Leaving home and coming to Williams may provide a new opportunity to think about sexuality, but at the same time, it may require certain questions to be asked and answered for the first time. Learning to talk comfortably about sex and to acknowledge one s feelings may be the most important skills to learn in the face of such dangers as HIV, unplanned pregnancy situations and acquaintance rape. By encouraging communication, ultimately we may all be able to challenge assumptions and misconceptions about sex, while learning to be more assertive of our own sexual needs and desires. For example, adolescents who identify themselves as heterosexual may participate in homosexual experimentation. The researcher Alfred Kinsey found that human sexual orientations exist not as exact categories of behavior but on a continuous spectrum bounded on the extremes by exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive homosexuality.
Few people can truly say that they belong exclusively to either extreme.
That s it. Homosexuality is not a disease, nor is it as uncommon as many people think. The most-quoted statistic says that one in ten people identifies her or himself as exclusively gay or lesbian. Others fall on the bisexual continuum. When sexual orientation is thought of in terms of friends and neighbors it becomes obvious that it is of the utmost importance that we, as Williams students and as people, respect the sexual choices of others.