liberalism and freedom of enterprise kind-of viewpoint), and the few that are socially conservative in that way are not at all bigoted, we simply disagree on certain subjects like gay marriage but not on the question of whether gay people are people and should have all the basic rights and civil partnerships