It’s good to know I could keep up my love of antiques if I were gay. I guess I could expand my love of musical theater. I would expand it now, but I find most non Sondheim highly inferior to Sondheim.
TBH, and I’m not in any way dissing your personal intrepidity here, you would probably find yourself having to be a lot more courageous just to negotiate day-to-day life.
The extent to which a huge proportion of gay (and otherwise gender-nonconforming) men matter-of-factly take in their stride the elevated risk levels of abuse and harm associated with being openly gay, or otherwise “doing masculinity wrong” in traditionally patriarchal societies, just flabbergasts me.
You yourself may have done some training along those lines even as a cishet white man with a taste for musical theater and antiques, but you would probably have to up your game considerably if you were gay. I know several humane, well-adjusted gay men who wryly joke about experiences with ongoing malevolent ostracism and repeated physical assault that would have many cishet men considering themselves entitled to become vengeful mass murderers. Those guys got balls of STEEL.
Excellent point.
At one point in my life, I lived and worked in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, which has a very large gay population.
One thing I learned is that gay does not directly correlate to masculine or feminine. There are gay men who are quite masculine, and there are straight men who are quite feminine, and the same relationship applies for women.
So it would be a mistake to think of a “gay lifestyle” as equating to something gender specific- you can be a gay man who likes sports and home repair, just as you can be a hetero man who likes musicals and fashion.
So what is a gay lifestyle? At some level it involves fucking people of the same gender (or, at least wanting to), but that’s about the only difference to any other typical lifestyle that’s out there.
According to a gay man I worked with he said a “gay lifestyle” depended on how “flaming” you are. Presumably everything one does is their “lifestyle”.
I think the phrase “gay lifestyle” is used pejoritively, but if you say “gay culture,” there’s quite a bit of difference. It’s partly to do with sex, but also a lot of the issues that at least used to mean that gay people couldn’t stay in their families and communities of origin.
Gender is relevant, only because an adult partnership with two men or two women has to re-think a lot of the gendered division of labour that goes into running a household. We (gay men) can’t coast on the defaults that shift cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc., onto the woman of the house if there is no woman of the house.
I can’t think of anything that comes up in gay culture that straight people don’t do, or vice versa, but there are differences in how prevalent or how accepted various things are.
Interesting that a “straight” man would be interested in gay porn.
It’s all a spectrum, ducky. Rarely is anyone 100% this or that.
I know older gay men whose lifestyle includes celebrating Thanksgiving with friends instead of family. Of course that’s also part of the vegan lifestyle, and the “i don’t have family i want to spend an evening with” lifestyle. But it’s something.
Of course, I also know younger gay men whose lifestyle seems to differ from that of straight men mostly in that they refer to their partner with male pronouns. So maybe it is all about pronouns. 
When I mentioned gay lifestyle I was simply referring to sleeping with the same sex nothing more or less.
That’s not what the word “lifestyle” is commonly taken to mean. It’s also commonly used as a dogwhistle word to emphasize the differences between gay men and “regular” people. So you shouldn’t be surprised if people take it that way.
Truly. I have found whether gay, lesbian, straight, or otherwise, there are people whose lives revolve mainly around their genitals, and those whose lives mainly revolve around something else.