Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I got my bum pinched, visiting a gay bar on the day of the Pride Parade in Glasgow. It was more bemusing than offensive. TBH, I'm not offended at all, I went to one of most famous/notorious gay bars, and I was well groomed and wearing pointy shoes. Dunno what the women are complaining about.
It's only a matter of time until you write your coming out as bi post.
If by "time" you mean the Heath Death of the universe. I'm painfully straight, as in I'm straight and it causes me pain.
Says the guy hanging out in a gay bar for Pride who enjoyed the attention of having his backside pinched. Suuuuure you are as straight as a ruler 😁
Now ma'am, let's review the evidence like good Bayesians. I spend most of my drinking hours at a gay pub. My friends here skew overwhelmingly LGBTQ: my closest friend in the area is an asexual lesbian (a contradiction in terms, though she reports only 90% confidence, down from 99%, so the market is moving, and I might be to praise/blame for rehabilitating men). The regulars assumed I was in a relationship with a bisexual man. I was not. I just tolerate him because he's a good guy who looked after me during a bad stretch, which I gather is what relationships are, but never mind.
Further data: my younger brother came out to me as gay. At least five independent observers have seen photos of a distant shrink uncle and rendered the verdict "this dude is so gay it hurts." I wear nice Chelsea boots, and spent my first months in this city genuinely puzzled as to why obviously gay men kept complimenting them. I may have written an ethnographic analysis in a gay pub.
Any reasonable model, fed these inputs, converges on one conclusion. And yet:
I have been propositioned dozens of times, across various states of sobriety, by men. The answer remains no. I appreciate the interest, truly. But I love women, an affliction exactly as inconvenient as it sounds, and one for which medical science has no treatment. My sole consolation is that they like me back.
(I was in Glasgow to see a woman. She was busy, so I killed time at... gay bars.)
Bro, no judgment, but you sure talk a lot about how many gay men come onto you (because you hang out with gay men) and then get really defensive about how totally not gay you are. Like, at this point either you're doing a bit, or...
It is a bit? I would hope that's blazingly obvious my man. Would you prefer I start throwing in "/s"? I find that approach crass.
I think you know me well enough that you should believe me when I say that if I had any real desire to engage in happy fun times with another man, there's nothing stopping me. Why don't I? Because I don't care to.
I am not gay. I am not a bisexual in denial. I like putting penis in vagina. I have the self-awareness to find it rather amusing that I find it fun to hang around gay people. I have been accused of having the musical taste of a gay man, but then again, they're the Jews of the music industry (let's not talk about the gay Jews).
It's become enough of a pattern that people are asking questions. It may not in fact be because you are gay, it could be because you've discovered a new subculture that makes you feel at home while you are going through a tough time and helps you connect with your brother (I think you said he was gay?) it could be something totally different. However it's usually because you are gay so even if that isn't it - it is certainly an impression you are slightly giving off.
I well understand why people might suspect I'm gay. I find it amusing, really, since at least to my own satisfaction, I'm as zero on the Kinsey scale as one can get. Adjusting for the kind of floating point error you wouldn't notice on a pride float.
Am I offended when people online suspect I'm gay? Not really. If I cared, I wouldn't supply the material. I'm more annoyed when people take my rather definitive declarations that I'm straight as evidence of denial. Gee, the dude who regularly writes essays about falling in and out of love with women is gay, is all I can say to them. Bisexuality is a harder to adjudicate diagnosis of exclusion, but we've moved past the ICD-10 paraphilia era.
I can only sigh in exasperation. If I regularly defend gay and bisexual subcultures against attack, it would take a particular form of intransigent self delusion to not acknowledge tendencies to join them. I don't acknowledge them because they don't exist
Honestly, there's are plenty of prosaic reasons I hang around with gay people. I started going to a gay pub entirely by accident (I have that essay about the shock of realizing it's a gay pub, I'm not very observant at times), and picked up gay friends. This well predated my brother coming out, but might have contributed to him feeling comfortable doing so. He could see I was more than comfortable treating gay people as human beings, though I can only hope that he had enough reason to trust me before that. Humans are weird like that, he could have told me a decade back and I'd have had his back, that's what brothers are for.
What else? Those environments are, as you suggested, quite novel to me. And there's always some drama going on, I pack my own popcorn. I also appreciate that they're quite understanding and accepting spaces, not that that's for my own benefit. I do not like moral busybodies, not that you can't find them there too.
More recently, I'm seeing a (straight) woman heavily enmeshed in the culture. She dragged me to a drag queen night the first date (I went willingly, I was just curious), and her best friend is a gay influencer. That kinda constrains the option space for me, you know, not that I particularly mind. If there's booze and people to tell me about their mental health issues, I'm content. You only get one of the two at work.
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