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Is Homosexuality On The Increase?

escargot said:
Yup, this is how it's always been. It was apparent to us kids back in the Swinging 'Sixties.
Well, in London it was the Swinging Sixties. Up North we were approaching 1951. Slowly. :chuckle:

We'd hear about Beatniks and occasionally spot a man with long hair - possible reaching past the tops of his ears! - or watch the male dancers on TV shows, and my father would grumble 'Poofs!'* and 'The Permissive Society steps at my front door!'
Not an original thinker, he'd probably read the like in the Daily Mirror.

None of my mates had any idea that 'pouf' meant 'homosexual'. We didn't even know the word. 'Pouf' to us meant 'cissy'.

I can see now how worrying all this was for my parents' generation. The tabloids were warning that their children were about to become raging poufs, Women's Libbers, cannabis fiends, anti-war/pro abortion marchers, mixed-marriage partners, disability rights campaigners, you name it.
My kind of people. :cool:


*Oooh, as I was typing that the narrator of Hitler's Secret Sex Life on TV stated that homosexuality was believed to be so rife in the early 1930s Nazi Party, it was called 'a brotherhood of poofs'. That exact word 'poof' at the same time as I typed it. :omg:

If that's not an omen, I don't know what is. :omr:
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I shudder when I remember how homophobic the Sun and other tabloids were in the 80s - remember the Eastenders gay kiss and headline of "Eastbenders"...?

With the likes of the Daily Mail and Telegraph etc it was more subtle but still there in bucketloads...
 
Paul_Exeter said:
I shudder when I remember how homophobic the Sun and other tabloids were in the 80s - remember the Eastenders gay kiss and headline of "Eastbenders"...?

With the likes of the Daily Mail and Telegraph etc it was more subtle but still there in bucketloads...
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It was disgraceful. The pathetic general excuse for the harassment was that gay men spread HIV/Aids and so were fair game.

Of course there've always been moral panics and folk devils. They are what sell the tabloid newspapers.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Personally I don't see anything bad in it and it saddens me that heterosexual men in particular have felt so threatened by homosexuality over the ages and felt the need to enshrine discrimination in religions and the law. Hopefully we are leaving all that behind us (in the West at least) and each successive generation is more tolerant and discriminatory laws have been relaxed or abolished.
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There is an argument that tolerant societies become intolerant of intolerance.
 
There have always been homosexuals, etc. in society.
Honestly, I don't believe anyone cares - we're all busy working, dealing with family issues, and living life. Here I don't think we even give it a thought.
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
There have always been homosexuals, etc. in society.
Honestly, I don't believe anyone cares - we're all busy working, dealing with family issues, and living life. Here I don't think we even give it a thought.
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Where is here?
 
bugmum said:
There is an argument that tolerant societies become intolerant of intolerance.
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Who are the arbiters of what is tolerable? The line of what we find tolerable now has shifted, but those in the past would also be sure in their beliefs as to what constitutes reasonable behaviour.
 
This is the Paradox of Tolerance, as delineated by Karl Popper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
In order to maintain a tolerant society, society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.

I'm one of the worst for this; I despise intolerant people, and therefore I am one of the most intolerant people I know.
In the words of Tony Soprano: 'What ya gonna do?'
 
I think homosexuality has always around but is talked about more these days especially on TV shows.

I feel sorry for my grandkids in school because in today’s times they claim that they have to be very careful to what they say to other kids who could appear to dress in a homosexual appearance.

When I was school a long time ago, I don’t remember this topic ever coming up.
 
I didn't even know there was such a thing as homosexuality until I got into my mid teens, but of course it was still illegal at the time, so if you were that way inclined, you certainly didn't broadcast it.
I'm guessing human beings have aways been the same, with roughly the same proportion being straight /gay/ bisexual.

Now that it's legally OK, it must be a great relief to feel you can 'come out'.Or simply experiment, to find your true feelings.
It must be a bit like the fable of King Midas with his asses ears -the barber felt he had to tell!

I've got a much loved gay granddaughter.
I have to admit that when I was told the situation I was relieved that my mother wasn't around to be told.
My mother was a good, kind died-in-the-wool Baptist, and would have found it hard to come to terms with.
 
Is Homosexuality on the Increase?

Not in my opinion, no.

Depiction of homosexuality is, however, on the increase: A major study of UK telly (see Page 10) found that on-screen representation of homosexuals was roughly four times that of their actual occurrence in society (3.1% according to the Office of National Statistics; 11.9% according to the telly study.)

In idle moments I have wondered how many Equity pages of potential homosexual presenters have to be unavailable before a heterosexual one is hired:

"Graham Norton? No. Susan Calman? No. Rylan Clark? No. Judge Rinder? No. Joe Lycett? No. Nick Grimshaw? No. Steph McGovern? No."

"Oh, sod it! Call Joanna Lumley!"

maximus otter
 
It's often seemed to me, from a purely subjective perspective, that it does seem that increasing numbers of people are identifying as something other than straight and cis. Now whether this is because people are more free to be themselves, or whether there's simply more people in total, or whether there are now more labels available, or if, in fact, the proportion of lgbt+ folk is increasing in society, I do not know.

I wouldn't find any of the above surprising, or any combination surprising.
 
I feel like the answer to the question in the thread title is rather obvious: no, but it's a lot easier to come out in western society nowadays than it used to be. We've always had a certain percentage of people who are attracted to the same sex, but at certain times in society people kind of had to keep a lid on it. The same goes some societies nowadays - you'd probably have to dig hard to find the gay scene in Saudi Arabia, because it's dangerous to be openly gay there.
 
I read quite some time ago that the perception of a male homosexual In Viking society depended very much on whether the person was the, um, penetrator or penetree. A Viking warrior could rape another man, and not be considered homosexual, but if he was raped or consented to being penetrated, this was a major disgrace. I also read in a completely separate source, also a long time ago, that the same attitude was taken in male prisons. I have no idea if either is true, but I found the parallel fascinating.
 
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James_H said:
I feel like the answer to the question in the thread title is rather obvious: no, but it's a lot easier to come out in western society nowadays than it used to be. We've always had a certain percentage of people who are attracted to the same sex, but at certain times in society people kind of had to keep a lid on it. The same goes some societies nowadays - you'd probably have to dig hard to find the gay scene in Saudi Arabia, because it's dangerous to be openly gay there.
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I think this is most likely the case. Homosexuality was at first something that had to be kept quiet about - many homosexuals had to appear to be straight and marry and have families otherwise people would 'talk'. Then, certainly when my children were growing up, it became almost the thing to shock your parents with, 'Mum, I'm gay'. Now kids are using the 'Mum, I'm trans' to shock their parents, and being gay seems to be neither here nor there.

To be honest, apart from a couple of people (one I'm related to, the other who recently got engaged to her girlfriend), I couldn't even have a rough stab at guessing the sexual orientation of most people I know.
 
Yithian said:
The clue's in the username: New Jersey.
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So New Jersey is the first place in the world to achieve total non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation? That is so cool!

I guess things have changed since the 2017 Public Eeligion Research research? Lockdown maybe gave people time to think.
 
SimonBurchell said:
I read quite some time ago that the perception of a male homosexual In Viking society depended very much on whether the person was the, um, penetrator or penetree. A Viking warrior could rape another man, and not be considered homosexual, but if he was raped or consented to being penetrated, this was a major disgrace. I also read in a completely separate source, also a long time ago, that the same attitude was taken in male prisons. I have no idea if either is true, but I found the parallel fascinating.
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The same in Roman society. The standard thing historians say these days is 'modern definitions of sexuality don't apply to past societies' so it doesn't make sense to ask e.g. 'Was Julius Caesar gay?' because the modern concept of 'gay' has so little to do with sexual/romantic practices at the time.
 
James_H said:
The same in Roman society. The standard thing historians say these days is 'modern definitions of sexuality don't apply to past societies' so it doesn't make sense to ask e.g. 'Was Julius Caesar gay?' because the modern concept of 'gay' has so little to do with sexual/romantic practices at the time.
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Yes, I remember from Greek or Latin translation lessons, many years ago, that a certain ancient man was frowned upon by letting a younger man be the "top" with him the "bottom". That was not according to etiquette.
(Remembering this I'm retroactively surprised that we were reading stuff like that as teenagers. And the translation was tricky because the Roman author of course used more floral language.)
 
So I went down that rabbit hole and did a Google search. My Bayesian prior :) was: 1) no rise in homosexuality per se, 2) rise in "coming out". Well ... this has been neither proven nor disproved. But it's a good exercise:

This 2015 article seems to support my hypothesis:
Over an age-range from 16 to 74, 1% of women and 1.5% of men consider themselves gay/lesbian, and 1.4% of women and 1% of men think of themselves as bisexual. But there is a clear gradient with age, with a much higher proportion in younger people, particularly in younger women

Along with changes in behaviour, there’s been a consistent shift in attitudes to same-sex partnerships . Natsal has been asking the same questions at 10-year intervals, and the proportion of 16- to 44-year-old women who agree that “same-sex relationships are not wrong at all” has gone up from 28% in 1990 to 66% in 2010 – an extraordinary reversal of opinion over just 20 years. Men are a bit more conservative, but agreement has still more than doubled, from 23% to 50%.
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/05/10-per-cent-population-gay-alfred-kinsey-statistics
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But there may be a third hypothesis: 3) more measurement in recent time periods. From a 2011 survey:
Increasing numbers of population-based surveys in the United States and across the world include questions designed to measure sexual orientation and gender identity.
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But there is not much reliable time series data:
A final challenge in making population-based estimates of the LGBT community is the lack of questions asked over time on a single large survey.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/how-many-people-lgbt/
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The trend seems to be rising. But still, that "self identify" does a lot of work there:
1675712409568.png

https://news.gallup.com/poll/329708/lgbt-identification-rises-latest-estimate.aspx
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And the same uncertainty is stated in this article:
Between 2015 and 2019, the percentage of 15- to 17-year-olds who said they identified as "non-heterosexual" rose from 8.3% to 11.7%, according to nationwide surveys by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Although our analyses demonstrated that there has been a significant increase in the proportion of girls and boys that self-identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual, we cannot be certain if this represents a true increase of this magnitude, or if it reflects at least in part, greater comfort by teens with acknowledging a non-heterosexual identity on an anonymous questionnaire," said Dr. Andrew Adesman, who led an analysis of the findings.
https://www.webmd.com/sex-relations...-rise-in-us-teens-identifying-as-gay-bisexual
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Similar statistics here:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population-rises.aspx
1675712785340.png

And here the same uncertainty:
Self-identification as LGBT is only one of a number of ways of measuring sexual and gender orientation. The general grouping of these four orientations (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) into one question involves significant simplification, and other measurement techniques which ask about each of these categories individually yield different estimates. Additionally, self-identification of sexual orientation can be distinct from other measures which tap into sexual behavior or attraction.
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Now I'm curious if there are any other measuring devices than surveys.
 
There's probably been a rise in reporting about it, rather than an actual rise.
Also, the number of LGBT+ people represented in the media and creative industries is higher than the proportion of the general population they truly represent - that is, they are over-represented in those industries. And they are in a position to create positive PR about it.
So, of course it may seem that there are millions of them.
My own personal view is that there are a LOT of bisexuals about and most of them don't talk about it, and they always tick the 'hetero' box.
 
charliebrown said:
I feel sorry for my grandkids in school because in today’s times they claim that they have to be very careful to what they say to other kids who could appear to dress in a homosexual appearance.
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I feel sorry for me as I am constantly walking on eggshells when it comes to political correctness these days. I have no problems with any person on the grounds of race or sexuality, but occasionally, and without thinking, I blurt out something colloquial from my formative years that was pretty much acceptable in the construction industry only a few short years ago but is now a massive no no. The construction industry did not really conform to political correctness until a very short time ago, but it has caught up very quickly.

I recently blurted out the word “poufs” without malice aforethought in relation to a pair of London villains; common and acceptable when I was a younger person growing up in London, but is now likely a sacking offence.

My outburst brought grins from the older members of staff and frowns from the younger members. Hopefully the team know that I never meant harm or hurt to anybody, but I wait in trepidation for the call from HR.
 
maximus otter said:
Is Homosexuality on the Increase?

Not in my opinion, no.

Depiction of homosexuality is, however, on the increase: A major study of UK telly (see Page 10) found that on-screen representation of homosexuals was roughly four times that of their actual occurrence in society (3.1% according to the Office of National Statistics; 11.9% according to the telly study.)
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I'd agree. I'd hypothesize that (a) most people (i.e. considerably more than half) don't give a rat's and never really have (b) there's always been people who are prejudiced against homosexual folk and (c) that if there's a genetic component, the greater and more overt acceptance of such will lead to a decrease in the general population. Not that it matters either way.
 
Delightful said:
It's generally reduced to just lgbt or lgbtq+ in almost all lgbt circles/groups I've participated in.

The simplest way of thinking about it is that it just means everyone who isn't cis and/or isn't allo and/or heterosexual. Whether that's a good or bad thing is a matter of debate.

Personally, I think there's a place to celebrate all forms of non-harmful human sexuality, a separate more focused place to raise awareness and tackle bigotry against minority sexualities, and an even more focused place to deal with issues specific to a particular community or minority, such as gay or trans or ace. I think all three layers are required.
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It is only two bodies business who I have consenting sex with...by the by, what is 'allo'?
 
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