When did you - if ever - realize there was nothing wrong with homosexuality?

In My Humble Opinion
81

I grew up in a very homogenous white-bread town in the late '70s and '80s. When I was a kid, “gay” was a general insult, like “jerk” or “moron”. It didn’t have anything to do with actually being gay. I think there must have been some gay kids at my high school, but 1985 Montana did not really invite coming out of the closet. It’s not really a rabidly homophobic place, but it is very much a “you mind your business and I’ll mind mine” sort of place, so declarations of sexuality – and behavior that made you different, like “acting gay” – would not have been approved. So I didn’t really have any awareness of homosexuality one way or the other as a kid – didn’t know anyone who was gay, didn’t really know what being gay meant.

BUT I was raised by a Republican father of a decidedly liberatarian stripe. He took the “you mind your business and I’ll mind mine” mindset to the logical conclusion, and taught me to do the same: If it doesn’t harm you or society, then it really isn’t any of your business. It isn’t your place to make moral decisions for others. Every person must make their own choices and be responsible for them. If a person is a good person and keeps his or her word, that’s all you need to know about them.

So when I woke up to the fact that some people were gay and that actually had some relevance to society and life, I couldn’t see what the big deal was. Having some fundie tell me it was “wrong” didn’t sit well, because I was raised to believe that no one else got to decide for me, or anyone, what was “wrong” or “right” unless the action caused harm. And I just never could see what harm being gay caused.

82

I never held any overtly homophobic attitudes, but I did have the general sort, “That’s gross! What’s wrong with those wierdos?” attitude that most kids my age had. But it wasn’t anything that I ever really thought about in any detail before I was thirteen. Because that was the year (1988) that Kids in the Hall started airing on HBO. I loved the show, but it had a huge amount of explicit gay humor that really disturbed me. Plus, Scott Thompson was both the funniest guy on the show, and openly gay, which really confused me. (Plus, he was totally cute, which really really confused me.) But it was so funny, I kept watching, and after a while, all the gay stuff just seemed normal.

By the time I was in high school, I’d realized I was bisexual, but it was another ten years before I had the guts to come out about that. Instead, I convinced myself that, since I liked girls, too, and gays were so persecuted, I should just date girls and spare myself the hassle. And since I was never going to act on my bisexuality, there’s no point in telling anyone about it, right?

The problem with this attitude is that, while I am sexually attracted to women, I’ve always had trouble being emotionally attracted to them. I’ve never fallen in love with a woman, whereas my entire life can be fairly easily categorized by which of my guy friends I was madly (but secretly!) crushing on at the time. So, I gave up on that chickenshit attitude, came out to my friends and family, and inside of a couple months, I was in my longest and most succesful relationship to date, with another dude.

Yay for happy endings!

83

L’il Pluck, I am actually female. I do, however, work in a male dominated field (construction) and am surrounded by testosterone on a daily basis. Perhaps it’s being absorbed.

Ok, to address the part of it being intrinsic to someone’s biological makeup, I believe it is counter productive to a biological imperative. Therefore, wrong. Do I think you, L’il Pluck, are wrong on how you think or feel or whom you are attracted to? No. But it* is *more than just preference for blondes, or tall people. As I’ve been told, and as I believe, it’s not just a lifestyle choice. Oh sure, there’s plenty of experimenting, and fashionable homosexuality, (in my experience, lots of young women go through this phase.) but I do believe it’s intrinsic.

I think I am going to bow out gracefully form this thread now, before it gets derailed.

84

Born in 1985. When I was 12 or so, my father told me that he’d kill me for my own good if I turned out gay. He wasn’t big on hyperbole; if I did not turn out straight, I may not have been able to type this today.

It’s kind of icky, but I usually don’t judge. Living in West Hollywood, judgement could lead to an aneurism. Yes, I do think it’s a valid basis for harmless jokes among my circle of friends - how dare you mock my baldness, foul bugger? :wink:

85

It’s hard to point to any one thing that changed my mind about it though there are a few significant events that definitely contributed.

I was raised Southern Baptist so of course I was taught that it was something unspeakably bad. I never really questioned that until a high school teacher was asked whether homosexuality was a choice. He asked the person who’d asked the question (a football player) if anyone had taught him to like girls. Did he choose to like girls? Doesn’t it make sense that it works the other way as well? That made perfect sense to me and I started having trouble making myself believe that it was a sin.

Later on, a cousin of mine was murdered. I found out after the fact he was gay. (In retrospect that was almost certainly the motive behind his murder.) Almost no one in the family accepted that and never talked about it either before or after his death. I was told about it in hushed whispers in the funeral home. Most people in the family pretended that his extremely distraught boyfriend was nothing more than a room mate or a “drinking buddy”. That angered me and I wasn’t sure why.

Later when I went to college and eventually freed myself completely from religion, I was finally able to see that there is absolutely nothing wrong with homosexuality. What’s more, the gay marriage issue pisses me off even more than it does some of my gay friends.

86

Wait a sec, since when do they let straight people live in WeHo? :wink:

87

By biological imperative, do you mean having children? Gays have as much desire to have kids as straights, and with modern technology and social services, almost as much ability. Since it’s virtually impossible for gays to “accidentally” have kids, they tend to have children only when they know they are financially and emotionally capable of supporting them, which means the kids are more likely to grow up in secure and nurturing enviroments. End result: children who are more likely to grow up to be stable, productive members of society, meaning that homosexuality ends up being an evolutionary advantage. Therefore, right, at least from a biological perspective.

88

I grew up in a socially restrictive area (Salt Lake City) and while some people will tell you that Utah isn’t as bad as you’d imagine it, this was back in the 80’s when Utah was not the melting pot it is today.

Anyway, being a bit of an outcast myself (I was catholic and a non-cowboy type in an area that was all LDS and rural), around Jr. High I started to hang out with other non-traditional folks for the area. Not that I had any problem with gay people before that, I just didn’t really know any. I would have been one of those mildly ignorant youths who would have been apt to call people that I didn’t like “gay” or “queer” as an insult.

I can’t think of any one specific thing that changed the way I thought or felt. I remember that I was in Drama (for my arts elective) and I was 100% sure that my drama teacher was gay and closeted. We were ALL sure. I think he may have been that turning point, he was one of the coolest, funniest teachers in the school. Someone that just seemed a lot more like the person I wanted to be than the macho jerkoffs that surrounded me. I never did find out if he was gay or not, but I think just that perception that gay people are no different (and sometimes a damn sight better than) anyone else changed me.

Since then I’ve had the pleasure of knowing a lot of great people that I may have missed out knowing had I not lost that stigma.

89

I don’t really remember a time where I ever had a problem with homosexuality, I was in band in middle and high school and two people that played the same instrument as me were gay and I still talk to the one that is alive on facebook, I remember some guy I knew talking about how he was making fun of some guy that was known to be gay in high school, calling him faggot and such. I didn’t say anything, but inside I was thinking why would you care if he was gay?

90

The rules of evolution and natural selection don’t apply to individuals within a social species, they apply to large groups as a whole. It’s totally irrelevant if Tom’s genes are passed on directly, what Natural Selection cares about is if the genes in Tom’s genetic line are passed on more than the gene’s in Fred’s close cohort - perhaps through his sisters or his mother or his brothers. So if Tom’s pitching in and helping provide for his sister’s babies results in more of the genes most related to him being passed down, nature doesn’t give to squats about who squeezed the pup out their loins. More of Tom’s close genetic relatives surviving to breeding age = advantage.

We’re social creatures and always have been. Nature doesn’t “care” who has babies, as long as some of us do. If more of them in this tribe here survive because gay people aren’t reproducing as much themselves, but helping provide for babies closely related to them, then that homosexuality is an evolutionary advantage for that tribe of humans, and they, as a group, will keep those gay genes alive.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! Being gay (and/or being infertile and/or not wanting children of your own) isn’t a mistake, it’s nature’s way of making sure there are more than two adults around for every kid when the sabre toothed tigers come to pick us off.

Also, what **Miller **said. Our brains (and our science) are part of evolution too.

91

It had a lot of WASP baggage and attachment to pedophilia and transvestitism to my parents when I was a kid, even though my parents had a gay friend (who really was an exceptionally weird person way in addition to being gay) and a lesbian friend (never came out but didn’t need to- butch, lived with a woman she held hands with, etc., but lesbians have never been quite as socially ostracized as gay men down here). I was homophobic as a kid, but for me it was when I realized

1- I was gay (I’d put it down to the “everybody’s bisexual” thing until then- I was bisexual but the attraction to women hadn’t kicked in yet)
2- I didn’t want to molest little boys, hump old men (that was another thing: homosexuals were attracted to any male regardless of age or weight or looks) or any of that jazz
3- I didn’t want to dress in women’s clothing (and hang around in bars)
4- Based on the guys I’d known who did this, denying it and becoming a Jesus Freak just made it all the worse (lots of this in high school- the “just can’t hide it” gays fell into either the “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell/Go Away” camp or the “Oh How I Love Jesus [and not big beefy muscle men]” camp to get that “people don’t accept him because of his faith” thing going with their moms and grandparents.

t just hit me that “Hey, they’re wrong”. My parents weren’t fundamentalists and had encouraged us to question things like the Virgin Birth and 6 Day Creation and the like, so I chalked this one up to “another thing that’s borne more of the Bible’s writers than the opinions of God”.

So finally I admitted I was gay when I was fisting Cervaise. It wasn’t the first time but back in those days everybody fisted Cevaise and nobody thought it was gay or anything- people would say “lordy lordy those yellow squash are as common as folks fisting Cervaise, but I wish I could get some good acorn squash but they’re dear as Unicorn’s hairs this time year”. (Likewise, Antinor I’d never met, but I’d known he was gay long before anyway; in fact, “gay as Antinor” is a common expression down here.) The next year I started fifth grade out and proud.

92

For context, I’m 24 and grew up in a suburb of Boston. So I had a fairly liberal, if sheltered, Catholic upbringing. My parents never uttered a racist or homophobic word in their lives, and often talked about friends they had back in Long Beach CA that were flamboyant.

I was very sheltered as well, and naive regarding sexuality. I didn’t know what gay meant until Junior High, and that was AFTER the girls had been calling me a dyke for a few years. Finally I figured out that the insults dyke and fag referred to one’s sexuality, not just the same as “dork” or “stupid.” My older sister explained that one to me.

Once I knew what the words meant I knew they weren’t appropriate insults. I knew the girls in school thought a dyke was a bad thing, and I hated that they called me it. I never used the term to insult anyone, but at the age of 12 I “knew” that a dyke or a fag was a bad thing to be.

But I got older and got more self confidence and started making good friends of my own and I stopped caring about what insults were thrown at me by the cool kids. Everyone thought I was a lesbian and that was fine, whatever, I didn’t care about them. I knew I liked boys.

Then I had a crush on my friend’s sister. This was at 16. I fell hard, infatuated with her. I panicked, was I a lesbian? It took a lot of thinking and processing to finally realize that one doesn’t have to be one side or the other. I can have a crush on the senior boy who runs the astronomy club and the cute butch girl I saw a couple times and that’s not a problem.

No one had ever explained bisexuality to me, and mostly it was mentioned as being something indecisive, a stage one goes through before they can accept they are actually gay. But realizing that I truly was attracted to both sexes was eye-opening.

All those slurs, the generalizations, the insults that flew around school were complete bullshit. None of those people understood how normal it really felt.

So for me, it took realizing I was bi to really come to terms with homosexuality as a normal, un-weird thing.

93

This thread reminds me of a guy I knew in high school. For no reason (except that you started it) I’m going to share the story of my first friend who I knew was gay.

Remember the mid 80’s? New Wave music, weird guys wearing makeup, etc? I was associated with the “stoner” crowd, although I rarely smoked pot. Stoners hung with stoners, jocks hung with jocks, wavers hung with wavers, etc. Since I didn’t spend much time stoned, wasn’t exactly stupid, and didn’t really notice that I wasn’t supposed to, I had friends in most of the various classifications. I stood out as the only stoner in choir, rescued a couple jocks from academic humiliation, and really only feared people trying to move into another group (you know, some guy wants to prove he’s a jock so randomly attacks a nerd).
Anyway, there was this kid a year or so younger that either had immaculate skin or wore makeup, really soft spoken, total outcast in the jock-dominated school. Anyway, somehow I got to know this guy a little and found out he was smart and a fairly interesting conversationalist when no one was picking on him, so we’d occasionally go out to lunch or hang around the back of the school and smoke cigs.
I really was kind of clueless (the stories that accompany this statement are long and not relevant) and didn’t realize for the longest time that he was (is) gay. One day we were coming back from lunch he looks over at me and asks “Bob, why are you nice to me?” Not being the type to give much thought to a question like that, I said something like “'cause you’re ok”. I thought he was going to cry, then he said “you know I’m gay, right?” Well, honestly I didn’t, but just replied “Yeah, so?”
He didn’t hug me or anything, but he did seem to like that I didn’t care at all. Not trying to make a point, not making fun of him or take advantage of him, just a friend. That kind of made me sad that he was at a place where he had to question even a casual friendship. I’ve no idea (now) what his name was, but he’s probably a big part of the reason homophobia pisses me off.

94

I don’t think homosexuality is wrong, I think it’s abnormal.

And yes, the world would be boring if we were all the same.

95

It’d be easier to go to stores and find clothes and music I like, though.

96

I nominate this for inclusion in the SDMB Hall of Fame.

97

It actually works out better for me. I have trouble matching shirts and ties.

98

Every single person in the whole wide world is abnormal in one way or another. There are so many ways people can vary that to be normal in every single aspect is in itself so wildly abnormal as to be for all practical purposes impossible. So, saying a human characteristic is “abnormal” doesn’t really mean anything unless the person saying it is also suggesting that the “abnormal” characteristic is somehow wrong or flawed.

99

You’re not alone. Same here.

100

Snerk.