rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo) (08/15/85)
In a previous article, on@hpda.UUCP (Owen Rowley) mentioned a lack of on-going discussion in net.motss, and in a follow-up, I agreed and said I would post an article about personal issues in my life as a gay man. This is it. After thinking, I came up with three major personal issues that have to do with my being a gay man on a daily basis. - feeling disenfranchised - AIDS - forming a home with someone I feel incredibly vulnerable about what I wrote below, but what the hell. I feel most vulnerable in front of those people at work that will read this but who I do not know well enough to talk about my feelings with. DISENFRANCHISEMENT I feel disenfranchised as a result of heterosexism. (By 'heterosexism' I mean an unwitting or unconscious assumption on someone's part that everyone is heterosexual and perhaps leads a certain type of life, e.g. marriage, family.) The disenfranchisement I feel does not come from individuals I personally deal with, but more from people at a distance or from institutions. For example, the people at work who I talk with are basically not heterosexist. But the words and actions of coworkers who I do not interact with much, even professionally, sometimes make me feel disenfranchised. Just subtle things in the way they phrase things sometimes. Usually nothing so consciously anti-gay that, if I chose, I could challenge them about. Nobody but me in our office openly gay that I know of. No one to REALLY talk 'sisterly' with. There are a couple three people at work I can sort-of talk with to in the way I would only normally do to another gay man, e.g. feeling comfortable enough to remark how nice it is that there are quite a few construction workers around to look at (the building is half unbuilt). And that comfort came only very recently. Sometimes I feel lonely. AIDS I don't think there has been a single day in the past year or so that I have not thought about, worried about the threat of AIDS. The New York Native (a NY-based gay biweekly newspaper that is national in its scope of news) arrived today and a good quarter of its 60 odd pages is about AIDS. I will go to the gym tomorrow morning. I will see perhaps a little bruise there or a red mark here and the first thing that flashes in my mind is KS, even when I KNOW that I ALWAYS get a little bruise there from horseback riding, and that I ALWAYS have had that little red mark here ever since I can remember. I will effortlessly use the exercise cycle for 20 minutes, but later in the day when I return to my office from lunch and get a little winded going up three flights of stairs while talking at the same time, I wonder if it is pneumocystis. On Friday, Bay Area Reporter, a local gay newspaper, will come out. I will turn to the obituary column with morbid interest. There will be half a dozen photos, mostly of gay men about my age, some of whom I will recognize from the neighborhood, from the gym, etc. Infrequently there will be someone I knew well, a person I once dated, or a roommate I once shared an apartment with. Do you think there's a chance Reagan will get AIDS from the blood (I presume) he got during his polyp surgery? Sometimes I feel terror. HOME I dream of having a home life with another man on a gentleman's farm. Something small but pretty. A few animals - two horses, some goats. Something I think I could afford with another person of the same means. Another gay man who likes country living? Another gay man who likes horses (and that's not just from the other side of the fence)? Another gay man whose boots are not just a part of his "cowboy drag" when he goes out to the c/w bar on the weekend? (And, god, he's got to be intelligent, verbal, and introspective enough to get along with someone who grew up in an upper middle class mainly Jewish suburb of New York, who went to college for 10 years, and who is a computer programmer). Sometimes I laugh! -- +--------------+-------------------------------+ | Rob Bernardo | Pacific Bell | +--------------+ 2600 Camino Ramon, Room 4E700 | | 415-823-2417 | San Ramon, California 94583 | +--------------+-------------------------------+---------+ | ihnp4!ptsfa!rob | | {nsc,ucbvax,decwrl,amd,fortune,zehntel}!dual!ptsfa!rob | +--------------------------------------------------------+
rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo) (09/01/85)
A few weeks ago I posted an article that described three major personal issues that impact me as a gay man on a daily basis. From some of the e-mail I have gotten in response, I believe many net.motss-readers may have misunderstood my intention and I would like to clear up any mis- conceptions out there. The article described my feelings of disenfranchisement from straight people at work, fear of AIDS, and unfulfilled dreams of forming a home with another man. I believe these are quite common issues in the lives of many gay men today. My intent was to document some issues that affect my life on a daily basis in the hope of starting some discussion in net.motss on them. I was interested in seeing how other gay men deal with those issues in their daily lives and perhaps find better ways to deal with them. The article was written in a personal style rather than in a more objective and expository style, and I think that misled some net.motss-readers to take my posting as a desire for support/sympathy. One heterosexual man e-mailed, "What a sad letter. I could sense the hurt over the phone lines." And a gay man e-mailed, "But I just wanted to write ... and say someone out there cares." Oddly enough, there were NO follow ups posted to net.motss. Is that because the three issues presented ARE in fact very common issues for gay men and because they DO NOT HAVE obvious solutions?
sdyer@bbncc5.UUCP (Steve Dyer) (09/02/85)
> Oddly enough, there were NO follow ups posted > to net.motss. Is that because the three issues presented ARE in fact very > common issues for gay men and because they DO NOT HAVE obvious solutions? Well, I posted a brief folloup which got disseminated to at least a few sites. I can send it to you if you like. Regarding disenfranchisement, I agree it can be a very strong feeling, but the only way to deal with it in a business setting without changing jobs is to simply grit your teeth and work past it. That means different things to different people, of course. I just don't let it bother me: comes with the (strait) territory. To be absolutely clear, since Rob posted his message a while ago, I am not alluding to overt discrimination or harassment, but simply the feeling of not sharing in many of the heterosexual assumptions which permeate the workplace. -- /Steve Dyer {harvard,seismo}!bbnccv!bbncc5!sdyer sdyer@bbncc5.ARPA