wizzstick: Your sexuality doesn't have a switch you can throw! It's like if God suddenly said that a man should only sleep with a man. What would the heterosexual population do? Could they suddenly create homosexual feelings? No you morons! You can take anger management classes but you can't change your sexual feelings, you can only spend your life trying to ignore them and getting psychologically damaged in the process.
Only partly true, I think!
1. There is a descriptive category called "institutional homosexuality." It describes the situation where large groups of a single sex are located together. Think shipping, particularly in times past. And also prisons. And to a lesser extent single sex boarding schools. For women, think of harems in the past.
Humans are adaptable, and in these situations humans rise or open (grin) to the situation.
2. Culture: The Anglosphere seems more restrictive sexually than say Europe. Back in the day, restricted by my JW acculturation, I had to visit France and Germany for business. So I arrived in Essen, had a brief rest and went out to see what Essen was like. I was shocked to go past two male couples engaged in heavy kissing. A few days later I arrived in Paris, took the Metro to the station close to the hotel I was booked into, and again. at the entrance to the station, there was a male couple engaged in kissing each other in a prolonged and fond farewell.
Since we are all human, I suggest the difference was that they lived in a culture that was less hostile to my own (Aust.) culture.
I am not arguing that there is no internalised preference, such as is posited for male to male sexuality, and in my studies of say Japanese cultures and their gender behaviour, I've noted periods in Japanese history when M2M sex was extremely common. Professor G. Leupp (Tufts University, USA) in his book "Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan," argues that M2M sex was 'normative' at that time. Even if you understood that 'normative' in that era meant that 50% of males could indulge in sex with another male without any qualms, a problem is posed as to why so many of those men could be attracted to another man, as well as to women, and in our contemporary Anglosphere only maybe 7-10% are so attracted.
A famous Japanese author of the era, Ihara Saikaku, does note that there was a core group, that he identifies as, 'women-haters' that refused sex with women, and they possibly correspond to the 'gay' males of today. Even so, because of our (anglosphere) culture many men who are likely in the exclusively gay (M2M) group, get married and function to an extent as heterosexuals, usually with less than satisfied wives.
Another era with a similar acceptance to Tokugawa Japan, was Athenian (and other Greek cities) society, in the fourth/fifth centuries BCE. In Plato's 'Symposium', he uses a meeting of the leading men in the city, at a drinking party, together with their boyfriends, discussing the meaning of love. To understand the full irony, you must know of course, that their wives were all at home looking after their kids.
There are other societies, cultures and time periods when there were similar differences to our own culture.
So maybe, to be "gay" you must have something that does control your sexual attraction, limiting it to the same sex.
But aside from that, perhaps its as I've attempted to describe, the mass of heterosexuals may be able to accept a sexual relationship with someone of the same sex if it is culturally driven, and that's why the subject of the other "gay" thread, at the moment is really wrong in what he says about bisexuality.