A reading question/poll about sexuality...
I'm rereading the Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and have been in a discussion with jillbertini where I've noted and have been trying to explain how/why those books (especially but not exclusively Thendara House made me aware of and okay with my not-straight sexuality
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I think what got me re: discovering sexuality through books was the matter-of-fact way that MZB presented characters who were not straight. There were conflicts (internal and external) regarding their sexual identities sometimes, but not always; the culture portrayed accepted that many/most (higher caste, at least) adolescents would form strong same-sex bonds that might include sex, and in fact those bonds were preferable at that age to heterosexual experimentation (which had negative social impact especially for girls, but to some extent also for boys; there's a double standard but it's not always as differentiated as one might expect). So the description of a society where it was accepted, even normal, to be bisexual - even if in some ways the expression of that was limited by age, i.e. people were normally expected to marry and/or have children after a certain age - reassured me that whatever I felt along those lines was not wrong, that there could be places where it was actually encouraged even if the 1980s US was not one of those places.
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