From: jtn@nutter.cs.vt.edu (Terry Nutter)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: consort gender
Date: 8 Sep 92 16:30:25 GMT
Followup-To: rec.org.sca
Organization: The Rialto

Greetings all, from Angharad ver' Rhuawn.  Thom Watson recently
posted,

>I regret the sarcasm, but I get steamed whenever I hear SCAdians
>appealing to historical accuracy as an excuse for bigotry and
>homophobia. If we recreated the middle ages truly, there'd be an
>awful lot of peasants, and a great deal of women sitting on the
>sidelines doing nothing. It's not an option; why then is relegating
>gay men and lesbians to invisible status sanctioned?

I think you are attacking a straw man.  No one has suggested "relegating 
gay men and lesbians to invisible status", or anything distantly like it.  
No one has said that gay men cannot be King, or lesbians Queen, and no 
one has said they cannot do it openly.  No one has said they cannot have 
their SOs recognized.  This is rather less than homophobia.

The rules say that the person fighting crown and the consort must be of 
opposite physical gender.  Yes, this means that there are couples that
can't rule together (lots of them -- and it is worth bearing in mind that
even among heterosexuals, many ruling couples are friends rather than
sexually-involved pairs, and some _heterosexuals_ might rather rule with a
same sex friend than an opposite sex one; so the ruled-out couples are
not limited by sexual preference), though there is no one in the SCA who
can't rule as part of some couple.  I don't see this restriction as 
necessarily homophobic, any more than it is "arts phobic" to insist that 
at least one of the couple must fight well enough to win a Crown Tourney.

It makes some sense to claim that requiring differently-sexed couples
is in some ways discriminatory; but that is a far cry from homophobia,
let alone bigotry.  When you make the stronger charge, you both insult
people I would have thought were your friends needlessly, and weaken
your argument by making obviously exaggerated and false claims.

Thom also said,

>So there are recorded examples of people fighting each other with
>weapons of rattan and duct tape whilst wearing armor made of plastic?
>In period women regularly fought? Crowns were handed down by right 
>of arm *only* and not by right of birth? Peers were created because
>of their ability to organize tournaments or write prettily? Kings
>and queens became dukes and duchesses after sitting on the throne
>a couple of times?

Hey, why don't we give up garb too, and everything else that has 
anything to do with the middle ages or renaissance, and just get together 
and party down?  Are we to have _nothing_ except a choice of party 
companions in common?  There are many inaccuracies in what we do; and
we can't hope to eliminate them all, and it's not clear that we'd
want to.  But the more we divorce our most central symbols from anything
that has any medieval or renaissance analog, the more we cut into what
little common ground we have.

I like the history, because, for instance, I find real medieval food
neater and better tasting and more fun than "fantasy medievaloid" food;
I love early music, and have few outlets for it elsewhere; I generally
find the reality richer, rarer, and more complex than anything I can
dream up, and so it makes a better game.  But entirely apart from all
this: our fantasies are ultimately solitary things; it is the history
as much as the ideals that holds us together.   We may want to think
about that before applying too readily the rule that "We've already got
bunches of inauthenticities; what's five or six more?"

In Service to the Society,

-- Angharad/Terry
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca