So, I am fairly new to the gay community and have been reading alot about what it means to be a panromantic heterosexual, namely whether what I am is considered to be gay. I've read threads on here and various other forums and have found, although 3/4 of people are accepting and understanding that what you are is who you say you are, there have been quite a few that disregard it as a legitimate sexuality and don't regard it as gay. I would've thought I was okay with it, but recently I had a run in with a bisexual male who told me that I'm not gay, with a snidey chuckle after I told him I had feelings for guys sometimes. Similarly, my roommate has disregarded it as simply that I am straight and that you can just, "tell". I wonder what you guys think? I have no idea. Seems there is some schisms in the gay community and it scares me. If you feel hesitant to voice your opinion, please don't be, I'd rather the truth than anything. But what I can say is that what the above people said were pretty hurtful :help:.
Well if you identify as pansexual (meaning attraction to anyone regardless of gender identity) then you're not completely gay or straight.
I have romantic feelings for boys, but I don't feel sexual attraction towards them. I think it's not so much the label that I care about so much, but I find it hurtful to not be accepted by straight people and gay people for who I am :/. I read afew people say they think of panromantic homo/heterosexual people as being high and mighty but I truly feel like I like people for who they are and not what they are. I feel kind of like I'm alone in this, but I don't know, that's why I'm asking
I don't think your problem is people thinking panromantics are "high and mighty" or a "schism" in the community, but more so that you feel your romantic and sexual orientations don't align. That's hard to understand for some people. Other people just don't believe it's possible. Going by the definition that heterosexual = straight, and that gay = homosexual, the people you spoke to were technically correct: you're not gay. And there's nothing wrong with not being gay. Why would you want to be acknowledged as gay when, according to you, you're not? You can absolutely label yourself any way you want to. But your chosen label, by its very nature, is going to confuse people. That's just the way it is.
There are a lot of different shades of gay you can be at any point in your life. Caring for someone at an emotional level, but not feeling comfortable with thinking about having gay sex with them, is a completely reasonable way to feel about people of the same sex. Its sort of like loving an older brother as a person, but understandably not wanting to have a sexual relationship with him. Sometimes we go overboard trying to think up or adopt highly-specific labels to digitize specific combinations of these emotions and then apply those labels to ourselves, expecting other people who are oblivious to these subtleties to understand them. If you say you are "bi", they will immediately focus on the same-sex aspect of that orientation and think of you as "gay", in the sort of "if you screw one sheep, then ..." mentality of "you can't be just a little bit pregnant, it's all or nothing". Of course, we know it doesn't have to be "all or nothing". You can be attracted to only one male in a sexual or non-sexual way, and be otherwise interested in many different females, or vice-versa. It can be a BFF (Best Friends Forever) relationship with one guy, and a sexual and emotional attraction to another. People are mentally complicated that way, and do it all the time. There is also the element of time in this consideration. You can be romantically attracted to someone for a long time, and only later develop a sexual interest in them, whether it is a heterosexual or homosexual situation. Your romantic attractions to men may, over time, turn into a desire to have a sexual relationship with them. At that point you might re-catagorize yourself from "pan-romantic" to "bisexual", if you are still attracted to women also, both romantically as well as sexually. Be yourself, even if other people don't fully understand who you are; not all of them will. The important thing is that you do.
Well, I would have to know more about what you mean. I can't just say "Yeah, that's on the spectrum" without really knowing more of your story. Something that gay people had to learn was that people cannot accept you if they don't really know what they're accepting. If you're Mystery Meat, Lot B, sn #527a, or whatever, no matter how much philosophy and rhetoric you can get people to internalize about LGBT acceptance, it's not the same as really knowing the story. That's why Brokeback Mountain was so useful. It didn't glamorize their relationship or try to defend the characters. Hell, they were cheating on their wives, and they had flawed personalities, you know, flawed like yours and mine. They were "everyman" types of characters. The story leaves little places in it where you ask yourself "What if?" such as "What if that rancher hadn't spied on them, and they'd gotten that second stay, before their lives were too complicated to change the paths they were on? Could it have worked? Could they have been happy?" And that terrible story that one of them told about two guys being murdered, you have to wonder, without stuff like that going on, could their lives have just been simple and happy? They were flawed human beings, but how far did society go in making it hard for them to just live quiet, moral lives? People who don't know you and aren't drunk most likely don't want to hear ideas or theories. You know what they say about opinions; it's a saturated market. However, there are always more people willing to hear a good personal story than there are people who have the gonads to open up and just share their experience, and you'll find that it's hard to do. You write and rewrite an attempt to explain something that happened to you for half a day, get up to four pages, and you end up spending hours fussing over it and taking things out that sound wrong, putting new things in, rewriting this or that to sound "lesss creepy," starting over, trying to type again, and you realize you've wasted half a day, accomplishing seemingly nothing. It's not easy to really talk about yourself effectively. Truth is not an easy thing for most people to discuss. It's not easy for me to discuss. I just know that figuring out how to tell the story behind what you're trying to share with us would make it a lot easier for folks to understand where you're coming from and why they should care.
Okay I see. Let me try, I would still really like to hear you guys perspective, though I realise this topic is more suited to the orientation forum. It kind of started midway through last year, I was going through a lot of things. I had just graduated in a degree I couldn't care less about, four of my relatives passed away and I had lost my job and my girlfriend, all within a few months! I felt super depressed, but wanted to clear my mind, so I left New Zealand to live in Hong Kong for awhile. For sure, the culture was different and people were different and although straight guys talked to one another differently, I could still feel that there was always a lack of an emotional aspect to the relationships. I was working at this little boutique restaurant and came to know a straight boy around my age. I thought there was nothing so different from the relationship from the outside, it still felt the same, he still seemed just like a regular friend, but I kind of felt a pang every time I thought of him and a fuzzy feeling. For some odd reason, I felt like I could be fully myself around him, which was something I only ever felt I could do around females. I wondered what it was like to kiss him and to hug him, and every time I acted like myself around him I felt more for him. He brightened up my day and I felt kind of normal about it, like it's always been in me and I just had to find the right person. I don't think it helped though, growing up in an all boys school and having my father say, "I hope you don't turn out gay". I guess I knew I was hiding something always, but I don't necessarily feel confused about it? Well, I left after a few months to travel in America and am in a great relationship with a girl, but find myself readily attracted to some gay men. Perhaps because I know they wouldn't feel weird about a relationship and that they would like me back? I feel like trust is super important to me, so knowing that the other person could feel that way for me would be really important. Bear in mind, I would never cheat, so I'm kind of stuck in this perpetual wondering, though I wish that I could have dated a boy before her so I know where I stand :/. Every day, though, I feel more comfortable with the sexual side, I realise that if there is love involved, to me, sex is just sex. ---------- Post added 14th Jun 2015 at 11:57 AM ---------- So, I think I'm still coming into terms with my sexuality? I realise that labelling can become restrictive and almost suffocating, I can see that it becomes almost redundant at some point :/. I guess I just wanted to vent about something I don't feel others could understand, because although I talk to people about my sexuality if they ask, the ones I do talk to never seem to be all that understanding. Like, "how could you have a relationship without sex?" and straight up denying the existence of some orientations (e.g. asexuals) . That's why I came here, I'm hoping and am sure you guys would get more where I'm coming from!
It might be that you're heavily demisexual toward guys. It sounds like you relate to men and women in similar but subtly different ways. A person who is "demisexual" is a person who needs a deep, romantic connection to feel...comfortable entertaining sexual thoughts. And it might be that thoughts of mixing sex and a romantic relationship with a guy just brings back memories of your repressed past. I imagine that killing any romantic thoughts or any associated disinhibition pretty quickly. It would for me. I actually knew a man who was outright homosexual, but because he was severely sexually abused as a child, he could just never bring himself to have sex, in person, even with his partner, with whom he had a deep and loving, very supportive relationship. He even called his partner a "saint." But that's just one speculation. It could be there is something in your brain-chemistry that hasn't been discovered yet. We don't know how deeply the distinctions between romantic and sexual orientation really go. There are still too many unanswered questions to say.
Perhaps this is an oversimplification but I wonder if this helps at all? Feedback welcome to add new dynamics, or improve the wording... p.s. I realise now there is a spelling mistake on the third dynamic, Romatic.. Romantic.
Being gay means exclusively sexually attracted to the same sex, and not to the opposite sex. So while I would consider for example a biromantic homosexual to be gay if they so choose, you wouldn't be gay by any definition since neither your romantic or sexual attractions are exclusively directed toward men only. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with being different, why would there be? Now the "gay community" is a different thing and pan and bi people are welcome in our community as well, they just aren't gay by literal definition.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks so much for being so understanding! That is totally true and the last thing I want is to come across like I am asking for acceptance into the LGBTQIAA+ community, but just to come into understanding of who I am and how people will react to it.
