I appreciate Orin's response to my post, and I agree that my post is based in some measure on speculation, as claims about people's motives often are. Yet it strikes me as sound speculation.

Recall that one premise of my post (for which I have considerable data) is that there are many people who have bisexual orientation, in the sense that they are attracted at least in some measure to both sexes. Of these, some may engage in purely heterosexual sexual behavior, others in bisexual sexual behavior, and others in purely homosexual sexual behavior. Social pressure, as well as internalized feelings of shame or guilt about homosexuality, may push many of the bisexually oriented into the purely heterosexual sexual behavior category.

Why wouldn't gays and lesbians who think that homosexual behavior is just fine want these people to experiment with homosexual behavior? After all, once some of these people overcome social and personal inhibitions, they may find that they're much happier in same-sex relationships than in opposite-sex relationships. Others may find that they're happier engaging in a mix of such relationships.

If the bisexually oriented person hasn't tried his homosexual side, I would think that many gays and lesbians would think that this is a shame: There must be something that keeps the person from looking into something that might give him or her great happiness. Working to convert a bisexually oriented person from a purely heterosexual behavior pattern that completely ignores the person's heterosexual side to one that is more open to the person's homosexual side -- even if only as an experiment to see how strong that side is -- would, it seems to me, be thought of as a good deed. (It would be seen as an especially unselfish good deed if the work involved destigmatizing homosexuality and making the bisexually oriented feel better about their homosexual side, rather than just having sex with the person directly.)

This is what I was trying to get at by posing the five questions in my original post. My sense of human psychology, based on which I'm speculating about people's intentions, would be that many gays and lesbians do think such conversions (or persuasion or influencing or whatever one may want to call it) are good; and I think the five questions help explain why that might be so.

Orin suggests otherwise: "Most people who encounter social disapproval for their conduct are probably more concerned about ending that stigma than about getting other people to be more like them." But I'm not sure that it quite works that way. Many people who encounter social disapproval for their conduct become especially aware of such disapproval, and especially empathetic of those who are in the same boat. I think to myself (to borrow an example I gave in my earlier post): What if I were a heterosexual in a hypothetical future overwhelming homosexual society, and I had overcome my original shame and fear at experimenting with heterosexuality? I'd think that I'd then want to make sure that other people like me -- including those who are bisexually oriented, but may end up happier in a heterosexual relationship than in a homosexual relationship -- felt comfortable experimenting, too. I'd even urge people who fit that profile to experiment (again, not necessarily with me), just so they can avoid the possible unhappiness of being stuck in relationships that aren't satisfying for them as they could be.

So it seems to me contrary to what I know of human psychology for gays and lesbians not to want the orientationally bisexual / behaviorally purely heterosexual people to convert to a more bisexual or homosexual behavior pattern. It's speculation, but it seems to me likely correct.