Sir Ian McKellen says
"Some people are gay - get over it."
Don't come to me for cutting-edge observations on these issues -- as with some other subjects, for example Feminism, this is a no-brainer for me -- For me, gender preference is really about as relevant in social occasions and policy as handedness. Yes, I'm in one group, and some other people are in others (straight/gay/bi/whatever), but it's not a reason for treating people differently.
My ideal would be for people of all persuasions to be able to say of their own group and others as Clive Barker does:
"Who Needs a Niche?"
by Laura Dempsey, Dayton Daily News, [July] 1998
quoted here
-- and see the FAQ for this site
Larry-Bob, Queer Zine Explosion
-- quoted in the credits of Assume Nothing
by the wonderful and talented Leanne Franson . (or at Amazon.com)
(and I find the scene at the top of page 18 where Liliane is anticipating
and practicing for a potentially hot date with a lady friend quite delightful!
Liliane, you are a sweetheart!)
more at Liliane Minicomics
"... any definition has its pitfalls and dangers -- this isn't because of any native intractability of the topic of homosexuality. It's more because the topic has been treated so badly by most people. It's not that the definitions make no sense, it's the bigotry that makes no sense."
Hear, hear
"... what are the causes of homosexuality — the predilection, not the acts (which I assume to be caused by free will prompted by the predilection)? I can list a baker’s dozen of theories that I have heard or seen written up at one time or another. In very approximate order of scientific respectability, as best I can judge it, the theories are: --"Good intro to the discussion. Derbyshire is widely notorious as "anti-gay". As frequently happens, the truth appears to be non-simple.
"There's an evil conspiracy under way. It's the gender conspiracy," Sheik Mohammed al-Unsi says on one tape. "Gender is total decadence, meaning families constituting of men married to men or women married to women. It also means that a woman can offer herself to any man she fancies."
-- or "any woman", I suppose --
"I've learned that talking to people who oppose homosexuality is like talking to a wall, only the wall doesn't spout bible verses in answer to every question. That said, I will ask again just to see what kind of answer I get: how does homosexuality hurt anyone? Every time I ask that question, the answer always contains some reference to religion. Of course everyone has a right to their religious beliefs, but that's not the issue. There is no (secular) reason to deny people their basic civil rights, especially law-abiding, adult citizens. Let's take a look at some of these 'special privileges'."
"If your current partner comes out to you as bisexual.... You might be thinking, "Well, if s/he is telling me s/he's attracted to two genders, does this not imply that s/he finds my poor monogendered body an inadequate love toy?"Fascinating. It's never occurred to me before to feel that my body might be inadequate because it's "monogendered".
"'For heterosexual women,' researcher Dr Meredith Chivers says in a new documentary about bisexuality called Bi the Way, which was shown at the NewFest film festival in New York, 'looking at a naked man walking on the beach is about as exciting as looking at landscapes.'Obviously enough, there's a huge amount of individual variation here -- any blanket statements will be only very general ones.
Dr Chivers, a research fellow at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto, says she has data to support this. She recently published results of a study in which she showed people video clips of naked men and women in various sexual and non-sexual situations and measured their genital arousal. Heterosexual women, Dr Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.
What really matters to women, Dr Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love.
Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr Chivers said. 'For heterosexual women, gender didn't matter. They responded to the level of activity,' she said.
Dr Chivers' work adds to a growing body of scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, rather than as an either/or phenomenon."
"First of all, gay sexuality is not a threat. (sic) Gay people are not sexually interested in straights. ...
Gay people aren't promiscuous. Another common myth about gay people is that they sleep around, but the statistical reality is that gay people as a group aren't any more slutty than straights.
("Median Reported Sex Partners" is 6, for straight men, gay men, straight women, and gay women. In fact the uniformity there is pretty surprising, at least to me.)
... we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.
Straight people have gay sex, too. Another inquiry that had unexpected results: we asked 252,900 straight people have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex? Almost a quarter answered 'yes'
Not unexpectedly, more women than men have had same-sex desires:straight women's same-sex desires:
- 1 in 3 straight women has hooked up with another woman.
- and of those who haven't, over 1 in 4 would like to. (Nearly half of women surveyed have "hooked up with" another woman or would like to.)
As for straight men, a surprisingly high 13% have had a same-sex experience, and another 5% haven't yet but would like to."
"Nearly three-quarters of a million adults in Britain say they are gay or bisexual, according to figures published for the first time today by the Office of National Statistics.
The findings, based on interviews with more than 450,000 people – the biggest pool of social data after the census – show that an estimated 481,000 people regard themselves as gay and a further 245,000 – mainly women – say they are bisexual."
"I am a heterosexual woman .... I am a Christian -- I believe that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is my Savior. (In some Christian terminology, I am a "born again" Christian.) ... I was educated in Christian schools, kindergarten through college, so every day I was taught the Scriptures. I believe that the Bible is to be taken seriously because it is the Word of God. ...IMHO some of Ms May's observations are extremely straightforward, while others (for example Leviticus) are more "interpretive", though not excessively so.
Genesis 19:1-11: The passage that scholars on all sides of the issue agree has nothing to do with condemnation of homosexual behavior is ironically the one that is most commonly understood to do the exact opposite. ... The sin, as described in the story itself, is the attempted same sex gang rape of Lot's male guests. We know instinctively that the gang rape of a woman by men does not teach us that all heterosexual behavior is wrong. In the same way we know that the gang rape of a man by other men does not teach us that all homosexual behavior is wrong. What's wrong is the rape. ...
Jesus says nothing about same sex intercourse, either its use or misuse. While we cannot say that everything Jesus fails to mention is therefore good or moral, it seems implausible that he would have failed to mention it if it is the vile sin some would have us believe. ...
Jesus taught us over and over again to love God and our neighbor as ourself. By example he showed us that this includes "socializing" with outcasts, and time after time he showed them their worth. He also taught us by parable, like the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) .... Jesus is teaching us many things in this parable, but one of them, says Herman Waetzen, is this: 'Instead of drawing lines in order to build an ordered and safe world, the challenge is to act for and with those who are in trouble, disadvantaged, or marginalized.'"
-- one of the amusing and often practical
(or is that "practical and often amusing"?)
suggestions for romantic success from the
Science Fiction Convention Survival Kit for Newbies