s/o "becoming" gay...

marrymemylove

My best friend is gay. She uses the terms "became", "turned", "decided", even "chose" to describe her situation.

I am betting many would be offended if they heard gay people described as "turning" gay because it implies to some that some malevolent force was at work. But she's fine with it.

She says (and I've known her since we were 5, I'm sure she's being honest) that she never felt gay as a child or teenager, she didn't even feel ambivalent or particularly curious. She dated men at college and slept with several men in serial monogamous relationships for 10 years. In her mid 20s she had a lesbian experience. She still went on to date men after that. Then she met a woman she fell in love with and since then she's been a lesbian (though her current partner is a different woman she's still friends with her first love).

In some sense she says she could have been quite happy with the right man, but she met the right woman first.

Just to put it out there to show that not every story of a gay person is "I felt gay from childhood" or "I suddenly realized I was always gay and hadn't accepted it". Those 2 lines get so cliched, and they are NOT always the way it happens.?

ElizabethD

The science emerging can "explain" gay men... and gay men do not grow up the way your lesbian friend does.  They are more hard wired and would not (generally) have memories of being really interested sexually in women from a young age.

Women are completely unexplainable with science at this point.  I guess we're just more complex ;-)

femmegem

Ditto Gethsemane.

DevonPow

I would argue that she is bisexual, not gay,

Obviously in the world of gay, lesbian, and transgender people there are many different scenarios. To be hapy with either a man or a woman, even if it is firmly one or the other at different points in yout life, is bisexual.

marrymemylove

I ditto Elizabeth, we're just more complex.?

A close friend of mine identifies as a bisexual man but he goes through definite phases or preferring men or women. My female friend says she would not go back to men now (though she could have been happy with a male partner before if the right one had come along).

?She has also made a moral decision that it isn't fair to her partners (she made this before her current partner) to keep switching. She chose exclusively women before she felt exclusively for women because she thought it was immoral to keep changing.?

A sad fact too is that my bisexual male friend and the gay men I know through him (3 of them at least that I know well) all say they did not feel anything for men until after they had been sexually abused. I know it is terribly unpopular to say that abuse has an impact on sexual orientation if at the critical age but there's got to be some people for which that is so. Note I am NOT saying abuse is a factor for all gay men, only some.

gracendantho26

Ditto on the bisexual comment

I do know that our good friends (neighbors) are gay and definitely would never date a woman. They are not bisexual at all.

marrymemylove

I just think bisexual is a cheap shot. To some extent we ALL are sure but that doesn't mean you can write off someone as "bisexual not gay" and go back to the stereotype of gay men.

There are plenty of gay women I've met (not all through my friend but many) who are very different from gay men in their outlook on sexuality and how it works. They get thrown in with gay men politically because they share discrimination, but that doesn't mean their experience is the same.?

Bisexual implies short-run phases of favoring 1 sex or genuine indifference to the sex of your partner (and I know men in both those categories). She's neither. She said if she'd settled down with the right man in her early 20s and never met Lily, her first lesbian lover, she probably would have been perfectly happy and not very curious. That's why she says she "turned". She wouldn't go back now by choice, but she isn't repulsed by the idea of sex with men the way that some of her lesbian friends are and many gay men are (with women). Partly because she's actually experienced it. Partly because it was more about love than sex. Another instance of women being more complex!

And she's planning to have sex with a male friend to get pg btw. Her lesbian partner could not bear to do that, but she is still only doing it to get pg.?

DevonPow

bi?sex?u?al var interfaceflash = new LEXICOFlashObject ( "https://cache.lexico.com/d/g/speaker.swf", "speaker", "60", "18", "", "6"); interfaceflash.addParam("loop", "false"); interfaceflash.addParam("quality", "high"); interfaceflash.addParam("menu", "false"); interfaceflash.addParam("salign", "t"); interfaceflash.addParam("FlashVars", "soundUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fcache.lexico.com%2Fdictionary%2Faudio%2Fluna%2FB03%2FB0371300.mp3"); interfaceflash.write(); /ba?'s?k?u?l/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [bahy-sek-shoo-uhl] Show IPA Pronunciation

?adjective

1.	Biology. a. of both sexes. b. combining male and female organs in one individual; hermaphroditic.

2.	sexually responsive to both sexes; ambisexual.

?noun

3.	Biology. an animal or plant that has the reproductive organs of both sexes.

4.	a person sexually responsive to both sexes; ambisexual

 

 

She is bi-sexual.

emiliemadison

Your follow up pretty clearly depicts someone who is bisexual. I don't understand your "cheap shot" comment. Saying your friend is bisexual wasn't meant as an insult; it was describing her sexuality.

marrymemylove

Sorry I think bisexuality is so often used as a copout so we can reinforce the stereotypes about gay people that it IS an insult unless they're self-identified as bisexual which usually means they have simmultaneous feelings for both sexes even if they don't act on them during the same period.

I don't think gay men are that shallow that they all have the same experience so I think ?the use of gay should be used more broadly to refer to those who exclusively have sex with the same sex (so my friend is most definitely gay and not bisexual).

Regardless of the evolution of definitions I think any tag that perppetuates stereotypes is a bad move.?