From: amz@iguana.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arnold M Zwicky)
Subject: Re: resonances
Followup-To: soc.motss
Summary: moral purposes
Organization: outil, lsa, osu, stanford,...
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 12:55:39 GMT

in article <1992Jul28.060025.23824@reed.edu> nelson@reed.edu (really
tall nelson minar) writes:

 >...I've known for a while that a
 >disproportionate number of community volunteers are family, but does
 >anyone know why there's an apparent bias towards deaf communication?

i brought this question up on soc.motss a couple of years ago, after
some discussion i'd had with an asl-linguist friend of mine, who
observed that lesbigay people were involved in sign classes,
translation, etc. *way* out of their proportion in the population (his
off-the-cuff estimate was around 50%), and so were jews (he's
straight, but jewish).  there was general agreement that lesbigay
people and jews feel some kinship with the deaf, but that observation
alone doesn't explain the size of the phenomenon.  (it is not uncommon
for lesbigay community groups to sponsor classes in sign, a fact that
strikes your typical straight hearing person as bizarre and
incomprehensible.)

it could be that there *is* no deep explanation beyond that sense of
kinship.  that is, it could be that while this combination of traits -
being lesbigay and working with sign - makes a lot of sense after the
fact, nothing necessitates the connection, which is just the one out
of many possible such connections that happened to click, to become a
kind of standard.  (it is well known that many times standards - or,
for that matter, fashions - crystallize largely by chance; indeed,
there are many circumstances in which the "winner" in a competition
between organisms is not in any sense the best one, but is only the
one that happened to get some small momentary advantage by historical
accident.)  perhaps if it hadn't been for the historical accident that
lesbigay liberation movements and the deaf advocacy movement arose
about the same time, from very different sources, it would be refugee
work or volunteer work in public parks and gardens or whatever that
attracted family in extraordinary numbers.

what seems to me to cry out for explanation is the first observation
nelson made, that lesbigay people are disproportionately represented
in volunteer work generally (and not just in political work or
activities like those connected with aids, which could be viewed as
self-serving).  remember that we are regularly accused of being
sexually obsessed, self-involved, and separatist.  yet there we are,
teaching esl classes to refugees, working in adult literacy programs,
maintaining public green spaces, reading for the blind, and so on, in
such numbers that (with a few notorious exceptions, like the boy scouts)
volunteer organizations are pretty good places for meeting family.
(certainly jacques, who fills his years of disability retirement with
various kinds of volunteer work, notes that there's always plenty of
family around.)  i think it is quite remarkable that a group of
people who have every reason to reject the values and practices of
the larger society around them are nevertheless infused with more
than their share of commitment to community service.

some years ago i also remarked on two other expressions of this kind
of moral purpose in the lesbigay world: the extent of principled
vegetarianism among lesbians and (until the appearance of aids)
the commitment of so many gay men to donating blood on a regular
basis.  again, there might be no deep explanation for why these
moral acts, and not some other candidates, became typical expressions
of concern for the larger community.  but the real point is that
these *are* expressions of moral concern.

(please do not follow these remarks up with anecdotes about particular
dykes and faggots who are perfectly selfish shits, and don't bother
to tell us if *you* think that the rest of the world can go fuck
itself, you're just gonna look out for yourself and maybe your kind.
we're talking groups here, and averages; the fact that there are
plenty of people off at one tail of the distribution isn't relevant.)

arnold (working just as hard to reclaim the word MORAL as he is
         to reclaim the word FAGGOT)
Newsgroups: soc.motss