Board Thread:False Info and Speculative Discussion/@comment-25184427-20140722165407/@comment-19765459-20140723060300

HolyDrumstickofLove wrote: DmanCO - Thanks for the effort you put into explaining things to me. I understand better, if not fully, now. But it is an agenda...just one aimed at pulling in the gay community as viewers. Haha....not what I was thinking, though. I live in a place where being gay is still not ok. One of my friends is gay and works in law enforcement. Unfortunately, he has to keep it under wraps as to not be pushed out of his job, through indirect bullying. He is pretty stereotypical, to be honest, but manages to fake his way through life. He goes to Austin, sometimes, because there are bars where he can kinda be himself, but even there, he has a hard time finding partners, because a lot of people shy away from police officers....double wammy....Anyway, I try to understand what goes through his head, but he's pretty reserved and sometimes I am scared to approach him about stuff like this... also, he wouldn't be caught dead watching a Teen Wolf. Anyway, thanks. I feel like I might understand him a little more now, and that's good.

Being gay can often carry with it a sense of invisibility, especially if you have to live in the closet. We also have to live with a lot of double standards. Heterosexual couples can passionately make out in public places and only the most puritanical people would consider it offensive. But two men holding hands in public are said to be "flaunting their sexuality".

At the same time, we don't even have the escape of fiction that straight people do. LGBT characters are very much underrepresented in TV, movies and literature. I know a lot of people think otherwise, but as I said above, that is because they have an ingrained psychological filter that edits out heterosexual acts conducted in front of them.

I got into a number of arguments with people when Michael Sam got picked for the NFL draft and was shown on TV kissing his boyfriend. These losers, trying to pretend they weren't homophobes, insisted that they didn't think there was room for any sexuality in football. So I sent out a blizzard of links to racy photos of cheerleaders (especially the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders) performing in skimpy outfits, making out with players and of course the "Kiss Cam" that is on the crowd in the stadium showing (straight) couples kiss during the game. In short, their minds never even registered all of these sexual displays, because they were heterosexual! One male-male kiss was, in their minds, a FAR bigger deal than thousands of male-female kisses! They'd never complained about any of that. It wasn't until it was two men that it was suddenly "getting shoved down our throats"!

So we feel keenly a sense of isolation. We cannot even turn on the TV and expect to see others like ourselves, whereas straight people see so many like themselves that they've stopped noticing anymore!