Religion and LGBT people

[Esquilax]

Throughout adolescence and early adulthood. Studies show that 1% of adolescents identify as gay, and that grows to 2.5% in adults. So, 60% of gay adults didn't identify as gay when they were adolescents.
http://www.sf-hrc.org/modules/showdocume...mentid=989
Read further for evidence that many Bs self-identify as either gay or straight because they're discriminated against if they don't, thus falsely reinforcing the born gay or straight paradigm.

So? I didn't identify as bi in my adolescence, and being that I'm not ignoring my lived experience as a teenager, I'm not surprised that so many adolescents don't. There's this thing that sort of rules the roost as a kid, called peer pressure; like it or not, casual bigotry is a huge thing among younger people. Not so much now, granted, but certainly in the past; even now, the word gay is used as a slur, or in a negative context.

Are you honestly surprised that gay teens would opt to identify as straight, to follow the crowd, to be what they believe society requires of them, until they leave the echo chamber of high school? That doesn't mean the decision was made in that age range, just that they didn't identify with their sexuality until later on; you're misrepresenting the data, I hope not deliberately.

And in reference to bi folk like myself... yeah, they self identify as one or the other for a while; I did. And you mentioned the reason why too; discrimination. Why are you willing to accept that as the answer for bi folk, but not for gay folk? It's the same answer for both, because we live in a society that still prizes heterosexuality over any non-normative orientation.

Now, I could go further and bitch about the raw deal bi folk get and extrapolate from there for gay folks too, but the link you provided does that pretty well. I love that you'd pervert the intention of that study to prove an inherently bigoted point that goes against the spirit of that study, though. Something startlingly classy about that.