What's the gayest country?

Factual Questions
21

If you are referring to Simple Homer’s post, what you are seeing is the assumption that “visibly gender-nonconforming” is strongly related to “willing to identify as gay”. Or maybe also what **boytyperanma **suggested about a “third sex”. There is a very strong string in this thread that it would be hard to find out the gay percentage in a lot of countries because so many people are not willing to be out in repressive cultures, which includes being unwilling to have a visibly gender-nonconforming appearance.

If we are talking about countries, it is a lot harder to move from a gay-unfriendly country to a gay-friendly one, than to move about in the US and go from, I don’t know, Pittsburgh to San Francisco.

The biggest problem with the question in the OP is that if you are looking at “true feelings” rather than just being self-identified as gay, then how do you define “gay”? I think it’s pretty widely accepted that there is a continuum of orientations from strictly straight through bisexuality (or pan-sexuality) to strictly gay. Where do you draw the line?

My own personal, biased opinion, only tenuously supported by research so far, is that the most hard-wired tendency to be attracted to the same sex is inborn but is not genetic. It is based on circumstances during pregnancy, such as the mother’s hormone levels and so on, and so is entirely situational. On that basis, it might well turn out that some cultural practices that could affect this (such as bearing children in later years) might vary greatly from one culture to another. It might even be affected by diet or weather. For myself, I hope we never find out.
Roddy

22

Perhaps any of the monarchies that observe Salic Law:

*It’s reigning men. *

23

Oman?
Montenegro?
Bulgaria?

24

As I said in the OP, we’re talking about percentage of the population here. Not raw numbers.

25

It’s likely that in societies where gayness/queerness (by whatever definition) is heavily repressed, a higher percentage of people will stay closeted from themselves—i.e., be in denial so deep about themselves that they actually believe it—for a time, anyway. Then there are all the people who know they’re queer but stay closeted from anyone who might harm them in some way because of it finding out. Also larger in a repressive society.

While gay may be equated with third gender in some cultures, it isn’t universal, and it isn’t true here in the US, for example.

I know of no reason why the natural distribution of LGBT people in the population wouldn’t be about the same anywhere. This is disregarding all the complications of repression that LGBT people suffer from in many areas, which makes data-gathering futile. “But what about the blondes”…etc. is not a reason, it’s a supposition. As though sexual orientation were correlated with hair color or whatever. At most, they have established tentative correlations with certain types of family birth order or index-ring finger length ratios. Birth order does not sound like it would vary from country to country. Not sure about digit ratios.

26

There is a large number of men in Thailand and the Philippines that are in public everyday wearing short skirts and high heels.
I know that not all transvestites are gay, but, the majority of the ladyboys that I have seen seem to be telling the world that they are gay.

27

Define “gay.” :confused:

28

Saudi Arabia

I’m serious.

29

Damn, you’re on fire in this thread!

30

Ladyboys aren’t gay, they’re trans.

31

Men that ask me, a man, to have sex with them.

What is your definition of gay ? :confused:

32

Ancient Greece? It’s fairly likely that the great majority of people just go along with whatever the social norms are, and only a small percentage are hard gay or hard straight. Dependent on the local culture, you might see variances between 5% and 95%. It’s just very uncommon for ‘straight’ to not be the norm.

33

People who fall in love with people of their own sex.

34

But if “ladyboys” and such are a “third gender,” then they’d be gay if they dated other third-gender persons. But if they dated either men or women, I don’t get how that works out to be gay, since third-gender people are defined as other from both male and female.

Also, just because you see someone in Thailand wearing a skirt, how do you know which of the three genders she likes to date, without asking her? This is what I mean about making assumptions. One, you have to assume you know what gender someone in a skirt is. Two, you have to assume you know who they like to date. That seems an awful lot of assumptions about a stranger passing by. This is why I find some of the conclusions being drawn about gayness in this thread to be incoherent.

35

And the mid-century Germans went about intentionally exterminating all the gays they could get their hands on. If accurate statistics can be had, and if Germany’s per-capita of gays is lower today, it would be a step in answering the question of whether being gay is a strictly genetic phenomenon. Because, you see, their gays would have been dead instead of reproducing.

And, are transsexuals gay? I know a guy- not a guy I guess- who is going through the beginning of a sex change. They have taken to dressing like a woman full time, have started the hormones, and evidently the rest will follow. This person thinks they are a woman and decided at last to live like one. They never went on a date with a man until recently, when the switcheroo was somewhat underway. So… is this person a gay man, or a straight woman who is working on her anatomy?

36

What Johanna is trying to explain is that there are different ways of categorizing people that are getting mixed up in this thread.

Sex: **Man **(XY), woman, (XX), or what I believe is called **intersex **(chromosomal or biological anomalies that make it difficult to assign “man” or woman"). This is the basis for gender.

Gender: varies by culture. In many places, you have male (the cultural attributes expected of men, above), female (the cultural attributes expected of women), and what anthropologists call “third gender,” one (or more) groups who have a fairly recognizable and coherent set of attributes that don’t match up with either group. Thai “Ladyboys” go here.

Sexual orientation: what sex you are attracted to: heterosexual (men —> women and women —> men), homosexual (men —> men and women —> women), bisexual (men —> men or women, women —> men or women), asexual, and maybe some other categories.

Gender orientation: what gender you are attracted to. Ladyboys who only have sex with other ladyboys? Homosexual, same-gender orientation. Ladyboys who only have sex with poor simple homer? Homosexual, male-gender orientation.

The problem with “gay” is that it’s both a sexual orientation and a gender orientation, at least in my experience in the English-speaking world. I’m gay, and I only date gay men. I do not have sex with straight men or any women. There are straight men who have gay sex; I would guess some do it because of the conflict between their gender (straight men) and their orientation (homosexual). Others maybe because it’s easier to get laid in airport bathrooms, I don’t know. There are gay men who meet up with straight men for this purpose.

(Note that you can change your gender to or from “third gender,” but you cannot change your orientation or your sex. Plenty of cultures define the “top” as the male role and the “bottom” as the female role, meaning that the XY top can stay the male gender but the XY bottom is third gender, maybe for twenty minutes of role-play in the boudoir or maybe for a lifetime.)

So you kind of have to clarify what combination of biology, gender behaviour, and attraction you’re talking about before we can even come close to answering the question.

37

Yay Me ! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I don’t have sex with ladyboys, but I do appreciate the shout out.

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38

I didn’t mean to imply that you did, and I hope I didn’t offend. Your definition of “gay” is what made me think of you for the example.

39

Is it even a question. Afghanistan of course. And if the question was on pedophilla, sex with animals and liking it doggy style it would still be Afghanistan; the land where everything but heterosexual sex won’t raise an eyebrow.

40

If I had to choose between a wife and a husband in Saudi Arabia, I’d pick the chick anytime.

Semi-related q: Is there a correlation between gay males and infertility?