Homosexuals do not feel the need to follow the expectations of society’s sex-role stereotypes, an NIU graduate student said Thursday.

Virgil Miller, a master’s candidate in the communications department, presented his study on homosexuality to a 15-member audience on the “Influence of Sex Roles and Sexual Orientation in Relationships” in the Holmes Student Center.

“They (homosexuals) do not have a large debate over who will pay for dinner or who will initiate the first sexual encounter,” Miller said.

“When there is a conflict in a homosexual relationship, you are dealing with a person and not an expectation. Some say the homosexual lifestyle is the freedom from expectations.”

However, he said homosexual relationships are not necessarily better than heterosexual relationships. “Any relationship is subject to the same types of pitfalls,” he said.

Miller’s study involved 50 heterosexual men, 50 heterosexual women and 40 homosexual men. The participants rated the different aspects of relationships on a scale of one to ten.

He said he gathered enough data to make a conclusion about homosexuals and wants to include lesbians in a later study.

Miller concluded heterosexual women and homosexual men were similar in their values of a relationship, but said heterosexual men widely differed from both in some points.

On the average, heterosexual men value sex much more than homosexual men or heterosexual women, he said.

The stereotype of sexually overactive homosexuals is a “myth … based on a very few number of people. The gay/lesbian population is very diverse,” Miller said.

Homosexual men and heterosexual women valued sharing time with the same sex twice as much as heterosexual men, he said. “Many men don’t know how it is to be close to other men without feeling guilty about it.”