Some are joking, others are not.Įither way, it’s probably nonsense. Numerous people (in my experience) seem to worry that they were in some way “responsible” for their ex coming out. Changing someone’s sexual orientation? Not so much. Spilling something is a thing you can do inadvertently. It’s nice when people try and be supportive, but you can probably just nod and smile at them in this context. Turns out he meant the call to join them in their bedroom activities, suggesting he had failed to grasp both the terms “lesbian” and “ex-girlfriend”. My own personal favourite was a friend who, upon hearing that my ex-girlfriend had come out as a lesbian, asked me if I was “waiting for the call”. Things like “How come you didn’t know?” aren’t helpful your partner was in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, so concluding they’re gay would have been a bit of a leap at the time. No doubt they’ve got the best of intentions, but you can probably ignore much of what they say. Why would there be? So if you tell your friends, they’ll just wing it. There’s no greeting card saying “Sorry your ex is gay now”.
If u can read this text your gay meme how to#
There’s no established etiquette yet for how to respond when someone informs you that their ex has come out. Your friends are often there to offer advice and suggestions, but they are often as clueless as you. You can probably ignore what your friends say You could end up tearing yourself up internally, obsessing over details that never really happened. There are so many inherent biases that change what we think we remember, especially for emotional things. The fact is your memory, the only real record of the minutiae of your relationship, isn’t going to be as reliable as you’d hope. Maybe your ex-boyfriend was surprisingly fond of Lady Gaga? Maybe your old girlfriend did have more checked shirts than you’d expect? But these “glaring” clues are probably just confirmation bias coupled with unfair and exaggerated gay stereotypes you’ve picked up without realising. Maybe this new information makes you interpret things in a new light. Fine in principle: it might prove frustrating for you, but at least nobody else is involved. Your ex coming out may compel you to analyse your relationship, to see how you “missed” something as significant as incompatible sexual orientation. Photograph: Troels Graugaard/Getty Images See also homosexual.Your memory is your only source of info. This argument is weakened by the fact that the sexual meaning has long been the dominant one, and thus permeates all usages of gay. It has been argued that gay in the sense “awkward, stupid, or bad” is independent of the sexual sense, and therefore not homophobic. How do gays feel about this? But usage as a singular noun is usually perceived as insulting. Today, the noun often designates only gay men and is usually used as a collective plural: gays and lesbians. After World War II, as social attitudes toward sexuality began to change, gay was applied openly by gay men to themselves, first as an adjective and later as a noun. This sexual world included gay men too, and gay as an adjective in the sexual meaning goes back at least to the late 1930s. A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer, a gay house a brothel. The word gay has had various senses dealing with sexual conduct since the 17th century. The sexual orientation meaning of the word gay has become so predominant that people hesitate to use the term in its original senses of “merry, lively” and “bright or showy.” But the word's association with sexuality is not new.