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It's not really that I'm deriding them as fakes, just that I'm deriding them as irrelevant.
If Ferrari is the favorite exotic sports car among those with net worth above $1mm, and Lamborghini is the favorite among those with net worth below $20k, Lambo has many more fans but far fewer customers. And they can pump up their fan numbers among poor people all they want, all they'll sell is a $20 poster not a $200k coupe.
I'm significantly less interested in how people identify, than in how much gay sex is actually being had. If 100 years ago 1% of people identified as gay, but 5% of people engaged in same-sex sexual intercourse in the average year; and today 15% of people identified as some form of gay, but only 3% of people engaged in same-sex sexual intercourse in the average year, I'd call that a decline in homosexuality not an increase.
I'd appreciate if you would explain this, the link just seems to take me to the same joke about Arsenic on Twitter.
I guess that's fair, if not what you said before, although in turn I'm not sure it is irrelevant, unless you really only care about the gay sex. You don't stop being bisexual just if you go a week without sucking a variety of genitals, any more than hets stop being het when they're not in the middle of reproducing, and there's a variety of norms that end up different in bisexual (even socially-bi) places.
And that's assuming that things keep the way they are; there's reason to suspect at least some amount of falling-into-het-relationships as downstream of simple selection effects, which could be less prominent if at least some portion of the newly-bi people are more 'haven't' than 'wouldn't' or 'couldn't'. I've written a bit in the past about spaces that turned high-prevalence bisexual and then had a lot of gay sex precipitate out.
There are a lot of people who have different norms of behavior when solely around people who aren't capable of seeing them as sexually attractive, even if there's no actual interest or chance of interest. Worse, they will become retroactively uncomfortable and consider it a betrayal of trust if they are 'tricked' into doing something outside of the bounds of these norms.
The classical variant of this for a lot of gay and bi guys is public- or semi-public showers, such as in gyms or dorm rooms. Where and when I grew up, it was considered immature or gay to be uncomfortable stripping for these environments. But at least some people also considered Incorrect to strip in front of a gay or bi guy.
((The broader LGBT movement calls this generally homophobic, and sometimes it is, but it's often from people who'd have the exact same objections in front of a heterosexual or bisexual woman other than their wives.))
One solution was for those gay or bi guys to be in the closet: keep your eyes up, think cold day thoughts, get in and out, done; what people don't know can't hurt their feelings. Does not always work out in practice. Another option is to disclose, either explicitly or through very well-known signals. People who aren't comfortable with it can change their behaviors (or make clear that you'll wait until they're out to go in); people who don't care don't even have to notice.
Public- and semi-public showers aren't the most common environment, but they're also not the only such example. It's not uncommon for businesses to put two same-sex coworkers into a single hotel room for conventions or travel (and especially older folks have often uncomfortable behaviors when doing that). I've had friends or coworkers invite me to certain types of 'themed restaurant' once and then when the only pleats I was looking at in the Tilted Kilt were on the host rather than the waitresses, and sometimes that doesn't matter to them a ton, and sometimes it does.
((I have strong reasons to believe there are equivalents for lesbian and bisexual women, but I've only heard them second-hand.))
These issues arise even and sometimes especially with people the gay or bisexual guy isn't actually going to be attracted to, just because the theoretical possibility is enough to matter, whether for "Caeser's wife must be above suspicion" reasons or just because they don't believe it. I've had people who I found absolutely repulsive, either on a physical or personality or both level, that insisted on changing room arrangements after I had to disclose for unrelated matters.
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Why are you interested in how much gay sex is actually being had?
I’m interested simply because I think the push-polling nature of these sorts of surveys may well be detrimental to social health. By pushing the idea that a full 25-30% of all Americans are some form of lgbt, it normalizes it, and thus pushes on the idea that we must find these poor souls before their traditionally minded parents cause trauma. We must push even harder to put normalization in the school system, on TV and in movies and music. If these things are actually rare, if very few people are consistently seeking only or mainly same-sex partners, and very few ever feel true discomfort in their natal sex, than we’re creating a health crisis that will hit the West in fifteen or twenty years when it hits us that these kids can never have children, and that it’s much too late to do anything. For people faking being gay, it comes with menopause in which it hits that particular woman that she can’t get pregnant or have a baby or grandchildren. For trans, it probably will hit around middle age — they will want kids, want to be parents, and that option was foreclosed for them long before they were actually able to decide whether it was something they wanted.
Furthermore, even if demography isn’t destiny in economics, it still is socially. And this means that as we sterilize our young, the future will come to belong to those who didn’t choose that path. And most of them don’t have the same values of freedom, high time preference, educational attainment, or democracy, among other things. This is potentially tragic for civilization itself. The values that created the modern world were taught and propagated by the West. And unless those values continue on, the ability to maintain civilization, let alone improve it will decline.
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It's a far more interesting question than "how many people identify as lgbtqwerty?" in terms of societal moral decline. And the question of "Is our society in moral decline?" is certainly an interesting one.
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I assume it's because that's the revealed preference in sexual partner rather than the declared one?
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