Before puberty, identification with a sexual orientation would have to be completely socially constructed, so in a gay-friendly society most people should identify as bisexual by default.
A society can be gay-friendly and still heteronormative. In fact, I’d say that contemporary First-World youth fit right into that, although gay-friendliness hasn’t spread to the whole society yet. Still, as long as heterosexuals are most common, gays and bis will still be seen as unusual, even if OK. So socially, I expect that most people will still assume that they’re het until they learn otherwise.
However (contradicting both you and me), there are gay people who say that they knew that they were gay from a very young age. On the other hand, puberty has been known to mess with one’s expectations.
Generalising from one example: I can’t quite describe the environment that I grew up in as gay-friendly, only moving in that direction. Perhaps if it had been, then I’d have identified as bisexual at puberty, but perhaps not. In any case, it was a heteronormative environment, so I expected to be attracted to the opposite sex, and was. Then I jumped to conclusions, self-identified as het and suppressed my attraction to the same sex (ETA: because it messed with my idea of who I was) for another ten years. (Before puberty, I was completely asexual.)
On reflection, I was generalizing from one example as well. I was pretty sexual-hangup-y as a kid. I didn’t begin to suspect I was gay until I was seventeen, and it was another two or three years after that before I was comfortable with the idea that I had a sex drive at all.
A society can be gay-friendly and still heteronormative. In fact, I’d say that contemporary First-World youth fit right into that, although gay-friendliness hasn’t spread to the whole society yet. Still, as long as heterosexuals are most common, gays and bis will still be seen as unusual, even if OK. So socially, I expect that most people will still assume that they’re het until they learn otherwise.
However (contradicting both you and me), there are gay people who say that they knew that they were gay from a very young age. On the other hand, puberty has been known to mess with one’s expectations.
Generalising from one example: I can’t quite describe the environment that I grew up in as gay-friendly, only moving in that direction. Perhaps if it had been, then I’d have identified as bisexual at puberty, but perhaps not. In any case, it was a heteronormative environment, so I expected to be attracted to the opposite sex, and was. Then I jumped to conclusions, self-identified as het and suppressed my attraction to the same sex (ETA: because it messed with my idea of who I was) for another ten years. (Before puberty, I was completely asexual.)
On reflection, I was generalizing from one example as well. I was pretty sexual-hangup-y as a kid. I didn’t begin to suspect I was gay until I was seventeen, and it was another two or three years after that before I was comfortable with the idea that I had a sex drive at all.