It’s about gender identity, not about sexual orientation (which are two different things).
Where the “pronoun thing” has happened, especially in the past few years, has primarily been with people who don’t strictly (or exclusively) identify as “male” or “female,” and who feel that using “he” or “she” in addressing them doesn’t reflect what their gender is.
https://www.glaad.org/how-sexual-orientation-different-gender-identity
Albert Andreas Armadillo would agree.
This seems an odd question to ask on this board. The answer is, “because it is a hallmark of the SDMB to raise and discuss speculative questions that ‘don’t matter’ much outside the context of the discussion itself.”
But, do you really care how they identify? The OP IS basically challenging their “gayness” - in this day and age why the hell does it matter? It shouldn’t. They are just people living their lives. Butt the hell out.
Good fucking god, I think my brain exploded.
Do you know what a pronoun is? Didn’t you take high school English?
I didn’t go to high school, but yes I do know what a pronoun is, I just wasn’t sure if somehow gay wasn’t being used as a pronoun.
So, just to be clear, you thought there were people out there saying things like, “Gay sure am hungry today. Tom, are gay hungry? Bob went to that new deli yesterday, and gay tells gay it’s really good. Gay have a really good pastrami.”
Is that something you thought might be happening?
Although pretty straight I find the men in gay porn a lot more attractive than the men in hetero porn.
Hell, they’re more attractive than a number of women in hetero porn.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Can you explain what you mean by “pronoun”? It’s clear you don’t mean exactly the same thing as the part of speech (like “I,” “you,” “us,” etc.), but I don’t understand what.
From the OP, I read “pronouns weren’t really discussed” as "people with penises were called “he,” people without were called “she,” but then you say “now the couples identify… as gay.” I’m a gay man, and I use the same pronouns as straight men do.
There’s no separate system of pronouns that gay people use, though in the past gay men were often feminized against their will, and took to embracing that in the subculture (leading to drag etc.). But that was all performative: for the most part, gay men identified as masculine. (Edit: I mean “performative” in the anthropological sense, not the theatrical sense.)
Transgender people are a separate issue, as has been stated. Some transgender people are ALSO gay, but that’s coincidental. It’s really important not to confuse anyone who deviates from the norm. LGBTQ etc. people identify together to support each other because we experience discrimination from the mainstream in similar ways, but we’re NOT (necessarily) the same. I’m G, but I’m not L, B, T, or Q (or I, or A). I stand with and support those who are, though!
Oh, I know this one! It’s because of bigotry. Or intolerance. And intolerance, like a combo.
Big Pronoun is out of control and now taking over other parts of speech.
Personally, I’m curious what exactly “Gay Lifestyle” is. I’m a heterosexual man. If I were gay, what changes would I have to make to my lifestyle?
Yes, what exactly is the gay lifestyle?
I hesitate to ask, in fact have hesitated to ask for years, because I don’t want to be insensitive. But since this thread is here, I’d like to ask about the ‘Gay accent’. I suspect the majority of homosexual males to not speak that way, but enough do that it is a stereotype. Is it an affectation? How and why did it become popular? A shibboleth?
Apologies for any offence. I’m curious, but will drop it if asked.
I think I have an answer for you–I recently started watching Uncoupled, with Neil Patrick Harris, produced by Darren Star and boy howdy there sure seems to be a gay lifestyle going on there. To be fair, though, it’s basically indistinguishable from the hetero lifestyles featured in Sex And The City but by gum, they’re lifestyling the hell out of it over there!
There’s a documentary on this Do I Sound Gay? . I very much want to see it but have no cable or streaming services.
Maybe slightly OT, but I had always heard that females accounted for ~51% of the population, and I always assumed that to be a flat number. But, when looking at a graphical breakdown, it looks like males outnumber females in the breeding-age brackets, and females do not take the majority until past age 40. Because of this, one could imagine an relative abundance of sexually frustated males, and if the Kinsey scale is anywhere close to reality, it is not difficult to imagine horny males resorting to alternative means of satisfying their primal urges. Especially if society starts moving away from its taboos.
And what about the anti-noun lobby? They are not covered at all by the main stream media. And then there are the adverbs, don’t get me started on adverbs.
It’s close enough the parity that I doubt that demographic differences are going to overcome in-born sexual preferences, outside of an extreme situation like prison. More likely they will find other outlets, porn, or prostitutes, or (shudder) join the Incel population.
