From: amz@iguana.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arnold M Zwicky)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: the main stream
Summary: who is in it?  why does anyone care?
Date: 16 Sep 92 02:11:32 GMT
Followup-To: soc.motss
Organization: earnestly practicing faggots

i read this claim that the main stream of gay people cannot be
expected to have much of a presence here on soc.motss, and i wonder
whether this is true.  i wonder how you'd tell.  who counts as gay for
this census?  everyone who sometimes has a thing (however clandestine)
with a motss-person?  everyone who sometimes fantasizes about or
checks out motss-people?  everyone who identifies themselves to
themselves as gay?  everyone who's come out to anyone else?  everyone
who's come out to almost everyone relevant?  what?

this is like trying to count the grains of sand in a single dune,
while the entire beach shifts and re-forms itself in front of your
eyes.

i dunno, maybe most gay people *are* closeted, so that the posters
to soc.motss are not representative in that respect.  even if so,
it wouldn't mean we weren't representative in other respects.  i have
as much right to claim we are as anyone else does to claim we aren't.

in any case, there are a gezillion readers who don't post, and no one
speaks for them (by definition)...and no one is in any position to
make generalizations about them.  even when a few more post, there
are still tens of thousands not heard from.

who knows what the main stream of dykes is like?  or the main stream
of bisexuals?  or the main stream of faggots?  how many of us work out
regularly at a gym?  play poker?  play volleyball?  are regulars at
the opera?  garden?  drive trucks?  cross-dress?  own and use guns?
cook sichuan?  are pilots?  have cats?  have horses?  like country
music?  speak spanish as their first language?  speak chinese as their
first language?  are into leather?  wear lipstick?  are left-handed?
are black?  do square dancing?  do modern dancing?  follow pro
football seriously?  play touch football?  run in races?  play tennis?
do crossword puzzles?  know who havergal brian even *is*?  like to
listen to ferron?  have children?  want children?  hate children?
teach children?  march in pride parades?  are mathematicians?  play
accordions?  whatever?

no one person, or two or three or ten or twenty, can have *any* sense
of the answers to these questions.  no one speaks for generic gayfolk.
not me, not anyone.  no one is in a position to know what all the
others of us are like.  we all have to speak for ourselves - and *that*
is one of the things soc.motss is for...so we can tell our stories.

but even if somehow we got the view from the eye of the deity, and
really knew what the main stream of gayfolk were like [ok, in
upper-middle-class urban late-20th-century america-and-maybe-some-
similar-places], *who would care*?  what earthly use would it be to
know that only 23% of gay men played poker, whereas 33% claimed to be
opera queens, that 55% of bisexuals had postgraduate degrees, that 64%
of certified lesbians had cats, that 85% of gayfolk generally were
registered democrats, make up any goddam statistics here?  WHAT ARE
WE VOTING ON?

what *is* this...if more than half of "my" group does x, then everyone
should do x?  well, *not ME*, honey!  i didn't take on being queer at
age 4 or 5 (with, i add, the considerable support of my parents) just
to submit to the tyranny of the majority in my 50s.  why should *anyone*
take straw polls of strangers to decide how they should be, what they
should feel, how they should think?

arnold