Youngsters aren't half queer

[DCI Harry Batt]

1 in 2 young people say they are not 100% heterosexual

At a bit of an angle - when we get these differences in political views among different age groups, it is said that "people get more right wing as they get older". Do we think people get more heterosexual as they get older?

[Vulgarian Visigoth]

Youngsters aren't half queer

Besides the obvious fctor of older people lying through their teeth, and at the risk of alienating the born-this-way fundmentalists, it's clear that sexuality, far from being merely physiological, has a large cultural component, and as such it stands to reason that as homosexuality becomes more socially acceptable more young people see it as just another form of sexuality.

[MsD]

Youngsters aren't half queer

Interesting, but there's also the factor of young people adopting bisexuality or undefined sexuality as a bit of a cool pose. I sort of did that a bit when I was young, but I'm (pretty much completely) straight and always have been.

Generally though, young people are much more open minded about sexuality. A friend is helping her 12 year old transition (male to female), and her friends and classmates are completely fine with it.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Youngsters aren't half queer

Yeah, you wouldn't have got that result among my peers when I was that age. It's a cultural shift and one for the better.

[E10 Rifle]

Youngsters aren't half queer

It does appear to be yes, not least because for every young'un keen to boast about an "experimental sexuality" as a pose, there'll be others really unsure about theirs, or anguished by their lack of sexual success, who'll be desperate to "pose" as staunchly heterosexual. "Gay" after all is still widely used as an insult.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Youngsters aren't half queer

From my relatively limited contact with the youth of today, most of them honestly don't give a shit if someone is straight or gay, or even if someone thinks they are gay when they are straight. I'm sure that's far from a universal position, but It's sufficiently widely held for it to be very encouraging.

There was a lovely letter to the irish times around the time of the gay marriage referendum, and it was written by a man in his sixties who had grown up in dublin and suffered horrendous bullying all through school and had to leave ireland. Anyway he was out handing out leaflets in the run up to the referendum and was approached by a bunch of kids from his old school, who asked him for stickers and leaflets to hand out to their friends, and he nearly had a total breakdown in the street. He couldn't really handle all of the happiness and hope for the future, and the sadness and regret at how utterly pointless everything he had suffered had been.

[garcia]

Youngsters aren't half queer

that old dude should hold on to his knickers. ireland voting to allow gay marriage does not herald a fundamental change in the human condition. there'll just be another way of dividing normal from the persecuted not-normal. so maybe those young people no longer have a problem with people being gay. but try being poor or badly educated.

A friend is helping her 12 year old transition (male to female), and her friends and classmates are completely fine with it.

do i understand you correctly - she's helping her 12 year old son to become her 12 year old daughter? it's obviously none of my business, but i feel that's bit young to make such a major, life-altering decision.

[MsD]

Youngsters aren't half queer

Yes it's young, but she wants to dress like a girl and be regarded as a girl. There's no surgery or hormones involved and as the friends seem cool about it, it would be fine to decide to be a boy again.

Since making the decision she's apparently been happier.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Youngsters aren't half queer

that old dude should hold on to his knickers. ireland voting to allow gay marriage does not herald a fundamental change in the human condition. there'll just be another way of dividing normal from the persecuted not-normal. so maybe those young people no longer have a problem with people being gay. but try being poor or badly educated.

No I really don't think he was making any of those wider points.

[Patrick Thistle]

Youngsters aren't half queer

But realistically, isn't this just the fact we are all on a continuum?

We've all wondered about our sexuality, haven't we? I know I did when I was a teenager. (And very occasionally still do.)

[Lucia Lanigan]

Youngsters aren't half queer

You absolutely would not have got that result from teenagers when I was one, back in the 1990s. Hip hop was all the rage at my school, and you know how the gender roles went there, back then. I wouldn't mind betting my lot were more conservative than kids ten or fifteen years older had been.

It's great that the kids have that attitude, and makes me wonder what goes into it. It must be difficult to maintain bigotry of that kind when you're surrounded by the panoply of opnions and perspectives we have on the Twitters and multichannel stereograms and so on. Also, many of them, straight and gay, must have been wanking themselves dry over footage of other men's ejaculating penii since they first felt a quiver. You couldn't really maintain a hard-on about other people's sexuality after that.

As garcia says, though, the little shits will find something.

[anton pulisov]

Youngsters aren't half queer

Being religious will get you in trouble nowadays. I've seen religious people being laughed at and asked if they also believe in unicorns.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Youngsters aren't half queer

That happened in my day too. Not the "unicorns" part, just the pisstaking. Christians will never be cool.

[Toro Toro]

Youngsters aren't half queer

My Mum says I'm cool.

[laverte]

Youngsters aren't half queer

TonTon wrote: Do we think people get more heterosexual as they get older?

Ha, I have so many thoughts about this. One thing I would stress: sexuality often gets debated using this very static imagery of scales and spectrums, but it's a lot more dynamic than that, informed as it is by imagination as well as practice and identity. It stands to reason that young people might describe their sexuality in terms of its potential, measuring the distance to the boundaries of their desire, while older people assign more value to experience. For myself, I'd say there's a lot more stability (or, perhaps, continuity) in what/whom I find sexually desirable now that I'm middle aged. I suspect that isn't unusual. When I was 18 I also fancied myself to be a writer because I kept a diary, a counsellor because I liked to meddle in other people's problems, and a winger because I couldn't shoot or tackle. Dreams die.

MsD wrote: there's also the factor of young people adopting bisexuality or undefined sexuality as a bit of a cool pose

I often wonder how widespread this is. Or rather, how we can know that it's a pose rather than just "I'm not sure yet". There still isn't much room for uncertainty: you're only 18 or 16 or even 13 but you're already expected to know. I hadn't a clue.

The summary linked in OP doesn't mention gender, but the data are interesting (with caveats for small sample sizes). The cliché that women's sexuality is more 'fluid' than men's is not supported by these figures (nor by Kinsey's). In the categories 1 and 2, where we might expect to find the 'cool pose' people and the 'I kissed a girl and I liked it' girls, there are similar numbers of women and men. Right along the spectrum, women are basically less gay. They are also less likely to be homophobic or to erase bisexuality.

Lucia Lanigan wrote: Hip hop was all the rage at my school

Wait, weren't you at school in Norfolk? How times change! In Swaffham in the late 1980s, even my Wee Papa Girl Rappers cassette was samizdat.

[Eggchaser]

Youngsters aren't half queer

[MsD]

Youngsters aren't half queer

laverte wrote:
The cliché that women's sexuality is more 'fluid' than men's is not supported by these figures (nor by Kinsey's). In the categories 1 and 2, where we might expect to find the 'cool pose' people and the 'I kissed a girl and I liked it' girls, there are similar numbers of women and men. Right along the spectrum, women are basically less gay.

Oh come on, luv, we've all seen the films ;-)

[Borracho]

Youngsters aren't half queer

I left school in the mid-1990s. There was a mixed-race kid in my class, and an Indian one. Neither of them got any hassle. Ten or fifteen years earlier those kids would certainly have been given a hard time.

In the mid-1990s, any openly gay kid in my class would have been destroyed by the numerous bullies who were floating around. There were one or two lads who were a little bit, shall we say, mild-mannered and slightly camp-voiced, and they got pilloried on a regular basis.

If this survey is to be believed, that's now a thing of the past. But I'm willing to bet that your average schoolkid probably doesn't have very enlightened views on, say, Travellers or Roma. And god help any classmate who happens to be a little unsightly, too.

A lot of kids are simply repellent little shits, even if that doesn't necessarily mean they will all stay that way for life. I sometimes wonder if I happened to find myself in a school that had a higher than average proportion of unpleasant cunts, or whether it was the same in every single classroom in the land. Probably the latter.

[Various Artist]

Youngsters aren't half queer

I left school in 1997, and it only strikes me now that I was never aware of a single person I was ever in school with who exhibited signs of anything other than conventional heterosexuality. I mean, not only was there no-one openly gay, bisexual or anything else, I don't recall there being anybody picked upon for even the supposition of it either. And I don't think that was for a lack of unpleasant little shits to do so.
I've long since lost touch with basically everyone I shared any schooltime with, although I have come to know in more recent years that there's at least one or two people I knew then who are gay and it simply never occurred to me to consider it at the time or afterwards. Which is an inevitability given the law of averages. I wonder now though if it was simply that people my age were much less open about it then, or just that as I almost never mixed with my peers socially (I lived several miles away from most of them, and was an overly sheltered child who wasn't encouraged into going out or partaking in any extracurricular activity) and wasn't part of any cliques I was simply outside of the loop and so extra oblivious.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Youngsters aren't half queer

laverte wrote:

Hip hop was all the rage at my school

Wait, weren't you at school in Norfolk? How times change! In Swaffham in the late 1980s, even my Wee Papa Girl Rappers cassette was samizdat.

Yeah, hip hop, acid house and new Jack swing were all doing the rounds at my school at the turn of the 90s. We were in the orbit of the mighty metropolis of Norwich, which had a taste for hip hop I later discovered wasn't universal. For some reason the East Coast seemed to click with it: you'd get Ice T playing two English gigs when he visited, Brixton and Norwich. Odd, really. I think Newcastle were into it too.

We used to take the piss out of Swaaaaarrrrffham by saying it in a funny accent. It was a backwards sort of place, we thought, even though we'd never been there.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Youngsters aren't half queer

I'm sure it wasn't just your school, CV. Teenagers are mad, and when you lock them in a school together for four years they'll pick up on anything they can, whether in a bullying way, a pisstaking way or just a bored way.

Like, there was one guy at my school who died playing chicken on a really dangerous bypass. We asked his best mate, who'd been there at the time, what happened, and his eulogy went something like: “We was just going over the motorway, fucking car come along, fucking splattered the cunt all over the road.” (That sounds much nicer in a Norfolk accent.)

I was just trying to think if there were any openly gay kids at my school, or kids who went on to be. The closest I've got is one guy a year above me who I only suspect to have been (camp delivery, went on to study fashion design, all his friends were female). He took an overdose on a field trip, and when the teacher informed the assembled group he'd taken 50 asprin the guitarist in my band pipes up, “That's one hell of a headache.” He never got bullied, though, perhaps partly cause he was friends with the hardest girl in the school, who was absolutely terrifying.

[Various Artist]

Youngsters aren't half queer

Christ, where did that happen Lucia? The one I'm most familiar with is the Holt bypass but I can't quite picture the Greshams kids playing chicken ('turkey', surely?) with the Escort Ghias, Corollas and Granada estates presumably whizzing along it at the time.

[Diable Rouge]

Youngsters aren't half queer

My own school was more or less roughly between Green Caix and CV's experience - there was no shortage of kids who acted the maggot, but I can't remember any open homophobia, perhaps because it was a mixed secondary, and most of us had come from rural primaries that were co-ed by default due to small communities. There were a few lads who were suspected, and later turned out to be gay, but they generally hung out with the girls by choice, and everyone basically stuck to their own gang of friends.

[treibeis]

Youngsters aren't half queer

I was just trying to think if there were any openly gay kids at my school,

In 1980, one of the sixth-formers at our school admitted to being gay. This caused quite a stir and there were several parents who voiced their disapproval. (They didn't picket the school gates or anything, but there considerably more parents' evenings than there had ever been before).

The sixth-former in question dropped out shortly afterwards. The official reason for his leaving was to "go and work in a bank in London".

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Youngsters aren't half queer

TonTon wrote: 1 in 2 young people say they are not 100% heterosexual

At a bit of an angle - when we get these differences in political views among different age groups, it is said that "people get more right wing as they get older". Do we think people get more heterosexual as they get older?

I would have thought the opposite, certainly with middle aged people who had to suppress their true sexual preference because of the prevailing views on homosexuality at the time. We have a number of friends of both sexes who have either come out, or who have parents now in same-sex relationships, relatively late in life.

I have no figures or research to point to - it's purely an anecdotal statement.