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

In My Humble Opinion
101

I don’t think it ever occured to me that there might be something wrong with it.

Very sheltered – not religious – upbringing. Sex, in any form, was not discussed, period, and if it was alluded to by some vulgar person, the subject was changed immediately if not sooner. I was educated about all body parts (liver, vagina, pancreas, penis, aorta, testicles, cerebellum, ovaries, et al.), conception, contraception, puberty, menstruation, yada yada, but the practice and social aspects were never mentioned. People got married, or they didn’t. People had babies or they didn’t. Details and reasons were not discussed.

I knew, intellectually, about homosexuality. Emotionally, I had no reaction, simply from lack of interest. Yeah, okay, people are short, gay, black, tall, jewish, white, hindu, fat, whatever, what’s your point? I’m just not that deep, I guess.

Then, in college, a friend trusted me enough to share his inner turmoil about being gay, and eventually, coming out. Wow, right there in front of me, couldn’t be ignored without causing a loved one additional pain, so I had to actually think about it.

It pissed me off that he - anyone - had to go through that, because somebody else gets their knickers in a knot about something that has absolutely no effect on their own life. 25 years later, I still don’t understand why anyone gets twitchy about gay or straight. I just don’t get it. I understand not associating with someone because their partner is a boring or a dipshit, but I do not understand what the other persons partners gender, or the particular mechanics of their act, has to do with it.

102

[QUOTE=Arabella Flynn]
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.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that’s always a nasty shock. I grew up in a very open-minded household. My first encounter with homosexuality took place when I was twelve, during a family trip to Maine; we were riding a trolley in a small resort town, and at one of the stops two men holding hands got onboard. I thought it was strange, so Dad briefly explained that they were gay; during a ‘family’ later on, we discussed that sometimes men like other men, and sometimes women like other women. There was no judgement attached to the discussion at all; I was in college before I learned that some people view homosexuality as a hell-worthy sin.

I didn’t have any encounters like Arabella Flynn describes until I got my current job (this past March). During lunch one day, one of the ladies was describing a TV show her girls had been watching. She decided to join them, and was telling us what a nasty program it was…from her initial description of how “bad” the show was, I assumed they were watching “Real Sex” or something similar. Turns out it was some weekly network TV drama that had a gay male character. She just went on an on about how nasty homosexuality is, and she just can’t understand why it’s is so accepted…it was quite startling to me, since she had appeared to be an otherwise rational person; yet she was sitting across from me, proclaiming that she “wished they just didn’t even exist”.

103

[QUOTE=fisha]
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.
[/QUOTE]

My sincerest apologies for the “male” thing. It’s not so much your way of thinking that made me assume that you were male (actually, not at all), but, rather, your style of writing. (I sometimes get very strong–but, obviously, not always correct–vibes about a person’s biological gender by the way they write.)

I respectfully differ with your take WRT homosexuality vis-a-vis the biological imperative–besides, both **Miller ** and **WhyNot ** took, I think, better stabs at explaining my position than I did (and so did Canadjun, though he/she was responding to another poster’s comments)–but I’ll give you this: I appreciate your attempts at elucidating your position.

And in the long run, I suppose that I’m less concerned (note: =/= not concerned at all) with how somebody feels WRT the “rightness” or “wrongness” or “normalcy” or “abnormalcy” of my sexuality than I am with how they feel as regards how I ought to be treated (and, definitely, will openly and unflinchingly support equal treatment for me) under the law.

Oh, and there’s no need to worry about derailing the thread; I think that, at this point, we’ve both said as much as we can say about this particular aspect of the matter. It’s all good. [boxing gloves off]

104

I finished high school in 1970. We had two gay guys in our year and although you would hear the odd remark I don’t think anyone really cared at all. One of the guys played football with our team and I don’t even recall any discomfort in the dressing rooms. Both guys at various times had parties that were as well attended as anyone else’s. In all honesty I don’t think I have ever worked anywhere since where anyone cared about it. But maybe that’s just Canberra and Sydney.

105

I don’t remember ever thinking there was something wrong with it. I remember that we used the word “bög”, which is roughly the Swedish equivalent of “fag”, as an insult from the age of seven or so, but I don’t think we understood what the word meant. I can work out from my memories that I believed being one was something you’d want to hide, but I think that was as far as my knowledge on the subject went. I don’t remember when I found out what homosexuality was, but I never had any negative feelings towards it.

It took me some time to realize that for most people, gender really was a big deal. For me, it’s just never been all that interesting.

106

[QUOTE=Sampiro]
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.
[/QUOTE]

These days, I’m falling in love with a gay guy every couple of minutes!

107

Fisting Cervaise would be an excellent book title.

108

post rescinded

109

I wonder if part of what makes fisha’s and similar posts stand out is that you’re not really likely to get someone posting “I hate fags and I think they should all die” here. So, even the least tolerant looks intolerant.

In a similar vein, I think my tolerance came in degrees. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and, yes, fag and gay and queer were used as insults. My family says they are tolerant but, like CaerieD’s family, it was said in a “thank God we’re not gay ourselves” kind of way. Nothing wrong with the gays, but…that’s not for us.

That’s a whole lot different, in my mind, than truly accepting that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. Truly accepting it, IMO, would mean accepting it if it was your lifestyle, too.

I did have a couple of relationships with women and the first one was very difficult for me to accept. I had these whirlwind thoughts, “What does this mean? What does this MEAN?” All it really meant was that I was in a relationship with a woman. I had a relationship with a man next, then another woman, then a few more men until I finally married. Big deal.

But it really was a big deal for a long time. And my “tolerant” mother? When I started dating a guy after the second girl I dated, she said, “Oh thank God that was just a phase.”

110

[QUOTE=lorene]
In a similar vein, I think my tolerance came in degrees. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and, yes, fag and gay and queer were used as insults. My family says they are tolerant but, like CaerieD’s family, it was said in a “thank God we’re not gay ourselves” kind of way. Nothing wrong with the gays, but…that’s not for us.
[/QUOTE]

You put it so much more eloquently than I did.

111

[QUOTE=Canadjun]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Your opening statement is incorrect. Not every person in the world is abnormal in one way or other. You’re also equating the word abnormal with different. By doing so you are trying to draw a conclusion that since everybody is different than they are also abnormal. That is not a logical conclusion.

Abnormalities are neither flawed nor flawless. You are assigning a judgement to a word in addition to it instead of using an adjective to alter its meaning.

112

[QUOTE=Magiver]
Your opening statement is incorrect. Not every person in the world is abnormal in one way or other. You’re also equating the word abnormal with different. By doing so you are trying to draw a conclusion that since everybody is different than they are also abnormal. That is not a logical conclusion.

Abnormalities are neither flawed nor flawless. You are assigning a judgement to a word in addition to it instead of using an adjective to alter its meaning.
[/QUOTE]

No, I’m equating abnormal with being not normal, i.e. having a characteristic not shared by the large majority of the population. Given the number of possible unusual characteristics, even when any given unusual characteristic is highly unlikely, looking at all of them together means that everyone is not normal in some characteristic. Hence my comment that everyone is abnormal unless you want to attach additional meanings (e.g. icky) to the word.