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Notes -
I’d imagine Tinky Winky was balanced out by Budweiser ads.
If I had to guess the boys who grew up gay did it because they were sexually attracted to men. Representation in media may make them more comfortable to “come out” and live as openly gay, but personally doubt it impacts their sexual preference.
We do not know why people are gay. In the past there was a strong push for saying that being gay is immutable genetic characteristic, I think this was a soldier argument against the old practice of conversion therapy. Of course there is a lot of nuance here, there is research such as that by infamous Alfred Kinsey who sees homosexuality as a scale, nevertheless there was research like this one on 61 pairs of identical twins and they found concordance of homosexuality of 65%. Which may suggest that there is some role to be played by the environment when it comes to this.
I am fairly certain that the culture has significant impact on rate of homosexuality, possibly increasing the numbers by tens of percentage points even when it comes to genuine identification as gay/lesbian based on sexual attraction and possibly more when it comes to superficial identification of just being cool etc.
Yeah. Reminds me of a friend I'll call Ninetyone. She was born in 1991 in a purple area in the Northeast. Was always into both men and women, but never acted on her attraction to women because she feared societal pressure. Her sister, seven years younger, is openly bi and has been with both men and women...what would have happened had Ninetyone and her sister been fraternal twins?
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