Even absent any social opprobrium, homosexuality would still make it harder to find a suitable partner, on a purely statistical basis. In an environment with 100 other people (say, a class of high schoolers), a heterosexual person is going to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 potential partners, while a homosexual person would have more like 5 potential partners. It’s a lot easier to find a suitable partner out of 45 choices than out of 5.
[quote=“Rebo”](Sorry if this is disjointed - it’s just stream of consciousness…)
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But really moving.
Would be true except that finding partners isn’t perfectly statistical. What happens with a lot of gay people is that they move. They move to where there are a lot more people like them, and find their partner there.
It isn’t dissimilar to other groups which may be small if sprinkled randomly through the entire population of a country, which is exactly why they clump up. I live near Northampton MA which is a lesbian mecca. For example.
I was born in 1975, went to Catholic grammar and high school. I don’t remember ever being explicitly taught homosexuality was against Church teachings – it’s possible we were taught that – but I certainly do remember the general culture at the very least frowned upon homosexuality. I personally do not remember any time where I had any ill feelings towards homosexuals, even when I was a church going and Rush Limbaugh listening conservative. It just never made any sense to me why homosexuality (or any LGBTQ+ orientation) would be “bad.” It also didn’t square with the whole “love your neighbor as yourself” commandment driven into me by my Catholic upbringing. (So the Catholicism was at least good for that.)
I do remember sophomore year high school, sitting around the dinner table, chatting with my dad, and somehow we do get on the topic of homosexuality, and I asked him “Dad, would you still love me if I were gay?” Silence. “Would you?” “Don’t talk like that Peter, don’t talk like that,” he said. My Mom just told us both to knock it off, and that was that.
I grew up as a very conservative Mormon so it was quite the sin. There weren’t any openly gay people I know in Salt Lake City in the 60s and 70s as I grew up. My father used to talk about LA as if it were the modern Sodom and Gomorrah, allowing open homosexuals living in the worse sin possible.
Like many stories here, I became friends with gay people as an adult and saw that there isn’t any difference as humans. I didn’t understand trans until I was exposed here on the Dope.
I have a sibling who first came out as a lesbian then later as non-binary, which my uber conservative mother has never been happy about.
For what it’s worth, I had a very Catholic upbringing, too (and still am Catholic). But both my mom, and the priest at church, never put any emphasis on the Church’s teachings about sexuality. It’s an easy topic to avoid, especially since it never shows up anywhere in the Gospels (the usual source of topics for sermons).
When I was in high school. There was a guy who was stereotypically gay. I mentally sneered at him because I thought that was how you reacted, but never actually said anything about it to anyone.
After I came back from my freshman college year, I started hanging out with a group that included him. He was dating one of the girls in the group. I realized I was mistaken and learned not to judge people on first impression.
The next summer, he was with another guy. My first impression was correct after all, but it didn’t matter. I had hung out with him as a friend the previous year and understood that being gay was not a problem for me.
As an addendum, I was in a summer play that year. The director was named Sandra Scoppetone. She wrote a novel based on those events and based most of the characters on people in the play. It was pretty obvious who represented who, since they all were cast in the book in the same roles they had in real life (Yes, I was in it).
The book, Trying Hard to Hear You, was a minor classic, one of the earliest YA novel that dealt with teen homosexuality sympathetically. It remained in print for many years.
Thank you.
I grew up in Zimbabwe, where homosexuality was - and I think, still is - illegal.
What made me decide that being gay is OK was meeting a phenomenally amazing gay couple, from the US, who showed me all the bigoted bullshit I learnt at school was wrong. Really amazing people. The one succumbed to HIV back when antiretrovirals were extremely new and certainly not available in the third world. (late 80s)
KLM, to their eternal discredit, refused to allow my friend onboard to return to the USA where antiretrovirals would have saved his life.
For me the most likely explanation is maturity. Growing up my circle of friends made fun of “homos” but we didn’t know any (just rumors). I grew up in a religious home but my parents never discussed it one way or the other.
Once I got out of college and away from the locker room mentality my views begin to soften. Over the years it bothered me less. I got to know some LBGT people on line and didn’t care about their differences.
There was no “aha” moment for me but I vividly remember when I realized my complete change. I had moved to Utah and then Seattle; while walking through Seattle’s Capital Hill I saw two guys walking hand in hand, something unlikely to happen in Utah. I was struck–almost to the point of tears–about how these two people could show their affection for each other publicly without fear of harassment. For a brief moment I could put myself in their shoes and rejoice that I could express my love for someone by the simple act of holding their hand.
Since then I have been in almost complete support of all LBGT issues. My entire close family–all religious–feel the same way and I think we’ve all made the journey together.
Due to my age (62) and where I grew up (small mid-west farming community), in my youth, the idea that there was such a thing as a “homo” and that you didn’t want to be one and they were deserving of ridicule was pretty standard, in the abstract. (I suppose that the same could be said of “hillbillies” and “pollacks”, and any other out-group (not “out” as in gay, but “out” as in not part of the predominant culture)…) My pre-teen years were full of boys being outrageously insulting and physically dominating of anyone perceived as weaker. Curiously, the bullying was very predominantly gay-play - pushing someones head into your crotch, using a fingers-in-a-circle gesture pushed at someones mouth - one wonders where that all came from? Anywho, again, this was all in the abstract for pre-teen boys. Actual sex and sexuality, both gay and straight, were not really part of the landscape. So, it would appear to outsiders that I was expressing homophobia. But it wasn’t based in any strong messages from parents or church, just peer culture.
Fast forward to high school and it became a little bit more concrete. Now, rather than being generalized insult play, actual individuals were being targeted or whispered about. Being a slender sensitive artsy type, I was often called “homo” or “fag”. I knew I wasn’t gay, and that the name-callers were wrong, but it was annoying, yah? At the same time, I got into theatre, so I became aware of actual real live gay people, many my friends. There was still very noticeable societal stigma, but being a young person one can identify that older people, the conventional ones who run things, can be kinda dumb. So, my attitudes and behavior changed in terms of no longer seeing gays as deserving ridicule. And while I still retained vestiges of squeamishness with the physical act, I could say the same thing about a some straight practices too. As I matured, that has evolved from “eww” or “why?” to “ok, it’s just not my bag”.
So, since high school I feel I have moved from gay-tolerant to gay-friendly. And in the currently world it’s almost anachronistic to narrowly focus on gay, when we now know there is a whole spectrum of experiences.
I can’t recall my parents ever sitting down to tell me that being gay was evil/wrong, but what I picked up from society in general was that making fun of gay people was perfectly normal. Homophobia was so common that it even reared its head in kid’s movies like Monster Squad (1987) with no objections from the general audience. It’s absolutely amazing to me how much things have changed over the last thirty years.
Being a somewhat nerdy kid who spent time with other nerds, my friends and I liked to wax philosophical about various topics. When I was around 16 or 17, the topic of AIDS came up and the conversation drifted to homosexuality. i.e. Was it wrong to be homosexual? So we did what we always did when trying to answer a question: We gathered as many arguments as we could, pro and con, and tried to see if they stood up to scrutiny. After going through our list we did not find the arguments that homosexuality was immoral or wrong to be compelling. It was then that I realized it was okay to be gay.