From: rsr@soda.berkeley.edu (Roy S. Rapoport)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Role Models (was Gay Homophobia)
Date: 22 Aug 92 17:53:09 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley, CS Undergraduate Association
NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu

In article <1992Aug22.170312.37756@watson.ibm.com> jakec@ralvmm.vnet.ibm.com (Jake Coughlin) writes:
->for one, the masculine gays, poor dears, who are so pitifully
->and hopelessly locked in that closet, to which sarver himself
->has hidden the key where you will never find it, ie up his butt,
->need to see that they can be gay without becoming (gasp) nelly
->(only jess could have said it better, btw).  think of it, my
->good friends, Instant Nelly, the breakfast bar.  second,

Hmm ... are you disputing this?

I'm not saying either of you is wrong ... I can only offer my own personal
experience and tell you that that is something I'm very concerned about with
regards to myself ... I find myself watching this part of myself very
carefully ... It's probably not very rational, I'd agree.  But for me, it is
a concern.  And, to be honest, considering the huge number of people out
there, I'm willing (quite easily, in fact) to admit I may be in the extreme
minority in this, but i doubt I'm alone.

->exist.  sound confusing?  it's really quite simple.  look at
->your role model and determine the role not the model.  learn
->humor from dana carvey.  learn ambition from madonna, but for
->queer's sake, don't learn of a fashion from barbara; she's too
->poorly dressed.  and here's where we'll lose sarvart because in
->this context, to learn is to discover in one's self; it doesn't
->mean to acquire.

That's very nicely put, IMHO ... I can very easily agree with that, because
I've thought of who my role models are before, and found that for each part
of myself, there is a different role model ... 

Elf Sternberg is a role model ... I have learned, and still am learning, to
be open and natural and confident about who I am, what I am, and what my tastes
are like ... I don't want to be Elf Sternberg ... I have no need to.  But I
learn from him.

Eric Neville, one of my two best straight friends, is a role model ... I
have learned to be utterly open-minded from him, to accept people, to think
about my actions, my statements, before making them, and to be utterly
non-judgemental, within certain limits (which apparently are pretty wide,
compared to most people).

Richard Stallman is my role model, thought to a much more limited extent
than the first two, because he's a role model in a field that's my
occupation/hobby/career, rather than a field that is a part of myself ...
I'd like, one day, to be as good of a software engineer as he sems to be.

Looking at my three choices now, I realize that the third one seems rather
shallow.  It probably is shallow.  Oh well ...

I don't want to be any of these people ... Elf's pain tolerance level is
extremely high and he's polyamorous, something which I vaguely would like
to be, but am not, and it's not a big thing for me.  Eric is, well, straight
:).  Richard Stallman, to me, has no other dimensions other than the
computer science one, and I have no desire to be *just* a computer
scientist ... 

Is this what you had in mind?

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roy S. Rapoport					rsr@ocf.berkeley.edu
Disclaimer:  "It wasn't me!! Must have been a fake posting or something!! I
              would NEVER say something like that!!"