I live in Tucson, a city of 500,000 people. Let’s say, both for the sake of argument and because it’s a good conservative estimate, that 5% of Tucsonans are gay.
That’s 25,000 gay Tucsonans.
There are four gay bars in town. No bath houses. The Outoberfest celebration, a big festival in a local park with music and concession stands and yes, dancing, drew 4,000 people, IIRC. And this is known as a gay-friendly town.
I’d be amazed if the bars had a regular clientele of over 1,500 people each. Let’s say that’s all separate, and that everybody in the bar/festival scene is getting laid all the time. That’s 10,000 promiscuous gay Tucsonans. Or, significantly less than half of Tucson’s gay population.
As you can tell, getting the numbers right on this is close to impossible. What about bargoers who are just there to dance? What about people who hook up over the Internet? How do you determine how many gays are out there, and how often they have sex?
Whatever the case, even in my (obviously facile) extreme exaggeration, less than half of the gay population of Tucson falls into the promiscuous stereotype. The reality is probably a lot less than that.
In the meantime, Tucson has a dozen titty bars, hundreds of bars catering to straight people, an active community of swingers, and the Straight section of the classified ads in the raunchier independent paper is always five to eight pages, while the Gay section barely reaches two columns on a good week.
I’m sure the image of gay people as sexy, fabulous sex machines is appealing to the general population, but the assumption that that typifies gay people is absurd. Which goes along with the general rule that making assumptions based on media stereotypes is foolish.
And to counter your anecdote, Eonwe, here’s mine…
I’ve been in a monogamous relationship with a great, loving guy for eight months now, and have been living with him for the past four of those. We’re very serious about spending the rest of our lives together. Before I met him, I was celibate for two years; dated a few times, but didn’t find anyone interesting. Before that, a three year relationship.
It doesn’t fit the stereotype, and it’s not particularly interesting, so it wouldn’t get much media attention. But according to my experience, that’s what the gay lifestyle is like.
Society expects Mexicans to be lazy, and blacks to have big penises, and blonde women to be stupid, and southerners to be bigoted, and New Yorkers to be rude, and Canadians to have flappy heads. It’s a stereotype, just like any other.
It’s an easy stereotype to fall into, because it’s the most obvious, most media-friendly image of the gay community, most likely to bring in ratings and shocked comments from outraged viewers.
In my opinion, from my perspective, the reason you dismissed this behavior from your friend is that you’ve bought into that stereotype. “It’s just what gay people do.” Well, some do. Some don’t. But if you hadn’t had that stereotype in your way, you might have become concerned for your friend earlier; he might have been having problems which resulted in, or from, his promiscuity. He may have been in the throes of sexual addiction. Or he may have just been having a good time. But the stereotype of “that’s just what gay people do” kept you from seeing your friend as an individual.