So much for believing you were straight.
According to HuffPost Live host Josh Zepps, “almost everyone” has the capacity to be attracted to the same sex at some point in life.
In a segment entitled “QueerView: Year in Review,” Zepps interviewed a lesbian woman, a gay man, HuffPost Live’s bisexual host Alex Berg and a man who is now living as a woman to hear their take on the milestones and issues defining the LGBT rights movement in 2015.
In her conversation with Zepps, Berg brought up a YouGov survey that polled 1,600 18-24 year olds in the UK about the Kinsey scale, a continuum of homosexual to heterosexual orientation. According to Berg, the study claimed that one out of every two of the young adults polled did not identify as fully heterosexual.
Reflecting on the study’s results, Berg stated, “I just think that it’s important because it just puts more sexual fluidity and bisexuality, sort of out there in the public space.”
Zepps responded, “Well also, there’s so much misunderstanding still, or confusion about what bisexual means, right? I think if you think that bisexual means that you are perfectly equally capable of sustaining romantic, loving, sexual relationships with people of either sex, than that’s obviously a much narrower cohort of the population than if you think it simply means that you have the capacity to be physiologically attracted to someone of the same sex at some point in time, depending on who they are, right? That’s got to be almost everyone.”
Did he really say what you thought he said? Of course, it’s not a new tactic. Through inclusion of LGBT characters and content, the media routinely attempt to amplify people's perceptions regarding the number of LGBT people in our country. As a result, most Americans believe the percentage to be thirteen times higher than it actually is. But Zepps’ unfounded assertion goes to new heights.
Yet, Berg went right along with it. “Yeah. Yeah, so that’s actually another interesting thing about this particular study. It wasn’t asking people if they’ve had bisexual relationships with people or if they’ve had some kind of sexual interaction. To just ask about how they internally feel, I guess, in terms of expressing their sexual orientation. So, on the one hand, the study doesn’t explicitly say bisexual, but I also think that the bisexual community is evolving. And I think a lot of people use the word now, bisexual, to denote that they are attracted to people all across the sex and gender spectrum.”
The pair then proceeded to discuss how the young age of the study participants might have affected the data. “There are so many different explanations for why they respond differently to people who are, say, over the age of 65. I mean, it could be that they are actually more in touch with their inner queer person,” Zepps said. … It could be that older people are just lying because they think that there’s a stigma, and it could also be that young people are just trying to seem cool, hip, and like, fluid, and like ‘I’m down’ and non-homophobic and feel like they’d sort of be embodying some kind of persona of the jock if they were like ‘I’m 100 percent straight!’”
To this Berg responded that the study broke down the adults by age, and as the groups became younger, the percentage of those identifying as 100 percent heterosexual also went down. She conceded that the results might be a reflection of cultural trends. “I think I would love to see more research actually that was a little bit more targeted about exactly how people are expressing their non-heterosexuality, so to speak, just because you know, it totally could just be a cultural thing, like, it’s cool now to not be, you know, 100 percent straight.”
Zepps interjected, “Yeah, and I don’t want to associate myself with, like, homophobic jocks, right? Yeah, that’s possible.”
Hopefully after that enlightening interview, you’re more in touch with your “inner queer person.” Otherwise, if you persist in being “100 percent straight,” you might just be branded a homophobe.
