Is "gay" Defined Only By Choice Of Sexual Activity?

[peekint]

Rather than muddy up another thread, this rather interesting question arose and deserves its own treatment.

Anyone bite?

Is "Gay" defined only by choice of sexual activity?

[onni4me]

I would assume that the obvious answer is 'NO'. For many reasons like being impotent to others like being so super sensitive that sex would be considered 'dirty' since it would lower the feeling etc. etc.

There has been famous people that we are not sure they were gay or not like Cecil Rhodes. At least the history never suggests them having sex...

Then we have people like Bavarias Ludwig II (Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm; sometimes rendered as Louis II in English) who indeed had an interesting life. Much more than sex happened and amazingly it didn't seem to bother his folks.

If you give a glimpse at wikipedia looking a list of famous gay people, there are plenty that have accomplished things far beyond being gay of sexual nature.

[peekint]

I realize now my post was unclear. Let me try to be more precise.

Is being "Gay" (as opposed to being "homosexual"), made up of more than choice of sexual activity?

[Ijustwannateach]

...'sex' is ... produced by a range of social practices, investigations, talk and writing - 'discourses' or 'discursive practices' for short - that come together in the 19th century. All the sorts of talk - by doctors, clergy, novelists, psychologists, moralists, social workers, politicians - that we link with the idea of the repression of sexuality were in fact ways of bringing into being the thing we call 'sex.' [This process] gave sexuality a new importance and a new role, making sexuality the secret of the individual's nature.

Culler commenting on Foucault's History of Sexuality.

[PeaceBlondie]

America's best known gay Mennonite, who has been living with the same lover for over 40 years, hates the term homosexual, and insists that gay is the correct word. For many of us, the terms are interchangeable.

Sexual orientation requires no physical contact, no action. If you think gay or bi or straight, you are, and no activity that denies your orientation disproves your orientation.

Is that what you were getting at, peekint? Why not give us your own opinion, with selected examples that illustrate your position?

One reason I never told my stepmother that I was gay, is that she was always a labeler. Alan S., the little boy next door, went on to make a life in the world, may even have earned two doctorates and been awarded 18 patents. But Mother only thought of him as Alan the queer. I never wanted my life to be subsumed as nothing more than a queer. Which is why countless thousands of former associates do not know what I did the night before the tax examiner meeting.

[Jingthing]

Rather than muddy up another thread, this rather interesting question arose and deserves its own treatment.

Anyone bite?

Is "Gay" defined only by choice of sexual activity?

Of course not.