Basically see gay guys as just another human being, but one that I don’t fully understand. But then I don’t understand folks who are prejudiced, or worship entertainers, etc. But just because I can’t wrap my head around gayness doesn’t mean that they are bad. Can’t say the same about people who are prejudiced, however.
Yeah, people vary. People vary a whole lot.
I think this is good. And that people should be able to say so out loud.
@Spice_Weasel thank you. I am out to the people closest to me and to people I am starting to meet. I am tired of running from who I am and tired of being ashamed. I appreciate this group.
@Jasmine I think sexual attraction results from a complex set of factors. As far as attraction to the same sex, I have read there is a correlation between birth order and sexual orientation. Boys with older brothers are more likely to be gay than boys without. And the more older brothers a boy has the more likely he is to be gay. Mothers of homosexual men have been found to have a higher concentration of the NLGN4Y antigen which is believed to affect the sexual gene. So, I think epigenetics might be part of the reason.
I read somewhere that girls with older brothers are also more likely to be lesbians.
I was born in 1967. So I remember the “open season” on gays in the 1970s/1980s. Was terrible. Horrible.
Nowadays I couldn’t care less is someone is hetero, homosexual, trans, or whatever. I only care about their character and honesty.
Regarding a spectrum of sexuality, I, cis-het male, try an experiment from time to time. I’ll look at any random group of people and ask myself if there are any guys I want to “do it” with. Never has there been a guy who just makes me want “action” with him. On the other hand, if I do the same thing with women in mind, I routinely see women who just trigger an attraction response in me.
I was 18 in 1967. What you witnessed (in school?) was probably because the absolute taboo about coming out of the closet was starting to go away, and especially kids had no idea how to deal with unrepentantly gay students. There was little hostility or violence when I went to school because I think most kids didn’t believe there really were such people. But, if you were such a person at that time (I figured it out when I was 7) you might have felt, as I did, completely isolated and unable to confide in anyone. I did my best to blend into the range of “normal;” I didn’t have it in me to try to over-compensate by being butch, but my niche of smart and nerdy served as pretty good camouflage. I spent all of those years hiding who I was, terrified of being found out. I’m not sure which era was worse for a gay student to live through.
Native New Yorker.
I don’t get the same-sex attraction aspect yet have no problem with it.
I’ve had a a drink in every bar in Greenwich and the East Village (at least as of 10 years ago). Though one day after walking down from Penn Station (I like walking to the village)I stopped into the first bar for a beer. Packed with women. I got to the rampy part where the bartender enters/exits, asked for and drank a Heineken, felt quenched and departed.
I had heard rumours about David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Didn’t matter.
Summer of 1984 my brothers went to the West End of Jones Beach on Long Island with my oldest cousin, Sean, from Ireland who had a green card and lived in Manhattan. I made some quip about the Pet Shop Boys “West End Girls” and he chuckled. I had no clue he was gay - it would not have mattered - till we lost him to AIDS several years later.
Heck, I didn’t know Neil Tennant (singer of PSB’s) was gay. There are some lyrics in West End Girls that tend that way, yet half the song is about Vladimir Lenin (Tennant is a Russophile) and the original version also has a verse about Stalin. Had my cousin Sean said anything about himself or Tennant that day all I’d have said is "I want that long coat/duster that Neil Tennant wears throughout the video)
Last summer my wife and I had a blast at some gay bar on Leicester square (London). Good music, great atmosphere.
Through most of the 90s, in a strange series of coincidences, all my closest friends were gay. A couple of them had not made the self discovery of this until later, but in retrospect it was probably something I could’ve figured out. Anyway, they were fantastic friends, and I enjoyed their social company very much.
Also strangely, since then I’ve not counted any gay people amongst my friends. Funny how things happen sometimes. But then, I am much more of a social loner now.
It’s somewhere between an act and a feeling of freedom to behave the way you want to, previously denied. It’s play, in a way.
Re: disgust about homosexuality (which seems to be mostly about male homosexuality, not female, which of course features in a lot of male porn), I wonder how it correlates to the known pattern of conservatives/reactionaries’ higher ‘disgust’ scores around many things other than sex. After all, intolerance, even unto racism, can be seen as a form of disgust. Culturally-inculcated disgust is much more easily overcome by people who don’t innately have a bias toward this reaction, I should think.
I meant to mention this as well, include Elton John and Freddy Mercury in there as well. In the 70s everyone knew or assumed that the were gay or bisexual and no one cared because they rocked!
Same with many black entertainers, my white friends in the 70s would spout out many racist epitaphs about blacks in general but still watch Stanford and Son, the Jeffersons, listen to Marvin Gaye and laugh whole heartily to Richard Pryor.
Left me with a distrust of many straight white people because of their hypocrisy. I see the same things today and the behavior still disgust me.
I’m not sure. On plenty of issues, I think I’m to the right of — pretty much everyone on this board, maybe? — yeah, maybe pretty much everyone on this board. But, well, it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, and my ensuing shrug is genuine.
This seems right to me. I’m still amazed by how rapidly the societal acceptance of homosexuality has happened. I’ve work with gay men and lesbians in various places, some in small town Texas Trump country, and even there (at least from what I’ve seen) it’s not a big deal anymore*. I’ve started to suspect that most of us are in some sense a tabula rasa, influenced largely by culture, with a few inherently good and a few inherently bad people that are destined to be saints or assholes no matter what.
*. Which isn’t to say that tolerance extends to other things. Spousal infidelity, abortion, transgender issues, and things like that are still big deals in those places, whereas homosexuality just isn’t.
ETA: Not that spousal infidelity is in the same league, just that a change culture to accept one thing doesn’t imply a change in culture to accept all things, stated in an inartful way.
(Emphasis added)
I don’t deny that many people in our culture feel that way. However, I suspect a lot fewer people (especially straight males) feel “revulsion” when they see 2 WOMEN kissing. Doesn’t that undermine the assertion that this attitude is “instinctive?”
There is no general answer; straight guys all have their own opinions.
I personally don’t care whether you’re gay or not and it wouldn’t affect my interactions with you. I do know some gay men and treat them like anyone else.
I’m not at all sure that expressed societal attitudes to spousal infidelity have any correlation with amounts of spousal infidelity.
And they often have drastically different rules for men and for women; in practice (in terms of the way the violater is treated) if not in theory.
What I was trying to get at is that homosexuality is no longer “kept in the closet”, at least in my experience. Not even in small town Trump country. Maybe within certain families it’s still problematic behind closed doors, but in terms of everyday conversation with my co-workers it isn’t the sort of thing that’s whispered about in secret (the way it would be if someone had an abortion, or was rumored to be having an affair, etc.) as if it’s something we shouldn’t be discussing out in the open. If it even comes up, it’s just part of ordinary conversation.
WRT to “not being in the closet anymore,” I don’t want to start a hijack, but another thing that was anathema in my high school days (1960s) and is now widely accepted is having a baby before or without benefit of a wedding. Does anybody in mainstream society “have to get married” anymore because the girl/woman got pregnant? Are there any more homes for unwed mothers where girls went in disgrace to hide until their illegitimate baby was born, only to be adopted by a two-parent family?
Back to topic.