In fairness as much as female sexuality is fluid, male sexuality isn’t completely rigid either. It appears to be less the case for men (whether this is cultural conditioning or physiological we don’t know) but they can also develop romantic/sexual feelings for other men, either a specific man or men sometimes.
Personally I think we’d all be better off if we just chilled the fuck out about the subject and not get so het up about where people put their genitalia (particularly if it’s nothing to do with them).
I’m 25 and when I was 19 I knew I was a lesbian but I was in major denial. I absolutely did not want to be gay and I was terrified at the prospect of coming out.
I took the foolish step of sleeping with a few guys just to…hell, I don’t know, just to see what would happen. With the exception of the first time, sex was great but I felt very guilty about having one night stands and I still felt gay - I managed to stretch this ill-conceived experiment over thee years.
I was really stubborn and decided I might be bisexual so I picked up a couple and had a threesome. That bit of empirical evidence did it for me, I was definitely into girls. I was still horribly guilty about having safe but NSA sex and being gay.
My mom was really worried about how depressed I was and just flat out asked if I was gay. It was a tearful conversation but I admitted that I was and I quietly came out to a few friends. Later, my cousin was taking flak from the grandfolks for being a lesbian so I came out to my extended family too.
After the family knew I decided to just be honest if asked. I think everyone I work with knows and one gal is always asking me questions. I feel pretty darned good about being gay and I feel SO good about not hiding.
I was in extreme denial and I dealt with it by not talking to anyone and experimenting in the most emotionally detached way that I could. If I could go back in time I would have been way easier on myself, I would have talked to people, and I would have tried to just date a girl like a normal person.
I have a friend (who knows I’m telling this) who developed crushes and even had some lesbian kisses in the dorms at her college- the uber Fundy unaccredited Bob Jones University- but she put it behind her, prayed for forgiveness and convinced herself it was just girls being silly. She married a guy she met on campus and dropped out, dropped a couple of kids, and then didn’t finally admit it until she was a grandmother (albeit a young one- early 40s) and her marriage fell apart for other reasons and she started dating again for the first time in 20+ years and when he started making moves she realized she wasn’t attracted to him. Friends she shared it with first told her it was because she probably felt like she was committing adultery, but she knew “Nope, that’s not it”. They asked her “What sort of man would you be attracted to?” because the guy she dated was attractive as most would define the term.
This started her soul searching and she finally admitted that though she’d enjoyed sex with her husband sometimes (just as gay men can enjoy sex with women sometimes) she wasn’t really and never had been attracted to men.
It was her married daughter who set her up on a date with a woman- the daughter had somehow always suspected and the woman was one of the daughter’s in-laws. For the first time since being in a dorm she felt real sexual chemistry.
It took her years to work through the baggage and guilt. Now she’s in a long term relationship (she’s in her early 60s or so) and says she doesn’t regret marriage because of her kids (one accepts her relationship, the other one loves her but is disapproving/unaccepting of the relationship) but says she regrets that so many women continue to go through this and not really understanding what the problem is.
So for women especially I think it’s possible to be middle aged before you really clock it. I’ve known a couple of men who didn’t come out until they were grandfathers. I think on some level even if they won’t admit it they’ve got to know what side their bread is buttered on long before, but denial is super powerful.
I get that there are stories here (first and second hand) of people who didn’t come to the realisation that they were same sex oriented until much later in life, maybe until after a long term heterosexual relationship. But people in this thread (unless they’re posting from Scandinavia/Holland) must accept that they live in a heteronormative society, and this is even more the case in the past than now (case in point Sampiro’s late-blooming lesbian). Heterosexuality is considered to be the default, homosexuality is considered by many to be an aberration or, in some cases, a flaw. A lot of people are either given no information about what homosexuality is, or are given information that ranges from “being gay means liking your own gender. Okay, next topic” to “being gay is an abomination unto the LAWD and if those sinful thought should enter your mind then the power of prayer will save you”. Hardly conducive to a realistic appraisal of one’s own sexuality.
If one grows up in a society where this is the case, isn’t it entirely possible that one would find it hard to classify one’s self as gay as one might not even know what that is? (As seemed to be the case with Dr Drake) If society treated same and opposite sex attraction as equal whilst accepting one is far more prevalent than the other, do people really contend that with all the additional information and affirmation and minus the fear, denial and condemnation they wouldn’t know what got them hard/wet?
Too lazy to search, but I remember even sven talking about women she met in Cameroon who by sven’s definition were clearly lesbians but, because of the way gays are perceived there (which includes, among other things, “rich” and “witches”) would never in a million years perceive themselves as lesbians. It makes sense: if all gay people are rich and I’m not rich, I can’t be gay.
At the same time, there are different levels and develompment speeds for both emotional-ness (is so a word, I just invented it) and libido. I have no problem believing that some of my classmates and some of the responders here were dreaming of romance (in either the sexless or sexed definitions) by age 3, whereas I only started being vaguely interested some six months after menarche.
If we could truly chuck our cultural baggage about sexuality, kids would grow up with an entirely different framework. In such a world I expect that people would discern their preference much sooner and that sexuality would be considered fluid, something that emerged out of personality traits rather than genitalia or gender roles.
The effects of heteronormative society cannot be overstated. Nava’s points mesh well with my own experience. I feel like a complete ass looking back, I absolutely should have known that I was a lesbian. But like Nava said, it wasn’t an option. The politics of being gay really tripped me up. In high school I would have told you that a lesbian was was a liberal, activist bitch.
I know that I was interested in romance/sex/masturbation from age seven. I read all kinds of books, all hetero, of course. I always felt informed and a little ahead of the curve when it came to sex. I recently read a blog wherein another woman shared a similar childhood experience. She said that she read romance novels and other more adult literature almost compulsively and that looking back, she feels that she was searching for something.
That definitely rings true for me. A big part of coming out to myself was reading massive amounts of lesbian-themed work. I’ve always been a voracious reader and if that material had been available in my formative years I don’t think I would have been able to live in denial as long as I did.
I am sometimes grateful though that I’m so stubborn and slow. I can’t imagine how stressful and occasionally terrifying it would have been to attend my small northern Idaho high school knowing that I was a lesbian.
It’s entirely possible that if we dispensed with the cultural baggage, Person A who is attracted to Dolores would self-identify as a “Doloresexual” regardless of Person A’s own sex; that is, people might think of it as entirely about the specific person they’ve got the hots for and not bother to make any large generalizations.
Or perhaps somewhere in-between, observing (but not self-categorizing in a big Identity-Factor way) that their attraction tends to be towards females or to males. The way someone today might observe that they tend to be attracted to blonde people or muscular people or whatever, where it doesn’t become much of a big deal to anyone and doesn’t tend to become a proscriptive attitude that strongly shapes who one is willing to consider in the future.
I like that theory a lot. I’m sure you’re right, preferences would be more in the “what’s your type?” vein than anything else and definitely secondary to individual personalities.
Our society is shaped around gender/sex roles to such a degree that it seems impossible to unpack all of our motivations for a realistic “what if” conversation.
I think I’ve mentioned before that one reason I had trouble realizing I was gay was because queers were men who liked to dress up like women and have sex with little boys. I never wanted to do either of these things, but I wanted to bang the hell out of a 1979 era Eric Estrada, therefore I was a bisexual who didn’t like women, and really, aren’t all people bisexual?
I don’t really believe all people are bisexual now. I know bisexuals exist but I think true bisexuals, especially bisexual males, are probably more of a minority than gays. This isn’t to say that most guys might not be able to get aroused under peculiar instances to members of the sex outside their norm (pardon the TMI, but I have had hard-ons for a couple of women over the years and I consider myself pretty solidly gay) but most people are attracted to one gender over the other in at least 99 out of 100 times. However I did subscribe to the everybody’s bi, I just like guys a bit more than most- mode of thinking when I was in my late teens.
When bullying became such an issue a few weeks ago I was asked by some people if I was bullied in high school for being gay. My answer was ‘No’. I was bullied in high school for being ‘different’, but at the time I didn’t even realize I was gay. There were no openly gay kids in my high schools- there were some who were obviously gay but they certainly weren’t open, and those who could conceal it did, and at least a couple of bullies in high school were- later- openly gay.
In my teens there was Three’s Company [where Jack wasn’t really gay anyway] and SOAP [where Billy Crystal was a gay man who wanted a sex change and then becamse straight somehow] and Tony Randall’s character Sidney Shorr, who was intended to be openly gay but this got really watered down til he was basically an asexual fuss budget, a Felix who just didn’t date. Today I’ve long since lost count of the openly gay characters on TV and in movies and visibility is through the roof, and while in some ways it makes society as a whole perhaps more accepting of gays it also makes it much more of an issue than it was when I was a teenager and probably more likely to get you identified and bullied. While I still maintain that too much correlation is made between school bullying and gay (gays can be bullied but not all are and I’d wager the majority of bullying victims aren’t gay) it’s probably more of a problem now than in the 1970s/1980s. In a way I think it was possibly easier in the '70s/'80s (not making it a golden era by any means) because it allowed you to concentrate on other facets of your development, and any straight person I’m sure recalls their teen years with angst galore without having to deal openly with the ‘gay stuff’ simultaneously or to the exclusion of the other teen crap.
I think one major reason gay men are so often promiscuous (though personally I’d settle for a date- a movie and a Coke would rock my world as I haven’t even had that in 5 years) is that we never really learned how to date. This can be hard to convey to straight people of the same age: you couldn’t ask out the person you were really attracted to in school because even IF they were gay there was major risk factor about being discovered, and then when you do realize you really can fool around with guys it becomes more of a sexual outlet than a social one. Of course another reason for gay male promiscuity (which is a stereotype but one that certainly does exist in large numbers) is of course that men are dogs.
Hmmm… I think that the baseline for gay men being promiscuous would, in a world with no other factors, be the same as for hetero men being promiscuous (or, as you put it, “men are dogs”). Dunnow about the learning how to look for partners thing, but I do thing there may be for many gay/bi/pan/whatever folk a factor of having heard so many times that they will be promiscuous and they will not pair up, that there’s some buying into that. And also, when your legal structure recognizes long-term commitment between different-plumbing folk but not between same-plumbing, there is less of a possibility of framing relationships in those terms, Mom won’t be asking “but, honey, when will you meet a nice boy and get married?”, and there will be people (evidently not all, but in case anybody needs his morning coffee: this whole post is generalizing) whose outlook to relationship bumps is and stays a lot closer to that of teenagers starting to explore than to that of married-with-kids folk. Not just no “staying together for the kids” (which I generally consider bad), but even no “fighting for the relationship because damnit I’m not going to leave the first time my SO farts within hearing” (which I consider good).
