I remember as a kid my grandmother complaining (this was many years ago) about how black people were showing up on TV commercials. That apparently made her feel uncomfortable. Or you could say she didn’t agree with the notion of black people existing on TV.

THOSE TV COMMERCIALS BULLIED MY GRANDMA!!!!

How dare (Coke, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Nabisco or whatever it was) bully her!!!!

Very true. And good conversation.

“I went into a Border’s 10 years ago and there was a sign FORCING gay pride down my throat and I never went back!!!!”

OK.

Neato – he never went back. That person can claim personal responsibility for the fact that they went out of business. I guess.

Conservatives are a funny bunch. They’re all about personal choice (corporations are people, remember) over collective responsibility (aside from the responsibility from keeping faggots and dykes from being in fulfilled marriages).

Hmm, I guess the site ate my earlier post. I think I’m in agreement with you and if my initial post suggested otherwise that’s my own lack of clarity. The example of US culture vs other cultures was just meant to illustrate how our own culture tends to color our views.

Would it be too obvious to point out that Ms. Sorock fails to support her accusations of bullying with any evidence? Were threatening letters sent to Kraft? Were protests staged at Kraft facilities?

She works in the field of market research, but apparently hasn’t encountered any companies that actually, you know, willingly reach out the LGBT community? Only if they’re bullied? Because in the course of her work in market research she’s never encountered marketers, brand managers etc. who were themselves gay?

Seems like a researcher who starts with her conclusions and then works backwards from there.

Yes and no. While it is true that we cannot view affection as evidence of attraction in a society as a whole, when it is presented in contrast then the presumption should at least be considered and not be held to some impossible standard of documented intercourse.

If, in the case of a historical figure the affection and its display are so prominent as to stand apart from the social conventions of their peers, then I believe that it is deceptive and dishonest to insist that we ignore it based on a comparison to our culture.

For example, the Lincoln deniers insist that it was not uncommon for men to share a bed – thus establishing a then v. now comparison. To which the response is “true but it was uncommon for men in the White House to share a bed” thus placing the comparison back into cultural context. (I’m not arguing Lincoln was gay – just that some deniers utilize a false comparison).

The question is not whether Marie Antoinette had a more affectionate friendship than might be common now but rather whether it was uncommonly close within the context of her culture and social class.

They cannot allow the “sinner” to continue because it is a temptation to others so we are a threat just for moving in down the street or having a job. The must do battle with any deviation from the prescribed behavior. There is no tolerance.

To NOM’s audience, it does. It sounds like it’s been thought out, so they’ll take it on faith, even though to anyone who actually looks at it, it’s close to word salad. And to anyone who actually thinks about the scenario she paints, it’s laughable.

Well, yes and no. I think the point the director was clumsily trying to make is that norms of friendship and perhaps even the structure of sexuality itself can’t be assumed as universals. Therefore, in cultures where passionate friendships were/are the norm, drawing the conclusion that a passionate friendship was “really” just some kind of sexual relationship or indicative of some underlying attraction to the same sex is just that – a drawn conclusion. The issues are similar to those in this example: in the US if we see two men kissing (even as a casual greeting), or if we see two men holding hands in public, in most contexts we can assume those two men are gay or bisexual. However, in other cultures (and in some American subcultures, for that matter), that would generally be an incorrect assumption.

However, I think you rightly object to the specific wording that we “could not call them homosexual” because that is reducing same-sex sexuality to behavior. In most cases it is certainly no less accurate to call them homosexual than to assume they were heterosexual and/or that the relationship was non-sexual. If we don’t have data then we simply don’t have data, which means different people may come to different educated conclusions about the nature of the relationship and/or the people in it, not that we have to assume that they weren’t gay (or that they were). I actually wrote my senior thesis on just this issue – the conceptual gap between homosexuality and homosociality created by a cultural focus on monitoring/ regulating/ otherwise obsessing about (an assumed dichotomous) sexuality, defining homosexuality by behavior, and the related destruction of affectionate behavior between friends (especially male friends). Our culture just doesn’t grok relationships it can’t neatly place into one preconstructed box or the other. No doubt this is also all interconnected with bisexual invisibility/biphobia as well.