User:Beno1000/LGBT

Pew2002

Kinsey Scale
Here I'm going to put in a table of the Kinsey Scale and highlight where I come on it.

I made this article in the hope that I can send people to this page rather than have them bug me about this kind of thing. Enjoy it.

The attitudes of people around me to my sexuality
Well as I've said before I'm a 16 year old gay male living in the United Kingdom. I recently came out to most people I know just before Christmas 2005 but at the time of writing this I still haven't come out to my parents. My parents are strong Catholics so I don't think they'd be very happy about my sexuality if I was to come out to them, and my stepdad has openly made homophobic comments in the past so I don't think telling him about my sexuality would be a good idea, and my mum uses words like "puff" and "puffy" and similar derogatory terms for LGBT people, and has laughed about LGBT issues as well so I don't know if she'd take it well either. I do plan on coming out to my parents eventually though.

Friends
All of my friends took my coming out well, some of them being gay, bisexual or lesbian themselves. One of my closest friends also came out as bisexual at the same time I came out as gay so he took it well as well. I also have quite a few other gay, bisexual or lesbian friends so I'm in a good crowd as far as sexuality goes.

Other people at school
A lot of people at school were OK when news about my sexuality got around, and took it well and weren't concerned with it. Other people were more hostile towards it and I've even been physically threatened several times at school over my sexuality, and when I've reported it most (and I emphasise most) of the teachers at my school have been pretty receptive over the problem and gave out fair punishments to people for homophobic threats. There is also quite a bit of verbal abuse that gets yelled around for it but I'm not really bothered about that because most of the people who yell abuse around for my sexuality are insecure over their own sexuality and well, the need to make comments over someone else's sex life shows they must be making up for lack of their own.

I frequently get asked by people I don't know at school who have heard rumours about me whether I'm gay or not, which I always respond to in the affermative, because I feel that you can't be out to your friends and those you trust and not other people in the same environment. Often they respond negatively to me answering yes, but they're usually 12 year olds or 13 year olds so am I really going to be bothered what they think about my sexuality or if they make physical threats?

Other people at my school don't even believe me when I say I'm gay and have the impression that I'm attention seeking. What I say to that is this: I've been threatened over my sexuality, I have people constantly making homophobic remarks at me for my sexuality, I risk someone from school outing me to my parents, and I risked losing the respect of some of my closest friends when I came out. Yet I still say I'm gay. Does this sound like attention seeking to you?

Other people around me
Other people in my environment who are mostly casual aquaintances I don't know enough to call friends, or are the family or parents of friends who know that I'm gay have mostly been ok with my sexuality but with an occasional "How can you know at your age?" or a "I'll prey for you" if they're a more religious type. I'm not too bothered about the more negative ones though, the ones who think that it's impossible to know their sexuality at my age are pretty ignorant, and the ones who think that my sexuality is something wrong and needs prayer to cure it are even more ignorant.

My own feelings on my sexuality
I know that some LGBT people are displeased or even ashamed of who they are, and I think this is sad. People can't choose their sexual orientation (In my opinion, which I intend to keep out of Wikipedia articles because some people feel that sexuality is at least partly choice) so being ashamed of your sexual orientation is to me, being ashamed of having blue eyes or similar. On a similar note, you could ask a rhetorical question; "do people with blue eyes openly display pride over the fact that they have blue eyes?" Well no, but have people with blue eyes ever been persecuted for who they are or still experiance discrimination and prejudice for who they are? No, they haven't.

Personally I have to say I'm quite proud and comfortable being gay, however it did take some time to come to terms with the fact that I may never have children.