Over the years I have known several people who weren’t really gay but they were unable to attract a mate of the opposite sex and eventually hooked up with their very close friends of the same sex. They watch straight porn and enjoy looking at beautiful women. Most of them that I have known stay in their relationships for very long times usually lifetimes. Years ago pronouns weren’t really discussed so it never came up but now the same couples identify usually as gay. But are they really gay? I noticed that really dumb question but it’s something I wondered about from time to time.
Surely you have heard of bisexuality?
I don’t know how you could possibly know this. Being gay isn’t defined by behaviors, it’s defined by what’s inside a person. There are still lots of reasons why a man might deny to himself and others that he is “really” gay and pretend that this lifelong relationship is only because
which I frankly don’t believe, unless they are rejecting a whole lot of women.
Point the 2nd: there is plenty for a gay man to look at in a lot of straight porn. If there are naked men in it, that’s enough.
Point the 3rd: If the couple now identifies as gay, why wouldn’t you want to believe them?
A startling percentage of straight women enjoy looking at gay male porn, you know. As Marjorie (on “Mom”) says, “I like the sausage party.”
By “hooked up with” do you mean that they entered into a sexual relationship, or a purely platonic domestic partnership? Or do you even know?
I don’t see where pronouns enters into this.
Yeah, that part confused me, too.
Pronouns have nothing to do with sexual preferences.
Why does it matter? They are people navigating a relationship, that’s it.
Possibly they became more open about their relationships and haven’t really changed at all over time in their sense of sexuality. The way people live their lives and revealed their sexual identity in their life styles has changed a great deal over time.
Maybe even though they felt they were attracted to women in general, they could never find a female partner because they were never sexually attracted to any particular woman. This may have been because they were primarily gay,
Many gay men are attracted to beautiful women aesthetically, but not sexually.
There is a spectrum of sexual interest, some people are at the extremes, some people are somewhere in the middle.
I prefer women but I’ve kissed a few guys. I don’t see it as a big deal.
I don’t think that’s startling. The most heterosexual thing a woman could watch is gay male porn.
Assuming that’s a picture of you in your avatar, I think there’s a generational thing here. Sounds to me like the men you are talking about just weren’t fully comfortable with identifying as gay in the 60s or 70s and preferred to compartmentalize this arrangement with the idea that they “just couldn’t find a mate of the opposite sex”. You say that “now the same couples identify usually as gay”, and I’m guessing that’s because now it is much more socially acceptable to be gay.
To me, someone in my 30s, the idea of someone my age or younger claiming that they just couldn’t find a heterosexual partner and so they’re going to hook up with a homosexual partner would seem very strange, but I can kind of see the reasoning for someone from an earlier generation where there was much more stigma about it and people may have felt like they had to “justify” it somehow, whether to themselves or to other people.
Yes, bisexuality is a thing, but the scenario the OP is describing strikes me more as people just not wanting to say that they’re gay.
I can see it…I saw a tv show, a ‘dramedy’, some years ago where a woman visited her divorced old dad to find him living in a very cozy domestic relationship with another older man. (a fussy mother-hen type, bringing him slippers, and cooking.). She was rather surprised, said what was going on and what about those years with his wife (her mother). He said, ‘honey, I LOVED your mother, and I always will…I don’t know what to call this…it’s all very confusing…’ He seemed happy. But he was older, from another era, and could never say he was bi or gay. He just rolled with it.
I think he thinks the word “gay” is a pronoun.
There is a small body of evidence suggesting that the most and homophobes have at least some degree of homosexual inclination, which does make a lot of sense. Why would one have such a strong opinion on something that one has no strong feelings about?
Kinsey suggested that bisexuality was the dominant modality, that true gays and true straights occupy about equal percentages of the population, and the remaining sixty to eighty percent of us lie somewhere between having fantasies about the preference-alternate behavior to being fully open to going either way.
In the end, homosexual sex can le just as pleasurably and emotionally rewarding as straight sex, so if it turns out to be the most practical way to get one’s rocks off, why the hell not? One does not have to act a certain way or be a member of a certain community just because they choose a certain type of partner to be intimate with.
The original version of the constitution didn’t begin with “We The People”.
No, it listed them by name.
I wasn’t exactly sure but suspected that it might have become a pronoun.
Dude, your OP is chock full of pronouns. Not only that, you used they/them pronouns which are the most liberal woke pronouns of all.
Now here’s a very simple sentence, a brief synopsis of your original query, rendered without pronouns.
HoneyBadgerDC said that HoneyBadgerDC thinks some of HoneyBadgerDC’s male friends are gay.
Do you really want to live in a world where everybody talks like that? That’s why we need pronouns.
Now that we’ve established that we need pronouns, we need to recognize that many languages, including English, use gendered pronouns. And sometimes, like if I’m talking to a person on the internet that uses the name HoneyBadgerDC, it is not immediately obvious what gendered pronoun I should be using. And some people, known as the polite ones, really want to use the correct gendered pronoun. And the most efficient way to do that is to ask.
I’m really not sure why so many conservatives are suddenly treating a simple part of speech like it’s sand in their underpants, but there is something I do know. If we tried to make you all feel better by eliminating gendered pronouns altogether, you’d get all hysterical about liberals trying to change the language we all speak for nefarious purposes.
And “gay” as a pronoun makes absolutely no sense at all, unless you’ve redefined pronoun to mean “a word I don’t like”.
I only started hearing about the pronoun thing in the past few months, I really haven’t given it enough thought or spent enough time dealing with it to totally understand what it is all about,