: Floyd: How do you know you've "never met someone who was just gay?" If s/he wasn't wearing the trappings and gear that you use to identify homosexuality, would you recognise a person as gay? Or would you just assume that they were straight because that's the default setting in western society? According to some reports, one in ten people are homosexual. : Morris: So we have gays that "look" gay, and others that don't.
Yes, and why not? We have film and music stars that look gay but practice straight, why should the reverse not be equally as acceptable?
: Are all the ones that don't advertise their homosexuality living in fear of being bashed?
Some are, others just have "straight" fashion sense or aesthetics, and still others "look straight" to straight folks simply because most straights aren't trained to recognize the signals.
:Perhaps they are somehow "less" gay then their "out" counterparts?
That seems unlikely, since "gay" isn't something you can buy at a store, whereas clothes and make-up are.
: The gay mannerisms that annoy some posters confuse the hell out of me.
Fair enough. I imagine straights drooling over supermodels must confuse some gays. I've always thought the fauning over Picasso's "blue period" crap (and over the Spice Girls, and most of what passes for "popular culture" for that matter,) was duced odd, myself. Aesthetics don't have a universal standard like weights and measures.
:Do other gays find it sexy,
I imagine some do, others don't. Today many straight men consider the symptoms of malnutrition desirable in a woman. 100 years ago, heavy-set women were generally considered more attractive. Today, short hair on a woman is considered sporty, even sexy, 50 years ago, it was unheard-of. What a group of people consider attractive changes through time, and what one group finds absolutely beautiful may look quite silly to others.
:or is it a peer pressure thing?
Are Levi's jeans a peer-pressure thing? or Nike shoes? If all fashion is due to peer-pressure, I suppose Gay fashion is due to peer-pressure, no less that straight fashion.
:Does one have to be "out" to be considered "officially" gay by his peers?
Does one have to be "out" to be "officially" straight? What is "official" sexuality? Does a single homosexual experience in one's lifetime make one "officially" gay? If so, does a signle heterosexual experience in an otherwise exclusively gay life make one straight? If not, how many gay experiences do you suppose someone has to have before they get "official" status? How many "straight" experiences must a person have before we can consider them "really" straight? or is it a statistical thing; for example, if a guy has sex with women 51% of the time, and men the other 49%, he's "straight enough," since he's more straight than gay? I don't believe there really are answers to these questions. Is someone of Irish ancestry that grew up in the states Irish, or not? Is the edge of a coin really "heads" or really "tails?" Does everything fit in nice, neat, little Aristotelian essentialist categories, or are some things "neither fish nor fowl?"
:Sounds like blatant discrimination to me.
Yeah, sort of like tv, radio, and hoarding/billboard advertising depicting exclusively straight sexuality must seem like blatant discrimination to gays, you reckon?
The point I'm trying to make is that the categories we use to define people are insufficient for real understanding of those people. For example, although your post doesn't explicitly state the fact, I gather that you are heterosexual. There. Now do I know who you are? Can I reasonably say "Oh, yeah, I know all about Hugh, he likes chicks." Of course I don't know all about you! Your sexuality is only a part of what makes up "You" as a person. The same is true for gays. Their sexuality is only one tiny aspect of their personalities.
It stands out because it's rare, just like white folks stand out in predominantly Black, "Hispanic" or Asian neighborhoods. It may seem like they are "flaunting" their sexuality, but I doubt that you'd interpret an African-American man in a predominantly white area as "flaunting" his ethnicity, would you? Are white folks who visit "Chinatowns" around the U.S. and Canada "flaunting" their ancestry? Or do they just stand-out from the crowd because they are statistically less common? I suspect the latter is a more accurate interpretation, frankly.
-Floyd
None.
