CSflim

Yes they are generalizations. They are stereotypes. But stereotypes have reasons for being. The problem with stereotyping is that it leads to prejudice: The idea that an arbitrary gay person (or member of ANY other minority subject to stereotyping) would be assumed to cohere with these specific stereotypes.

To elaborate: I'm Irish. A stereotype exists of Irish people, most notably drinking habits (social) and red hair (genetic). Now you take your non-existent stereotype of an Irish person and I will laugh at it, and claim that it does NOT represent the essence of Irish people, not even the majority of people, let alone all Irish people.
That being said, comparison with other nations would lend support to the stereotype: There are more people with red hair living in Ireland (proportionately) than in say the U.S. That's not to say red hair is the majority, or even common, it is still relatively rare compared with black or brown. It would be slightly less common than blonde. But because the stereotype does not ring absolutely true, does not trivialise its importance: There are reasons why "Irish people have red hair", and those reasons are genetic.
Similarly, I know for a fact that I am not a raving drunken lunatic, but I will concede to that stereotype in that there is more alcohol abuse in Ireland than in many others. The reasons why "Irish people are drunken bastards" is not genetic, but social.

I am saying that homosexuals have a stereotype. A stereotype which is not representative of an arbitrary homosexual. It is not even representative of ANY specific homosexual. Rather it is a "caricature" of exaggerated characteristics to encapsulate homosexual people when juxtaposed with "normal people".
Again, think of a stereotypical "nerd". Now I know lots of nerds. But none I know who aligns perfectly with The Nerd, but certainly, when regarding the "community" as a whole certain characteristics emerge: Weird hair, poor fashion sense, poor hygiene (spots), a flair for mathematics and programming, poor social skills, strange humour etc.

Anyway, my original point, is that the stereotype of a homosexual male IS grounded in reality in this sense. To put it to you another way: Have you ever met a person and just know, intuitively, that that person was gay? I'm sure you have, and the reason for this is due to shared characteristics with the stereotype. On the other hand, have you ever met a person, and afterwards find out that they were gay and you had no idea? Also I'm sure the opposite is true: you meet a guy who you just "know" is gay, who turns out to be straight. This does not negate the usefulness of the stereotype for our purpose, where we're looking at the population as a whole.

Now you could claim that the stereotype of the Homosexual is in fact, purely a social construction, that gay people only fall in line with the stereotype as a subconscious effort to be accepted by this new "gay community" after being excluded from the "normal community". However, I don't believe that this is so. Have you ever “know” a person and known that they were gay, before they did? I know I have. A guy I went to primary school with, had a stereotypical homosexual personality and physical facial features. He didn't know he was gay, being too young to have realised his sexual feelings, but many people suspected it. It is only after he matured that he realised that he was in fact gay. He wasn't hiding his feeling for fear of ostracisation (not at first at least), he simply didn't know.
So don't try and tell me that there is nothing to stereotypes. The word is seen as inappropriate, as it is so open to abuse, due to people making judgements about INDIVIDUAL people based on the stereotype. ("Oh he's Irish, he must be a drunken bastard!" )



Whatever generates pleasure is Ok. That seems fair enough in my book. However, that said, I know that I would not enjoy homosexual sex. The thought of engaging in it repulses me. I am not attracted to male people. Heterosexual sex, I enjoy. I AM attracted to females. I strongly believe that I am hard wired to be that way, and heterosexuality is not simply due to social conditioning.
In a similar way that a homosexual is "born that way", I too am born a heterosexual. There is definitely a biological prerequisite for sexuality. That being said, I have no doubt that society can reinforce certain attitudes. Many homosexuals live an unsatisfying heterosexual life due to an unconscious avoidance of being ostracised.
Most of the homosexuality that occurs in nature (not all) is down to the rarity of partners, often down to mankind’s intervention. Kind of like an all male prison, where the idea of "homosexual sex is better than no sex" is adopted. But this is not a natural environment.


That’s a tricky one to prove. But I would claim that they key is to look to history, when a time when homosexuality was not looked down upon. It was certainly more openly prevalent than today, but it was still not "the norm". Heterosexual sex still outnumbered homosexual sex.
I really think that you're over-playing the social influence card. It sounds to me like you are saying that a person’s sexuality is a life-style choice, and hence subject to change.

I agree that there can't be a homosexual gene. However, there equally can't be an "attracted to males" or "attracted to females" gene. Think briefly about the gentic mechanisms that would be behind it. My idea, is that homosexuality is not genetic, but is biologically hard-wired. Hence my reasoning of it being decided in the embryonic stage.

Why do men have nipples?

My suggestion is that the answer to this question is the same as the explanation for biological homosexuality. Both men and women follow the same initial embryonic recipe, but then the two begin to diverge* at a particular stage in the embryonic process. Homosexuality is due to a biological "confusion" at this divergence. In this sense homosexual/bisexual men are, at a biological level, partly female. Homosexual/bisexual women are ,at a biological level, partly male.
This theory appears to agree with the stereotype, which as I have illustrated above, is not without merit.

*Note: I am not saying that the divergence is discrete.

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