I'd gotten into a breif conversation with my best friend about our other friend who has mentioned about very briefly liking another girl in a romantic sense. Now my best friend was rather suprised by this and never expected it in our friend. I'd said to her that everyone questions their sexual orientation at some point, but she swears down that she doesn't think it's a normal occurance in 'growing up' and that she never has questioned her own preferrences.

Personally, I think it's odd to never have questioned such a thing in yourself. I have, I have friends who have and even an ex-boyfriend who had. I just figure it was one of those things that just happens. Secretly, though, I think she has...she just won't admit it.

But then perhaps there are people who haven't really thought about it or questioned themselves or just knew they liked boys or girls without mulling it over?

some do some don't some are some aren't that's just the way it is. each to their own. personally I did but i'm deffinatly more turned on by boys, still don't hurt to have a good snog with a nice gurlie every now and then mind

Not exactly. I never had a moment where I thought "Oh! I'm gay!". I've always been aware of what I found attractive, and I guess the only real "question" has been whether to keep an open mind or not. While I try to, experience has led me to work to the assumption that I like boys rather than girls, and I've yet to meet a woman who's given me any reason to doubt that.

We're told that questioning your sexuality is perfectly normal. Did that mean that not questioning your sexuality is abnormal?

I'm not sure if it's different for gay people...I intuitively feel like it is, since even if you haven't questioned your own sexuality, you've gone against the path of heterosexuality that's been automatically set down for you. To automatically assume heterosexuality in a culture where this preference is the norm is what I find disturbing. I had a phase where I questioned my sexuality, but now I just accept that I don't need to fit into any binary category. I roughly call it bisexuality so as to explain it better, but it isn't, really, because even it includes the prefix "bi" which represents what I'm trying to avoid in the first place.

I don't think many of my friends would admit to questioning their sexualities, perhaps because the teenage phase where everyone makes fun of you for it still hits too close to home and also, they're all very straight (in sexuality & normality terms.) You tend to hear that women are more open about and to this sort of thing, but my experience has been knowing a much higher proportion of gay men than lesbians, or bisexuals of either sex. Well, since going to uni; I didn't know any gay men IRL before that (my school...let's just not talk about that)

Yeah, unfortunately we're kind of stuck with it until they can find a way to show a gay person without them being overtly gay/engaged in gaying about. The word for it is "heteronormative", and it's probably not worth getting worked up about because, due to sheer force of numbers, it's if not inevitable then at least very hard to reverse (kinda impractical too). You get it with race, where a person can be of a different race without it being an issue. I'm not talking about hard-hitting dramas about Asian culture, I'm talking about when you get an example in a maths book where "Tom has 10 apples and he gives 4 to Sharon and the rest to Hardeep; how many apples does Hardeep have?" A big step towards encouraging acceptance is in establishing that it's normal not to be a member of all of the majority, or if not "normal" then at least common.

I kinda ties in with the thread about gay role models. Acceptance relies not so much on showing exceptional or strong characters, but on totally boring and one-dimensional ones. Hardeep isn't in the maths book because the maths book is telling a poignant story about Asian culture. He's in it because he's just as boring as white people are and shouldn't be exempt from being treated as such just because he's Asian.