This discussion is interesting, but I think that the reality is that it is different for each person.
I am 55 years old. I grew up in a home that was conservative and I wanted to be the "good little boy" that everyone else wanted me to be.
I reached a very weird point in life. I did not really discover my attractions for the same sex until I was college aged. I continued on and actually reached a point where I was in a totally heterosexual environment and was literally on the doorstep of a heterosexual marriage. My prospective Mother-In-Law was a bible thumping Baptist and my prospective in-laws were all "Born Again" in their viewpoints.
I listened at those family get-togethers to one diatrible after another that spouted more hateful and innacurate infomation on people of gay orientation than you could possibly believe. Here are a couple of the more entertaining lines." "Gay men all recruit kids and they are all child molesters." By the way I listened to a Baptist preacher get up and give a whole sermon (about two hours) dedicated to this subject. It was one of the most un-christian things I had ever heard. Not only was it a violation of what the Bible says about judging others, it was instruction on how to be homophobic and how to hate people. The main thing is that statistics do not back that one up. Most child molesters by statistic are heterosexual and so are most molestations. This kind of thinking makes me wonder what had been taught to the kids who killed Matthew Shepherd (remember that one)
Here's another one...."All gay people eat feces at least once a day." That line also came from the pulpit of a Southern California Baptist Church.
These lines and old stereotypes went on and on.
During this same time in life I was beginning to examine who I was, and the only way I found to do this was to meet people who were gay and find out for myself. What I quickly discovered was that the gay community was every bit as diverse as the rest of the world and that there were some really strange people, but there were a great number of really great people too.
I knew that I had sexual attactions at that time for both males and for females. By the late 1970's I had explored enough to begin to realize that I was at least bisexual if not totally gay. Over time I found that I made the emotional connection far more with same-sex encounters than I did with opposite sex encounters.
I have to admit that I lived through some very fun times and that a great many of the people I grew to know and grew fond of as friends and business asssociates died of complications of HIV at an early age.
In my insane period I was going out on one heterosexual date and then going to gay bars afterwards. It was the craziest circus that is almost beyond imagination.
There are probably very few here who are old enough to remember the availability of open sex in the late 1970's and early 1980's. It had nothing to do with orientation either. There were as many females that were just as much tramps as the males.
At the peak of all of this, imagine going out on a Saturday and having your first trick home and in bed by 3:30 to 4:00P.M., and if you were extremely horny you would start searching for your last one at about midnight. That one had the honor of spending the whole night be it male or female even though by morning you may have remembered the sex but not their name.
It was not unusual to have as many as 10-15 sex partners in a single weekend. Then there were things like "crisco parties" and all the rest.
I had to come to accept what my own orientation was, but coming from a medical family, I also was on the ground floor when "gay cancer" started showing up. When we come from medical families we have advantages. I determined long before the CDC did that the method of transmission had to be body fluids because of the way things were progressing.
There was a period of years that I cut my sexual activity to a minimum while I watched friend after friend die. I buried a total of 52 people before the weekly funerals ended for me.
I was clever, I engineered a break-up with the female with whom I was considering a permanent realationship. I still think the world of her to this day. I am grateful in that she has had multiple marriages and none have worked well. She is just too independent and even though she now has multiple children (all grown) I will always have fond memories of her. I would still be there for her if she needed anything because she is a great person. She just would not have been right for me and over time it would not have worked.
It took me years to find a same-sex relationship. I was criticized by many friends who said my standards were too high. I reacted to this in anger and raised the standards instead of lowering them.
I have been with my life-partner nearly ten years now. Life has never been easy for us. We have cared for and buried aging parents and we are raising and helping a nephew find his way in life. I feel honored in that we were given an 18 year old male who had orientation issues. Neither one of us cares if he ends up straight or gay. We care that he gets a good education, we care that he finds his way in life and that he remembers that he was raised by two gay Uncles who loved and cared for him when his parents failed.
In the end the reasons for sexual orientation are unimportant except to a very misguided few. The thing we all need to remember is that we need to love our fellow man whatever the orientation and we need to realize that self-acceptance and self-esteem suffer badly when debates take place over what is choice, what is environmental, or what is genetic.
The best thing we all can do is to throw out discussions of why and try to foster acceptance and caring for all. The one thing that I have as low on my list for the most part would be my orientation. It is not important and it is not the business of anyone I choose not to bring into my personal world.
I am not alone. In the gay community there are many relationships that last just as well or better than in the heterosexual community. I have known several that in spite of hardship based on a different time managed to last over 50 years.
Just a little footnote on this: Like many in the community when you do meet "Mr. Right" you drop out of the limelight, the bars the cruising and all the rest. If you don't you did not meet the right person because somewhere down deep inside you are still searching for something you have not found.
We live on a big old horseranch in the Southwestern United States. We get up, work for a living and we try hard to have some semblence of morality and a value system.
This part of the gay community is never talked about because it drops completely off the radar and so do those individuals.
Food for thought.......