Begging your pardon, doctor, but it should be “… you will be rapidly dismissed here.” It’s still splitting a verb phrase, but less flagrantly.
BA journalism; MA English, University of Northern Colorado. 
By the way, can you look at this? I thought it was just a rash … you don’t think it could be some of that gay blood, do you?
Looks like carbuncular trollopsy to me.
:smack: Damnit! Ya forget to put the little hat on *one * time!
What bullshit. Yeah, maybe if you are in San Francisco or Asheville it’s a matter of everyday social acceptance. But trying being out in the workplace in the midwest. Every gay person I know around here, including myself, has gone through a period of wondering if it is safe and prudent (especially in terms of workplace advancement) whether to “come out.” Many haven’t. Or how about the woman at my job who won’t even meet my eyes or interact with me because I’m a lesbian? How the hell does that count as every day social acceptance?
Most of that, I think, is due to the fact that we live in a time in history when attitudes about homosexuality are changing, but have only started to change. Yes, there are some people who will avoid you because their belief system doesn’t let them accept you. But a lot of people just don’t know how to treat a gay person. I know, I know, it’s a stupid excuse, but it’s true. Part of it is the fault of a media industry that has so sexualized people that we are unable to think of anyone in other than sexual terms, and when that person’s sexuality doesn’t match any of the paradigms we were raised with, we just don’t know what to do. Outward hostility and real discrimination have no place in society; but for the confused and uncertain, be patient, they’ll all get it eventually.
I know, you shouldn’t have to be this patient, but you do.
I never called it a trap, and I never said that anyone had to be saved from it. Just because a bigot and I both believe a similar premise doesn’t mean that we drew the same conclusions.
If you care what I think personally about homosexuality and morality, I think that there’s some pretty compelling evidence that most people have the potential to become either gay, straight, or bi based on their experiences in life, especially their childhood. I don’t think anyone’s (or hardly anyone’s) sexual preference is “hard wired” into them, and that their environment and experience plays no part in it.
What is so sacred about sexuality that to suggest it ISN’T the ONLY aspect of one’s personality that is completely immune from environmental pressures is the same as being a bigot?
What is this evidence?
Although you haven’t show any of this “evidence”, I’m going to throw you a lifeline because I think you’re partially correct, although perhaps for the wrong reason.
We know that homosexual sex can be fairly common in some cultures. In Classical Greece and Rome it was not uncommon for “straight” men to also take younger, male lovers. Men in prison will engage in homosexual acts even if they think of themselves as “straight”.
What this tells me is that there is likely to be a continuum of sexual orientation, and that many (most?) people fall somewhere along the continuum rather than at one extreme or another. It also tells me that the sexual act may or may not be tied necessarily to who we are emotionally attracted to (ie, who we might fall in love with). As I noted above, I can’t think of any human behavior that can be labeled accurately with a strict dichotomy.
So a more tolerant society might very well result in some people suddenly “discovering” that they don’t lie at the straight end of the spectrum afterall, but I don’t see any evidence that people will suddenly discover that they were on the opposite end of the spectrum to what they thought.
And in all of this it is necessary to separate out the aspect of who one is willing to have sex with and who one finds oneself romantically attracted to. For someone to “become gay”, they would have to become romantically attracted exclusively to the same sex. That’s a whole different kettle of fish.
An enormous amount of useless verbiage and misunderstanding is the result of people not being clear about what they mean, and usuing sloppy definitions.
SO HERE IS THE RULE. I WILL MONITOR THIS THREAD CLOSELY AND ANYONE, PRO-GAY OR ANTI-GAY, WHO FAILS TO RESPECT THESE DEFINITIONS WILL BE YELLED AT BY ME IN LARGE TYPE! And I can yell loud!
“Turning/becoming/being gay” or “turning/becoming/being straight” are meaningless expressions unless they are better defined, and are hereby banned from this thread.
There is 1) sexual attraction and 2) sexual activity. You MUST specify what you mean.
For example, I have never in my life felt any sexual attraction for the female body. But I have had sexual intercourse (i.e. sexual activity) with a couple of women when I first came out. Interestingly, there are enormous numbers of attractive women who will offer to go to bed with a young man upon learning he is gay. Seems it is some sort of ego trip that strtaight people have about showing gays “what they really need”. Similarly, straight men **DREAM ** about “converting” lesbians with the magic wand betweeen their legs. I know from many lesbians I have spoken to.
So could I have sex with a woman if I decided to? Yes, if you gave me, say, $10,000 or alternatively, put a gun to my head. Or made me live in an era or country where gays are imprisoned or killed and unmarried men viewed with suspicion.
By the same token, if I put a gun to the head of any straight man on this thread and ordered him to, say, blow me, is there any man out there who would prefer to take a bullet than comply? But would that make you gay? Do you understand that sexual activity with a woman would not be the same as sexual attraction to the opposite sex? Do you understand that “being” gay or straight, if it means anything really means you are **attracted ** to the same or opposite sex?
Incidentally, the two women I had sexual intercourse with in my youth both thought it was wonderful. You see, for one thing I didn’t shoot too fast. I had staying power that amazed them. Of course I did! It was not turning me on.
Then again, being a giving person by nature, I sought to make it interesting for them. By putting myself in the female, receiving position in my mind, I quickly understood what I would want from my partner if I were being penetrated.
For example, I understood that in penetrational sex, there is a magic moment in the intercourse when the couple suddenly realizes that the so-called “submissive” partner being penetrated is in reality the one controlling this fantastic dance of excruciating bliss. I would whisper: “Oh baby, yer holdin’ me, yer killin’ me, yer milkin’ me you hot bitch.” I would lick and bite nipples and suck earlobes between these whispered phrases. The women would go WILD!
The saddest part was that once it was over, in both cases the women assumed that I was now straight. One of them kept saying, “But how can you still like guys?” and shaking her head.
So, the moral of this little bit of internet pronography is this. PLEASE be clear whether you mean “being gay” as in “being sexually attracted to your own gender” or whether you mean “engaging consensually in sex with members of your own gender.”
Otherwise, this thread will go around in a circle without resolving anything. A man in his forties who is thought to have left his wife and children and “turned gay” may be doing nothing more than deciding to be who he has really been all along.
In other words, he has always been attracted to men, but for the past 30 years, with his wife, he has engaged in straight sexual activity only.
Now, the amazing and somewhat crackpot idea that started this whole thread seems to be that some teenagers are really attracted to members of the opposite sex, but fail to realize it!!! 
. Instead they continue to mistakenly believe they are attracted to their own gender and to have sex with their own gender, because of the effect a few TV shows and movies and evolving societal attitudes have had on them.
Today, a **small minority ** of movies, television programs and other media deal sympathethically with homosexuality. How many movies do you suppose dealt with human sexuality/love/romance last year? What proportion of these were films like Brokeback Mountain? What proportion showed and glorified hetero sex?
Does somebody seriously expect us to believe that there are healthy young men out there 18 to 20 years old who think that they are gay because they jerked off in back of the garage with their male friends a couple of times when they were 14, and then later watched Will and Grace? You seriously expect me to believe that they have not noticed lately that they get one hell of a woody when Mary Ann rubs her big knockers against them in a bathing suit? They are not aware that their horny young bodies are screaming (get boobs! get pussy!) because they watched “Brokeback Mountain”? So they continue to have sex with other men, even though that is not what they really want?
How stupid do Maerzie and his/her supporters think those young people are? 
I think this is a good point. I’ve seen the reason given for there to be less expressions of affection in public by gay people from parents as being that they don’t want to have to explain the whole thing to younger children. Heterosexuality, OTOH, seems to be seen as perfectly fine to bring up (in kiddish terms) with young 'uns. I think it’s a combination both of homosexuality generally being encountered later in life as well as it being encountered later than heterosexuality that is at least partially to blame for this.
Valteron; while i’m on your side in this, demanding that everyone follow your own personal definitions in caps is probably not the best way to gain sympathy.
I am not really demanding that people follow my own personal definitions. I am mostly joking (have you never heard of a dizzy queen?)
But I am strongly recommending that people make the distinction between “being” gay and “having gay sex” (or straight for that matter), because failure to do so leads to incredible confusion and a “dialogue des sourds” (dialogue of the deaf) as we say in French.
Take the religious groups who claim to “cure” gays. They never explain what they really mean. Do they mean that they talked a deeply religious gay person into refraining from gay sex? He is still gay, then. He just does not have sex. Are they alleging that he now loves to have sex with women when in the past he had no sexual interest in them? Or was the person bi, and they convinced him that to be a good Christian he had to obey only his other-sex urges and only in marriage?
These groups that “cure” gays often have “poster boys” who later end up being discovered in gay bars much to the amusement of the gay community. One of them claimed a few years he had come in to use the washroom. The religious groups say that this proves nothing, since alcoholics and addicts can backslide into their old ways. An ingenious but specious argument.
If there were a religion that opreached that people had to be gay to please God and we could get inside the heads of some impressionable straight people, we could probably claim to have “cured” them in a similar manner if they gave up straight sex for the sake of pleasing God. Every now and then we would catch them with an opposite-sex hooker and say that they were just “backsliding” but could still be “cured”.
Did I “turn gay” at 25? To an outside observer, it may have seemed that way, since until then I had told people I was straight and had gone out with females (but I didn’t tell people I was still a virgin). I am sure that more than one of my friends said I had “gone gay” or “turned gay”. In fact, I was following an exclusive attraction I had had since I first reached puberty 12 years earlier .
Just remember that the restrictions on Mods changing the text of a post do not affect our ability to “fix” vB code.
Hmm, no, wait a minute now, they may be actually disproving their own point. I don’t know anyone who chooses to be an alcoholic, or adopts alcoholism as a lifestyle because it’s more attractive than sobriety. Even if they claim that, like alcoholism, homosexuality is either a disease or a character flaw, then they HAVE to accept that it’s NOT a matter of lifestyle choice. So you see, even their twisted logic works against them.
I’m posting this for younger readers here. It’s just my own opinion, but maybe it will be helpful:
In the fight against ignorance, it’s particularly important to consider your sources. On the topic of homosexuality, I take the word of people who have lived as homosexuals for a long time before I would believe anyone else. (I am a heterosexual female.)
I also believe the physician or physicians who have been posting here for a long time, but I’m skeptical of anyone else claiming to be a doctor. I’m also skeptical of doctors who are malicious. Don’t pay attention to anyone who tries to make you feel bad about who you are naturally.
I also think that there is a law against impersonating a physician. If someone is passing along bad information as if it were true, that is particularly disgusting.
Meh. Gay, straight, whatever… it only has the significance we waste the time to assign to it.
I thought the latest hypothesis for homosexuality involved the timing of hormones in the womb. I recall an article, somewhere (maybe SA) where scientists were able to make gay rats by tampering with the womb’s chemical balance. Or is that not remembering correctly?
Once gain, this posting contains an inherent and built-in prejudice. “Tampering” implies they shifted the rat from what he was supposed to be in the eyes of God to something unnatural.
The very idea of gay rats is laughable!!! Are they the ones who walk on limp-wristed legs and swish? Do they have Bette Midler and Cher albums? Do they decorate their cage in the lab with impeccable taste?
How do they decide the rat is “gay”? Because he tries to hump other male rats!??? Give me a break. Comparing human and animal sexuality is a stupid game and I am always amazed that there are scientists willing to make fools of themselves by announcing some “discovery” about homosexuality and rats.
Human sexuality (or perhaps primate sexuality) is vastly different from that of other animals and even closely-related mammals.
As a gay man of almost 60, I have seen a variety of sexual attractions and responses in men and women. My conclusion is that human sexuality is a VERY complex matter that involves feelings, attractions preferences and social bonding. I will go so far as to say that reproduction is clearly the SECONDARY purpose of sexuality in humans. Humans have no mating period. Only human females want sex even after they are pregnant. Menopausal females want sex (in some cases their sex drive increases). Non of these facts make sense if reproduction is the primary purpose of human sex.
Men who can get an instant rection with one partner stay soft with another who does not turn them on. Human beings choose their sex partners mainly on looks an an undefinable “attraction”. We recoil in horror from sex with close blood relatives, though, no matter how attractive. Sex shows notwithstanding, most of us want sex in private away from prying eyes.
To put it simply, our large brain also happens to be our largest and most important sex organ, as any sexologist will tell you. Most sex happens between your ears, not in your sex organs.
With animals, on the other hand, everything indicates that sex is mainly a mechanical function set off by triggers. They have mating seasons, females lose all sex interest once they are pregnant, and even the higher mammals have no reservation about sex with their offspring, parents, siblings, etc. Animal don’t care who is watching as long as it is not a predator.
Many dogs, if they are petted affectionately and massaged near the legs, will suddenly get horny and start to hump your leg or your arm. Have they become “armsexuals” or “legsexuals”? Or has the touching simply set off some triggers?
Do you honestly believe we can draw valid conclusions about human sexual preferences by analogy with rats?
I remember one study a number of years ago (sorry, I do not have the cite) where scientists attempted to show that homosexuality increases in proportion to population density among rats. The obvious implication was that homosexuality is “increasing” among humans as a reaction to population pressures. As I recall, the scientists, far from being homophobic, were trying to show that homosexuality becomes more prevelant in growing populations, because it acts as a safety valve so to speak.
This study was flawed in so many ways that it is impossible to recount them all. First, there is the underlying assumption that human homosexuality is increasing in absolute numbers, rather than simply becoming more evident as toleration grows in many countries.
But once again, how did they decide the rats were “going gay”? Well, as they reduced their cage space thus creating a denser population, the scientists noticed an increase in male rats on top of other males making sex-like thrusts.
The stupidity of this conclusion is obvious. Small rodents, like rats and mice, regularly crawl over one another in crowded situations. Rats and mice show very little species differentiation. A male rat, already stressed by the shrinking cage(and perhaps horny because of the stress) finds himself on another warm rat body. Perhaps he smells a female in heat nearby in that crowded cage. His gentitals tell him to thrust a couple of times, he does so, and ejaculates over the rat below him, who happens to be a male. His body has done nothing more than react to a few triggers.
This is comparable to gays in human society?
A lot of people are shallow, easily manipulated or just plain stupid and will follow whatever appears to be the “cutting edge” trend of the day. As I’ve said elsewhere, there are thousands of people who would become cannibals if they thought that was the cool thing to do this year. I have very little trouble believing that many people get involved in gay relationships or take up a gay lifestyle because they think it makes them sophisticated, worldly and “cool.”
The idea that everybody is hardwired to be straight, gay or bi is political dogma, not scientific fact.
What is your evidence?
So people get involved in gay relationships because gay is cool?
Seriously? You don’t think they have gay sex because the idea of sex with another man gives them a boner? In the same way that the idea of sex with a woman gives a straight man a boner?
You honestly think that there are men who lust after and desire women, but they deny themselves this, and instead have sex with other men despite having no sexual attraction to men, all in order to seem “cool”?