6/14/99: My name is Mohan, and am male, 25 and am right now in Bangalore , studying. I came out to a few friends of mine a couple of months ago till which I was well and truly in the closet (I know, I should have come out earlier etc etc but I just couldn't!). Anyway the outcome was that every single person whom I came out to (about a dozen or so) was very happy and comfortable with it !
6/16/99: I am quite confused with the whole concept of queer-by-choice. If I forget all conventional (well, when did homosexuality ever become 'conventional' ? :->) theories and popular wisdom, I still cant believe that it was a matter of choice for me. As far as physical attraction towards the opposite sex goes, I would be what you might call a Kinsey 6 and I really dont think I am going to turn bisexual ever (well, after being on this list, I have started hesitating a bit before boldly dropping labels like bi, gay, hetero etc as distinct separable and complete categories—thanks to you all!!)...
I was reading a few articles arguing for and against Foucaults's theory about homosexuality. First off, I am not a lit major or even a minor but an astrophysics guy and so I know zilch about the subject and I might be talking nonsense for all I know...
To summarise what I understood, Foucault said that sodomy was a recognised act in olden times and all laws and social sanctions applied to the act per se and there was no social construction of a 'type' of person engaging in sodomy but modern class divisions etc stratified people according to their traits etc and the 'homosexual' was born. The fact that there are people who have all the modern day homosexual attributes beyond just the act to homosexual sex is artificial and is something taken upon believed in by homosexuals and thrust upon and believed in by others in this century. So these guys called Norton and Mohr have written articles arguing against this and their essays actually makes sense. One of the examples they use to disprove Foucault is actually the Greek one talked about today. They say that Plato's Symposium and Aristophanes etc talk of people who are not just predisposed to sodomy but also can find happiness only by living with a member of the same sex for their entire life. They give other arguments as well but they are all mired in detailed postmodern theory which I cant make head or tail of...
So what do people think about this whole issue ?
6/17/99: Ok! this is something new to me. I had been under the impression that bisexuals are attracted to males and females in some proportion and this proportion stays fixed with time and that both kinds operate simultaneously—obviously that is not true. In some sense, people, even those who are queerphobic, would tend to be more comfortable with gays and lesbians rather than bisexuals cos they wouldn't be able to put them into tidy little categories and predict what their responses are going to be—am I right ? (All the more reason for everyone to turn bi :-> )...I had always wondered if the world wouldn't be a better place if everybody *was* bi—you get rid of differences in sexual orientation, gender, gender roles etc at one go—neat idea !
I agree that distinguishing between sexual love and non-sexual love is probably not very justified. But is the fact that we all think that some kinds of love are completely devoid of sexual feelings, purely something imposed by or learnt from society ? Though the idea kind of appeals to me, I also cannot believe that that is the right answer (maybe this disability to believe is because of the above mentioned social conditioning ? As an aside, if that were true, I could construct theories about anything which would be self consistent and impossible to falsify based on its own premises on a much more obvious and sillier sense than what Godel meant but this is off-tangent).
So ... my question is the inverse of what most people ask—not why some small fraction of people are bisexual, but why so many are not ? Is it because all these people havent accepted or are not aware of such a situation ? In which case, what about gays and lesbians who have thought about this a bit and rejected social gender roles and have also decided that they are not attracted to members of the opposite sex ? I know I am simply throwing questions at you without a premise of my own to defend..but that is because I dont have one yet !!
6/28/99: I came out to my professor yesterday—I had never planned to. The subject of homosexuality came up and he was making really silly statements and basically I just came out and told him primarily cos he would then treat what I say with some credibility, which he did. Anyway after I told him, it turned out that he was not in the least homophobic and in fact supports same-sex spouse benefits etc etc but still he has this weird viewpoint which is that homosexuality or basically, non-heterosexuality is a defect in nature as most behavioural characteristics in humans and animals are geared to the propagation of the species and since this does not, it is a genetic defect where nature has gone wrong.
This is of course utterly ridiculous and I can't believe that something which doesn't help in increasing the total population is a defect of nature but that is what he thinks.
While I am still writing :->, another question....
It is commonly believed that gay/bi males like to get anally penetrated whereas het males do not as a liking to get penetrated in treated as a female characteristic. I was wondering if this is really true. What I would like to know is whether (predominantly) het males who know that they are probably not attracted to males, like to get anally penetrated, say by a female using a dildo or some such thing. If that is true, then this theory would go out of the window...any comments ?
Of course any male would get physically aroused modulo some pain due to the prostate [during anal penetration] but I was also thinking of the point you mentioned, that of having immense psychological inhibitions against it since the act in itself is percieved as a female characteristic. I wonder if this perception is so widespread across cultures because men do not even *realise* that they have this thing called the prostate and it can give them sexual pleasure ? If all het men knew it, then the next thing we know, there would be competitions on the streets ! ... I think it is true that a few decades ago, most women in the west didn't know that they could, in principle, have something called an orgasm simply because the men never bothered to make sure they had one, in the first place. Same goes for the lack of knowledge of the existence of the clitoris...we probably have a very similiar situation here, dont you think ?