• ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    there’s a lot more to what it means to be perceived as gay in this society than just that person, personally hating gay people.
    i had someone say that to me and i’m just extremely self conscious so i was just trying to figure out why….
    was it my tone of voice? mannerisms?
    all these penises in my mouth?
    Is that why women are seldom romantically interested in me? Do they all think i’m gay? is that the key to my loneliness? (probably just the ugly part).
    if you tell someone, “oh i figured you like country music” and they don’t, they’re going to wonder why.
    and i don’t know if they stopped, but kids used to be pretty mean calling people gay… it can be kind of a “touching on childhood trauma” thing.

    my advice: don’t “trick” people with clever “tests” and try to be genuine with your friends. If you’re gay and you have straight friends, those friends probably aren’t the problem even if they have a problem with being misidentified as gay.

    • glimse@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      my advice: don’t “trick” people with clever “tests” and try to be genuine with your friends.

      That’s was my reaction to reading this, it’s like shittestting in a relationship. YOU are the asshole if you do that. You’re also an asshole if you think your straight friends would react like that. You’re also terrible at picking your friends.

      This post is basically saying “your straight friends aren’t actually your friends, this is how you can prove it”

    • Florn [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      Yeah I once had some guy give me a sly grin and say “I can tell you’re Mormon” and to this day I have no idea what he meant. I am not nor have I ever been Mormon

          • ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            2 days ago

            what if he said it 800 trillion times? like he paused time for 76,052,972,416 years, repeating that he can tell that you’re a mormon….
            then would you slowly lose your mind until you didn’t know anything else other than that you’re a mormon?

    • n0respect@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Agree. Let’s approach this from the rational angle. “If they don’t react how I think they should react, then they must be…” But that’s clearly not a rational process. Its not even a decent heuristic.

    • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      I wonder if this kind of “advice” has always been prevalent, or if it’s an artifact of the Internet that everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone else and feels like coming up with “tests” like this. In a real friendship you’ll have months or years of context on how a person acts that you’ll use to actually have a decent picture of their personality, their strengths and weaknesses, any reactionary tendencies, etc and you won’t need to “test” if they’re a real ally because you’ll have an idea of what’s going on.

    • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      there’s contexts where it could be fine I think, like if you know your friend will take it lightly, and you’re not taking it seriously either. but actually trying to test someone with that is stupid

    • sgtlion [any]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      Well said, there’s a pretty obvious difference between not wanting to be perceived as something and actually hating it.

    • KT-TOT@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 days ago

      I feel the need to emphasize that there is no difference between a straight person and a gay person outside of where they fall on the kinsey scale, just as there’s no difference between a trans person and a cis person, outside of the difference between their physical traits and preferred gender.

      People are made up of tens of billions of neurons firing in a complicated puzzle, every one of us is unique and different. We should use caution and discretion in defining and perceiving the labels we use to categorize people using any trait that is not directly influenced by that trait.

      • ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        i don’t believe in labeling people as such either, but for the sake of being able to communicate i’ve used the vernacular terms aforementioned, here within.
        Also the kinsey scale is yet another human attempt to collapse the broad, multidimensional aspects of sexuality into a one dimensional “scale”. Like the “political spectrum” plane, it’s overly reductive and attempts to understand and explain the elephant by feeling its tail.

        • n0respect@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          That simple spectrum is how we get paradoxes like “there will always be yin in yang” and “horseshoe theory”. One dimension is not enough to describe the complex universe.

    • KT-TOT@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 days ago

      I think that’s more of a tell on your own insecurities if the notion makes you uncomfortable. You can’t tell if someone is gay, even if there are some trends/social queues.