| Thanks for the reply, alh. I would also like to see some students commenting on this. On one site I went to (commenting on sexuality profiles on Facebook), several young people stated that FB assertions can be deliberately ambiguous, even teasing (intellectually, not sexually), when no "other" sexual orientation is actually true. Other people alluded to what you just did: that FB is a "safe" way to "hint" or prepare peers for disclosure. (i.e., many people opening a FB page include Friends from early childhood, not just college age). I can also see the logic of what you said about announcing orientation to current college-age peers.
However, I wonder how wise it is to "announce" covertly or overtly, online, that you are gay. I know the parents of these people & am very close friends with some of them. I actually don't know if they know this news, and it also puts me in an odd situation, but if I were the parents, I would NOT like learning second- or third-hand that my child is gay, and has announced this on the internet first.
It's also interesting to me that the cultural family backgrounds of these individuals are not what I would define as middle-of-the-road. They are all either from very morally rigid environments or very morally permissive/liberal ones. I don't mean to draw conclusions about this: could be pure accident. |