Was I molested as a child??! I can’t believe I’m answering this, but no.
Well, I figured I knew the answer to that one too. I just wonder why it's such a popular misconception with homophobes?
Thanks, LongDistanceOperator
Because they desperately want to believe that anything they don’t agree with is a product of pathology?
A popular myth, despite its ridiculousness. Is every heterosexual molested by their mother as a child? On the flip side of the coin, wouldn’t someone traumatized by this molestation then automatically rebel against similar treatment? Amusingly enough, this is another fairly popular myth: “lesbians are just poor suffering women who were raped early on and now hate all men”. This contradicts the gay male myth, of course, but it’s not like the actual substance makes a difference. Someone who wants to be a bigot can always invent a supposedly-justified reason for being so.
I implore those who target “ignorant @#%@s who post homophobic trash” not to see this post as another one in that dimension.
But I’m curious about something I’ve noticed, and I’d like to report it and ask for dispassionate discussion. I stress that my evidence is anecdotal and I’m not drawing any universal conclusions from it.
As those of you who know me are aware, I spent nearly five decades in a phobic small city (not just homophobic, everything-unconventional-o-phobic). I was acquainted with a few of the (apparently small) gay and bi people there, including a few who were closeted and apparently felt I was sufficiently “safe” to be out to.
I would venture to guess, based on memories of twenty years or so of talking to these people, that approximately half the 20 or so of them had been “molested” in youth or adolescence. (Quotes on “molested” because some of those with adolescent sexual contact with older people had welcomed the encounter and would not feel that it was molestation – I think matt_mcl can speak more fluently than I to the conceptualization involved there.)
About ten years ago, my wife and I got involved in a ministry to troubled, antisocial youths. Of the 22 people we worked closely enough with to discuss their younger years in any detail, 20 had been abused, six of them sexually. Of that six, two reported it as mildly traumatic but pleasurable, and were about Kinsey-one bisexual in their orientation. The other four were significantly homophobic in the literal meaning as a result – fearful of gay people and feeling hatred towards them as a result of a generalization from their molesters towards gay people in general – and don’t bother correcting me that the molesters were not “gay” in the sense used here – I’m reporting their reactions, not the psychological truth behind molestation.)
This makes me wonder if molestation is in some way a triggering factor for at least an appreciable minority of gay and bi people – having discovered that they derived pleasure from the childhood/adolescent contact, they were more open to accepting their own same-sex attraction than the average person. Or perhaps there’s a different way of looking at it, which I’m not seeing.
I hasten to add that this is solely anecdotal, and I put no store in the statistics I would derive from that limited sample. But the proportions, substantially higher than one might expect from a random sample, cause me to wonder if there is some interrelationship there. (Needless to say – I hope – I’m not drawing the conclusion that Long D.'s co-poster did, simply wondering if the correlation I observed has any validity or is simply the distortion of a relatively small sample.) Any thoughts?
I suppose others have stated this, also, but I was never molested as a child.
Nevertheless, I realized at a young age (probably 8 - 10) that I preferred men to women. Of course, I didn’t know what it was and I sure couldn’t ask my parents.
I find the idea that being molested would make a person more attracted to a person of the same sex rather than the opposite, to be rather strange.
I was never molested nor abused in any form as a child.
That having been said, I do know several gay people who were.
At the same time, though, I have had the “abuse” conversation with far more who say that they were never.
I think it’s a bit of an impossible statistic to prove. Abuse is such an underreported thing that it’s very hard to get many good statistics on it, and when you combine it with something as stigmatized as sexual orientation… well, those aren’t easy numbers.
To Esprix and the gay guys & gals, have you ever been accused of acting “too gay” or not “gay enough”. Do you see a gay person who might be a bit, uh, more flamboyant, than most and say, “You need to tone it down a bit”? I know this is the media’s fault, but it seems that every time a gay pride parade makes the news you usually only see some hairy, 300lb guy in a tutu waving a magic wand or a big muscle woman on a Harley. They rarely show a “normal” (that is, not stereotypical)-looking gay guy or woman. How does this make you feel when you see this?
Oh, my. To live in a world where hairy 300-lb. guys are stereotypically gay! dreams
Oh, sorry…please stay in your car until the hijack has come to a complete stop…
But to answer your question, it is a media thing to focus attention on the parts of the community that will be the most sensationalistic. “White Democrat Monogamous Vanilla Gay Men and Lesbians United” will be ignored in favor of “Dykes on Bikes” or “Genderf*ck Incorporated” or “Radical Faeries”. Personally, I find great joy in the fact that the gay community is so generally accepting of its more diverse aspects (though that’s not a universal characteristic…I’ve known my share of judgmental gays). It’s a bump in the road toward general societal acceptance, a bump we have to navigate every time the media covers a pride parade or protest march, but if we can’t be honest about who constitutes the gay community and fight for them as much as for the yuppie gays, we’re selling our souls.
jayjay
Personally, I have never been accused of being ‘too gay’ or ‘not gay enough’, but I haven’t been gay very long (well, all my life, really, but just out in the last 3 or 4 years), and I wouldn’t ask someone to ‘tone it down’. They have to live their life their own way. I’m a pretty middle-of-the road guy (except maybe in bed) with neither strong feminine or steroidal-male characteristics and it’s doubtful that anyone can tell that I’m gay just by my actions.
It’s true that the media focuses on the more extreme cases in the Gay Pride parades but I don’t think that hurts us much. They always have an overall view of the attendees so the impression is of normalness.
Incidentally, the local ladies motorcycle group (the Cycle Sluts) is anything but a ‘big muscle woman on a Harley’.
Now another question, and maybe a slight hijack. I’ve never been able to figure out what guys are looking for when they advertise for a ‘straight acting’ or ‘masculine’ partner. I never know whether I qualify to answer the ad, so I don’t.
Sorry. I meant ‘Dykes on Bikes’. ‘Cycle Sluts’ is a male group.
Well, I look for a guy whose behavior is masculine rather than fey, who doesn’t wave his hands like Bette Davis when he talks, who is stable and not “dramatic,” and most importantly, who has a masculine voice rather than an effeminate one. A guy doesn’t have to be Russell Crowe, but he had best not be Richard Simmons. Yes, I know fem guys are just being themselves, but I find it to be a strong turn-off. I’m all for Radical Faeries doing their pixie thing in gay parades because everyone has a right to acceptance and self-expression, but for that visceral, libidinous sexual response, a man has to be manly to get me going.
Whew.
I just spent the past two hours reading the ORIGINAL ‘Ask the Gay Guy!’ thread in its entirety, and reading and scanning all the subsequent threads as well. Double phew!!
I’ve learned a lot from reading through allllllll those posts and I’ve discovered I do have a few questions.
As an African-American, I know that one constant in our culture is the use of gay people, particularly men, as the subjects/targets of pointed comedy bits, especially when performed for African-American audiences. Black comedians have been doing it for decades and one only has to look to the top male comedians (ANY of the Wayans Bros., Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor (not much), Redd Foxx, D.L. Hughley, Steve Harvey, Cedric the Entertainer, Bernie Mac, etc.) to know that it’s basically a rite of passage. Care to comment how offensive the material is/was, and whether there were any instances where a black performer did a routine where it was not offensive at all?
Would anyone care to venture an opinion why straight black men subject black gay men – moreso than the rest of society, it seems to me – to this relentless and (largely) verbal gay-bashing?
What was the smoking gun that outed J. Edgar Hoover?
Did America ever have a ‘confirmed bachelor’ for president?
James Buchanen. 15th president. There was a thread about his sexuality a week or two ago in GQ (?). Status: undetermined.
I feel that the most visible segment of the gay community has long been rich and middle class white gay males. What I’ve seen this translate to is that many other communities, particularly those of color, feel that gay people simply don’t exist within their community. This lends to extreme invisibility as well as easy targets.
I have a black gay male friend who told me once that he was accused of being a race traitor by someone after he came out. Many Asian languages don’t even have a word for lesbian. The first Indian film that dealt with lesbianism, Fire, is banned from the country.
I wouldn’t say that various minority communities are inherently more homophobic, but rather that there’s a “not among us” mentality that is only slowly being displaced.
Why, on this very message board… :rolleyes:
I have been lax, but hopefully the holiday weekend will give me a chance to catch up. I’ve been kind of burned out on the SDMB over the past couple of weeks because of some other stuff that’s been happening online, but hopefully I’ll pull out of it soon.
Esprix
Have I been accused of being too gay?
Oh, honey.
sigh
I’ve not been accused of acting “too gay”. In fact, no one really knows until I drop a hint, or talk about guys (such as with one of my coworkers). If I see a very effeminate guy, i do think maybe they could tone it down a bit, but then I realize that’s them being them. Why should I tell them to tone it down? It’s their life, i think to myself.
As to media showing the more extreme segments, i dont mind too much really. I do understand it’s the media’s job to get all the flash shown at things like that, so i pretty much expect them to do that. BUT, i think it would be nice if they would show a few more regular people (meaning middle of the road in dress, etc).
Off to Gay Day in Walt Disney World, so I’ll try and catch up upon my return. 
Esprix
Have I ever been accused of acting too gay or not gay enough? Well, no, not exactly like that. In my experience, the lesbian version is:
“You’re not REALLY a lesbian!” (Spoken by another lesbian. Straight people are usually willing to take my word for it.)
This is always a reaction to something that has nothing to do with who I sleep with. It’s who I vote for, how I dress (look, I just <b>like</b> skirts, OK?), what I think, etc. Drives me CRAZY. Much worse than all the lesbianism-fetish straight boys.
My response is always: “Look, I’ve been living with a woman for eight years. I have sex with her. I love her. What’s left?” The people who make these kinds of statements never seem to find this sufficiently compelling, although I can’t think of another definition that applies.