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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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I have to wonder about the people who are fully 100% convinced that it’s just knowing about gay/trans/queer people that “turns” their children LGBTQ.
It’s like when I asked my youth leader in Bible study when he chose to be straight and he looked me dead in the eyes and answered, “when I was 12”. I wonder if he ever figured it out.
"Being gay isn't your choice. It's mine. You are gay now."
I have a theory about that
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-link-between-homophobia-and-being-gay-youve-got-it-the-wrong-way-round-07d4b017d2ec
might be biased due to being bi myself but imo the simpler/more likely explanation is that the "homosexuality is a choice, reject it" homophobes are mostly bi people who've been conditioned by their environment from an early age to reject the same sex attraction, so it literally is true for them. In private they might also prefer gay porn because they find the taboo aspect arousing (a common pattern that extends to fetishes).
On demographic surveys bi people are much more common than gay people as well, but bi erasure is a thing in both the straight and LGBT community
Oh yeah you might be right about most of the "homosexuality is a choice" guys. I wrote that article right after Nick Fuentes got caught looking at gay porn, so I was thinking about that cliche.
I really like that, and will posit the transphobic chaser (chaser is the term the trans community uses to describe people who fetishize us) as further evidence. There are plenty of cis people who are attracted to us normally, they’re a huge chunk of who I date, and they’re usually somewhere between neutral and good with our issues. Sometimes you even get someone transphobic who found themselves attracted to a person who happens to be trans.
But then there’s the chasers. Some are attracted to our bodies as novelty, but a large chunk are virulently bigoted towards us, and they follow the same pattern. They’re ashamed to be seen with us (even if we pass for cis), overly focus on our genitals, and generally treat us like we exist for their fetishization of us. And this winds up with a nasty cycle of them trying to define our existence as a fetish, them attempting to push us out of “normal” society and into a life where we hide or are relegated to sex work, and in a society where they succeed we’re deemed disgusting immoral sex objects that only sick freaks are into which creates more of the bigotry by which fetishization spreads.
I think some of that is right, and maybe all of it for a portion of people, but I also believe there are gay or bi people who hate that about themselves and that causes them to be homophobic. I don’t think that’s a large percentage of homophobic people, but I do think it’s not zero.
I don’t blame the gay community or gay people for their own oppression. I blame these bigots, as well as all of the other bigots they join. It doesn’t matter to me what you truly believe underneath or whether your actions are motivated by self hatred.
Oh yeah statistically it's gotta be that some homophobes are queer. Queer people are 10% of the population, and homophobes are even higher. Two groups that large, there's got to be crossover. Historically, it would have been even moreso the case.
I'm just unconvinced that queer people are the majority of homophobes because that makes no sense, and I'm unconvinced that the study randomly found mostly bi homophobes. The sheer prevalence of the gay homophobe trope is out of proportion with the conditions that would have been capable of creating homophobia in society in the first place and sustaining it.
For one thing, the study asked the men to rate themselves on the Kinsey scale. Those men fully believed they had never felt attraction to another man. And only 20% of the homophobes showed no penile reaction. Meanwhile, 66% of the gay-accepting men had no reaction.
Yeah, I think often the nuance in the criticism that’s easy to miss is that often when people automatically assume a homophobe is gay it can be used to absolve straight society of the homophobia it perpetuates by pretending homophobia is mostly an issue of self hate rather than one in which members of an oppressed class are taught to hate themselves by less focused bigots of the privileged group, and then are used to do the dirty work of homophobic violence. This is notable in conversion therapy where the people running it are “ex gay” but the people sending their loved ones or telling people to are straight.
Anecdotal time: I have a friend who is a staunch Republican and christian. He is also extremely gay. He denies it and tells me its wrong when I tell him to just accept himself and stop worrying about it so much. I also have another acquaintance who tells him its wrong every time he thinks gay thoughts.
Dont feel too bad for anyone in this story. I forced them all to read Mandate for Leadership and they all still said they'd vote for Trump.