What's the percentage of people that are gay?

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Japher


No. I'll let my wife answer that one...

See how that works?

But you COULD be one of those closeted cases who got married to carry out the societal expectations of a suburban family with a white, picket fence and a pet dog.

[Ecthy]

poll: what's the percentage of gay people that are fun?

single option: 0%.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
poll: what's the percentage of gay people that are fun?

single option: 0%.

Have you had a bad day today or something?

[Ecthy]

actually yes

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
actually yes

So lie down on the couch, and I will get an Apolyton counselor for ya.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Oh, get one for all of us.

We all need it .

[Boris Godunov]

Aw, I missed when it was fresh!

Originally posted by Dissident
Time for big D's offensive post of the day

Nah, just ignorant.

I find it strange that gay people like to over-inflate the percentage of gay people. Is that to make your behaviour look a little more normal? Sorry, ain't goin' to happen.

I find it strange that straight people like to underestimate the percentage of gay people. Is that to make yourselves feel more secure in your world and further marginilize people you don't understand?

See how that obnoxious line of reasoning works both ways? But wait...since nobody knows the number of gay people there are, this is just speculative BS. What's more, it's pretty insulting to insinuate those of us who are just offering an honest opinion on the question--based on our own observations, experience and study--are deliberately lying to achieve some agenda. Accusing people of actually lying, when you have no real evidence to the contrary, is ignorant.

I have only knew 1 person who was gay. And yes he was in the navy- he got out though. Not for being gay, but because he was crazy or something. Psych discharges are not uncommon. In fact he was a roommate of ours for a while. As a joke my roomates put in a gay video of his into my VCR. . Didn't bother me. I have no problem watching videos of guys ass ****ing each other.

See, molly bloom already pointed out the stupidity of assuming your personal experience must be ubiquitous. You were in the navy, for pete's sake--not exactly an accepting environment for a homosexual. Of course you aren't going to see many openly gay navy officers.

The second mistake is that you're assuming the one person who you knew was gay was the only gay there. Most gays serve silently in the military, and nobody suspects their orientation. See, we aren't all campy, effeminate people. We're often just as "normal" as you. Not a single one of my friends, even close ones, suspected I was gay and was surprised when I told them. My family only suspected because I never ever brought home a girl.

Although when I was a kid I knew a kid who probably grew up to be gay. He always wanted to take baths with me, and play games where we ended up naked. I didn't think that was strange at the time.

Again, this is based on environment and narrow personal experience. I grew up in a very conservative area of Maryland and went to a conservative school. Yet, of my class of 13 people, 2 including myself are gay. In the class ahead of ours, 2 out of 23 are now known to be gay. That's 4 out of 36, which is more than 10% Woot! I just used personal experience to prove you wrong! How empirical of me!

And yes being gay is being strange. Face it, the nation will not turn into a gay majority anytime soon. you can believe in closeted homos all you want, but the number isn't that high.

Strange? To you, yes. But not to us. "Strange" is a personal value. Having sex with a woman was "strange" to me. And what is this red herring of a gay majority? Who even postulated that here? Your paranoia is a little "strange" itself, I'd say!

And most gays do not start out hetero. I've seen many interviews where they said they knew they were different even when they were like 10 years old. Ellen Degeneres is a good example. She knew she was different. Now women like her did make an attempt at having sex with men. But does that make them hetero? No, it's a pathetic attempt at trying to be normal. Forcing yourself to do heterosexual acts does not make you heterosexual. You have to want to do them.

Oh lord...you missed the entire point. It's not that gays start out hetero and change. It's that they start out with the presumption of being hetero, even that they themselves are hetero, until they come to realize they are not hetero. That's precisely what happens in almost all cases. That's what makes a young person discovering he is not what is expected a particularly tortuous affair. Can you imagine realizing that you aren't what you're expected to be, and what you are is something that a good number of people describe as "sick," "disgusting," "strange," "abnormal," "freakish," "abominable," etc....and you haven't even done anything!

What I don't get is the supposedly gay men that get off inside women and produce babies. If they can manage to get off inside a woman, they are bisexual at most. Despite what they may say. They probably only say they are gay, so their gay partner doesn't get fearful that his partner will cheat on him with a woman. I have trouble believing a guy would marry a woman he was not attracted to. That's bull****. .

Hey, newsflash: I've had sex with a woman. Yeah, I got a boner, I inserted and I got off inside her. If it weren't for the condom, I might have produced mini-Borises. I am categorically not bisexual. Why? Because I was not sexually attracted to the woman. I knew she was pretty, but seeing her naked didn't ignite my loins. But how oh how did I perform? Simple, really...External stimulus on the penis tends to cause it to become erect, especially in a young 20ish guy who has hormones raging anyway. Continued stimulus can lead to ejaculating. Is that detailed enough of an explanation?

I'm not bisexual because I don't feel a sexual attraction, or any physical attraction, to females. I see myself with men when I think of sex, romance and the like. I categorically do not see myself with a woman for these things. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with who we are able to get off with. If this were the case, you'd be up ****s creek with your estimates of gay and bisexuals, since a full 60% of heterosexual men have admitted to having same-sex intimacy. I suppose then that 60% of professed heteros are really bisexuals? Yeah, sure.

Regardless, I can speak from experience here and you can't. One of my good friends, Greg, is 37 and just divorced from his wife about 4 years ago. He has two daughters. He is gay, not bisexual. He can see now that he was in total denial about it his whole life. See, he came from a conservative, religious family, and did exactly what was expected of him. He was miserable for most of the marriage, and as the years went on he knew increasingly why but was so enmeshed in it that he felt there was nothing he could do. The breaking point came when he sat on a bed and put a gun in his mouth. He realized there were two paths: pull the trigger, or tell the truth. It just took a glance at a photo of his daughters to clue him in on the way he had to go.

You simply don't understand how crushingly difficult the pressure is for gay people to conform. This is odd, since you freely throw around the words "not normal" and "strange" yourself to describe gays. Most people want to be normal, and if they realize they aren't they will go to extreme lengths to try and force themselves to be so, even if it means marrying someone and having kids. When you grow up seeing people called "******" and being beat up for perceived gayness, you can bet people will learn real quick how to fake heterosexuality to avoid such things happening to them.

t's time for you all to fess up, and admit you are less than 10% of the population. Areas such as Bum****, Iowa don't have thousands of closeted gays running around. What happens is any gay person in that ****hole town, moves to the big city where they are more accepted. They aren't going to stay somwhere they aren't accepted..

Interesting speculation, but completely speculative again. Lots of people love where they live and don't want to leave, even if they're gay. I'd encourage you to watch "The Laramie Project," which is about a group of documentary makers who went to Wyoming in response to the Matthew Sheppard murder. They interviewed this one gay man in Laramie. He said that he had been lonely, so drove 50 miles to Colorado to a gay bar, since none are in Laramie or even nearby. At the gay bar, he found a whole bunch of men from...Laramie. They still lived there, because they loved the area, despite the non-existence of a gay culture. They were also all closeted to everyone but each other.

Another person, a lesbian, remarked how she moved to Laramie shortly before the murder. She was not out herself, and was relatively isolated. After the murder, she made an effort to seek out the few known lesbians. She wasn't the only one. In the wake of Sheppard's deaths, a slew of otherwise closeted gays who lived and worked in Laramie, WY came together for comfort, to try to understand what had happened.

Gay people aren't visible in a lot of rural areas because they simply don't "appear" gay to anyone, and they go about their business and act like anyone else. Your assumption here is so full of stereotype it's quite funny.

So what happens is you get a bigger concentration of gays in certain cities such as San fransisco, LA, new York, and Chicago. But some cities such as Charleston, SC only had one gay club. And it was only gay some nights a week. Trust me, if there was a demand, more clubs would open. Even my city which has thousands of bars, only has a few gay bars (I have been in most of them).

How about towns that have no straight clubs. Are there therefore no straight people in those areas? Gee, maybe there's more to gays than going to bars and clubs? The town I went to high school in had a population of nearly 6,000 people, no clubs and one bar. Gee, where did all the straights go?

It's funny how gay bars in my city can get away with showing gay pornos, but if a straight bar showed straight pornos that would be sexual harrassment and violate lewd laws and such..

And this nonsequitur was brought up...why?

and like Che said, many straight people attend gay pride parades. Hell some straight people go just to see the outlandish costumes and acts the gay people do on the floats.

Certainly, and we appreciate supportive straight people. We all go for primarily one reason: to have fun. That's really what pride is all about, since it's easiest to have fun when you're surrounded by people who you know aren't going to be judgmental *******s.

But considering that most gays don't even go to the Pride parades, any attempt to extrapolate the numbers of gays from them is useless and pretty much destined to be an underrepresentation.

Well, back to more fun fare...gotta pack for moving.

[Agathon]

Gee... Boris really cares about this....

[mindseye]

Originally posted by Agathon
Gee... Boris really cares about this....

Most gay people do.


(Good job, Boris )

[Dis]

hehe, yes he does.

BTW the person I knew wasn't openly gay. You can't be openly gay in the navy. But he always suspected of being gay. The gay porno sealed the deal. And we are talking about the navy. We've all heard the jokes about gays in the navy. There is more likely to be more gays in the navy than any other service.

I find it funny that Boris thinks I'm paranoid about gays.

You can try to pin the homophobe label on me, but it won't work. It seems any time you say something about the gay lifestyle they don't like, they label you as a homophobe.

Ain't going to work I tell you.

[Zylka]

Wh?

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov

Oh lord...you missed the entire point. It's not that gays start out hetero and change. It's that they start out with the presumption of being hetero, even that they themselves are hetero, until they come to realize they are not hetero. That's precisely what happens in almost all cases. That's what makes a young person discovering he is not what is expected a particularly tortuous affair. Can you imagine realizing that you aren't what you're expected to be, and what you are is something that a good number of people describe as "sick," "disgusting," "strange," "abnormal," "freakish," "abominable," etc....and you haven't even done anything!

And thus, Boris has spoken.