| Yawning
Bread. October 2006
Gay sex is for straight men
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A recently published survey done in New
York City [1] found that 3.7% of men aged 18 and above identified
themselves as gay.
This figure is lower than the usual figures gay activists use. They tend to say 10%. I myself have generally said, for some years now, that probably 6 – 7% of men are exclusively homosexual, that is, they have no real attraction to or interest in sex with females.
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Compared to the 10% claim, the 3.7% figure seems rather closer to the figure generally used by Christian fundamentalists who lead most anti-gay campaigns in America and elsewhere, including Singapore. They tend to claim that only 1 – 2% of men are gay, with the subtext that it is an inconsequential minority for which state and society need not make any allowance. But wait. The same New York City survey also asked respondents how many sex partners they have had in the previous 12 months and whether the sex partners were male or female. It turned out "87.5% of men... exhibited exclusively heterosexual behavior and 12.5% demonstrated exclusively homosexual behavior." [2] "Among men who have sex with men, 72.8% identified as straight." These included married men [3]. "In our sample," the report pointed out, "10% of married men reported same-sex behavior during the preceding year." The Community Health Survey set out to investigate the sexual behaviour of New Yorkers in an attempt to understand the patterns of potentially risky behaviour that might expose people to HIV and AIDS. One of the reasons why the researchers wanted to ask people how they identified themselves sexual-orientation-wise was because other studies had found a significant discordance between declared sexual orientation and sexual behaviour. The researchers in this study wanted to see how large this discordance was. A big part of public policy and HIV prevention efforts are directed towards "gay men", but what if most people who were having gay sex don't see themselves as "gay"? Are they missing out on health education and testing programs? And that's exactly what the New York study found, except that now that they have gone out specifically to put a number to the discordance, it's turned out to be larger than most anticipated. As mentioned above, there were more straight men having gay sex than gay men! Conducted between March and August 2003, it was a large survey, with 9,802 residents participating. Of these, 4,193 were men. Of these 4,193 male respondents, about 69% (2,898 men) provided answers to both the sexual orientation and sex behaviour questions (and reported at least 1 instance of sex in the previous 12 months), enabling the researchers to cross-tabulate. Those who reported no sexual activity were left out. Despite the attrition rate, 2,898 participants is still a very large sample. The demographic profile of these 2,898 was checked against that of the 1,295 who didn't answer one or both questions, and was found to be similar. The attrition therefore did not result in any demographic bias. The following pie-charts show the main highlights, referring to men who had been sexually active during the preceding 12 months:
(There was no separate analysis for men who identified as bisexual because the sample numbers were too small) As we know today, most men who are attracted to other men erotically and romantically are not effeminate and (by definition) certainly not transsexual. Hence, it is possible that these ethnic minorities and migrants would not identify themselves as "gay" based on their understanding of the term. Singaporeans are kind of like these foreign-born New Yorkers. Our Asian cultural frameworks are intact even as we tend to speak English. Would that mean that many Singaporeans too think of themselves as straight, but still have sex with other men? * * * * *
"As the representations of gay people changed from being somebody who was a bottom feeder to the girl or boy next door, it became increasingly safe for young people to identify those feelings. But they also realized that it could be them," said Ryan of San Francisco State University.
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Spending the last four years researching lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth, Ryan, a clinical social worker, noted that the average age of coming out has been decreasing. In the early 1990s, teens tended to come out between the ages of 14 and 16. During the 1970s, most waited until they became adults to come out. Many, in fact, got married and lived a life pretending to be straight, until they were in their 40s and 50s before they took tentative steps out of the closet, if ever. (See also the box on the right about transgenders). However, despite many teenagers coming out earlier than before, staying in the closet may still be the case with respect to many adult Americans today, as the New York study showed, let alone in more conservative parts of America. While the climate might have improved for gay teenagers in America -– one in ten schools have Gay-Straight Alliances, for example -– there is still a lot of abuse. According to the US' National Mental Health Institute, the typical secondary school student hears an anti-gay slur about 26 times a day. And 31 percent of kids who are gay or are perceived as gay were physically harassed or assaulted last year at school.
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7.5 percent of 237,000 students who responded to a state-sponsored survey by the California Safe Schools Coalition in the 2001-2002 school year said they were targeted by bullies because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation. Those students were three times more likely to miss school because they felt unsafe and more than twice as likely to be depressed or to consider suicide [4]. The Safe Schools Coalition website also notes that research done for the FBI in 1998 found that these LGBT teenagers make up 30 percent to 40 percent of the America's homeless youths and that usually the gay youths' coming-out conflicts with their families' moral and religious beliefs. Speaking of which, the fundamentalist group Exodus International (to which the group "Choices" in Singapore is affiliated) has now ramped up its efforts to "convert" gay teenagers to heterosexuality. It created a youth wing 6 years ago and is combatting the schools' Gay-Straight Alliances with "Truth and Tolerance" clubs that promote lies and intolerance towards gay teenagers. Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus International decried the "absolute push in Hollywood, in the sitcom world, to really normalize and legitimize homosexual relationships and homosexuality." "We thought, rather than wait until they were immersed in a homosexual identity and wanting help, let's catch them before they have to make a decision," he said, explaining his mission.
But as the New York study showed, identity may be one thing, but people
are still having gay sex. The other side of coming out is not
"turning straight" but living a lie. So why create all that
emotional trauma? © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda None
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