Quote:
Originally posted by TRSimon
Wow. I thought that with all of the taboos in our community about sexuality, that these men would not be willing to acknowledge any part of their homosexual activities in public. In your information gathering, did you find out if these men were more willing to open up to heterosexual partners using this term or was its use only for healthcare purposes?
TRSimon
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Well, it wasn't exactly a public situation. The data was gathered in various ways: through anonymous surveys, through one-on-one interviews, by attending meetings of organizations African American MSM (I've also heard the term Same-Gender Loving), and -- here's a kicker -- in churches. The study was intended to find out whether African American MSM felt a specific connection to or ostracism from faith-based communities, and to what degree their level of disclosure affected their feelings of acceptance.
In general, we found out that men still weren't willing to open up to their heterosexual partners any more than normal regardless of the terminology used. The stigma of gay sex = weak male kept a lot of them from doing that. However, for those men who did open up to their female partners about their "other" sexual desires, they found that the MSM term sort of... helped make that disclosure easier, because they don't honestly think of themselves as "gay".