Well, I started out having “latent homosexual tendencies” which were no longer latent, and much more than tendencies. But either way, it was considered a mental illness.
As per my parents’ teaching, I’d never believed that there was anything morally wrong with it. However, ‘gay’ and ‘fag’ were still common everyday insults (interchangeable with ‘dumb’ ‘geeky’ and anything else uncool) when I was in Junior High and High School (mid-late 80’s). That got left behind when I started college.
Hey, I’ve never understood the appeal of cunnilingus either, but who am I to fight it? wouldn’t want to say no, hurt someone’s feelings. Heh.
Thanks, panache, for saying that we heteros do unfathomable things that you don’t understand, too. This thread was getting a little saccharine in all of our tolerant understanding oneupmanship crap. I gotta believe there is more than just me.
And yes, I would hate a boring world where every one was the same.
I guess equating ‘wrongness’ with ‘very different and not to my taste’ is something I just don’t get.
Not that I’m saying you’re wrong, mind you. 
Ok, take my example of suicide. It is a personal choice, and someone may be genetically predisposed to taking their own life, may not have much control over it. Can I understand it? Sure, in some instances. Do I think people should be allowed to do it? Again, sure, in some instances. Do I think it’s wrong on some level? Yes.
Well, ok, but I don’t think the two are comparable. You might well have said murder is wrong, and I would agree with you. I didn’t mean to say nothing is wrong, but you’re talking about a specific act rather than a … desire, attitude, I’m not sure of the best term.
But maybe I’m overthinking this – 'cause I have to admit, I would say there is a ‘wrongness’ about an adult being sexually attracted to small children, even if the attraction is never acted upon.
So I dunno, maybe I’m wrong about this.
For me, I’ve made a lot of progress from thinking “sin! sin!” At this point I cant say if I find anything wrong with it, although there is still a heavy “oogy factor” about it.
My sister ‘came out’ when she was 17 and I was 15. Almost thirty years ago. Back then I was a little too autistic to grok much about it.
When I was 19, my best friend/roommate and I were invited to a lot of parties by a woman he worked with. We were the only straight, unmarried men in the place. (There were straight married men, just no other straight single men.) Since we came together, it was naturally assumed that we were just another gay couple.
I got propositioned quite a bit. No interest on my end, but it was an eye opener. Since then, I’ve never had any issues with someone’s sexuality.
My first awareness of homosexuals was that they were considered outcasts, which made them underdogs and okay in my book. And, as I got older I realized that human personality is so complex that the question of what kind of sex you want to have is just one of many interesting facets.
Going to an all guy high school in the 60s, gay (well, really, queer or fag–“gay” did not exist in our world) was bad. In college, I was teaching a religious ed class for high schoolers and one of the kids began talking (outside of class) of the way that he was attracted to guys and had no interest in girls. His feelings made no sense to me, but I had known him for a couple of years and knew he was not doing anything to “rebel” or to “act out” and it dawned on me that he was just responding to some wiring in the brain that differed from mine. Since it was pretty obvious that he had not made a decision to “be” queer, I could not see where he had chosen to “do wrong” and figured that it must be natural (if odd) and not perverted.
When I arrived as a freshman at college, there was a somewhat socially awkward, nerdy little kid who lived across the hall from me. My roommate and some of the other guys made life really hard for him, and I, somewhat reluctantly stuck up for him. When they started covering his dorm room door with shaving cream saying ‘fag’, I decided it was enough, and ended up in a bit of a knock down drag out fight over it. After a broken fist, two lost front teeth, and three black eyes between the two of us, he agreed not to harass the kid anymore.
A few days later, the kid came out of the closet to me, which absolutely spun my then-virulently homophobic world around. While I stick think the idea of red-hot-man-on-man action is pretty icky, the dorm-mate in question has remained a very close friend of mine for the past 7 years.
Thanks to tolerant parents, I never really thought that anything was wrong with homesexuality, but it took me a while to actually understand “the whole story.”
Growing up in a small Texas town, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to have contact with openly gay people. It may have been that there were gay people all around, but they didn’t share it. The few who were open about it were almost famous in a way. Everyone knew them or knew of them.
My mother would take me and my little brother to get our hair cuts at her salon where two openly gay men worked. I guess you could describe these guys as stereotypically flamboyant. They would tell us these hilarious stories in this dramatic effeminate style and would have us laughing so hard our sides would hurt. It was like watching a two man show.
It wasn’t until I went to college and met and became friends with gay people who had just come out or had just left their house for the first time and were living without family to judge them. It was a real eye opener from my one dimensional view of homosexuality (Do you mean that not every gay guy is confident, fashionable, funny, friendly, and thinks that the world is a non stop party?).
I think I was in college. Among the girls I hung out with were two girls who pretended to be a couple. I treated it like a big joke, but secretly I was a bit thrown for a loop, having had a rather sheltered upbringing. Little did I know that two of the other girls were lesbians (for reals, not as a joke, they were not together), and yet another came out to me as bi a couple of years later. A male friend I had a few years later, who came from a very religious household, also turned out to be gay. He changed his name, left his religion, and after a while stopped talking to me because I was female and he was now rejecting all things female for some reason. I still don’t know why.
The point of all this is that because of these friends I used to have (and still keep in touch with, in a couple of cases), homosexuality doesn’t bother me now. I was still a bit surprised when I found out a friend of my brother’s is bisexual, however; maybe 'cause I’ve known him since he and my bro were 14 or so and had no idea till bro told me. I still think he’s the same nice guy I used to know, whether he dates guys or girls, and nothing will change that.
I think it was in high school. I had been brought up in a fairly conservative environment, and homosexuality was never even brought up. Once I heard about it, my primary “knowledge” about it came from friends. I had no idea that women might like each other, only that some guys liked to have other guys …um… fuck them in the ass. At first I was like “Well, that clearly doesn’t go there.” Then again, sex was new and relatively unexplored as far as I was concerned.
I heard that there was a guy at our school that was gay, and I really didn’t care. What he did was his business, regardless of what I thought about it. I decided that what people did in the privacy of their own homes was not my concern.
I went to a bar next to the place I worked for a while, and there was a regular there that was nice enough. He seemed pretty gay to me, but he was nice, so we would often shoot the shit while drinking. He was gay. After becoming friends, he would tell me things that I wish I never heard, involving himself and another guy in the bathroom, “Don’t get in in my hair” type stuff. He was cool enough, and I really didn’t give a shit about his orientation, though I could have done without some of the stories.
I can’t remember when it was, probably early college, I had an epihany. One of my best friends when I was growing up was gay. There was no doubt in my mind, he was very gay. I just didn’t know that he was that different. In retrospect, I would have still been his friend had I known. He introduced me to what I’d later recognize as “camp” or kitsch. That guy could sing every single word to “Little Shop of Horrors” from start to finish. I just thought he was overly happy (heh, gay).
I guess some people have to make a human connection with a homosexual person in order for it to give them perspective. If a concept is foreign and repulsive enough to a person, they may easily forget that there are actual people involved. When I was younger, the concept of a penis in another man’s anus was borderline horrifying to me. Meeting people that were gay helped me to realize that people’s sexual proclivities do not define them as people. Sex is meant to be a somewhat private thing anyways. If what they’re doing is wrong, I am certainly not the one that can or should judge them. So, I let it be.
Hell, if everyone were repulsed by other people’s sexual tendencies, there’d be nobody at Sundays Catholic Mass. I keed, I keed.
I grew up in a family that was Catholic on one side, and fundamentalist Protestant Christian on the other. I was raised Catholic. However, both of my parents have the amazing ability to expand their minds.
We never talked about gay-ness. I even confessed a couple of “girl crushes” to my mom (I’m mostly straight but very slightly bisexual) and while I could tell that talking about them made my mom uncomfortable, she stifled any judgement.
Fast forward 10 years, and my youngest sister hangs out in the theater and my mom has helped make up her (sister’s) male friends for fun. Mom was genuinely happy when she went to an extended-family reunion a year or two ago, and the gay family members flocked to her. I hang out with lots of gay guys (without quite being a “fag hag”) and my mom is pretty open about hearing about it and asking questions and, most importantly, about understanding that my gay friends have long term relationships that they cherish, even if they occasionally have a fuck on the side.
(My best friend in my Catholic Confirmation class was another guy who was forced to go, like I was. Looking back, I’m sure he was at least bi, if not gay.)
I guess the point is that I was never taught that gay was wrong, so I never internalized that. By the time I figured out what gay was, I was faking lesbian makeout sessions with my highschool friends just to annoy other people. So while it’s taken me a while to understand gay sex, etc., I’ve never seen anything wrong with it.
(Sorry, I ramble.)
For me, it was when I realised my mum’s best friend (who was also my godmother) was gay. She left her husband and moved in together with her girlfriend, taking her son and daughter with her, when I was about 11-12 years old. They had separate single beds in the same room but they were pushed together. Us kids worked it out pretty quickly.
My mum tried to tell me about her when I was about 15 but I just laughed and said I already knew.
She was (and is) a pretty cool person. I just accepted the idea from a fairly young age. It would seem odd to be intolerant of your parents’ friends, KWIM?
When I was 18 or 19, I saw two guys holding hands for the first time .
And I had an epiphany.
My first thought was ewwww grrrrosssss. And then I realised that the problem wasn’t a couple cute leather boys making out in public (sorry, I didn’t stop to take photos), but the naive teenager I saw in the mirror every morning. The whole gay prejudice thing kinda evaporated pretty quickly after that.
Bless my parents… I was quite naive about sexuality but by the time I became aware that there was such a thing as gay, it was in the context of gay rights. For them, the personal is always political, and it was more important that I know that there were some courageous people trying to get anti-sodomy laws overturned than that I worry about what went on in the bedrooms of said people. This is probably good as it turns out that I’m not terribly straight myself, and it saved a whole lot of worry on that front. When I told my parents that I had started noticing girls as well as boys, we had a brief, casual chat about sexuality as a spectrum and their kinsey numbers and that was that.
There never was a ‘moment’. Or if there was, it wasn’t me suddenly deciding that homosexuality was all right, so much as a sort of horrible dawning that other people thought it was wrong. Gay men in particular have always existed in my little world; my father’s best childhood friend was gay, and although I’ve heard several interesting stories about my great-great [or great-great-great – never worked that out] uncle and his boyfriend/partner/whatever the proper word is now, the ‘gay’ thing was rather overshadowed by the ‘trance medium channeling Lillie Langtry’ thing.
The real shock came when I emerged into the wide world and discovered that some people really, genuinely hated other people for doing or thinking or feeling things that affected no one but themselves. Not one of my better days, when I realized that.
At the age of 19, after I survived a particularly nasty case of suicidal depression.
Then, again, what else could I have expected, being the scion of a conservative, religious Southern family? As you might imagine, my coming out party was no fun at all.
And, fisha, I just wanted to chime in that I’m honestly not getting this thing where you think there’s a “wrongness” to homosexuality. Wrong for you? No problem. But wrong for me? Perfect together.
I’m not particularly offended that you find the idea of homosexuality to be “weird” (though even that gives me a pause for reasons that I can’t quite explain), but to ascribe the adjective “wrong” to it kinda creeps me out.
I mean, there are lots of things that I might not “get”–like belief in god (especially of the anthropomorhpic variety), for example–but I’d be hard-pressed to call them “wrong” in and of themselves.
But, you know…whatever.
Oh, and yeah, given what you’ve said thus far in this thread, I don’t get an overwhelming sense that you’re a rabid homophobe. I certainly hope that I’m correct in that.
One more thing: I wouldn’t be inclined to describe this thread as an example of Dopers engaging in “tolerant understanding oneupmanship crap,” but YM clearly V.