I was reading the Daily Mail today (well, you have to keep an eye on the enemy) and they were having a pop at the Muslim Council of Great Britain. Whether you think the MCB is a valid organisation to have a go at is one thing but one of the criticisms that the Daily Mail had was that the MCB is intolerant of homosexuality. I had to to read that twice and then just fell about laughing. The Daily Mail defending poofs. What a bunch of <deleted> hypocrites

Suppose an MP described black or Asian people as an abomination and compared them to paedophiles. That MP would surely earn not only the opprobrium of his or her political party but also a visit from the police for inciting racial hatred, be on the news a lot and have to apologise.

Until very recently, homosexuality was considered to be a mental illness by doctors and psychiatrists and was treated much like pedophilia is today. It will take time for middle-aged and older people to realize that they were being brainwashed for much of their youth.

Your historical note is quite true- but it is also illuminating to note that the existence of homosexuality itself as it is socially and psychologically constructed today (and perhaps of sexuality itself) wasn't until the mid- to late 19th century (according to Foucault, anyway), which makes the recent form of the prejudice itself a very recent development- historically, anyway.

There have been other eras when homosexuality was in, out, in, out... well, you get the picture.... but it was never constructed in exactly the same way that it is right now- which in the West, anyway, is partly in reaction to that recently constructed prejudice by the 'objective' doctors (this would have come out of the same era that didn't know about antisepsis and looked for 'criminal' nature in bumps on the head).

I wish sometimes I could have grown up in that future time when the only people who remember the prejudice are those who are well-educated historically- at least, as long as that time period will still have beaches, fresh water, and a non-Venus-like or Ice-Age climate.

Be real here.  If there were a plethora of willing women hanging around bathrooms or other public places, don't think that straight men would be crowding around them?

In Brain Sex, a very good book, in my opinion, the author points out that straight men, straight women, and gay women have approximately the same number of lifetime sexual partners, somewhere in the low teens.  However, gay men have an average of literally hundreds of partenrs in the course of their lifetimes.

What she postualtes is that women are the reason for this. WOmen, as a whole, tend to place more of an emphasis on relationships than on sex, so they tend not to have casual sexual encounters.  And straight men, being married or in relationships with women, are held in check from their natural proclivity to spread their seed around. Women become men's sexual governors.

Gay men, on the other hand, do not have women to keep their sex drives in check, so they freely act out their natural desires. She feels that gay mena nd staright men are the same in that if given the chance, both morally and just having available partners, straight men would have just as many chance and brief sexual incidents as gay men do.

I tend to agree with the authors opinions on this.  

Seems like a reasonable argument to me, though I would question how they got the data on numbers of partners- especially how the set of 'gay men' were selected (i.e., gay men who are easy to 'find' may also be an unusually active group in other respects, and not necessarily representative).

Seems like a reasonable argument to me, though I would question how they got the data on numbers of partners- especially how the set of 'gay men' were selected (i.e., gay men who are easy to 'find' may also be an unusually active group in other respects, and not necessarily representative).

The book was heavily referenced, but I don't remember from where the numbers of partners figures came.  And of course, any discussion which deals with average figures completely ignores the outliers.  There are gay men with very few partners duirng the course of their life, and there are straight men and women with hundreds of partners.

And you make a valid point.  Interviewing men around gay establishments may get real or inflated figures which are much higher than if the interviewees are closet gays who are not too open about their sexuality.  I am not saying they did this, but I just don't know from where they got their samples.  But I think we can safely say that gay men have, on the average, more partners during the course of their lifetime than straight men, and I would feel very confident that straight men would have just as many partners as gay men if they had the same opportunities. 

Once again, as a vast generalization, guys tend to be sexually attracted to people easily and are more apt to act upon simple sexual attraction.  Women tend to be a little more circumspect and want to know more about the person first before they act on simple sexual attraction.  So if two people were to meet, be sexually attracted to each other, and be willing to act upon that attraction right away without the normal courting and such that goes on, statistically speaking, I would say the two people would be male instead of one male and one female  or two females.

And as a straight man, I can say I envy that about gay men.

Hee hee! Well, it's one of the FEW compensations- there should be something, after all!!!

Hee hee! Well, it's one of the FEW compensations- there should be something, after all!!!

See??? Life is unfair for straight guys!  Women get multiple orgasms.  Gay guys get multiple partners.  Straight guys sit at home and watch CSI.  

Whilst I also doubt the 'hundreds of lifetime partners' for the average gay male, I accept that we have more sex partners. In fact, if I told you my numbers, y'all might be jealous. Two or three women, well over a hundred men. And the men were more interesting, more varied.

I may be back in San Diego next week (where I have a house), and if so, I will get the book and see where the figures came from as far as average number of sexual partners.

And there are plenty of straight men who have had literally hundreds of partners during the course of their lives.  They are just balanced out by men who have never had sex and men who have had only one or two partners.

I have no numbers. However, I suspect that gay men have more lifetime partners. The social patterning necessarily puts restraints on straight fidelity, not on gay fidelity. Look at the comments in our gay forum, where good, educated men like Scott (and myself) have Thai partners and yet by permission, are allowed to fool around. Wives, especially North American ones like Kinsey and Masters and Johnson interviewed, are less likely to permit such dalliance. And once a gay man in the West decides to act out his gay impulses, the church and society - even military law - have less power over them.

I have no numbers. However, I suspect that gay men have more lifetime partners. The social patterning necessarily puts restraints on straight fidelity, not on gay fidelity. Look at the comments in our gay forum, where good, educated men like Scott (and myself) have Thai partners and yet by permission, are allowed to fool around. Wives, especially North American ones like Kinsey and Masters and Johnson interviewed, are less likely to permit such dalliance. And once a gay man in the West decides to act out his gay impulses, the church and society - even military law - have less power over them.

That certainly may be true about lifetime partners.  However, that also would tend to butress the numbers that indicate gay men have more overall partners than straight men.  If a man is given premission to roam, most men will, gay or straight.  

There is an interesting anomaly here, though.  One study I read indicated that about 40% of American women can accept their male partner having sexual relations with someone else, while only 20% of the men thought it was OK for their female partner to do so (this was on a study of research about swinging).  So I wonder why gay men would buck that male trend?

I don't have any sources, but I know that a lot of places that tested for HIV used to ask about the number of sex partners (at least in the last 3 months), type of sexual activity and few other pertinent questions.

While I wouldn't like to think about the exact numbers, I know that I have been pretty active- and making up for the lost time when I was clueless about myself. That may have something to do with it? Also, well, men don't always expect commitment (or children) from each other, and as long as it's in a spirit of fun and all involved parties know what the rules are- well, why not?

What my older gay friends tell me is that they are not aware of any successful functioning very-long-term gay partnership that doesn't allow for some playing around- maybe the straight folks should have a long think about this, too. Our nearest relatives, as Bonobo well knows, are the Bonobos- and they are the opposite of monogamous!!!

While I wouldn't like to think about the exact numbers, I know that I have been pretty active- and making up for the lost time when I was clueless about myself. That may have something to do with it? Also, well, men don't always expect commitment (or children) from each other, and as long as it's in a spirit of fun and all involved parties know what the rules are- well, why not?

What my older gay friends tell me is that they are not aware of any successful functioning very-long-term gay partnership that doesn't allow for some playing around- maybe the straight folks should have a long think about this, too. Our nearest relatives, as Bonobo well knows, are the Bonobos- and they are the opposite of monogamous!!!

Yes, the bonobo is very well known for being, shall we say, more open and not possessive about its sexual forays. They use sex to deal with stress, not violence.  Well, they use sex to deal with alot of things as well.  

From today's Sunday Times

"Why I salute Kelly McGillis

Rachel Johnson

So, Kelly McGillis, the teenage pin-up of the 1980s, who memorably starred as Charlie, the blue-jeaned blonde training instructor in the hit movie Top Gun, has a new call sign: lesbian.

Last week, to the consternation of all of us who stuck that poster of McGillis astride a motorbike with her red-blooded co-star and love interest Tom Cruise on our bedroom walls, she gave a frank interview to a vlogger from SheWired (allow me to translate: SheWired is, and I quote, “the go-to site for women: lesbian, gay, bi, queer, trans, straight but curious and otherwise identified”, and a vlogger is someone who has a video blog). In the interview, McGillis was asked whether she was looking for a man or a woman and it all came out.

“Definitely a woman,” said McGillis, 51. “I’m done with the man thing.” There was a certain amount of whooping from the lesbian vlogger (another girl on the team) but then Kelly said some more surprising stuff that kind of resonated and made me stop and think about whether being out and proud was really the super picnic we all suppose it must be, now it’s 2009. And when I say “we”, I mean those of us who are under no pressure either to conceal or reveal our sexuality, because we are plain vanilla heterosexuals or because no one gives a hoot or, as is the case for most of us, both.

Anyway, McGillis went on to say that she’d been aware of her sexuality since she was 12, that identifying her orientation had been a “hard process” and that she thought God was punishing her (crikey!) because she was gay. “Life is a freaking journey,” she observed, “and it’s about growing and changing and coming to terms with you and what you are.”

The news that a fiftysomething actress who has been married twice and has two teenage daughters — ie, was so deep in the closet that she was practically in Narnia — has outed herself received a mixed reception. “Who?” said my 15-year-old daughter, and, “Who cares?” said most of the people who posted comments online.

I found McGillis’s raw revelation after so many years of denial (she denied she was a lesbian even after playing one in the US drama The L Word in 2007) both touching and important. And it definitely made me pay closer attention to the other gay news of the week, which was, in case you missed it, the publication of Stephen Fry’s long, moving and, it has to be said, unutterably pretentious open letter to his own 16-year-old self.

Let’s be clear about one thing before we draw any conclusions. Fry, who has made something of a — pun intended — cottage industry out of his own struggle with his sexuality, is a brilliant wordsmith, even if he is a little in love with his own unstoppable prolixity. His letter is addressed to “Dearest Absurd Child” and by the second paragraph Fry has already lost it: “My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on my keyboard now.” Indeed, there are moments in his missive mailed to the Republic of Pubescence when I wished Fry had condensed his thoughts to 140 characters and put it out on Twitter instead.

By contrast, McGillis is an actress who was talking on camera in fluent therapy-speak to a vlogger in Key West, Florida. But the fact remains: both Fry and McGillis were essentially saying the same thing, in very different ways, and it was this.

Despite the internet, gay chatlines, gay parades, the ubiquity of men-seeking-men personal ads, even though being gay has gone from a matter of deep personal shame to pride over many years via Stonewall rioters and Harvey Milk, it’s still tough out there.

“Don’t kid yourself,” Fry writes to himself. “For millions of teenagers around Britain and everywhere else, it is still 1973. Taunts, beatings and punishment await gay people the world over in playgrounds and execution grounds.”

Despite all the positive lesbian role models in the United States — Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Lindsay Lohan (okay, strike LiLo) — McGillis kept it under wraps because she wanted to get parts, just as boys keep it on the down-low because Hollywood is still one big closet. Teenage girls won’t pay cash to watch a leading man who’s actually come out (rather than done the usual thing, which is to allow his studio to equip him with a series of willing beards) snog Miley Cyrus or Anne Hathaway.

Which makes me think that maybe Fry is right and not all that much has changed, after all; which in turn means that we should greet those who bravely admit they are done with the man thing, or the girl thing, with genuine applause, not yawns.

For the taboo remains. And the more who refuse to treat their homosexuality as a taboo — wherever they are on the weird and wonderful spectrum that is human sexuality — the better. I agree wholeheartedly with one woman who wrote in from Connecticut: “Thank you for coming out, Ms McGillis. Everyone who stands up for their truth makes it easier for the next one. Written on behalf of myself and my 14-year-old gay daughter.”

Thinking about it, I now understand why Fry wrote of tears on his keyboard. "

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but I just wanted to mention David Laws as an example of the OPs original question. Double first from Cambridge, made enough as an investment banker to retire at the age of 28 and move into politics, got the job he'd dreamed of all his life and lost it because he daren't tell his parents that he's gay.

Here's a piece by Mathew Pariss (another poof) in today's Times:

"There’s something sick about this country. We’ve spent a weekend arguing about whether David Laws should go when we should have been trying desperately to persuade him to stay.

No, he did not have to go. No, it was not “always inevitable”. No, Mr Laws was not right to jump “with dignity”, “before he was pushed”. And who, pray, would have done the pushing? We, the media. What stinking hypocrisy, then, to call the fall inevitable, and then wring our hands in pious lament about what a tragedy this is for the individual and the nation, as though we were helpless witnesses to some kind of extreme weather event. We in the media have been the instruments, not just the chroniclers, of the fall of a good man.

Of course Mr Laws made an error of judgment. Hundreds of MPs have cocked up badly as parliamentarians scramble to keep abreast of violent and bewildering changes in the national mood. The present Defence Secretary handed back £22,000 in March. Hundreds have made repayments.

Others were rescued. Mr Laws was rescuable. Privately both Nick Clegg and David Cameron tried to persuade him of that. But when Mr Laws saw how The Daily Telegraph was treating his story, he despaired — and jumped.

Meanwhile, other MPs across the United Kingdom are living, with a declared partner, in accommodation wholly or partially funded by the taxpayer — entirely within the rules.

David Laws could have arranged things likewise, and claimed as much or more. I find it shocking that commentators slavering for a story that fits the headline “fleecing the taxpayer” have entirely glossed over that central fact.

Why didn’t Mr Laws declare his relationship? The puzzlement of many heterosexual commentators is forgivable, the sneers of one gay Labour MP less so. Who knows — and you really don’t, Ben Bradshaw, and nor do I — what Mr Laws’s close family and personal circumstances are.

But wouldn’t it have been more sensible to come clean from the start? Of course it would. Mr Laws knows that. Hundreds of thousands of closeted, middle-aged gay men in Britain know it about themselves.

How they wish they had, half a lifetime ago. But they feel trapped in an account of themselves constructed when they were young.

You start by declaring nothing — and friends and family assume there’s nothing to declare. You find yourself, by your silence, playing along with a lie you never meant to tell.

Imperceptibly, but in the end fatally, the outer self diverges from the inner. And whenever you grit your teeth and resolve to blurt it out, there’s always a mother who might be heartbroken, a dad who’d be devastated, a boss who’d be contemptuous, mates whose trust you might lose, or a frail grandma for whom this might just prove the final blow. The years go by, the gap widens and calcifies.

For most of us it’s during our teens and early twenties that we construct whatever version of ourselves becomes the face that people know. David Laws is 44. He was 14 when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, 24 when she fell. If in those days a young political hopeful had decided to come out (or been outed) as homosexual he could — if anyone had heard of him — have been torn to shreds in the newspapers.

Few took that risk. Maureen Colquhoun, then an MP, was pulled apart, and sank, never to resurface. Later, Chris Smith survived. As an ex-MP in 1987 I endured a brief weekend of sniggering in the News of the World, but lived to tell the tale. And what was it we all feared in those not-so-distant days? It was the vengeful hatred of newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph. They excoriated gay pride then.

So we got gay shame instead.

Mr Laws, it seems, got it worse than most. I know who I blame, and it isn’t David Laws."

New South Wales Minister Resigns After Being Outed by TV Station

On May 20, 2010, the Roads and Transport Minister of NSW, David Campbell resigned from cabinet. Campbell, 52, tendered his resignation to Premier Kristina Keneally just hours before New South Wales’ Channel 7 broadcast a video showing the married minister who has two adult sons going to a gay nightclub.

Keneally accepted the resignation and told the media that when Campbell resigned he told her had led a double life for the past two decades. Keneally also said that Campbell had not been blackmailed over his long term extramarital activities. There was some concern about blackmail especially since Campbell had served as Police Minister between April 2007 and September 2008.

The day following his resignation, Campbell held a brief press conference. He said that his visit to the club was a private matter that had nothing to do with his job as minister. He also asked for privacy for himself and for his family.

Channel 7 Defends Decision to “Out” Campbell

Since the video was aired, there has been criticism of the station’s decision to broadcast the footage. Many people feel as Campbell does; it was a private matter and nobody’s business except Campbell’s and his family’s. Some critics went further and painted the station as being run by a bunch of homophobes.

This criticism, including that of previous NSW political leaders who were sympathetic to Campbell, put the station on the defensive. John Meakin, the station’s news director defended his decision by pointing out that Campbell had driven his ministerial car to the gay nightclub. But, as Premier Keneally had noted, ministers are allowed to use their government cars for personal business although she questioned Campbell’s use of it to go to a gay club. Even Meakin was forced to admit that the use of the car did not violate any ministerial guidelines.

Meakin also justified the broadcast by saying the public had a right to know about Campbell’s double life because he had campaigned as a “family man”. Campbell had never been known as promoting family values the way some politicians are. Meakin based this argument on the fact that every year, Campbell sent out Christmas cards in which he was pictured with his wife and sons.

The third justification was that Campbell had been the Minister of Police and in that office would have been particularly susceptible to blackmail. However there was no evidence presented that there had ever been a problem during the 17 months that he served in that portfolio.

Campbell’s defenders point out that not only did he not breach any guidelines but he was not alleged to have committed a crime and did not have a criminal record. Meakin on the other hand was sentenced to 14 months in jail on weekends and given an eight year license suspension after he pleaded guilty to drinking and driving in 2007. It was his third drunk driving conviction

Campbell Just the Latest NSW Minister to Resign in Scandal

Sex scandals are nothing new in the government of New South Wales. In 2009, John Della Bosca resigned as Health Minister after the married man admitted to having a six month affair with a 26-year-old woman.

In September 2008, MP Matt Brown was forced to resign after three days of serving as NSW’s Minister of Police. Brown had a party in his parliamentary office where he stripped down to his underwear and simulated a sex act with MP Noreen Hay.

And in November 2006, Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Milton Orkopoulos was arrested and charged with several child sex and drug offences. He was later convicted of 28 of the charges and sentenced to 13 years and 11 months in jail.

The controversy surrounding Campbell’s resignation continues. As ABC News (Australia) noted, public entertainment is not the same as public interest.

http://news.suite101.com/article.cfm/new-s...station-a239932

The thing with politics is the great unwashed will vote ( if they can be assed ) for the candidate their daddy voted for or secondly someone who cons them enough into making them believe he/she represents their views and importantly is one of them.

When a politician is publicly, labelled gay, the vast uneducated mass that voted for him/her feel betrayed simply because in one fundamental area he/she is different from them

The general public fear change and are petrified with differences they cannot or choose not, to understand. Qualifications, suitability for the job.....nah. " He's ( she's ) different from me, he/she's out "

It will never change.

Is NZ the only country with openly gay parlimentarians and ministers? A couple of terms ago, we even had a transgender minister (a world's first, I think), who came from a post as mayor of a city.....

I just don't understand what the problem is considering how Western thinking has supposedly evolved to "modern thinking".

Sexual preference would not influence my vote.....why should it?

Infidelity, on the other hand, indicates lack of integrity and conviction.

My advice to any politician from any Western country is; If you are gay, out yourself from the start.

Is NZ the only country with openly gay parlimentarians and ministers? A couple of terms ago, we even had a transgender minister (a world's first, I think), who came from a post as mayor of a city.....

I just don't understand what the problem is considering how Western thinking has supposedly evolved to "modern thinking".

Sexual preference would not influence my vote.....why should it?

Infidelity, on the other hand, indicates lack of integrity and conviction.

My advice to any politician from any Western country is; If you are gay, out yourself from the start.

Being openly gay for over 20 years and totally lacking integrity hasn't hurt Barney Frank's political career in the USA.

The german soccer players have certainly outted themselves at FIFA World Cup..

The hugging and kissing etc was gay as..... and more.