wolfman Um… no, I don’t think there a correlation between being gay and being “hi-tech”, certainly not as strong as you are suggesting. Yes, a high-school boy who is gay (aware of it or not) might tend to be more of a longer than the average straight boy, and therefore be involved in more of his own, solitary pursuits. But I don’t think those solitary pursuits are more likely to involve electronics and computers than, say, playing a musical instrument, reading or martial arts (my own solitary pursuits as a teenager). An extension of your theory would be to suppose that any “solitary” profession – musician in a symphony orchestra, publishers/editors/authors, martial arts masters – ought to have a higher-than-average proportion of gays. I don’t have statistics to back this up, but on the face of it, this seems very unlikely.
Also, I would think that when the current Silicon Valley intelligentsia were teenagers, computers and electronics were not as readily accessible to them as such things are to today teen-age boys.
However, it is an interesting theory and perhaps not without merit. Worth exploring.
freyr So are you saying that you, like C.S. Lewis, are a lapsed atheist???
Christina25 Still working that issue out for myself. I was raised as a Catholic, and I still appreciate some aspects of the Church, but I have a hard time reconciling myself to a religion which teaches, however tolerantly, that I cannot be myself. This is important to me, because I was raised in a fairly religious family and so I hesitate to reject the values and beliefs with which I was raised outright. Then again, I have always had an interest in paganism, wicca and things like astrology and Tarot-card reading, even before I knew I was gay. So perhaps coming out is the most personal, but not the only, thing which has brought me to my current “crisis of conscience”. Luckily I don’t have anyone (family or otherwise) beating me over the head with the Bible, telling me how wicked I am and rejecting me because their religious belief teach them intolerance and disrespect.
I have been to Unitarian Universalist services a few times and felt very comfortable there. They are very accepting and welcoming to people of all persuasions, and recognize that every religion – every person, perhaps – contains some grain of truth from which we can all learn and benefit. I find this a beautiful way of looking at the world.
I still believe in god in some sense of the world. Lately I have found myself speaking of “the Universe” where others might use the word “God”.
(Oh, and it took me another year before I had sex for the first time.) And accepting faiths? Quite a few, but none with the numbers of those that don’t. (Although I should clarify – they accept homosexuals, but not homosexual behavior.) Some that do include them, warts and all, include the Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, Metropolitan Community Church, and United Church of Christ. As far as coming out, my father called me a butt-fucking cock-sucking faggot, and my mother said, “I thought you were a gift from God, but I guess this is God’s joke on me.” My evil sister told me my life was useless since I was just going to die from AIDS anyway, and my good sister (several years later when I finally told her) said, “Well duuuuuuh!” Of course, that was almost 15 years ago – as of last week, my mother was upset because Dr. Boyfriend and I aren’t dating anymore, as she liked him (and he’s a doctor). She’s come a long way, baby! In school homosexuality was never mentioned in any capacity, but then our school had virtually no sex education in general (it’s tough being a white bread suburbanite). Everything I learned I learned in college. And the “indoctrinating” the radical right accuses people of is nothing more than teaching tolerance for those who are different from you, encompassing race, gender, orientation, religion, and a host of other things. Yeah, that’s bad for society… :rolleyes:
I once started a thread to get a pseudo-list of queer folk hereabouts – go see if you can find it in MPSIMS.