The LGBT IBers Hub

[ShineeLikeMe]

Daedalus theres the obvious such as gay lesbian and straight and even bi/asexual is well known.

some of the less known ones are:

Pansexual: where you like someone based on their personality alone. Gender doesn't come into play here.

Transgender is in the mind its not physical.

Transexual is physical

[Patel108]

Sort of random, but in IB English HL Year 1, we have to read a book called Critical Theory, and it has various stuff like psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, etc. Anyway, the next chapter we have to read is gay, lesbian, and queer criticism. Just thought I'd let you guys know. Anyway, this is going to be a very......interesting discussion next week.

[ShineeLikeMe]

Bring it on!

I'm actually quite interested about this topic. I've never had it discussed before.

[Patel108]

Lol I've never discussed it either. And even though a lot of the IB teachers are pretty liberal, the school is still pretty conservative, so I wasn't expecting reading something like this in class haha.

[ShineeLikeMe]

Ohhhh it's about to get heated up in her.

[Patel108]

Okay so our class had the discussion today! I'll try to put everything I can remember.

We started the discussion about drag and camp (I believe). We said that drag is when gay men dress femininely as an expression of their sexuality, while camp is men dressing femininely but the man are not necessarily gay. I did not pay attention to this part a lot.

We also talked about the book saying that the gay population is about 10% of the US. One girl said that the 10% figure seems a little exaggerated because it is not as if there was a formal survey of each person's sexual preference. She also said that it is possible that some people who actually are not gay might identify as gay (mainly in metropolitan areas) because gay people are considered to be unique and different, and being unique and different is considered cool. Next thing I remember is talking about the Kinsey scale of sexuality, which is 0 is exclusively heterosexual, 6 is exclusively homosexual, 3 is bisexual, etc. Then someone else brought up something about how sexuality is genetic and the guy asked does that mean a parent has to be gay or there has to be a recessive gene for homosexuality or something. Then other people compared being gay or straight as being happy, sad, angry, etc. For example, most people do not believe that having a typically happy or angry nature is do to genetics, but it has to be from how people are brought up, although people have the genetic tendency for that. So a lot of people thought that gay people genetically have homosexual tendencies, but what the person chooses to do makes the difference.

Then another girl asked how can a person be exclusively homosexual. This is because society sees heterosexuality as the norm, and children are naturally exposed to this unconsciously, such as having a mother and a father, playing with Barbie and Ken, little girls planning their wedding to a nice boy, etc. So she asked how could someone be exclusively homosexual being in such a society like this? I don't remember anything after this.

Then we talked about whether homosexuality is genetic or a lifestyle choice. Many people believed it was a lifestyle choice while others thought it was mixed. They thought that acting out the homosexual tendencies would mean that the person was gay because they never would have been gay without experimenting. Another thing someone said is that there are cases of identical twins where one is gay and one is straight. Others disagreed because society views homosexuality as taboo and with disdain and there would be no beneficial reason for someone to become gay if society disapproved of it.

Then we actually did gay/queer criticism of literature. In "The Great Gatsby", Nick is shown as being clingy to Gatsby and always wanting to know all about Gatsby and he sometimes randomly talks about some of his dates with women. It also says that Nick does not have very deep relationships with women. It pretty much concluded that Nick was actually gay. And there were surprisingly a lot of gay undertones in that part (especially the part about him having his pants fall down).

Oh wow this was a long post. And there was probably other stuff, but I can't remember them right now.

[ShineeLikeMe]

Whoaaa!!! That just brought up all the concepts I always want to talk about but never can because we don't focus on societal issues, we focus on philosophy. Ughh. It seems that your class focused on Nature vs Nurture. I'm one of those that think its a mix of both.

Has anyone ever seen that clip that explained the hormonal imbalances within a woman during pregnancy? It's quite interesting.

Anywho I think it's like intelligence. A person's genes determine whether they're their "gay potential" as it were and then their experiences are what determine how gay they actually are.

Speaking of gay literature. Dom Casmurro and Chronicle of a Death Foretold anyone? I wrote my WL1 on how Dom Casmurro and Bayardo san Roman were both latent homosexuals . It was the best literary analysis I wrote junior year.