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Split Thread [Ed] Personal experiences with gays

Darat said:
How would you know whether you have met such a gay man?
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He wouldn't,that is the point that he doesn't seem to get. A long exposure to rednecks can have deleterious effects. I suggest a long stay in San Francisco.
 
Quad4_72 said:
I never said there weren't any. But from the size of my sample I just have trouble believing that there are as many masculine gay men running around as you seem to believe.
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It's meaningless, since you haven't done any formal "sampling". You've just met a bunch of people that you didn't immediately detect as gay. And your "sample" includes a population with an extremely high motivation to conceal exactly the trait in question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biased_sample
 
Quad4_72 said:
You keep suggesting that I have met all of these hordes of supposed gay men who act masculine. I am pretty sure I can speak a little more intelligently on who I have and haven't met then you can.
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You are aware that some gays keep the sexuality hidden in order to avoid negative social repercussion, right? Those who chose to do this feel threatened enough, or desire personal privacy enough to realize that the common stereotypes will give them away. They aren't particularly interested in letting everyone know their business.

Setting that aside for the moment, you've met hundreds of men that you, yourself, based on your definition of behavior, have recognized as gay. What makes you think that these hundreds represent the millions of gay men in America? What makes your sample special?
 
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dafydd said:
No,just naive. You did say hundreds. You can't have known them all intimately. I am not using the word known in it's biblical sense.
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I have consulted my facebook account, and yes I do know them all pretty dang well. I guess it depends on what our version of "intimately" is.
 
Darat said:
How would you know whether you have met such a gay man?
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Well he would have to somehow indicate that he was gay. Like I said, in my sample these guys all indicated that they were interested in women, were married, engaged, had girlfriends etc. My margin of error comes in for those that were perhaps putting on some sort of elaborate cover.
 
Quad4_72 said:
Well, my personal experience has informed me otherwise. I acknowledge that you guys may have some very different experiences then I have. But, my sample sizes are pretty large, and from those sample sizes I come up with a pretty high confidence level with a very low margin of error. The statistics don't lie :p
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Sweetie, darling, you are addressing people who have sample sizes many, many times larger than yours. Who know about being gay from the inside. Who've spent decades with gays --being their friends, being their lovers, talking to them, hanging out with them. I go to gay bars. I date gay men. I talk to them. Most of my friends are gay men. I'm one myself. In January I attended a social event with nine thousand other gay men. I believe I am vastly more qualified than you to draw conclusions about masculinity and teh gays. My statistics are better than yours.

Swish! *snap* *snap* *snap*
 
Dave_46 said:
How do you know this?

Dave
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He doesn't,that is the point. As for social mores,quad seems similar to many Americans I have met who seem to think that the world consists of a few states that they have lived in.They don't seem to understand that there is a big world out there and in many parts of said world people do not have the same lifestyle and attitudes as bible belters.
 
Quad4_72 said:
Well he would have to somehow indicate that he was gay. Like I said, in my sample these guys all indicated that they were interested in women, were married, engaged, had girlfriends etc. My margin of error comes in for those that were perhaps putting on some sort of elaborate cover.
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What if he wanted to keep it quiet and didn't indicate it. Until the 1960's in the UK they put you in jail for it,so people were good at hiding it. I don't know what they do down in bibleland but if I was gay or bi and lived there I would keep it quiet.
 
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Quad4_72 said:
You know, I probably should have been a bit more specific in my OP. I should have said that I do not know very many gay men as opposed to having met gay men. I used to work at a club which would put on drag shows every once in a while. Plus they had an "80s night" which seemed to attract a lot of gay people. It was glaringly obvious who was gay and who was not, as pretty much every one of them acted feminine. I am going to have to disagree with you on that one. The stereotype is definitely true.
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I haven't read most of this thread, so perhaps what I'm saying will already have been said, but I imagine it bears saying more than once anyway. If your experience of homosexual men is observing who shows up at a club devoted to drag acts, I think you've met only a self-selected subset of gay men, too exclusive to base generalities on. Unless you're very good at spotting, there's a good chance you've omitted a good number of gay men from your sample, because the ones who are not effeminate, or inclined to hang out at drag shows may not be distinguishable as gay.

Maybe it depends on where you are. There are plenty of gay men "running around" up here in Vermont, where people have pretty much stopped caring who is what as long as they don't do it in the road, and my own anecdotal sampling suggests that in a culture where being gay is rapidly becoming normal and unexceptional, most of the gay people themselves appear normal and unexceptional as well.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Sweetie, darling, you are addressing people who have sample sizes many, many times larger than yours. Who know about being gay from the inside. Who've spent decades with gays --being their friends, being their lovers, talking to them, hanging out with them. I go to gay bars. I date gay men. I talk to them. Most of my friends are gay men. I'm one myself. In January I attended a social event with nine thousand other gay men. I believe I am vastly more qualified than you to draw conclusions about masculinity and teh gays. My statistics are better than yours.

Swish! *snap* *snap* *snap*
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But you haven't lived in Texas!
 
Quad4_72 said:
Which statements have I made in this thread that appear bigoted to you?
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Most of them.

A lot of bigotry is based in ignorance. You don't have to know that you are a bigot to be one. Most people who are ... don't.

Your personal conviction that your limited and inaccurate stereotypes must be true, even in the face of concerted dialogue which should at the very least give you pause to reconsider your certainty, is more than enough to earn you the not-so-coveted title.

A lot of the people responding to you here, and disagreeing with you, are well known to you from other discussions, on other topics. In most cases you have good reason to not discount out-of-hand the opinions they offer because of that prior knowledge.

And yet you do, on this particular topic. Why is that? How could your expertise in this one area be so incontrovertible and unassailable? Why are you so reluctant to concede that you might be mistaken?

At some point it may become evident to you that there are reasons people of different sexual orientations might be less than forthcoming with you about that subject in real life. Your side of the discussion in this thread, if you were to peruse it less defensively, might give you some insight into those reasons.
 
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