Seeing your attitude toward gay people, I can see how most of them prefer not to show themselves to you, and that is why you still think there just aren't many around. Take my word for it, just like white protestant males like you, gay people people are everywhere and they are here to stay.
I have taken this challenge a long time ago. For a week, I tried to avoid telling people the gender of my significant other (aka my wife). I always referred to her as "the person" or "my better half". The interesting thing that I noticed was people who would otherwise don't care much for gays were the ones that kept trying to probe me to try to make me spell out the gender of my significant other. Someone my friend recently introduced me to wouldn't let it go and kept asking questions to try to get me to reveal. Someone at work after many questions went straight out and asked "is your significant other a man or woman?"
I have a co-worker who's been working there for 5 years now. I only recently found out she's been married (not legally of course) to the same woman for 10 years now. At some point in her life, she decided to not share her happiness with anyone at all by pretending she didn't have a significant other at all. Right now, I'm the only one in our office that knows she's living with someone else. As far as everyone else is concern, she's living by herself. I might also like to add that she decided to pretend to be alone because of people like you who thinks gay people who are in monogomous relationships are so extraordinarily rare and when there is one around to be seen he/she must be some sort of freak.
The writer seems as if she has just made some sort of sociological break through here.
The sociological break through is do you have any idea how hard it is to try to hide the gender of your significant other, especially when the very language we use everyday to communicate with other people is designed to make it hard for us to hide people's gender? Why do I have the priviledge of using "my wife" or "her" or "she" just because I'm part of a majority while the people who belong to the minority in this respect have to use something as lame as "my significant other" just to make people like you feel happy?
Actually, you don't even have to use "my signficant other". Go ahead and try to say "my spouse" a few times and see how uncomfortable that is both for you and the people you are talking to.
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