there are not... I've not ever experienced bigoted comments or anti-gay attitudes from any of my extended family, so I really don't expect there would be issues with "coming out," if they were gay or lesbian. I think, speaking only for my family, that when the elder generation finally came to terms with issues of gender and racial equality many decades ago, that it pretty much extended to differences in general. Of course the conservatives/Republicans in my family are not (and never were) remotely like those of today.

of having gay family members.I had a lesbian great aunt though and I remember her coming for Christmas with her girlfriend and nobody batting an eye. I think past generations probably accepted their gay family members a lot more than they're given credit for sometimes.

so my comments only really reflect the couple of dozen of combined first and second cousins I do have (or had had) contact with

but I do have friends who have gay cousins and uncles. I knew them before I even knew what 'gay' is. Rethugs don't care about anything except themselves and money.

my family. My nieces didn't come out until their 30s, and granted, denial for the RWers was easier, but they got over it. When it's your own...which is Republican mantra...it's usually OK.

My husband suspects that his nephew may be, but if he is, he isn't "out." I've never met him, so I don't have an opinion.

If I had a gay child or other relative, it wouldn't change anything. I couldn't be any more in favor of equality than I already am.

we have no gay family members. 14 cousins, 13 aunts and uncles, 1 brother and 1 set of parents.

If I go out a little further I have one lesbian second cousin that I know about and we all love her.

We may not have any gay members that close but not a single member of my family would, as far as I know, ever denigrate anyone that was.

Based on the 2013 NHIS data [collected in 2013 from 34,557 adults aged 18 and over], 96.6% of adults identified as straight, 1.6% identified as gay or lesbian, and 0.7% identified as bisexual. The remaining 1.1% of adults identified as “something else[]” [0.2%,] stated “I don’t know the answer[]” [0.4%] or refused to provide an answer [0.6%].

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/07/15/what-percentage-of-the-u-s-population-is-gay-lesbian-or-bisexual/

It is an anonymous survey.

or ignorant or both.

It is one thing to say I dont know of any, but to say there are NOT any, matter of fact, is something only a bigot says.


How can you know if a 3rd cousin or great great great grandpa wasnt, etc.

of people who don't have any gay family members though.

there is a GOP prick senator who said that recently

just trying to answer my rather simplistic question.

he said that he was proud to say that no member of his family, anywhere in his family is gay

impossible for him to know, of course

It's easy for me to say that no, I don't have gay siblings or cousins. Don't know any farther out than that, though. With the exception of one person, I can't imagine it would an issue for anyone, anymore than the multiethnicity that most of the family is. We're all pretty liberal with the exception of that one ass, who is also up on felony charges.

My husband's family is different; there are a number of LBTQ aunts, uncles, cousins, etc and that family is largely very conservative. Go figger.

he remarried a born again christian, he has disowned him now. We're all pretty pissed at his new found assholeishness.

how about your aunt who was born in 1872 in England, her too?

You see it is IMPOSSIBLE to say you know for a fact

BEFORE I am alerted on, I sure hope everybody reads the whole thread, but they wont


Yes, I am saying NO Person alive knows for a FACT that NO Person of their family EVER was or is gay

past or present is gay? Was gay?

Is that the debate we are having?

Read what I said again, saying you KNOW of none is one thing, saying you KNOW FOR A FACT that NO past or present member of your immediate or extended family was or is gay is either the statement of a liar or an ignorant person or both.

BECAUSE

it is IMPOSSIBLE to know, especially of people who are now dead

But have a nice day...

who lived 200 or 100 yrs ago

ESPECIALLY whether they were gay or not given how ALL or almost ALL had to hide the fact.

Also, I dont KNOW of any gay people in my family other than the ones I know are gay because they told me, I canNOT however say that I KNOW nobody else is for a fact, dont know how you could either.


BTW

god help the family member who wants to come out but is surrounded by people proclaiming they KNOW there are NO gay people in the family..

You are either being willfully provocative or obtuse.

then, yes, we have plenty of gays in our family.

I do know all my cousins and they are all straight - unless they got married to cover it.

My second cousins, I do not know them all. The ones I know are straight. But the ones I don't know could be gay.

The OP was talking about people we know.

my exes niece whom I am friends with even today.

recently that no person in his family now or EVER was or is gay.

Impossible to know, but something I expect from a bigot

It is one thing to say "i dont know of any"

entirely another to say you know for a fact and to extend that out to entire family current and past

math works


Oh, and "know" is different from "no" LOL

that NO person of their family, extended or otherwise (I then added historically speaking as well when i said great great great great uncle) is gay.

Cant do it, no person can make this statement, honestly.

I did it because of a rightwinger who recently said it in the news, I thought, wrongly, on a LIBERAL message board, it would not be a provocative thing for me to say.

wrong again

I don't know of any in my family.
At least none that has ever confided in me, and no
gossip thereof...

One of my dad's cousins married a guy that was gay (bi?).
She didn't know it when she married him.

That's the only anecdote I can remember.

this is the distinction I am making

No immediate family members: grandparents, parents, in-laws, siblings, aunts, uncles, or first cousins.

She's also my favorite in-law.

I have a relatively small family - only 6 first cousins. One of my cousins has a transgender son. Even though he is biologically female, he always had quite a bit of facial and body hair even before he started taking male hormones. I do wonder if there is something different about his genes or his naturtal hormones. Anyway, he's had a mastectomy and takes male hormones and is quite proud of his new whiskers! He even got baptized again.

but I have a small extended family.

no siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles or parents

(edit to add) likewise, none of my family members would appear to be sufficiently uptight to not reveal if they were.

Oh, and my husband is gay. It's one of the reasons I like him so much.

In an extended family of about 50 people. And I don't suspect anyone else.

They're cool with me though. They invite my partner to everything. Although some of the older folks refer to him as "your friend." Meh, they try =)

That skit never gets old.

across any.

and a gay aunt - they tried to hide it, but it wasn't a very well-kept secret. I'm a lesbian, myself, and frankly, no, none of them give a shit if it harms a family member. The most important thing in the universe is making money by being a conservative, Jesus and making money, period.

All my cousins, aunts, uncles, and everything are straight.

We're depressingly boring, if a bit dysfunctional.

cousins is depressingly boring. He's the most deadly serious,sense of humor lacking persons I know.

Not only that, she's convinced that the ghosts of her dead mother and grandmother are calling her on the phone.

And I have a step-cousin who is a lesbian. (My uncle's step-daughter. Is that step-cousin?)

I imagine it is much more difficult to come out in a family with conservative cultural values. However, my nephew's father is a Republican and he accepts and loves his son. He even voted for marriage equality in the 2012 election. Knowing LGBT people makes a difference, even for Republicans.

we a very large family and I do not have contact with everyone. I do have a very close friend whose son is gay and I have had coworkers who are members of the LGBT community. I have a good friend who is transgender. We are all members of the human famly ultimately.

No one else that I know of in my family, either.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

with an openly gay parent.

Still, live and let live, right?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

Married had children and then came out after 20 years of marriage during their divorce.

My maternal grandmother was either a lesbian or bisexual. She married and had one child. After she passed we found the love letters and pictures of her true love she'd kept hidden away. It broke my heart they didn't feel they could be together openly. They were obviously deeply in love for decades. My grandmother was such an amazing person, she deserved better than that.

Darndest thing...shocked us all. They were trying to be hetero. Both have partners and she is grown, but still regularly goes back and forth between them.

Edit: Both were completely Out...both families knew.

perplexing to me that any conservative with gay loved ones would still be OK with denying them equal rights.

..is lgbt.
Its not hereditary, it just is. Same way hetero also, just is.

know if I would have had gay siblings. I do know that my gay relatives' friends and lovers came from other families and at the time I don't know how many had outed themselves to family as in those times it would have been very hard as many were disowned by their families. In my own family, the parents, aunts and uncles were not told, but the cousins and the grandparents were. I can only speak for myself but I don't really believe there are any families that are 100% heterosexual.

I have two cousins that I suspect are gay but neither of them are open about it. It's not like my cousins were close when growing up anyway. They all lived over 300 miles away and some lived over 1,500 miles away. And heck, it is always possible that my two cousins are just lifetime bachelors - just like me.

is gay..........

One came out in high school and the other during college. Both of them now have partners.

I thought one of my brother's sons was gay, but he has recently become engaged to a woman.
Bi? I dunno.

My husband had a sister whose husband left her--after fathering a child--to come out about 20 years ago. Their
son has been married to a woman for some time.

As for the rest of the family, I'm not aware of any gay members in either of my parents' families. My aunt
and uncle--mother's side of the family--had a son who is still a bachelor at age 60. I thought he might have
been gay, but since have decided that he may have Asperger's and just never met someone with whom
he could commit to a long term relationship.

A lot of it depends on the family though. My family is not exactly bohemian libertinism personified, but neither are we the Phelps clan. The closer families get to the latter, the less likely gay members of it are likely to be open cet par. Since more Republican families stray onto that end of the spectrum than Dems, I'm betting fewer of them know a family member is gay even when they are.

But still far too many of them are willing to despise and place obstacles in the path of their own family members willingly because of Gawd and "principles".

even among my cousins and extended family...that I know of anyway. Both my ex-hubs have lesbian sisters though.

My side and my wife's side. Open and out, too.

...married and had children and most of whom remained with their original opposite gender spouses or remarried another opposite gender spouse. My eldest cousin is on husband number 4 (2 divorces; one death), so I guess she is extra straight. The one unmarried cousin has had numerous emotional health difficulties over many years, is currently living in a women's shelter, and seldom communicates with any of us. She has at times spoken of having "lots of great sex," but I never inquired as to the gender of the partners.

I don't know much about most of my cousins' children. I do know 3 of my first cousins are grandparents. As far as I know, those offspring are in heterosexual marriages.

We have 2 sons. The oldest one has a serious girlfriend - his 3rd since high school, and he is now 25. The younger one, who is 22, has not had a long term girlfriend as far as we know, but based on the various colors of long (presumably) female hair that I have found clinging to his soccer socks when he comes home from college with laundry, AND the pair of tiny blue lace panties (much too small to be mine) that were also in the laundry one time, he seems to be straight.

Past generations - no clue.

My husband says that Bi-sexuals have a difficult time when people are doing these types of lists; everyone who's big into advocacy politics thinks your faking it whenever you shift your love between genders. I'm pretty sure my late uncle, a confirmed bachelor, was Bi; he was also schizophrenic and messed up from the prudity of the 1940's and 50's, which didn't help his issues.

It's all about who you love, not just who turns you on.

Honestly. If men in general can turn you on, but you also love and are sexually turned on by a particular woman - or vice versa - what does it matter? Some people have a difficult to satisfy libido, some people have an easy to satisfy libido, and some have almost no libido; with most people not completely on the hetero- or homo- side when it comes to sexuality, most of us are somewhere muddling in the middle.
Which is probably the root cause for most of the virulent hate; if someone is bi, and was taught that having lust for someone of the same sex was wrong, wrong, wrong, there would be some serious confusion when faced with "I love and am turned on by my wife; why am I also turned on by Anderson Silva, Bradley Cooper, or the new Sexton at Church?"

Haele

But yet a lot of them do support gay marriage.

Republicans are stupid; look at Cheney.

No, I do not come from a family with no gay members, meaning yes I do have gay members in my family.

One comes from a very "Christian" family. I figured out at age 10 that she was gay. She's in her 30s now and nobody in that family has ever acknowledged that fact. It's all still very hush hush. Fucking religion.

Although I think there are no families without at least one gay person, I know of a couple that would deny it. I'm thinking of one particular family with a very obvious butch lesbian daughter, and the parents keep taking about Jane meeting nice boy, and giving them grandchildren, and so on. Jane just rolls her eyes. She's told them, directly, several times, that she's a lesbian, but they always say something about a transition phase, or evolving identity, or confused gender roles, etc. They keep thinking she'll "get over it." She's 28, and has been with the same GF for about three years. Yes, the parents have met the GF, several times.

My family has gay,straight,bi as well as black,white,Asian and Christians,Buddhists and atheist. In the history of my family at one point or another the differences have caused some disharmony until we all just got over it.

My husband's niece
Another who is possibly in the closet

None. I would hope if someone was they know they would be aok with us - we don't throw people away.

My husband does have a gay cousin though.

....that I know of!

I have a great uncle who is, and pretty sure my great great aunt was.

Certainly seems to run in my family on my mom's side.

I think that most homophobes who don't think there are any gays in their families are simply being kept in the dark by the rest of the family.

though my best friend from junior high came out, to me at least, when we were in our early 20s. Fair number of gay/lesbian friends and acquaintances over the years, though.

One cis, one trans.

Nor anyone else of their families either…

But then again, I'm not a bigoted right wing Republican.

he came out to me in middle age. I had no idea.

diverse.

Some lesbian cousins, although no gay men.

Female cousins married to black men...biracial children

One nephew married to a black woman...a biracial daughter

Different cultures

Republicans and Democrats

Liberals and Conservatives

Religious and non-religious


One big family stewpot

and a bi great niece. However, I'm not in touch with most of my extended family.

At one time, it was speculated that 1 in 3 siblings are gay--as an average. That was flitted about in the 90s, don't know if it still holds water or not.

I've mentioned my father before but the thread as a whole reads like a 'coming out' opportunity for many.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Don't ever underestimate the long-term effects of a good night's sleep.[/center][/font][hr]

Adored and loved him so much. Died of AIDS. Still miss him and wish he was here.