With the Ellen Page coming out thread, I noticed a lot of the replies were of the "nooooooo!" or "AWESOME!!!" variety.

I'm just curious as to why this changes anything at all for you? It's not as if 99.999% of anyone ever had a chance of anything going anywhere with her either way and she's still the same person for your fantasies or whatever it's supposedly ruining for you. And especially with celebrities, you were never going to have a chance anyway.

If you find out someone you fancy is not likely to be interested in you because you're the wrong gender, does that alter how attractive you find them and if so why? I'm just really curious to know.

Personally to me, if someone is hot they're hot. I don't see how something like their sexuality really impacts on that.

Of course it does since such a huge part of our minds are based on imagination.

Realistically you will never bone an actor, or ever get to meet Brad Pitt or president Obama or any other famous person, and everybody is aware of this, but in our minds we still relate to them, we judge them compared to ourselves and our own experiences and ordinary lives, and we pretend and imagine, and in our minds we put them in a context that relates to ourselves personally. This happens automatically and instinctively. We're all split personalities (the vast majority of people).

I read that thread, and while I like to believe that I don't care a rats ass about Ellen Page I insitictively went through the same reaction ("oh no, she's out of reach from my weaner now"), in a childish, superficial but instinctive way.

^
There's probably other psychological mechanisms involved as well, in this specific case the heterosexual male mind trying to distance himself from entities that are out of reach, that would be a waste of time. The mind wants order, it tries to sort things. Again this being an automatic instinct, a mechanism which might or might not have a biological and evolutionary basis.

When i find someone to be gay/lesbian, if they are good looking my first thought is thats a shame.
I do tend to find lesbians less attractive than stright girls. If i fid out someone is lesbian it kind of puts me off of them sexually.

Now gay blokes, i aint attracted to. Or straight blokes for that matter as im straight myself. However if a straight bloke is foud out to be gay im just like eh less competition for me lol