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Nah, it's just women are more likely to admit same sex attraction even if it's occasional.

For men regardless of political orientation, most men wouldn't act on it, and if they do they keep it a secret.

Women get less judgement for it.

So it makes sense men would be underrepresented in surveys.

“Oh, it’s perfectly normal to be romantically attracted to some men, you eventually grow out of it”

Why do you think so many conservatives believe it's a choice? They think that everyone has to repress it like they do.

I suspect it's just an increase of reporting and decrease of self-denial. When you lift the taboo penalties the rates go up because people are less afraid to admit it to both themselves and others. Whenever you hear some country saying there are no gay people there, it's because the gay people who definitely live there are so terrified that they will not only keep their mouths shut, but live in denial so hard they might even believe they're doing the right thing.

You just described it perfectly. I grew up in a conservative household and those were the exact thoughts I ended up internalizing for nearly 35 years.

I have an amazing life now, so I wouldn't want anything to change, but damn if I wouldn't have made some different decisions growing up if I had realized I was bi.

You claimed a fact - don't do that without citing a source.

Where is the source?

The gay agenda™️

How many gays are out there? No one knows. 10000? 20000? 30000 since obama is in office

They might as well. Couldn't do a worse job.

I feel where you're coming from, and on the other side of that I think labels can do a lot of good. There's a lot of relief and comfort that comes when someone who might otherwise have thought themself broken discovering that there are more out there like them. Finding a label that resonates can get them there. I'm speaking from firsthand experience.

Most queer people I know and have talked to agree with you. I certainly do, labels can be useful but as a society we clearly focus way too much on them.

Where queer people might take issue with your comment (I'm definitely lightly irked) is that cishet people never say "I wish we would stop focusing on labels" unless the discussion is about queer labels.

People will straight up say "omg we need to chill out about labels, we're all the same" then turn around and say shit like "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" or "boys will be boys".

I disagree with this position in this context. I do think that there are cases where labels are unimportant, but they have a primary purpose. For people who feel broken, labels can help them put a word to something they didn't understand otherwise. I didn't realize I was asexual because I hadn't heard the word, or didn't understand it properly, until late high school. For me, my journey of discovery of many queer identities has largely been led by learning about new labels. Underpinning these labels is the perspective of the community that coined a term for it, to put a name to their shared experience.

I think it is incredibly important to remember that labels are descriptive, not prescriptive - they should always be seen as approximations of a person's understanding of themselves, not strict categories, and I think that's the essence of what you're trying to say, but I disagree that we need to focus less on it overall.

8% of the population is a lot of people, and the self-report rate is much higher among younger generations. For queer people this is a show of strength. After all, we are a minority group whose rights and social status are being threatened. I find immense comfort in knowing just how many of us there are now, because unfortunately we do need sheer strength in numbers to achieve justice.

So I think it's very important for queer people to be loud about their labels, I think it is a social good and seeing the sheer size of the community helps me sleep at night. The more people that know how common it is, the more likely it is to be fully tolerated and the easier it gets for people to recognize it within themselves.

The only people sowing division with their use of labels are majority groups touting supremacist ideologies (or bigoted gatekeepers within the queer community); everybody knows what "white pride", "straight pride", and "cis pride" really mean. It is frustrating to see this argument get made in the context of queer labels which are loud by necessity, as if they have the same motives or serve the same purpose.

I know you're at least partially talking about labels in general, but since this is in reply to a poll about queer identities, I am taking your comment to be related to LGBTQ+ labels.

I don't think most individuals with an LGBTQ+ identity think of themselves as only that identity. Race, class, religion, ability, and other dimensions of identity ultimately combine to create the whole person. In fact, most discourse surrounding identities involves some analysis of intersectionality, as coined by Kimberle Crenshaw. In essence, she illustrated how being both black and a woman brings different experiences and struggles than being a white woman or black man. As an extension, the queer identity a person has and the other identities a person has interact to inform their experiences in ways that are different than having any one of those identities alone.

If some people externally equate a queer person's whole self and their queer identity, that isn't the fault of the queer person. In fact, this is another reason why having a label (as inadequate as it might objectively be) can be useful. Queer people need those labels so they can maneuver in society to build coalition and obtain equal rights. If we squabbled over the differences between subjective experiences of queerness, our groups would be smaller and have less bargaining power.

I might be way off about what you meant in your statement, but i figured it was worth throwing this out here anyway!

Are you familiar with erasure as a concept?

I could change the system from the inside out. And all I have to do is pare down my sexuality to simple gayness, which is heavily in the mix[. . . .]Get ready, America! Dean Pelton is coming out as approximately two-sevenths of what he is!