Nathan Buckley

 Ozzie rules ('footy') player.  Still just as handsome as ever, despite his age.

He's straight as far as I know, but hey, no harm in us just looking!

Jocks kissing

 

Why straights don't need straight pride parades

Ollie Wines

Footy player. Prolly straight.

Nick Youngquest

Rugby player and model. Straight.

Luke Hodge, Ozzie footy player

Watching sport

Homosocial but not homosexual.

Footy

Some time ago I started switching my website from http://www.nick-thiwerspoon.com/ to https://nickthiwerspoon.wordpress.com/

Lots of work, because each file has to be re-uploaded and each link redone.  And then I got depressed and unwell, so I didn't transfer the files at anything like the rate I'd meant to.  The good news is that I have started moving files across again.  I took the chance to re-edit the story and tighten it up, and I feel it's better for that.

Anyway, I've transferred 13 chapters out of 35, so there's still plenty more work,

You can read it here.

Jamie Bell

The guy made famous by his role in Billy Elliot.  A wonderful film.  He acts a young bloke who falls in love with ballet in a coal-mining town in the north of England.

Is 10% of the population gay?

Alfred Kinsey

David Spiegelhalter in a Guardian article analyses new statistics which suggest that that's not a bad guess.  But it's a question of definition.  Which is pretty much what I've been saying for a few years now.


For a single statistic to be the primary propaganda weapon for a radical political movement is unusual. Back in 1977, the US National Gay Task Force (NGTF) was invited into the White House to meet President Jimmy Carter’s representatives – a first for gay and lesbian groups. The NGTF’s most prominent campaigning slogan was “we are everywhere”, backed up by the memorable statistical claim that one in 10 of the US population was gay – this figure was deeply and passionately contested.

So where did Bruce Voeller, a scientist who was a founder and first director of the NGTF, get this nice round 10% from? To find out, we have to delve back into Alfred Kinsey’s surveys in 1940s America, which were groundbreaking at the time but are now seen as archaic in their methods: he sought out respondents in prisons and the gay underworld, made friends with them and, over a cigarette, noted down their behaviours using an obscure code. Kinsey did not believe that sexual identity was fixed and simply categorised, and perhaps his most lasting contribution was his scale, still used today, in which individuals are rated from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual on a scale of 0 to 6.

Kinsey’s headline finding was that “at least 37% of the male population has some homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age”, meaning physical contact to the point of orgasm. He claimed that 13% of males were predominately homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55 (scoring at least 4) and that 4% of males were exclusively homosexual all their lives (scoring 6). For 30-year-old US men, he estimated that 83% would score 0 (totally heterosexual), 8% would be 1 or 2 on the scale, and 9% would be at least a 3. He acknowledged that people could move on the scale during their lifetime, and indeed Kinsey himself is said to have moved from a 1 or 2 when younger to a 3 or 4 in middle age.

When he published his study on women in 1953, Kinsey estimated that 20% of women had had some same-sex experience and 13% to orgasm. In unmarried females between the ages of 20 and 35, he claimed there was at least some homosexual experience in 11%-20%, and 1%-3% were exclusively homosexual.
So, in 1973, when Voeller was putting together the NGTF campaign, he went back to Kinsey’s estimates for those with predominantly homosexual experience (4 to 6 on his scale) for at least three years. As this was around 7% for women and 13% for men he took an average to get the headline figure: 10% of the population was gay.

This 10% claim was controversial, to say the least, and reignited old arguments about Kinsey’s poor survey methods. But even cleaned-up data gave similar answers, and Voeller stuck to the 10%, stating in 1990 that “the concept that 10% of the population is gay has become a generally accepted ‘fact’… As with so many pieces of knowledge (and myths), repeated telling made it so.”

However, later surveys gave much lower results, and of course the ChrisTaliban seized on them as proof that gays don't need rights (as if Jews, for example, who are much less numerous, shouldn't have rights either because there are so few of them)

The explanation lay in the terminology.  If you ask ppl whether they're "gay" or "lesbian" or "bi"  most say no.  Even if they have had same-sex experiences to orgasm.  

Same-sex sexual behaviour can come in all degrees of intensity. So Natsal carefully distinguishes a “same-sex experience”, which could be just a smooch in the dark, from a “same-sex partner”, who is someone with whom you have had any genital contact intended to achieve orgasm. Respondents are asked about activity at any age, so adolescent fumblings counted.

For women in the age range 16 to 44, the proportion who report having had some same-sex experience has shown a dramatic rise over the past 20 years: from 4% in 1990 to 10% in 2000, and to 16% in 2010 – a massive change in behaviour over such a short period. But this is not all just girls kissing girls in imitation of Madonna and Britney Spears; around half report genital contact, and around half of these in the past five years, so that overall nearly one in 20 women report a same-sex partner in the past five years.

But has there really been a change, or are women simply more willing to report what they get up to? Using some neat cross-checking, Natsal reckons that the change between 1990 and 2000 was partly due to more honest reporting, but the rise in 2000 and 2010 was all real.

And it is clear that there is a lot of experimental activity – roughly, for each woman who has had a recent same-sex partner there are two more of the same age who have had some same-sex contact in their lives, but no partner in the past five years.

Men show a different pattern. In 2010, about 8% of 16- to 44-year-old men reported having had a same-sex experience: this is higher than in 1990, possibly associated with both better reporting and the decline in fear of HIV, but there have been no substantial recent changes.

Overall the proportion of people with same-sex experience is far higher than the proportion who identify themselves as gay and bisexual. This must mean that many same-sex contacts are by people who do not consider themselves gay or bisexual. That’s just what we find in reputable surveys: in the last big US survey, 10% of women and 3% of men who identified themselves as “heterosexual” also reported a same‑sex contact.

Read more here.

Other pieces about this:

How many of us are there?

How many American Men are Gay?

What makes us gay?

The Cum-and-Go Culture

I kiss them because I love them

Labels

Ben Cohen

Straight but not strait. The handsome and thoughtful Ben Cohen, who is straight but gay friendly. A top bloke. Good on him!

Transgender model

Very sexy bloke, the transgender model Aydian Dowling, on the left, Adam Levine on the right.

 [From PinkNews.]

Sharing a bed

Pic from this intriguing Queerty piece.  I discuss an earlier paper by the same author here.

Bad dreams

This morning (it's Saturday, so I have a lie-in, dozing, instead of getting up at 5.50 a.m. as I do on a weekday)  I had a recurring dream.  I was in some place I didn't know, but half recognised.  And everywhere I went, in despair, trying to find something--anything--familiar, I was threatened by men.  Not actually hit, but those sneering, disdainful, mocking looks and comments which we all know only too well.

Interesting that in your dreams what you deep down really think and fear is revealed.  And the the truth is, I shall never be comfortable with straights, or indeed with men.  Always trying to be "the good kid", trying too hard to be nice and complaisant, always I excite disdain instead of liking or understanding.

Tradies

I've written before about manly icons, here, here and here.

Henry Cavill

Straights

All my life I have been despised by straight men.  Not because I was a thief, or a liar, or a rapist.  Not because I was cruel or vicious or evil.  But because I didn't conform to their image of what a boy, or teen, or man should be.  For something I couldn't help, because I was born that way.  They were happy enough for me to pretend to be what I wasn't, to lie to myself and them.  They were happy enough for me to do without love, and without the affection and caring that they got from their partners, because their partners were women, and I (for a long time) wasn't even allowed to make love to a man because it was illegal, punished by a prison sentence.  Their contempt has scarred me and deformed me.

"There had never been a time when he hadn't thought of himself as one of this company the mischance of battle had brought together: one with a secret, as many others had of one sort or another; one with an oddity, but there were plenty of those.  Lovell, who had owned a freak-booth that toured the fairs; Jansen, who was three parts coloured; Willis; Charlot; Odell, who had started with the handicap of 'talking posh'.  Now in a cold solitude he imagined, everywhere in the shadows, men quietly watching, curious, or mocking, or repelled, according to their kind, but all thanking their Maker for the solidarity that didn't include him."  [The Charioteer, by Mary Renault]

But if I say I despise and dislike and mistrust straight men, the response I get is that that is "so unfair", that "not all straight men are like that", and so on.  Indeed.  Yet the anger and hurt and disdain inside me aren't salved by exhortations to be "forgiving"  and "understanding"  and "accepting".  Bitter experience has taught me again and again not to trust men, not to let them into my heart, even as friends, not to rely on them to accept me for what I am.  No one can say I am stupid, and one definition of stupidity is to go on doing the same thing again and again even though what you do doesn't work and merely gives you pain.

And behind this whole cultural hate-fest lies the Church, with its assiduous drip-feed of homo-hatred and lies: "abomination", "intrinsically disordered", "kill the gays".

I cannot forgive or forget.

Night and day

People often say, well, it's obvious--gay and straight are as different as night and day!  You're either one or the other!  Choose!

Yep, night is different from day.  But note--where it is something we know well, like 'night' and 'day'--how we are well aware of the subtle differences within 'night' and 'day'.  A summer's day, when it is 40 degrees outside and the sunlight is white hot.  A late afternoon, when the air is still warm and the sunlight slants through the trees and the air is golden.  A sunny winter's day, where the light is crisp and silver and so is the air.  An early morning, dewy grass, a pink tinge to the eastern sky.  Those are all 'days'.  A night sky of indigo silk, the stars  brilliant sparkles scattered across it.   A harvest moon, yellow and prehistoric, rising over the eastern horizon.  A sky of black velvet, rich and lush, with a silver scimitar of a moon at the west.  The wee hours, when all is silent and the moon's shadows lie sharp and clear in the garden.  These are all 'nights'.

The words 'night' and 'day' are convenient portmanteau terms for real things.  But we also all know that it's more complicated than that.  We try and create words to convey these realities because we know that the words we have aren't enough.  Just as Eskimos are supposed to have 17 (or is it 12?) different words for snow.

'Gay' and 'straight' are nice convenient clichés/labels for the unthinking, the-not-very-perceptive.  But the truth is that  it's more complicated than that.  Even if you add 'bisexual' to the mix, what does that mean.  Some men like serial sex with male strangers even if they're married, happily married.  Others have just one male partner with or without their wives' knowledge and acquiescence.  Some (like me) remain faithful to their wives yet feel the emotional attraction of men.  Some call themselves straight but love a single man. A very queeny man I know is with a guy but says that his next partner, if there is one, will be a woman.  I feel closer to women, he says.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the vast diversity of human sexuality.  Once I too thought it was nice and simple and just a matter of correctly labelling and all would be clear.  Now I am more humble, more aware of just how complex and rich all our sexualities are, of how many different ways there are of seeing and experiencing 'night and day'.


 

Nick Riewoldt

Who is straight, by the way.  But I've been told that he reminds ppl of Tom, in Footy.

You know you're bisexual when ...

This morning I woke from a powerful erotic dream of ... my wife.  We were making love, doggie position, and it was, well, very satisfying.  It would not have been a good idea to wake her too, at 5 am, to finish off what my subconscious clearly wanted.  Not a good idea at all.  So I lay there staring at the ceiling and thinking about our life together, nursing a massive hard-on.

The day before, I was woken from another erotic dream, this time with a bloke.  We were in a hotel room, high up, with a view over some city.  He was very handsome, with dark curly hair, pretty much like the bloke in the pic.  Perhaps that was where the dream came from.   Anyway, I was impaled on him in an entirely pleasing, sexy and fulfilling way.  In this case, I also woke up before the climax.  (Is there some hidden pattern here?) Perhaps the nicest part of the whole dream was that I could feel his desire for me.  I could see it in his smile, in his face.  Definitely wish fulfillment, that!

Your subconscious doesn't lie.  When you dream of a man or a woman sexually, or of both, it's reflecting a profound reality, a truth, from deep inside.  There was a time when I thought bisexuality was a con: a transition phase to gayness.  And for some people it is.  Many straights I've mentioned this topic to are inclined to believe that if you desire or love another man, you are by definition gay, even if you also love and desire a woman.  If you have one drop of gayness in you then you are ipso facto gay, just as it used to be considered in regard to black blood.  Which is rubbish.

Our culture likes nice convenient labels and divisions.  Somehow, if we can just say 'it is thus', we can come to grips with complex phenomena, we can make the world less scary because we have labelled it.   We confuse the label with reality.  But reality is much more diverse and complex than these simple categories.  I am what I am.  I respond emotionally and sometimes sexually to men.  But I also respond emotionally and sexually to woman.  Some people would call me 'gay', others 'self-deluding', or 'in a phase'.  Some 'hypocritical' or 'dishonest'.  Actually I have news for all of you.  I am me.   Put me in a box at your peril.

Meanwhile, later today, after my lady gets home from work ....

I have written about this a lot.  Here are some more blog posts:

Labels

Queer but not gay

Saturday Night Thoughts

Special

Thought Experiment

Gay Sex by Any Name

Letter from Thomas

What Makes Us Gay