That Gay Thread

[no one]

The stupid is strong with this one:

[Paraselene]

I like peeking at the telly every so often while the constant stream of HGTV is airing to check out the couple looking for a new house or apartment. The number of times I have superficially judged them by appearance alone, thinking to myself He's gay and he'll leave her and the kids in his forties when he finally comes to full acceptance of his sexuality is mind staggering.

Why do there have to be so many gorgeous straight guys in this world lying to themselves about their sexuality? It's frustrating.

[no one]

Are they really "straight", if they're dishonest to themselves about it?


Could it be wishful thinking on the part of the otter?

[HappySkeptic]

I like peeking at the telly every so often while the constant stream of HGTV is airing to check out the couple looking for a new house or apartment. The number of times I have superficially judged them by appearance alone, thinking to myself He's gay and he'll leave her and the kids in his forties when he finally comes to full acceptance of his sexuality is mind staggering.

Why do there have to be so many gorgeous straight guys in this world lying to themselves about their sexuality? It's frustrating.

I'm pretty sure that being attractive to another gay guy doesn't make one gay.

Of course, sexuality is spectrum, and large minority of men are not 100% straight.  They may stay married and monogamous, or they may try out same-sex affairs.

[no one]

[Paraselene]

Does the label straight worsen perceptions of gay people?

BigThink.com

It's no surprise that using negative language to refer to a minority group can produce negative effects among those being targeted. But what about using positive language to refer to a majority group? Could doing so suggest negative ideas about the minority group?

Noting a "surprising" lack of research on this question, a new study titled "If I Am Straight You Are Askew": Labelling Heterosexuals as Straight Worsen Gay Men's Perception" (published in The Journal of Sex Research) aimed to fill the gap by exploring whether referring to heterosexual people as "straight" produces negative perceptions of gay men.

Read further:

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Previous research suggests people associate moral perceptions with certain spatial concepts. For example, one study found that people are more likely to prefer straight figures after recalling moral deeds.

The researchers behind the recent study noted that these findings proved "true not only in the European language but also in Chinese, Arabic, and Russian, thus suggesting this relation to be spread in different cultural contexts."

"Giving a look at the dictionary, straight is defined as continuing in one direction without curving (adv.), being without bend (adj.), being honest and respectable (adj.) and being heterosexual (adj.)," study author Simona Sacchi , a professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, told PsyPost.

"For this reason we decided to investigate the possible impact of this association between straightness (related to morality) and heterosexuality on social perception and prejudice towards sexual minorities."

To examine how the word "straight" might affect heterosexual participants' perceptions of gay men, Sacchi and her colleagues conducted three studies involving 275 English-speaking and 131 Italian-speaking participants. The researchers collected data on participants' levels of religiosity and prejudice against gay men, as measured by the Modern Homonegativty Scale.

In the first study, participants were shown a fictitious Facebook profile belonging to a man named James. All participants read the same profile describing James, except for one difference: Half of the participants read that he was "heterosexual," while the other half read that he was "straight."

Then, both groups were shown a fictitious Facebook profile of a man named Chris, who was described as gay. The researchers asked participants to rate their impressions of Chris. The results showed that participants who had been recently exposed to the word "straight" tended to report worse perceptions of Chris, however this was true only among participants with higher levels of religiosity and prejudice.

The researchers conducted the same study again, but this time they included a third group of participants who read a profile of James that didn't describe him as "straight" or "heterosexual."

The second study produced similar results: Highly religious participants reported worse impressions of Chris after being exposed to the label "straight," although in general there wasn't a significant difference between the three groups ("heterosexual," "straight" and control).

The first two studies involved participants who commonly used the word "straight" to refer to heterosexual people. But what about cultures that don't use such language?

The researchers decided to conduct a third study in Italy, where people don't use the word "straight" to refer to heterosexual people. In the study, all participants were asked to classify 20 pictures. Ten pictures showed heterosexual couples, while the other ten showed non-romantic partners, such as a pair of police officers.

The first group of participants was asked to apply the Italian word for "straight" ("retti") to pictures of people in romantic relationships, and to label those who weren't as "other" ("altro"). Meanwhile, the second group was asked to perform the same task, but to label the romantic couples with the Italian word for yellow ("gialli").

"The word "gialli" was selected because this is a common, neutral adjective, related to a visual feature (in this case, color instead of shape) and unrelated to sexual orientation," the researchers wrote.

Again, the results showed that being exposed to the word "straight" tended to worsen participants' perceptions of gay men — but only for highly religious participants. Interestingly, all three studies showed that participants low in religiosity actually reported better impressions of gay men after reading the word "straight."

The researchers said their study is the first to examine the consequences of using positive language to describe majority groups, and that they hope the results will lead to "fruitful" future research to better understand the effects of positive labeling.

"We should remember that modern prejudice is often subtle, indirect, invisible to the perpetrator, and revealed more by ingroup favoritism than explicit outgroup derogation," Sacchi told PsyPost. "In contemporary society, ingroup-directed favoritism and accentuated positive feelings, as sympathy and admiration, toward ingroup members could be the 'modern' basis for discrimination."

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[brewer]

And now, a treat.

[Paraselene]

And now, a treat.

Was the woman of the house wondering why you were looking up such tasty treats?

[brewer]

Was the woman of the house wondering why you were looking up such tasty treats?

Nope, just wanted to change things up.

Be glad I didn't post a Vorlon treat.

[Paraselene]

Why can't we accept that Da Vinci was gay?

TheGuardian.com

A new series focusing on the great artist’s relationship with muse and supposed lover Caterina da Cremona rests on virtually no historical evidence

The woman in Leonardo da Vinci’s life is finally getting her due. The new drama Leonardo, due to start on Amazon Prime on 16 April, drags Caterina da Cremona out of the shadows. Billed as his “muse” and played by Matilda de Angelis from The Undoing, this forgotten woman of the Renaissance appears in publicity images deep in intimate dialogue with Aidan Turner as Leonardo. It looks as if they’re about to go full Poldark.

You may have heard rumours the great Renaissance man was gay. That’s not the full story, says the show’s writer Steve Thompson. “Some of his relationships were with men; those were significant relationships,” he told Variety. “But perhaps the most significant relationship in his life was with a friend who was a woman, with whom he was very close, and we unpack that.” Note he’s claiming a historical basis for the show’s breathy encounters between De Angelis and Turner. Even though Leonardo is framed as a murder mystery, it claims to use this device to get at the reality of who Leonardo was.

But Caterina is a figment, a fantasy, a complete piece of tosh, invented by a 19th-century Romantic and for some reason given highly unconvincing credence by one modern biographer, Charles Nicholl.

Read more:

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If the makers of Leonardo wanted a strong woman character, they had plenty of historical options. He clearly got on well with Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of the ruler of Milan, whom he portrayed holding a very phallic pet mink, perhaps to symbolise her power over men. He was also friends with Isabella d’Este, ruler of Mantua and art connoisseur. Most fascinatingly, there was his encounter with one Lisa, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. It’s said he got musicians to play and entertained her with jokes when she posed for the painting we know as the Mona Lisa. What was it he found so mysterious about her? But no solid evidence exists that he ever had a romantic relationship with a woman – either sexual or platonic.

His reputation for loving men has never been hidden. Giorgio Vasari’s book The Lives of the Artists, first published in 1550, suggests he was besotted with his male assistant Salaì, “who was most comely in grace and beauty, having fine locks, curling in ringlets, in which Leonardo delighted”. Gossip solidified into social history when documents were found at the start of the 1900s that show Leonardo was accused of “sodomy” before Florentine magistrates in 1476.

All the evidence is that men having sex was common in the art workshops of Renaissance Florence. The sodomy accusation against Leonardo was made to the fantastically named Office of the Night, a unique sex crime agency set up in 1432 to counter what was seen as a specifically Florentine vice. The records of the Office of the Night, brilliantly analysed by historian Michael Rocke, reveal that in Leonardo’s day “the majority of local males at least once in their lifetimes were officially incriminated for engaging in homosexual relations”.

As for Leonardo, he lived with his entourage of good-looking assistants and pupils, dressed them and himself in luxurious clothes including pink and purple tights, and drew stupendously sensual male nudes.

But for some people that leaves something missing from his life. So his affair with a woman from Cremona was invented in the Romantic age. An Italian writer claimed to have seen a mention in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks of his female lover called “La Cremona”. The passage is not in any of Leonardo’s surviving notebooks. And even in the Romantic age, it didn’t catch on.

I am trying to understand why anyone would be desperate to dig up this slender story. Yet one of Leonardo’s modern biographers, Charles Nicholl, tried to resuscitate it. Nicholl noticed a single word, “Cremonese”, in a list of names in Leonardo’s papers in the Royal Collection and claimed it might mean La Cremona. Nicholl then speculates that Leonardo, who would have been 57 at the time, slept with this north Italian sex worker. He can’t have painted female nudes without experiencing heterosexual love, he claims. It’s as if Leonardo’s homosexuality is incompatible with the universality of his art. Now that will be hammered by streamed television into popular culture.

Instead of being bedazzled by Turner and De Angelis, why not go to the National Gallery when it reopens and look at Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. The most hypnotic figure in it is an angel whose long curly hair matches Vasari’s description of Salaì and whose tender pale face is magically androgynous. This angel is the most beautiful and most queer bit of painting in Britain. The Leonardo I want to see on screen is the man who painted this.

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