for a straight person to recognize or even admire a good looking person from the same gender?
I was watching Justified and Timothy Olyphant/Raylen Givens is probably one of the best looking people I've seen and If I look like that I'd get all the females lol. Does this mean I'm gay? I'd hate to be even though there is nothing wrong with it.
I dont believe it means you're homosexual.
The theories of projection and identification from psychoanalysis which I think are credible in terms of explaining some of the determinants of sexual orientation besides cultural or genetic predispositions explain it this way:-
- When individuals have not developed an adequate psychological sex profile, ie masculinity in males, femininity in females, themselves they can tend to project what they feel is inadequate about themselves onto others of the same sex, so you have males or females who will idolise or infatuate about others of the same sex which they believe personify the attributes which they lack. This is an unconscious or preconscious psychological process.
- Once an individual has an adequate psychological sex profile they wont engage in projection, they will have become fully identified with their sex and develop an interest in the opposite sex. In my understanding this is linked with Jung's archetypes of male and female within the human collective and personal consciousness, the anima and animus, which exists in everyone male or female.
Now, I acknowledge that is a heteronormative theorising of sexual identity and orientation, perhaps, it makes sense to me and I believe corresponds to the majority of humanity for the majority of human history. I dont think that the linking of development towards and culmination in hetersexual love relationships, as a linear maturational progression, is necessarily discriminatory. I dont believe it is, as it has been labelled, hetero-sexist or hetero-supremacist. It is, so far as my direct experience tells, and contrary to the queer theory of liberal arts contemporary cultural norms, the experience of the majority.
I dont accept the view that, as a consequence of these psychological processes, bisexuality is in reality the universal norm and heterosexual or homosexual binary or dichotomous definitions invalid, at least not in the sense of sexual attraction in the popular sense. The sense in which this projection and consequent attraction is sexual it is sexual in the classic Freudian sense of a wider concept meaning all social interaction (which I in turn interpret with certain revisions and insights from social interactionist and symbolic interactionist theories).
I think that the way in which this question is posited and is one that the OP is posing to themselves and then reflecting in a discussing with others online indicates that culturally there has been a shift towards treating homosexuality as normative. The various political campaigns are just window dressing to that basic paradigm shift, which will effect those least willing or able to reconcile themselves to that change the most.
To me that's disasterous, it should be something which anyone could see as such, there's few other decisions or choices in which best intentions have mandated that the majority be compelled to validate decisions and choices, privately and publically, which are not naturally their own.