[Gay] Gay News from Around the Gay World That is Gay

[Razgovory]

The difference is that, of course, transgendered people do not try to tell other people how to live their lives - whereas religious people do. I have a lot of respect, actually, for mystics and others in touch with their divine - I don't tolerate those having the audacity to tell me that *their* idea of the divine (with whom, more often than not, they have very little actual connection whatsoever) somehow has authority to say how *I* should live my life.

And here we are talking about the the correct behavior and thought pattern.  I guess you can't act civilized.

[Martinus]

The difference is that, of course, transgendered people do not try to tell other people how to live their lives - whereas religious people do. I have a lot of respect, actually, for mystics and others in touch with their divine - I don't tolerate those having the audacity to tell me that *their* idea of the divine (with whom, more often than not, they have very little actual connection whatsoever) somehow has authority to say how *I* should live my life.

And here we are talking about the the correct behavior and thought pattern.  I guess you can't act civilized.

[Martinus]

What gay couples get about relationships that straight couples often don't

When it comes to dividing the labor at home fairly, straight couples may have a lot to learn from gay couples.

A new study finds that same-sex couples tend to communicate better, share chore duties more fairly and assign tasks based on personal preference -- rather than gender, income, hours worked or power position in the relationship.

Straight couples, meanwhile, tend to talk less and fall into to traditional gender roles, what one family describes as "pink chores" and "blue chores."

In dual-income straight couples, women and those who earn less money or work fewer hours tend to take primary responsibility for stereotypically female -- and more labor-intensive -- chores such as child care, grocery shopping, washing dishes, cooking and laundry, according to a survey of 225 gay and straight dual-income couples being released Thursday by PriceWaterHouseCoopers and the Families and Work Institute.

The survey, while a relatively small sample, has interesting findings.

Men, higher earners and those who work longer hours – which researchers say can signify a position of power -- in straight couples tend to do the yard work and outdoor, auto and more traditionally male chores that tend to be less time-consuming.

Yet in same-sex couples, income and work hours didn't have the same affect. And, perhaps most important, same-sex couples were much more likely to share equally the time-consuming work of routine child care – 74 percent of gay couples versus 38 percent of straight couples. And gay couples were more likely to equally share the unpredictable work of caring for a sick child – 62 percent versus 32 percent for straight couples.

Why is that important? In straight couples, women are still often considered the primary, or default, parent, responsible not only for organizing, overseeing and caring for children but for also doing many of household chores. Time diary data shows that women, even when they work full-time, tend to spend about twice as much time doing housework and caring for children.

"There's been a lot of calls for more sharing of child care responsibilities, so it isn't only a woman's problem and she isn't the only one dealing with the fallout at work. But we see more sharing in same-sex couples," said Ken Matos, FWI senior director of research and author of the study. "Taking on primary child care responsibility impacts one's work time. It creates so many unscheduled interruptions, so that's an important thing to be shared."

The survey also found that men in same-sex relationships were more satisfied with the division of labor than were women in straight relationships. The reason? Same-sex couples talked about it more.

Men in gay partnerships were much more likely to say they had discussed how to divide the labor when they first moved in together. Women in straight partnerships were much more likely to say they wanted to, but didn't.

"The people who said they bit their tongue had a lower satisfaction with division of household responsibilities," Matos said. "So satisfaction may not be so much about what you do, but whether or not you felt you had a voice. Did you say what you wanted? Or did you let it evolve and feel like you couldn't pull yourself out of the situation once it settled and got stuck?"

In the survey, 20 percent of women in straight couples said they hadn't spoken up about how to divide the labor fairly, but wish they had. In same-sex couples, 15 percent of the women had.

"Perhaps because they can't default to gender, people in same-sex couples are in more of a position to have these conversations," Matos said. "That's probably the biggest takeaway of the survey: how important it is to talk and say what you want, rather than stay silent, not wanting to start a fight, making assumptions, and then letting things fester."

Writer and lecturer Andrew Solomon said he and his husband are constantly talking about how to make all the pieces of their lives fit together. "I feel like we're constantly inventing it," he said. "We talk about it all the time. It's a constantly evolving process."

Solomon is the primary breadwinner and his spouse has taken on the bulk of caring for their six-year-old son. Everything else, Solomon said, they've divided chores based on what they're good at. Solomon is organized, so he arranges school and summer camp activities. His husband cooks. They share school drop off and they shift duties as the demands of their schedules change.

"People often make assumptions: We get asked, since I'm the one who works more, am I more the 'Dad,' and is John really the 'Mom?'I feel like we have a paucity of vocabulary to describe these roles," Solomon said. "If there's one thing same sex parents could teach is that it's not that one of us is 'really' the mom and one is 'really the Dad. Those are irrelevant concepts. We're just both in this together."

This seems to reflect my observations as well. There is much more negotiation going on in gay relationships, I think, as you do not have any "templates" to use.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/04/what-gay-couples-get-about-relationships-that-straight-couples-often-dont/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na

[Valmy]

Wait couples with two different gender have more gender issues than a coupe with two identical genders?

This is not a problem in our home because we are both lefty types when it comes to social roles like this. But not everybody feels like this is a priority. Some people really feel these gender roles are important and I am not about demanding everybody meet my standards.

But hey what do I know? I don't have a gay relationship I have had to compare my straight ones to.

Solomon is the primary breadwinner and his spouse has taken on the bulk of caring for their six-year-old son. Everything else, Solomon said, they've divided chores based on what they're good at. Solomon is organized, so he arranges school and summer camp activities. His husband cooks. They share school drop off and they shift duties as the demands of their schedules change.

That sounds like all my straight friend's relationships. People do what they are good at. But then we are all suburban Austinites so do not have big cultural pressures to do differently.

[Malthus]

I don't follow:

In dual-income straight couples, women and those who earn less money or work fewer hours tend to take primary responsibility for stereotypically female -- and more labor-intensive -- chores such as child care, grocery shopping, washing dishes, cooking and laundry, according to a survey of 225 gay and straight dual-income couples being released Thursday by PriceWaterHouseCoopers and the Families and Work Institute.

How is it surprising, unfair or a negative that those who "work fewer hours" tend to do more "labor intensive" chores around the house? Isn't that exactly what you'd expect - if someone is working a harsh 12 hour shift and the other person isn't, that the person who isn't will do more of the labourious chores at home?

Throwing that little criterion into the mix tends to invalidate the whole thesis. 

[Valmy]

Yeah isn't that exactly what any couple with common sense would do? In their example the gay couple shifts chores around to suit the work schedule.

[Josquius]

I read this article today, pretty interesting

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-china-gay-marriage-is-between-a-man-and-a-woman

In China there's been a surge in xinghun, variously translated as "cooperative marriage" or "marriage-for-show"—that is, weddings between gay men and lesbian women. A young gay man in Beijing says that right now probably 50 percent of gays choose xinghun in order to assimilate into China's conservative, family-oriented society.
When gay men marry lesbian women, things can get complicated. Recent stories in the press have featured two lesbian couples living together, with four gay husbands off on the side. Or married gay couples (as in—a man and woman who are both gay) who have recently had a child but are still living with their respective partners, and trying to figure out what to tell their son as he gets older. To an outsider, it may seem like the distorted Chinese version of the 2011 film Friends with Kids, where two platonic friends try to start a family.
Maintaining a "cooperative marriage" to the satisfaction of two sets of prying parents with traditional expectations is highly complex. Nonetheless, thousands of gay men and women are tying the knot. Chinagayles.com, the earliest and most active website for gay men and women to find stand-in spouses, currently has over 380,000 users and claims to have matched nearly 20,000 couples since it started in 2005. But matching up with someone is just the first step—from there, it can take years to establish expectations, discuss financial responsibilities, and figure out the logistics of how the marriage is going to work.
Hm, not quite there yet.
Not quite there yet. (Photo: Fobos92/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
How does it work? It's advised that one approach a "cooperative marriage" like a business deal. Generally, xinghun couples, who tend to be wealthier, will arrange some form of pretend cohabitation. This means a place where they "live together" and can bring their parents to visit. Sometimes this is one of their apartments, and sometimes, if they can afford it, it's an empty flat exclusively for parent-pleasing occasions, carefully strewn with items suggesting the couple is happily shacked up.
Some members of these "marriages-for-show" have long-term partners on the side, while others date casually or not at all. Either way, there's the unavoidable baby question (the reason their parents wanted a marriage in the first place), and that can get tricky. Those who don't want to raise a child with a fake spouse will sometimes pay for sham certificates declaring the wife infertile, which they'll then show to their parents.
While xinghun is hardly ideal, it's an improvement from what's already been going on for centuries—gay men wedding heterosexual women and vice versa. According to research from Qingdao University, 80 percent of the estimated 20 million gay men in China are in fake marriages, meaning that 16 million Chinese women are currently married to gay men. Unlike the users of the xinghun website, the majority of these partners were not informed beforehand.

The Chinese character for happiness and couple, often used as a wedding decoration. Happy couple, indeed. (Photo: sharptoyou/shutterstock.com)
Until 1997, homosexuality was a crime in China, and until 2001 it was still classified as a mental illness. Yet today's pressures to be "normal"—having a traditional family and continuing the bloodline—come less from the government and more from the family. In China, you can only obtain a permit to have a child if you're married, and a child born out of wedlock isn't allowed basic identification information (hukou). This has led to a phenomenon known as "sexless marriages," which is an option for Chinese who want to start a family but don't want a romantic relationship. There are separate websites catering to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese seeking this kind of baby-enabling nuptial.
Childless Chinese are left with wracking guilt: Mencius, an ancient Chinese philosopher, said that failing to produce offspring is the worst form of disloyalty towards one's parents. Add in the One Child Policy, and you have gays feeling that their lifestyle is "selfish" because their parents have no other options for grandchildren.
Yet the one-child conundrum can be flipped the other way, too. Tian Tian, a 30 year-old woman working in Beijing, says that since most young adults are the only child, if they come out, their parents have to accept it—otherwise they lose their sole child in addition to a prospective grandkid. She adds that thanks to the internet, people her grandfather's age now "know what's free love." Tian Tian, who is recently married, says it's more accepted for men to come out than women. "Gay okay, les[bian] no."

Which nice woman wants one of these fine eligible men? (Photo: kris krüg/flickr)
That, of course, is in Beijing, which is more progressive than most of the rest of China. According to a 2013 Pew study, just 21 percent of Chinese believe that society should accept homosexuality. There are social media polls that suggest otherwise, but don't be fooled. Even among students, there remains a strong anti-gay bias.
There are more and more signs of hope, like a marriage proposal between two men on the Beijing subway that recently went viral; however, change is painfully slow. Since China's legal system is seemingly designed to baffle, no one knows how gay marriage would be legally recognized even if it had the right support. It's a practical matter as well as a human rights one: Some 30 million more men than women will enter China's marriage market by 2020. Gay men in particular should be marrying each other, instead of marrying members of the decreasing population of heterosexual women. China will shortly need to reconsider its stance.
Sadly, in the meantime, more and more gay men will continue seeking lesbian spouses, and together they will have to navigate the parent-pleasing, logistical nightmare that is "cooperative marriage."

[DGuller]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/12/utah-judge-removes-foster-child-from-lesbian-couple-saying-shell-be-better-off-with-heterosexuals/

[Eddie Teach]

Ah, Jaron's people.

[Martinus]

When I first saw this article on my Facebook feed, I thought it was from the Onion. Can anyone explain what's a "LGBT safe space" at Starbucks?

http://www.towleroad.com/2015/11/starbucks-safe-spaces/



It sounds like some SJW shit to me.

[garbon]

Yeah announcing that they want to help victims of hate crimes sounds terrible.

[DGuller]

It's not a place at Starbucks, it is the Starbucks that is LGBT safe place. 

[Martinus]

It's not a place at Starbucks, it is the Starbucks that is LGBT safe place.

But what exactly does this entail?

Are all the other Starbucks unsafe for LGBT people? 

[Admiral Yi]

But what exactly does this entail?

It entails a marketing campaign and instructions to staff on when they should call the police and when they give an upset homosexual a free cup of chai.

[Martinus]

But what exactly does this entail?

It entails a marketing campaign and instructions to staff on when they should call the police and when they give an upset homosexual a free cup of chai.

So I was right for calling it bullshit?