From: cjmchale@dsg.cs.tcd.ie (Ciaran McHale)
Subject: Re: Hetero/bi/homophobia
Organization: DSG, Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 10:42:22 GMT

In <5495@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> dente@els.man.ac.uk (Colin Dente) writes:
>I find it very difficult not to adopt a bisupremist attitude much
>of the time. [Explanation that a supremacist attitude is a useful way
>of self-defence against 'phobic remarks.]
>
>Please accept this for what it is - an honest statement of feelings,
>and invitation to discuss them - not an attack on monosexuals, or an
>invitation to flame.

I think a supremacist attitude can be an extremely useful tool in
dealing with oppression. The way I think of it is as follows:

	Let's say that a "normal" person has a "normality rating" of
	zero and that society thinks of queers as having a normality
	rating of, say, -10. This negative rating is an indication that
	we are considered to be perverts, evil, <other derogratory
	stereotypes here>.

	So, in order to regain our self-esteem we have to raise our
	rating (in our own minds) back up to 0. One way to help do this
	is for us to claim that we are "better" than "normal" folk. (We
	do this through (1) finding queer role models; (2) rejoycing in
	any positive stereotypes/statistics we might be able to
	find---e.g., on average, queers earn more money than straights
	and we vote more often too; and (3) rejoycing in any negative
	stereotypes/statistics of straight people and/or homophobes we
	can find.) This helps give us an inflated normality rating of,
	say, +10. Having done this, we can then average our two
	normality ratings (the one society gives us and the one we
	manufactured for ourselves) and they tend to average out as
	somewhere close to zero, i.e., "normal."

I certainly went through the above process. That's just my experience
and I don't claim it generalises to other people.

As I indicated, while going through the above process, I found a number
of +ve statistics of queer folk and similarly some -ve statistics of
straight people and homophobes. These snippets of "facts" became firmly
implanted in my mind and have proved to be quite useful when arguing
with phobes.

But I began to realise that I was clinging to the "+10 normality
rating" too much and it was having some undesirable effects on _me_ (I
won't try to claim that these effects will be the same for others too):

	o I was becomming queer-supremacist and this state of mind did
	  not seem to reflect reality. (E.g., if queers are better then
	  straights then why is it that I know of a lot of queers who
	  are total slime?) I was in danger of becomming a bigot.
	o I was applying too many of the +ve queer images to myself
	  personally and was becomming egotistical. I usually walk a
	  fine line trying not to let my ego get too big; applying
	  these +ve images to myself certainly wasn't helping matters.

I think the above helps to explain why I always seem to be jumping down
on anybody who posts a generalisation here on soc.bi. Apart from the
fact that generalisations are _always_ false (including this one?), they
can also be quite damaging. We all know of the sort of generalisations
used by homophobes---gay men are promiscuous, gay men are child
molesters, etc.---and how false/damaging they can be. Similarly, I find
that bi/queer-supremacist generalisations can be damaging _to_ _me_
(because of the likelihood of me becomming a bigot and/or egotistical).
Are bi/queer-supremacist generalisations harmful to other bi-ters? I
dunno. I guess that depends on whether the process I've described above
applies to you, and, if so, just how far along you are in that process.


And now for a random quote...

<> It is astonishing how much energy some people waste worrying that
<> someone else might be enjoying life in ways they don't approve of.
<> --- Kevin Michael Vail

Ciaran.
-- 
Ciaran McHale                                                             ----
Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland.       \bi/
Telephone: +353-1-7021539 FAX: +353-1-772204 email: cjmchale@dsg.cs.tcd.ie \/
Newsgroups: soc.bi