I usually get crushes on straight girls. But maybe that’s because there are more of them around than lesbians. Or maybe I’m just into unrequited lust.
We had a candidate for the leadership of a major political party who tried that argument recently.
For years, there were rumours about his sexuality. As he is single, and has never tried to present himself as a family man, the rumours were not particularly relevant.
Then he was asked directly: “Are you gay?”
His answer was an unequivocal, “No.”
And a few days later, he er… clarified that he is bisexual.
Yes, bisexual is different from gay, but the two are so closely linked in the minds of the general public that the consensus was that the politician was guilty of giving a misleading answer. His campaign nose-dived.
I recall an American politician saying he had not had sexual relations with an intern. Given the later revelations, the consensus was that he was using a rather narrow definition of “sexual relations”, and that he was guilty of giving a misleading answer.
bah! no such thing as bisexual, that just a half way house. Dead funny when you see someone say they are bi and yet they only have sex with one gender :p.
Just means they ain’t willing to tell you, so go for the easy option.
As if my name as zippy and rainbow tunes on my mobile ain’t good hints enough 
Not that i know about such things 
No, that’s trisexual: “I’ll try anything sexual.”
Being one thing or another - homo, hetero, or bi - is a fairly modern idea.
The ancient Greeks (around the time of Socrates and Plato) regarded sex between an older man and a younger man as the truest expression of love, and sex between a man and his wife as merely necessary for the production of children.
In this country, until very recently (and in the USA, at least in some states) homosexuality was a diagnosable mental illness. Participating in homosexual acts was until recently a criminal offence.
Today , it is generally considered irrelevant, although still the source of predictable jokes and a certain amount of bigotry.
Perhaps bisexuality is simply the unfettered enjoyment of sexual activity, without artificial social constraints. Maybe they’re the only ones who have got it right.
Movie: American Beauty
*Spelling corrected
The hypothesis that homophobes are suppressing their own homosexual feelings is difficult or impossible to prove. In an individual case, a homophobe might eventually give way to those urges, and “prove” it, but that doesn’t prove that all homophobes have the same motives or feelings.
I think experiments have been done with er… suitably placed… electrodes, and erotic images on a computer screen, but the problem here is with selection: what is a “homophobe”?
You can only make useful statements about homophobes if you have a consistent definition of what one is. In a rough working class area in Derbyshire, almost every male will be culturally homophobic (Shouting “Backs to the wall lads!” etc., every time a gay person is detected or suspected) just as in some areas, almost everyone is culturally racist.
Take that inidividual out of his homophobic (or racist) background and introduce him to a real homosexual person (or person of other race) on a one to one basis, and very often, there is no fear or hatred - just an understandable awkwardness arising from being in an unfamiliar situation. Individual gay people or black people are often accepted into ostensibly homophobic/racist communities. (“You’re alright, Chalky, you’re one of us.”)
So perhaps a homophobe needs to be defined by his behaviour - in comparison to the average behaviour of people from their own community.
Either way, it’s always fun to suggest that homophobic bigots are secretly homosexual. It annoys them so much. Trouble is, it doesn’t work for racist bigots: “Hah, you only hate black people because deep down, you know you’re black yourself.” Er…
This reductio ad absurdum shows that being racist cannot be because you are in a closet. This suggests there is no obvious reason to believe that being a homphobe is because you are in a closet.
Thats what i ment, worded it in a way that isnt as easy to understand is all lol
Hehe, same here, its like “woah, even guys think im hot =)” lol, but seriously fi a gay guy tries to kiss me, or grab me, or something sexual like that, im still gonna be like “back off” everything else is fine
Happens all the time. You can hardly walk down the street these days without being kissed, grabbed or something sexual like that. I carry a stout hickory stick and brandish it to keep them at bay. 
- no offence to any gays in the crowd, but i thought this was a pisser
I would think that would backfire…
…in a double entendre sort of way!!! 
Editor fired after telling truth: After a BJ, most would say they did not have sex
Editor fired after telling this truth: After a BJ, most would say they did not have sex. Context: AIDS researchers were asking persons if they had sex with someone. But we also know that for years many considered “having sex” as menaing intercourse.
Would You Say You “Had Sex” If . . . ?
Stephanie A. Sanders, PhD; June Machover Reinisch, PhD
JAMA. 1999;281:275-277.
Context The current public debate regarding whether oral sex constitutes having “had sex” or sexual relations has reflected a lack of empirical data on how Americans as a population define these terms.
Objective To determine which interactions individuals would consider as having “had sex.”
Methods A question was included in a survey conducted in 1991 that explored sexual behaviors and attitudes among a random stratified sample of 599 students representative of the undergraduate population of a state university in the Midwest.
Participants The participants originated from 29 states, including all 4 US Census Bureau geographic regions. Approximately 79% classified themselves as politically moderate to conservative.
Main Outcome Measure Percentage of respondents who believed the interaction described constituted having “had sex.”
Results Individual attitudes varied regarding behaviors defined as having “had sex”: 59% (95% confidence interval, 54%-63%) of respondents indicated that oral-genital contact did not constitute having “had sex” with a partner. Nineteen percent responded similarly regarding penile-anal intercourse.
Conclusions The findings support the view that Americans hold widely divergent opinions about what behaviors do and do not constitute having “had sex.”
Author Affiliations: The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, (Drs Sanders and Reinisch) and Gender Studies (Dr Sanders) Indiana University, and R2 Science Communications Inc (Dr Reinisch), Bloomington; and the Institute of Preventive Medicine, Copenhagen University Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark (Dr Reinisch).
It’s not that hard to get homophobic men to admit to homophobia (tho they don’t call it that), so an attitude scale is all it takes. Of course, therre are also behaviors one can observe, like MPs who voted against an equal age of consent in 1994 (all listed, in a search). The researchers did not mean to explain all bigotry, just homophobia, based on theories which have been around a long time.
Henrey E. Adams, Lester W. Wright Jr., and Bethany A Lohr, Is Homophobia Associated With Homosexual Arousal? in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 105., No. 3 (1996), pp. 440-445.
The results of this study indicate that individuals who score in the homophobic range and admit negative affect toward homosexuality demonstrate significant sexual arousal to male homosexual erotic stimuli. These individuals were selected on the basis of their report of having only heterosexual arousal and experiences. Furthermore, their ratings of erection and arousal to homosexual stimuli were low and not significantly different from nonhomophobic men who demonstrated no significant increase in penile response to homosexual stimuli. These data are consistent with response discordance where verbal judgments are not consistent with physiological reactivity, as in the case of homophobic individuals viewing homosexual stimuli.
The researchers reported that 24 % of the nonhomophobic men showed some degree of tumescence in response to the male homosexual video, compared to 54 % of the subjects who scored high on the homophobia scale. In addition, 66 % of the nonhomophobic group showed no significant increases in tumescence after this video, but only 20 % of the homophobic men failed to display any arousal. Additionally, when the participants rated their degree of sexual arousal later, the homophobic men significantly underestimated their degree of arousal by the male homosexual video.
[QUOTE=kington99]
Strange how alot of men think that every gay guy they meet is after them. A friend of mine got drunk recently and told me exactly what he’d like to do to me, I really did find it rather flattering.
I always wonder what being a girl and getting hit on by a guy you’re not interested in is like, presumably like being a straight guy and being hit on by a gay guy. Maybe if you find the second disturbing you should refrain from doing the first.
/QUOTE]
I think this is a very good point. Something that I have noticed in my life is that men (in general) will often say the kind of thing that has been said here by blokes about being chatted up by other blokes - “back off” etc.
But women (in my experience) tend to do so MUCH less often.
I have thought about this over the years and (I’m sorry) but I do thing that it’s something to do with the men’s strength, that somehow both men and women find it slightly threatening (even if it’s subconsciously) to be ‘hit on’ by a man. Women do not find it threatening to be ‘hit on’ by a woman.
Cathy
Possibly. But I don’t think it’s just strength per se. In the majority of cases, at least theoretically, a man could take what isn’t given freely (rape). It is difficult (but no impossible) for a woman, however strong, to take what isn’t given freely. (Cathy, you’re a bit younger than I, but do you remember the celebrated case of Joyce McKinley and the Mormon? - I’m not sure if I recall the name correctly after er… 30 years.)
However, I think with men doing the “back off, buddy, backs to the wall, don’t drop the soap” routine, it’s more to do with being very keen to avoid being mistaken for gay. The harder that men try to avoid being mistaken for gay, the more it is tempting to suspect that they aren’t too sure themselves.
This behaviour, of course, is an artefact of the fact that homosexuality is still stigmatized, although, thankfully, less so than in the past.
Possibly in part. Not completely.
Being crazy is stigmatized too, but that doesn’t explain YOUR behavior.
Why don’t women do this kind of thing so much then? Is it something to do with being a threat to machoness, which doesn’t effect women?
And no, I’m aftraid I don’t remember the case you mentioned. Sorry.
Cathy
Machismo is all to do with being strong, competent, authoritative and in control. In very crude terms, for many men, that would translate as the one doing, not being done to. Any suggestion that you might want to be done to by another man is therefore an attack on the very foundations of your masculinity.
(I emphasise that this is how I interpret the prevailing view of masculinity in modern western culture. It is not my own personal view, nor is it inevitable in all societies.)
Femininity is very different. It often has connotations of subservience. If you accept the negative “subservience” model of femininity, then lesbianism can be construed as a form of empowerment.
An alternative and more positive image of femininity is that a woman gives/offers herself to her partner as an act of love. There is no inherent conflict with this model in a woman giving herself to another woman as an act of love.
The models of femininity which present the woman as either subservient or as willingly giving herself both imply the woman as the passive partner. This presumably arises at least in part from the simple mechanics of the sex act.
In the 1970s, lesbianism became fashionable in a certain subculture (associated with feminism, left wing political activism, the peace movement) and it was a very strident and overt manifestation of lesbianism: heavy work boots, dungarees/overalls, close cropped hair and other things which could be interpreted as caricaturing masculinity. Sexuality can be a fashion statement or a cultural manifestation (compare with the ancient Greek men).
Sexuality and gender identity and the related discourses are areas where I find social constructionism particularly convincing.
You’re such a swot. 
Cathy
What if I want to shoot you? Would you let me kill you since that’s your philosophy on everything?