3 Cherry Cokes, 4 Beers, and Red Wings

yesterday in the car, my friend and i were talking about when we knew that the word 'gay' was descriptive of our sexuality.  we both agreed that from a very young age, we knew that we had feelings toward members of the same sex, but we didn't know what it meant until many years later in situations that had one thing in common:  porn.  

my friend realized that he was gay when he realized that he was only watching man on man porn.  i realized that i was gay when i got aroused by breasts in scrambled porn (channel 95 pre-cable boxes).  

the sociological affects of this are scary.  why is it that children must explore their sexuality and attractionality through the pornography industry?  if only homosexuality weren't taboo in society, we could have learned about our sexual orientations via non-sex-only based media.   a huge societal misconception is that being gay is only about who one has sex with, not about who one is emotionally or physically attracted to.  by learning about our sexOs via porn, we are unable to help that stereotype.  

this brings us to the unusual discussion of MSM who do not identify as gay.  there is a huge community, often forgotten or criticized by the queer community, who have sex with people of the same sex and yet do not identify as gay because they find love and attractionality toward people of a different sex.  this community in itself validates the gay identity by proving that it is about more than just sex.  

i must admit that a lot has changed since i was a child.  there are now quite a few television shows and movies that portray queer people and their love toward people of the same sex.  hopefully, for future generations, this can help to explain that being gay is not just about ones sex life.  if i had seen shows that portrayed women loving other women as a child, i could have realized sooner that the emotions i was feeling had an identity and could have become comfortable with myself much sooner.  however, there are perks to not ignorance.  i thought i was just like anyone else as a child and never had to deal with feelings of exclusion or oppression.  i just assumed that all of the other little girls thought that their female teachers were beautiful and had crushes on lois while she was dating superman.  at the same time, having an explanation and definition for those emotions would have been beneficial to my self-development.

speaking of porn, let us analyze hetero porn for a moment.  why is it that the focus is always on the girl, her boobs, and the faces and noises she makes?  why is porn automatically played toward the audience of straight men?  while i do know more men who get off to straight porn than women, this is quite possibly because of the intended audience of the porn industry.  sadly, i can't complain, because it is this cinematography that made me realize what aroused me.  unfortunately today, the porn i want to watch is very hard to find.  discovering real lesbian porn is like trying to find a palm tree in michigan:  the few things you find are most likely fake.  

at least these days we have the internet and no longer have to rely on scrambled porn on channel 95.  maybe one day society will recognize that not only do gay people have a sexuality, but they also have emotions and attractionality that goes even deeper than their sex lives.