From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: Too straight looking to be gay
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 03:05:08 GMT


In article <1992Aug31.213232.27039@microsoft.com>
bobsarv@microsoft.com (Bob Sarver) writes:

Rod Williams:

>>and if those guys had half a clue between them they'd
>>realize that those same clueless straights will hate them
>>just as viciously whether they're in three-piece gray
>>flannel or a fucking tutu, but thanks all the same...

>Not true.  Not by a long shot.

If you had said "not true in my experience," you might have
something, because your experience in the only evidence you
adduce here, ...

>I might believe this if it had ever happened to me.  Or to
>anyone that I know.  I don't mean to say that every single
>last straight person I have "come out" to was open-minded.
>But I can count the negative reactions on two fingers.

...  but I think there are at least two things to be taken
into account *about* your experience (as reported here).
You've gotten two adverse reactions from straight people
you've come out to.  Out of how many, total?  My point is
that if you came out to 70,000 people (we have the sample at
the ready), some fraction of whom are straight (and posting)
and they (many more than two, surely) had a negative
reaction to you, how would you explain that?  Do you suggest
that would automatically make them closed-minded?

The other issue is arguably more difficult to rationalize
away.  There is this quality in much of what you write that
the world *is* a certain way -- and you seem fairly adamant
about, most of the time -- based on what must be limited
number of cases known to you *directly*.  But there are
reasonably well-established facts that suggest -- strongly
-- the world is some other way from the way you think it is.

You would agree, I suppose, that there are many thousands of
gay-bashings every year in the US (and more elsewhere)?  That
there are suicides and murders because of widespread bigotry?
That some elements of society *foster* this violence?

I have no statistics ready to hand, but I would bet anything
that the cast majority of these victims of bigotry are just
plain folks, quite indistinguishable from you are me.  I bet
almost none of them are in tutus.  One gets up in tutu only
in safe curcumstances, ordinarily.  But people every bit as
respectable-looking (I'm trying to use terms you'll buy
into, just for the point of argument) as you get slaughtered
every day.  I think you have to take that into account,
somehow, even though it hasn't happened to you.

And you don't when you say "not by a long shot."

>The less threatening you are, the less extreme the response
>from others.  I don't know why you struggle to avoid this
>rather elementary principle of human behavior.

Some would say you have the wrong end of the telescope to
your eye.  What's threatening about a tutu?  What's
threatening about a harness?  Intrinsically, absolutely
nothing.  But the *society* that is driven by its collective
insanity to fear something as harmless at that is where the
problem is, obviously.  Do you think it's elsewhere?

Yet you're proposing, looks like, giving in to that
insanity.  For how long?  What happens in the interval?  And
what, really, is gained, and at whose expense?

So I think your "elementary principle" is a long way from
being one.

<> The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small
<> voice' within me. -- Mahatma Gandhi
-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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