Identify yourself before someone else does. Kennedy self-identified with the wish that young people will not be made to feel ashamed of being who they are in the event of Rondofication. But Kennedy is His message would seem to apply to anybody currently playing anything and to anyone facilitating that playing, be it from a front office or in the bowels of an arena. Athletes have come out, but only a fraction of those currently playing a professional sport are openly gay.

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The stigmas are different for gay male athletes, in part because men have made intolerance and slurs a lasting feature of sports culture. Such declarations are anticipated as seismic events, anyway. News of Collins and Sam was important. But you still sense that people are looking for the Big One, for the comingest of outs.

The pressure and scrutiny for that person would probably be unbearable. Lots of athletes have a God complex, but who wants to be the messiah? But it was also something more complex. Not only does it imply ownership of the identity. It also implies that the person coming out was, under the circumstances, not actually in.

Your sexual orientation can be an open secret or a plain old secret. Professional sports offer a big tent. It has room for racists, homophobes and misogynists as well as the people they hate. In the case of, say, a job application or a census report, reluctance can become principled refusal: He also knows that he works in an industry in which not all of his co-workers necessarily identify with his self.

So he has evidently self-identified with care. A lot of us do. It takes about half an hour, which is enough time to overhear and participate in conversations about everything from sexy women, financial solvency and the American presidency to why the dust at the bottom of a bag of Doritos is so good. Some of those conversations veer into comically incorrect presumptions about gay life. He traded a useful job protection to advocate for other gay people in sports to feel safer while doing their job.

Nor have I seen any other man do the same. We should. Wesley Morris is the critic at large for The New York Times and a contributing writer for the magazine. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.

Transgender sexuality - Wikipedia

Mean scores were 2. When the parallel questions about activism that was unrelated to sexual-minority issues were combined to create a summary score, a similar pattern emerged. However, slightly more than one respondent in six reported being born again. Nearly one respondent in four was an atheist or agnostic or reported having no religion. However, with age, education, and race statistically controlled, lesbians and bisexual men reported receiving significantly more daily guidance from their religion, compared with gay men and bisexual women.

Examination of the frequencies within each response category suggests that lesbians and bisexual men were somewhat more likely to report that religion offers them a great deal of guidance, whereas gay men and bisexual women were more likely to report receiving no guidance from religion. When these responses were combined with ratings of the importance of religion, the aforementioned group differences were eliminated. Only A majority These patterns are consistent with findings from previous studies that gay, lesbian, and bisexual voters are less conservative than the general voting public e.

Except for the fact that no lesbians reported having voted for Ralph Nader, the subgroups did not differ significantly on these variables. Women were significantly more likely than men to report they were currently in a committed relationship, either heterosexual or homosexual. Another notable difference was observed between homosexual and bisexual respondents: Because so few bisexuals were in a same-sex relationship, their responses to this question are not reported. Overall, approximately one third of respondents reported having one or more children, including adopted and stepchildren.

About one third of lesbians and bisexual men reported having children. Respondents overwhelmingly supported legal recognition for same-sex couples. Although bisexual males were somewhat less supportive than others, the overlapping confidence intervals across groups indicate that these differences were not reliable.

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Overall, The data presented here offer a wealth of information about the general characteristics of self-identified gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults in the USA while highlighting important commonalities and differences among sexual orientation subgroups. Without recapitulating all of the results, we comment here on some key findings. To begin, the composition of the sample is noteworthy. In addition, gay men outnumbered lesbians at a ratio of approximately 2.

This finding is consistent with data from other national probability samples Black et al. Among self-identified bisexuals, by contrast, the weighted proportions of women and men did not differ significantly. Within genders, the weighted sample included more gay than bisexual men and more bisexual women than lesbians, but the difference was reliable only among the women respondents.

Of course, any inferences from these patterns about the composition of the sexual-minority population must be considered tentative until more data are obtained from other probability samples. Sexual orientation and gender subgroups within the sample differed on key demographic variables, with bisexuals tending to be younger than homosexuals, and bisexual men the least likely to be non-Hispanic White or to have a college degree. Comparisons to the US adult population using contemporaneous Census data suggest that lesbians and bisexuals but not gay men may be younger, on average, than the US adult population; that bisexual men but not lesbians, gay men, or bisexual women may be less likely to be non-Hispanic White; and that lesbians and gay men but not bisexuals may be more highly educated.

These patterns are consistent with previous findings from nonprobability samples indicating that lesbians and gay men tend to be highly educated e. They are also consistent with past observations that bisexual behavior is more common among African American and Latino men than among non-Hispanic White males e. Bisexual men and women were not only younger than the US adult population, they were also significantly younger than lesbians and gay men.

Transgender sexuality

This age difference might reflect generational differences in patterns of identity labeling: Perhaps younger people are more likely than their older counterparts to view their own sexuality in fluid terms and thus to identify as bisexual rather than exclusively homosexual or heterosexual. Alternatively, it could reflect developmental differences insofar as some younger respondents who currently self-identify as bisexual might later identify as gay or heterosexual indeed, roughly one fifth of bisexual men and one tenth of bisexual women said they label themselves Gay or Lesbian at least some of the time.

These accounts are not mutually exclusive. Younger adults may be more open to a bisexual identity today than was the case a generation ago, and bisexuality may constitute a transitional identity for some individuals who will ultimately define their sexuality in terms of exclusive attraction to men or women.

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Indeed, the findings of the present study suggest that bisexuals may constitute a more heterogeneous population than gay men and lesbians, one that includes not only individuals who publicly identify as bisexual but also those who privately acknowledge same-sex attractions while currently maintaining a heterosexual relationship, and still others who are in the process of defining their sexuality. It is possible that comparisons of self-identified bisexual men and women according to their self-reported attraction patterns i.

However, the present sample was not large enough to permit such analyses. Compared with bisexual men and women, gay men and lesbians were more strongly committed to a minority sexual identity, identified more strongly with a sexual-minority community, were more likely to consider their community membership to be a reflection of themselves, and were generally more open about their sexual orientation. Overall, gay men and lesbians tended to attach greater importance than bisexuals to community involvement and were more likely to engage in such behaviors as attending rallies and demonstrations or donating money to community organizations.

Here again, the present data suggest that the population of individuals who label themselves bisexual may be a more diverse group than those who self-identify as lesbian or gay and may include many women and men for whom being bisexual is not a primary basis for a personal identity or community involvement. Related to this point, substantial minorities of the bisexual respondents said they never 4.

By contrast, men who indicated they were homosexual overwhelmingly reported using the term Gay to describe themselves at least some of the time. Similarly, about three fourths of homosexual women used Lesbian as a self-label, and roughly the same proportion employed Gay as a self-descriptor. The latter finding is somewhat surprising because Gay has often been assumed to be primarily a male-oriented identity label e. Other patterns of self-labeling also warrant comment. The term Queer was used by only a small minority of respondents, as was the case for Dyke among female respondents.

Considerably more respondents more than one third of gay men and lesbians used Homosexual as a self-descriptor at least some of the time.

Notably, gay male and lesbian respondents were much more likely to say they never used Queer as a self-descriptor Bisexuals, by contrast, were about equally likely to say they never used either term. Among bisexual men, Thus, although Queer has sometimes been suggested as an inclusive label for sexual minorities e. Some recent court cases addressing rights for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people have considered questions related to the origins of sexual orientation and its mutability e.

Brien Moreover, some opponents of equal rights for sexual minorities have asserted that homosexuality represents a willful choice of a sinful way of life Herman If, as the present data indicate, gay, lesbian, and bisexual people experience little or no choice about their sexual orientation, they probably communicate this fact to their heterosexual friends and relatives.

Related to this point, the data reveal notable differences in disclosure and outness between gay men and lesbians, on the one hand, and bisexuals, on the other. A similar pattern was also observed in most categories of friends, other family, and coworkers: Compared with lesbians and gay men, significantly fewer bisexuals—especially men—reported they were out of the closet to even one member of these groups. Coming out as bisexual may differ in important respects from coming out as a gay or lesbian person McLean The data indicate that self-identified gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults tend to be less religious and more politically liberal than the US population.

Although most respondents reported that religion or spirituality provides some guidance in their daily lives, the sample overall reported a fairly low level of religious commitment. The data corroborate previous findings that sexual minorities constitute a politically progressive constituency e. A majority of respondents described themselves as liberal, and the sample was overwhelmingly Democratic in party affiliation and voting patterns.

Consistent with findings from previous research with convenience samples Peplau and Fingerhut , sexual-minority women were substantially more likely than sexual-minority men to report that they were currently in a committed relationship. Whereas virtually all coupled gay men and lesbians had a same-sex partner, the vast majority of coupled bisexuals were in a heterosexual relationship. This disproportionate number of different-sex couples among bisexual adults probably has multiple explanations.