Gay marriage has been legal in parts of America for 13 years. But as the battles for more states to approve the law are still to be fought, it continues to be on the national agenda. So how do Americans feel about same-sex marriage? Well, according to he Public Religion Research Institute’s study into attitudes towards homosexuality, which has just been released, 70 per cent of millenials are in support of gay marriage.
This is great news - of course it is. The report credits popular youth culture for helping homosexuality to be accepted as normal – we’re guessing this means everything from Glee to the #ItGetsBetterProject to Frank Ocean coming out with a story of same-sex attraction. All these cultural and social changes are having a real impact - 65 per cent of of the Americans surveyed said that a family member or a close friend is gay, up from 22 per cent in 2003. We doubt there’s been a successful gay recruitment drive - it’s perhaps more to do with people feeling comfortable enough to be honest about themselves to more people.
These stats demonstrate that, where policy is put in place, public acceptance follows - and bodes well for how gay marriage will lead to acceptance of gay people when it comes into effect later on in the UK this month. However, ‘acceptance’ is a tricky term here, because in the same survey, 44 per cent of the respondents said that gay sex is ‘morally wrong’.
This comes as no surprise. Because although the report credits positive representations of gay people in the mass media with helping to change social attitudes, the representations we see in the media tend to be of wholesome, sexless couples. You’ve got Ellen and Portia, who may kiss each other on the cheek in public - at most, or the gay couple on Modern Family, who despite their popularity, exist to play out gay stereotypes by being limp-wristed, camp and slapstick. The list goes on, but essentially, gay people are never depicted in the media having actual desire for one another. Even the lesbian fauxmance played in Shakira and Rihanna's video for Can't Remember To Forget You only exists for men to slobber over - it's certainly not a depiction of genuine female-female desire.
While we get Justin Bieber’s desire for Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift’s desire for Harry Styles, or whatever, played out daily for huge audiences to see, we don’t see gay desire played out, especially among young people. That’s why Tom Daley’s coming out was so much less important to us than Ellen Page’s. Not because it’s harder to relate to a gay man. But because Tom’s coming out was a lot more ‘you can’t help who you love’ than ‘this is who I am’. By taking ownership of her own identity, saying, outright ‘I’m gay’, without mentioning the intervention of anyone else in the formation of that identity, Ellen was hugely brave, throwing out the implication that she might not actually be in love - she might just want to sleep with other women. There are plenty of gay people out there who aren't in love, they just really really fancy people of the same sex. And their sexuality isn't any less valid because of that.
To throw the question back to you – when did you first realise you fancied the opposite sex? Was it before or after you got a boyfriend?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.