Second, I have to leave work and go to rehersal! I’m very much enjoying this conversation and hope it can continue tomorrow, but I’ve got to say goodbye to the internet until I get back to work tomorrow AM. Thank you MrVisible and Jerevan for participating in this. It’s a tough question for me to wrap my brain around, and getting around prejudices and perspectives (or even identifying them) to see “truth” (whatever that is) is a challenge.
Eonwe: Oops, sorry. I am usually very careful about using pronouns to refer to a SDMB poster until gender has been established. It was not a deliberate choice; unconsciously I think I associated your username with “Eowyn”, one of Tolkein’s characters!
Or, as you have already guessed, perhaps being more open about their sexual behaviors than your straight friends. Being more honest, open, up-front about sexuality in general is often part of “coming out” and becoming comfortable with who you are as an individual, not trying to be what someone else expects you to be.
Personally, I think it’s rather sad if your gay friends really think that “being gay means being promiscuous”.
Hmmm, this is topic for another thread entirely but – no, I don’t think so. The point of gay pride is that in spite of our sexuality and expressions thereof, we are the same as you and we’d like to be treated accordingly.
It would seem that gay people can be a bit more fast and loose with their relationships, since there is no possibility of pregnancy, which is the primary reason for monagamy in most of the world, I imagine.
(Something like this: Since human females don’t physically ‘advertise’ when they are in heat, so in theory, human men are encouraged to stick with their women, to increase the odds that any offspring she does have is his. It was on ‘Evolution’ on PBS a bit ago, I forget the details.)
But with gay persons, there is no possibility of pregancy, and barring STD’s, there is no consequence to being promiscuous. Hence, there is no social need to keeping a monogamous parter, only personal reasons.
Of course, in the real world, promiscuity runs rampant among heterosexuals, or we would not have so many ‘unwanted’ children, unwed (or nearest cultural equivalent) mothers, etc.
I wouldn’t know where to begin to look for reliable statistics on these issues, but would be curious to know whether your friend’s anecdotal expereince with promiscuity has until now been your main up-close view of (at least one slice of) gay culture.
My own anecdote: I went to college at NYU, in Greenwich Village (aka Gay Mecca), which was my first knowing encounter with a gay person of any sort. (After I left for school, a close male friend propositioned my boyfriend, which is how I discovered he [the friend, not the boyfriend] was gay, but that’s a story for another day.) In my 3 years there (1986-89), I made many gay friends, and saw their relationships, in all their various durations, up close and personal. Some were committed and mushy, some were one-night stands and mindless flings, and some were just confused, like any relationship where at least one party is eighteen years old.
At NYU, what was then called the Gay & Lesbian Union was the largest student organization on campus, with some 2,000 members (some were more, ummmm, active than others. But boy, did they know how to throw a great dance!) All my gay friends were at least nominally members of the GLU, and all commented on how the first GLU dance of the school year basically turned into a meat market, with the more seasoned members scoping out the freshmen, who were mostly away from home for the first time (or not even away from home yet, as NYU has a large commuter student population) and newly out of the closet to find their first fling of the fall season. My friends all thought it was a disgusting phenomenon, as the older guys were esentially taking advantage of the sexual confusion and naivete of the new guys to pounce on them.
My friends also all commented that when a guy comes out, he frequently goes through a period of screwing everything he can lay hands on, which in my experience is not generally what happens when a straight person first becomes sexually active. (All but one of my straight friends lost their virginity to someone they had been dating for a pretty long stretch first, ranging from several months on one end, to the extreme of refraining from age 17 to their wedding night at age 25 or so on the other end.)
Maybe the ravenous pouncing is because of the generally longer delay for gay guys between hitting puberty and getting nookie in line with one’s sexual preference? Any thoughts from the gay guys out there?
Re: ravenous pouncing-- is it not reasonable to assume that a room full of straight men (already self-selected by their decision to attend a dance which attracted the young and clueless frosh) would prove equally ravenous if presented with a whole bunch of nubile, inexperienced women whom they would have reason to believe might be open to their advances?
The words “little sister rush” from my college days (in the misty past) come to mind…
Dunno, as NYU had essentially no Greek scene (there was one frat with maybe 20 members, and they had no house - this being Manhattan), so at least at my school there was no parallel situation.
If I had to take a wild guess, though, I’m guessing the hypothetical room full of straight guys would have a larger proportion of people who had already acted on their urges than the analogous room full of 18-year-old gay guys.
On the question of statistical support for the idea of homosexual promiscuity, in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, Matt Ridley refers to a Kinsey Institute study of gay men in the San Francisco Bay area ( the study appears in D Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality according to the bibliography) which found that “seventy-five percent had had more than one hundred partners; twenty-five percent had had more than one thousand.”
He goes on to suggest that this is for the intuitively obvious reason that men have ( on average) stronger sex drives than women and so sexual encounters are more frequent when both potential participants are male.
Hold on a sec’. When did promiscuous straight men start attracting nasty names? (I mean, I’ve been called a slut before… but in a positive way!) In my experience, it would seem straight men are met with approbation rather than disapproval for our ‘whorishness’. I don’t think there’s a double standard for gay men vis a vis straight men and women. Just the same ol’ double standard we’ve applied to men and women for the past millenia or two.
Well, “ravenous pouncing” might be putting it rather strongly in some cases, but I think you have something here. At least, it matches my own initial experiences in coming out at age 25, knowing no other openly gay people, and never having had sexual contact with anyone (man or women) before. Essentially, I was exploring certain aspects of myself, emotionally and sexually, in my mid-20s which most people explore and develop in their teens – when social and parental restrictions create a great deal more structure for them. So yes, in a sense I was “making up for lost time”, acknowledging and releasing a lot of long-pent-up energies.
Straight kids are given some kind of guidance, structure, role models, etc. for the development of their sexual selves – often confused, mixed signals, but signals nonetheless. Gay people often go through the initial stages of sexual development alone, whether as adolescents or adults, because our society generally offers, at best, no guidance or signals at all, and at worst, negative signals.
So as I and others have said earlier: society does not define a place and path for gay relationships the way it does for straights. From our point of view, there are no rules except the ones you make for yourself. And in order to determine where your own boundaries are, sometimes you have to go beyond them. Of course, straight people go through this process as well, but within social structures that are already better-defined and acknowledged.
I’m familiar with the study. Of course you realize that it was taken in San Francisco in the mid-1970s, using the population of local bathhouses and bars as its sample, and was never intended to be representative of the gay population as a whole.
Drawing conclusions about the nature of present-day gay life from one of the most bacchanalian gay environments ever recorded is about as valid as making assumptions on the nature of straight life based on exhaustive interviews conducted at the Playboy mansion in 1978.
Hmm… so, women have weaker sex drives than men, huh? I wouldn’t know about that. Any women want to comment on that one?
I think there’s something to that as well. It is a lot like making up for lost time, at least when you’re younger.
It isn’t only sex, though. When I was living in Vancouver, a local gay organization held a “prom-for-people-who-never-got-to-go-to-the-prom” type of thing. There are a lot of experiences we feel left out of, if we were closeted in high school.
Is the first statistic inclusive of the second? Or does it represent 100 to 1000? If it’s the latter, then 100% of gay men in the Bay Area have had more than 100 partners, and I’d be very skeptical.
Gathering information on gay life is hard, because so many people are in the closet or just concerned about their anonymity.
For the record, at 26 I’ve had about thirty partners in my life, and almost all of those were within the my first five years of coming out, when I was “making up for lost time.” I’ve known a few guys who are saving themselves for “domestic partnership.” And I have a close friend whose number of partners is probably nearing, without exagerration, ten thousand by now. There’s an enormous range of sexual behaviour in the gay community, depending on personal tastes and personal morals. Most of us tolerate the others’ way of life, although there is some pontificating on all sides.
Most gay men I know apply this tolerance to our straight friends as well. If there’s a double-standard, it’s probably being applied to straight people by straight people.
I think the former because a) this is the usual way of presenting such statistics, and b) otherwise it would have the consequence you describe. Thus the claim is that 25% of the sample had fewer than 100 partners; 50% had between 100 and 1000 partners; and 25% had more than 1000.
As you point out, drawing conclusions from these data is problematic. Not having access to the original data, I do not know if any attempt was made to collect data from closeted gay men. If not it may be true that out gay men have more same-sex partners that those that are not out ( certainly this seems plausible). Secondly, all the men questioned were from the San Francisco Bay area. Though I am no expert, I believe this area has a reputation which suggests that its residents may well have had a greater than average number of partners. Thirdly, the Symons book mentioned was published in 1979. Again ( though again my ignorance must be borne in mind) this decade had a reputation for hedonism; this might lead us to infer that these numbers are higher than current ones ( and the rise of AIDS may reinforce this belief). All in all, the only conclusions we could feel comfortable in drawing relate to the number of partners of out gay men in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970’s.
Unfortunately I have not found any more recent ( or geographically widespread) data. Still, as long as we remember the limitations of the data, we do not need to dismiss them as worthless.
I’m skeptical of statistics in general, but I’ve found that statistics gathered about the gay community are particularly shoddy.
It comes down to the problem of finding gay people. You’re not listed in the phone book with a “g” next to your name. So what pollsters usually do, at least in Montreal, is leave a box of surveys wherever they think gay people are likely to go.
Usually this includes at the entrances of gay bars. And In medical clinics in gay neighbourhoods. And with the people who run gay youth organizations. You can see how the choice of areas could skew the statistics on promiscuity.
Then, of course, there’s the human factor. Some people are going to brag about their number of partners. Others will downplay it because of the taboo on promiscuity. And, of course, many people simply will never pick up or even notice the surveys at all.
The challenging aspect of this is (as with any issue) is that there are so many “definitive” answers coming from all sides. In the past few days in a number of threads I’ve observed many dopers, gay and not, have pretty strong views that gays are one way or another. It makes me wonder if it’s possible to talk about a common experience for anybody in any circumstance.
One person saying we’re the same, and another seeming to say that there are irreconcilable differences. That’s the beauty of life and orriginal thought, I suppose.
No one likes to be put into a group where traits are associated with that person that he/she doesn’t have.
Eonwe, I think you have hit on it something: individuals who have a common experience may not have anything in common but that experience, and so one has to be careful drawing conclusions about an entire group of people on the basis of a single shared trait or behavior or experience.
Actually, when I said “we are the same as you”, I meant that there is just as much diversity of thought, modes of living, and perceptions as there are among straights. I am gay, but I don’t think of myself as living “as a gay man” or “in the gay world”. The way I live, think and perceive the world is similar to that of some people, different from others. I don’t think of my sexual orientation as the defining element of my personality and life, but others do and so live, think and perceive differently. For my part, I say that all I really want is for my sexual orientation to be respected in the same way I respect differences in others, whether that is a differing view on the idea of “being gay”, heterosexual orientation, female gender, Muslim faith, and so on.
When I examine things this way, the larger boundaries break down and we are left with a mosaic in which no one piece truly represents anything about the whole picture, or any significant part of it.
I think that Brutus made a very good point and it is being overlooked: the spectre of pregnancy is always present when dealing with heterosexual sex. Unless you’ve had surgery or stick to non-coital sex, every time heterosexual people have sex they risk having a baby: sure, birth control can be very effective when used reliably, but the fact is that it often isn’t used reliably, and even when it is, it can fail. Many of the uber-promiscious people (male and female) I know have at least one child that came from a casual relationship: sometimes that casual relationship developed into a short marrige because of the child, but then falls apart again. In these relationships the non-custodial parent is usually completly absent, both physically and finacially, and the custodial parent is, more often than not, a poor parent. It isn’t good for a child to be born to poeple that don’t even know each other. It seems shameful to me to risk making a baby with someone you don’t admire, and my reaction to promiscuity tends to be directly in proportion to the precautions a promiscious person takes to avoid being pregnant (and I have known way too many people, male and female, who took few or none).
As pregnancy isn’t an issue in homosexual sex, I think of it more as a hobby. Like any hobby, someone who engages in it to the point of obsession is going to freak me out: I would have trouble relating to someone who had had 100 partners in five years not becasue it was “wrong” but because it seems to me that that level of promiscuity requires a certain level of committment: oyu have to go out and meet people alot, and I, myself, can’t imagene valueing sex so much that it was worth giving up all the other things you wouldn’t have time for. I feel the same way about people who go to the mal every week. But there are plenty of poeple who couldn’t understand why I would be willing to waste all my potential sex-having-time reading the SDMB.
I will say that in the case of an individual that I knew, homosexual, or heterosexual, I might be concerned if I felt they were using sex to avoid dealing with other things, or as the only way to garner approval. It is true that promiscuity can be a symptom of certain problems. But ithat cretainly isn’t the case in all, or most, cases, and it is never a judgement I would make without knowing the person personally and being aware of other elements of their personality/lives.
