sexuality

[desh]

Inspired by today's Gene Weingarten chat and by talking to a few friends of mine, here's a poll:


But first, to define some terminology: "Gal" is what I'm saying since neither "woman" nor "girl" is as age-nonspecific as "guy". Please ignore whatever patronizing connotation you may think "gal" has.

If "gay", "straight", and "bi" aren't specific enough for you, then consider "gay" to be kinsey 5-6, "bi" to be kinsey 2-4, and "straight" to be kinsey 0-1.

There are limits to the number of choices any poll can give (especially on LJ), but not limits to the number of different answers that are actually possible, especially with a charged question like this. Please, wherever possible, choose the closest answer even if it's not perfect. Feel free to elaborate in comments.

Now, then:
[Poll #1104392]
(As always, LJ lets you edit your poll results if you misclicked or something.)

Comments

[atthe-algonquin.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is going to be *really* interesting to watch -- thanks for posting it.

dagoski makes a good point up there, that there's a lot of cultural stuff involved in what you identify as. (For practicality's sake, just preface everything here with 'in my experience', since I'm sure it changes by age, location, whatever.) Lesbians can really turn on women who identified as lesbian, and then as bisexual, and most of the gay men I've met refuse to believe that bi men exist; the overwhelming opinion is that they just haven't accepted that they're gay yet. (I've known a handful of bi guys, and I can say, it's a brave, odd place to be. The ingrained urge to 'pass' as straight is enormous.)

One of the more interesting things about bisexuality, and being bi, is that I get a lot more shit from the gay community than the straight. I had a (lesbian-turned-bi) girlfriend very, very seriously tell me that I didn't have it as hard as she did, coming out, despite the fact that her mother's a lesbian, she had a lot of family support, etc. People are...surprisingly hurtful, I guess is what I'm trying to get across. There aren't many bi role models, and they're nonexistant in pop culture. It's a curious little segment of the Kinsey scale :)

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

I think one thing that happens a lot is that a person knows they aren't straight. But, if they're not straight, then what are they? If you're lucky enough to come to that point in a free wheeling place, you might just be able to say "I'm still not sure" or "I'm bi" and have people be okay with it. Unfortunately, there's not too many places like that and they're often sub-cultural pockets with in a liberal locale. I think there are a great many papers in this subject, but issues of trust make it difficult for a researcher to become enough of an insider to do the study. So I think gay, or, for that matter, straight become default settings in a society that makes binary judgments.

The relationship I was in was with someone who identified as Lesbian despite being attract to men as well as women. She came out, lost her biological family and took on the local Lesbian community(very distinct from the gay male community in that time and place) as her adopted family. When we got involved she had to come out again and lost that family as well. It was a bad, bad experience for all concerned and it never did have a happy ending.