I'm very curious to know which of you may have been propositioned by a member of the same sex, and how exactly you dealt with the situation ( at least those of you who are straight ).
I've had experiences with this in the past, but they were usually very direct. A fellow American tried to pick me up once when I was abroad, and a young man flirted with me quite a bit some years ago, after a night out with mutual friends. But last week I was approached in a much more subtle and abstruse way.
A young man I work with, and whom I knew to have a girlfriend, had been engaging me in increasingly personal conversations about the difficulties of his relationships. But during our last such exchange, he suddenly revealed that he had had homosexual relationships. Initially he gave the impression that these had been consentual, but then later confessed that he'd been raped. He then asked me if I'd ever had any similar experiences, to which I answered "no"... but I then related the above mentioned incidents, and assured him that there was nothing unusual or shameful in what had happened to him. From there he proceeded to relate events in his personal life that revealed both interest in pursuing homosexual relationships, but also a lingering homophobia. It's also worth mentioning that he was a young Latino man who projected an air of robust machismo, and didn't display any of the affectations or mannerisms one normally associates with homosexuals. After reflecting on the course of the conversation that evening, it occured to me that he was, in all probability, testing my reaction in an attempt to gauge my interest.
I wasn't troubled in any way by this exchange, but it did make me wonder how other men may have dealt with similar situations.