Quote Originally Posted by Askthepizzaguy View Post
Now, you're thinking.

Good response, Koga. Very on-point and decisive.
Pharaoh thanks you.

This is purely for my curiosity.... does anyone here have any gay friends or relatives they are on good terms with? I noticed a couple times in this discussion people said "wow, am I the only person against this?" or something similar. It left me wondering, wow... are there so few people who have gay friends or relatives?

I'm just curious.

Personally, of course I Knew a lot of gay people. I wasn't friends with the couple I (suspected) were gay in high school, but that was really just luck of the draw more than avoidance. The three or so that I heavily suspected were gay (or just by common knowledge were, even though they never said so out loud to me personally) in my class hung out with the popular girls and of course the popular girls looked at me like I was a deformed ladybug on their sandwich.

In college, I knew lots. I did Student-to-Student Peer Counseling (called SSPC on our campus) for two years and not only had a lot of training seminars which touched on sexuality and relationships, STD's and safe sex, but also of course talked to a lot of struggling students who came in during office hours to talk to someone. Though frequently I saw these people only once and we weren't friends or classmates, it was a big campus.

I had a lot of female friends who had had sexual encounters with other women, but of course, I think anyone who knows a good deal of women knows that sexuality is a harder to pin down thing for them in many cases. They are freer and more liberated about everything from hugs and kisses to flirting to sex when it comes to gender crossing than men are allowed to be in our society, without necessarily being gay. My sister's best friend for a couple years of college was a lesbian, and through her my sister (heterosexual) got really involved in the UC-Irvine gay clubs on campus. I didn't really know many of them firsthand other than meeting a couple when I was visiting my sister and hanging out in the campus coffeehouse where she worked and a lot of her friends would come in. Since most were female it got me over the stereotype that lesbians were bulldikes or all masculine and butchy. Many you would have no way of knowing were lesbians.

I had a friend, whom I did not know was gay right off the bat, live with me for about a year after a big fight where his family had cut him off over something unrelated to sexuality. (Fight over his paychecks, which they had cashed and spent and threw him out when he was pissed about it.) I found out he was gay later, but that didn't bother me-- he had a lot of issues though. I suppose the fact that we were very good friends for years and he didn't tell me till very late despite my ... what the forum would call... "Berkeley liberalism", is proof that he had a lot of hangups about it. He was very "straight"/closeted and had multiple girlfriends over the course of time I knew him.

I had a lot of college classmates who were gay, ranging from normal to rainbow hair. I had a couple of friends that hung out in my "circle" who were, and it was no big thing to anyone. I was surprised (pleasantly) that rather than the "omg... omg, DID YOU HEAR?" reaction that people in my high school had to the topic, people in college treated it like absolutely no big deal.