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Originally Posted by someone123
It seems like people with kids tend to hang out with other people with kids and schooling along with a desire to keep up an ideal peer group tends to sort people into socio-economic silos.
If you are gay there's a whole other set of factors. Most gay male couples do not have kids, and many spend less time around couples with kids or around straight couples. In a larger city it's easy to get siloed off and be around ~90% gay people (or some more specific subgroup) even though they are a small percentage of the overall population. The cultural norms in the gay community are also pretty different (e.g. 2 males much more affectionate with each other, even if it's not sexual, more like 2 females might be in wider society) so once you get used to them it's easy to feel like you cannot be "yourself" in other social settings.
On top of this when you're gay there's a bigger risk some people will be judgemental or even outwardly hostile so interacting closely with random others is higher risk. It's much lower risk than it used to be but it doesn't take much to push people away. As an anecdote that illustrates this, a gay friend told me a story about how some neighbours moved into his building from another country recently. They asked him to come over and answer questions about some basics in terms of getting settled in the city. Everything was 100% friendly but they kept asking him about his wife and they had a giant crucifix up on the wall. He eventually felt uncomfortable and didn't explain that he actually has a husband (well, sort of tried, but they didn't get it or didn't want to get it). If he were straight, he would have integrated more easily into that situation.
Cultural background has an impact on this too. The Canadian-born gay guys with Canadian parents tend to have few family issues and just go do whatever. Europeans are similar. Chinese often have somewhat clueless or judgemental parents (similar to 1980's North America, but maybe with more you-have-to-uphold-your-family-duties type stuff) but not very hostile. Indian and Middle Eastern gay guys are unfortunately more likely to have hostile parents and are often completely closeted, so they can be relatively underrepresented in public social settings.
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My wife and I a have found it extremely challenging to maintain friendships with couples (very approximately) our age who've never had any kids.
It's not that we're those annoying parents who talk about their kids incessantly. We're actually very self-aware socially and almos intuitively adjust our conversation topics based on who we are with - we don't focus on Québécois comedy sketches if in the company of visiting Swedes, for example.
For example, we have a couple who are (or were) dear friends that we've effectively phased out - if we see them once every 3-5 years it's good. I mean, if you're sitting down with friends you've known for decades for 3-4 hours over dinner and drinks, and an hour and a half of that is about their fucking cat and all the adorable things she does, and then every time our kids are mentioned it lasts about 30 seconds before they switch the topic back to the cat or something else... that's not really a satisfying friendship for us.
BTW I don't have anything against pets as we have them and love them too.
But about my kids... they have 90-95% averages in top-10 private high schools, they're polite and accomplished both inside and outside the school milieu. One of them even just got invited to a humantarian project in Ethiopia with Craig Kielburger. (But won't be going.)
I won't rave about them endlessly with my childless friends, but surely they deserve more consideration than a goddamn cat.
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(Risking another admonishment from esquire for bragging! 
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