levasseur@morgan.DEC (12/19/84)
Funny Homophobe Tales to Share
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Over the years I've come to wonder about these guys who rant and rave
about *queer* this and *faggot* that. They seem to have an obsession with
us. I'm not grouping up all homophobes into this category but from my days
in Psych 101 I learned that the fear or obsession masks the desire, Hmmmm!
Before I came out I was one of the biggest Homophobes going. I had a fist
fight with a guy I knew to be gay (he beat the hell out of me). What I later
realized was I wanted *HIM*. I know that there are people who just hate gays
with no hidden motives, just media, family and peer programming. I grew up
hearing the same "Tales of Terror" about what *they* did with each other. I
grew up believing that *queers* were these perverted, twisted little men in
trenchcoats who lured little boys out of school yards with bags of candy or
of the drag queens. I heard my family talk about what friends saw when they
ventured into the local gay bar. "I'm not kidding Claire, I saw these two
guys doing it to a 15 year old boy, right on the dance floor. God! I had to
fight 10 of them off in the men's room. One of them was screwing a dog in the
parking lot". These are all things I heard and believed; no wonder I was a
Homophobe until I went to the bar in question myself. Geeee! I was kind of
disappointed at what I saw. I was expecting something right out of a Tijuana
bar but saw just a normal buch of men and women talking, dancing; nothing
more. I wasn't even approached!
That's all history. What I want to share are some funny things that I saw
while in college. I attended Lowell Tech, now the University of Lowell. Low-
ell is a mill town about 26 miles out of Boston and boasts a wide diversity
of ethnic backrounds, rednecks, outlaw motorcycle clubs, etc. Oh well enough
about Jack Kerouac's "Strange Dark Lowell".
I was a brother at one of the school's frat houses when I came out. The
brothers from the houses regularly drove out to the local gay bar to hassle
the fairies whenever they could. This was an obsession with some of my frat
brothers (there's that ugly word *Obsession* again). I'de hear them come back
to the house drunk; bragging about how many faggots they messed up. I also
saw a few of their cars in an infamous roadside rest area on quite a few occ-
asions (not for fairy busting either). One day I was curious and parked in
the rest area to walk in the woods. I saw one of the jocks laying on his
stomach another guy on top (I won't go into any further detail). Uh! huh.
This same guy was a very vocal fag hater on campus.
A friend of mine returned to his dorm room to find his roomate in bed with
another man (his roomate was another fag basher). My friend's roomate requ-
ested a room change post-haste and threatened to kill my friend if he ever
told about what he saw.
In my frat house it was common knowledge that a few guys in the house slept
together when they struck out with the girls. These same dudes went to the
local bar to bust heads on weekends. A few friends and I started our own lit-
tle "Gay Student Union". We were the laughing stock on campus but were dis-
creetly propositioned by the jocks more than a few times. Kinda makes me won-
der about some of these guys; where their heads are really at.
In the first company I worked for after college, my boss was a real jerk.
He was always badmouthing women, blacks and especially gays. He knew I was
gay and the subject never came up until one night when I went out drinking
with him (Ah! alcohol brings out one's true colors). He told me I had a cute
ass and asked me home. I said "ARE YOU FOR REAL!" I didn't take him up on
his offer and was warned (threatened) not to say a word about this at work.
I wonder if anyone has any other funny little stories to share out there
in motss land on this subject.
"Today's Trade is Tomorrow's Competition"
Rayrrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (12/21/84)
A good friend of mine, a New Yorker, met one of his lovers years ago in Boston (no, it wasn't me!): he was strolling through Bos- ton's Combat Zone (the local redlight district: small, grimey, & violent) one night and approached a rather hostile-looking black man sitting on the hood of a car. My friend said "Hello." And thereby began a long relationship. Up til then the guy used to hang out in the Zone to beat up gays. Why didn't he beat up my friend. "No one ever said hello to me before," he explained. Macho football players at local colleges (Tufts, Harvard, BU, Northeastern, you name it) used to consistently pick up a really outrageous and flaming quean I knew in the 70s: the athletes enjoyed being penetrated anally, to the point of obsession: it got tedious so my friend started refusing offers after a while. I don't think all of the jocks were necessarily gay or even bi- sexual, but simply wanted relief from the straitjacket of hetero- sexual myth & rite. One more item about sexual appearance vs. reality: I remember reading about the results of a survey done in the Bay Area in the late 70s. Brothels in the East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley etc.), of which there are more than a few apparently, were canvassed about the sharp rise in S & M demanded by heterosexual male customers of the ladies. The ladies wearily reported that the clients only wanted to be M's and be humiliated & abused: tied up, beaten, insulted, dominated, etc. The clients were typically aggressive high-power upper management types, happily married & with promising careers, who had large numbers of people under for them. Happy Holidays, Ron