From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Clay Remembers Rob
Date: 19 Aug 92 15:34:28 GMT
Article-I.D.: macc.1992Aug19.153428.11760
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison


A nonanonymous posting from Clay Bond:

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I will leave the sentimental platitudes, so ghastly and moribund
in themselves, to those who dote on them.  Whatever sentimental
feelings I have I will keep as mine.  Someone who helped me,
befriended me, someone who earned my respect has died, however,
and I am obligated to break my silence.

I have too many photographs, so many that there are piles of them
and finding one would be such a nightmare that I leave them to
collect dust.  There are, however, a few which I keep at hand,
photographs of events and people dear to me.  One of these is of
Rob, Owen and Mick, taken at Rob's ranch on a Fourth of July some
years ago; another is of Rob on another hajj to Mt. Diablo.

In the summer of 1987 during my stay at Stanford, the summer in
which I met Jack Kouloheris, I met Rob one evening at the Rawhide.
I was waiting for someone there, and a Stetson-clad man sat down
next to me, introduced himself by first name, and started talking
to me.  He invited me to his home, and I would have liked to have
gone, but I could not, as I was waiting for a friend.  He stayed
and we talked for a while, but he was in search of a calf to rope,
I was unable to cooperate, and we parted ways.

Rob was the second net.persona I had e-met, some months before we
encountered each other at the Rawhide (Henry Mensch was the
first).  Here at IU, they had a mystifying newsreader called news
(if they did have rn, they did not publicize it) and although I
had figured out how to send email to someone who had posted, I had
not yet been able to post.  I sent email to a Rob Bernardo in
response to an article he had posted on sci.lang.  We began our
correspondence, at first linguistic, then broadening in topic as
we began to probe each other--and discovered we were both queer.

Two years after the Linguistics Institute at Stanford, Xopher and
I vacationed in the Bay.  Among many other people during that
visit (Roger Klorese, Harry Ugol, Jeff Dauber, Owen Rowley and
STella, to name a few who gave me great joy while there) I met
Rob, the man with whom I had, in some very important ways, so much
in common.  We arranged to rendezvous (ironically) at the Rawhide
in the back by the jukebox, which was exactly where we had
encountered one another before.

The meeting was somewhat awkward.  We met, and then went out to
eat, but instead of the usual "you're not what I imagined you to
look like at all" there was a sense of deja vu.  While sensuously
rolling a bite of enchilada around in my mouth, I realized where
we had met, and with that, the slight tension evaporated.

Rob and I spent long hours talking about many things which most
non-linguists find most dull, if not absolutely bizarre, as well
as things that were not linguistic in any sense, save that we were
talking about them.  He was one of the few people on motss
actively interested in the semantics and connotations of words,
and the relationship between those meanings and attitudes.  Such
discussions were to be found on motss, and in fair frequency, but
only with regard to certain groups; a curious silence was the
response when the same ideas and analyses were applied to certain
words and groups, and Rob and I discussed and debated these ideas
and analyses even more avidly in person than we had been doing in
email.  It was Rob, more than anyone else, who encouraged me to
look at heterosexism using the tools of feminist sociolinguistic
analysis as my model -- and it was Rob who supported me the most
when I was ludicrously labeled "misogynist" for identifying the
inherent heterosexism of the language of feminism.

Among all those I knew on the net and in some ways felt close to,
Rob Bernardo had no peer.  Rob was the only person who recognized
my hand behind a couple of anonymous articles, and immediately.
He once emailed me a text he had downloaded from a private BBS,
one which he had never seen anywhere else, and asked me if I had
written it (even though it was attributed to someone else).  He
was correct; I had written it, and posted it several years before
on yet another BBS.  Rob knew, not because he had seen many
screens of my writing in private email, on the net, and even on
paper; but because his eye was keen, and he saw the person behind
the mask as easily as most see the mask.

I once told him that he was wasting himself programming, that
linguistics would be vastly improved by a mind and eye as sharp as
his.  He said, quite uncontroversially, that the jobs (and pay)
were much better in programming, and we left it at that.  He was
wasted, though.  Linguistics (and by extension, the world) lost a
great mind; I lost a man I trusted and admired, and was proud to
call my friend.  I missed him when he became ill, I miss him now,
and I will continue to miss him, along with many others I knew
who died, senselessly and unfairly, of this plague.  Were someone
to gas the Houston Astrodome and rid the world of those who
publically proclaim that Rob and others like him died of their
own "immorality", it would not be vengence enough for the death
of one so trustworthy as Rob, or the loss of what he was and
might have become.

He is not dead here.  He is, in a metaphysical sense, part of me,
and he always will be so.  His criticism, support, fantasies,
likes, and dislikes will always be here, in some corner ready to
emerge when provoked, as he was on the net, because I admired him
and held his thoughts and ideas, from pornographic to political,
as precious gifts that, for some strange reason, he gave me.  And
I wish I could visit him the next time I am in the Bay.

There is nothing else to say, as I have already come dangerously
close to decending into meaningless sentimentality.  Another
light as been snuffed out while an apathetic, if not evil, god
reigns over his willing, murderous slaves.  Requiem in pace.

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-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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