tag@ucbvax.ARPA (Todd Gross) (12/09/84)
I have seen that there are people who question the nature of homosexuality. Personally, I like to compare it with left-handedness (of which I happen to be both). Both of these traits are apparently with us from birth (that is, congenital). And both ARE changeable; that is a person born with left- handedness CAN learn to be right-handed, and a person born with tendencies toward homosexuality CAN become heterosexual. But neither of these pro- cesses is natural, and the foisting of the desired trait (right-handedness, hetersexuality) often results in abnormal phobia. In the first case, the result is known as levophobia--literally, a fear of the left. People with this condition are afraid to make left-handed turns, etc. In the second case, the cdondition is called homophobia, and I'm sure we all know some- thing about this one. You might think it strange to compare the two, but in ancient Greece and Rome the left side of a person was considered to be evil (thus we get the word sinister, the Latin word for left). And in Victorian England chil- dren who were left-handed sometimes had their left hand place in boiling water to make him learn to use his right hand. In fact, a very latent form of "levophobia" exists to this day (When you first learned to dance, did they tell you that you have two RIGHT feet?). Any guesses on the effects of latent homophobia 400 or 500 years down the road? I thank you all... Todd Gross (tag@ucbvax.ARPA)
rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (12/10/84)
In fact, when people talk about manual agility, they say via Latin one has two right hands, the Latin for "right" being DEXTER. Except for my sister, my whole family is left-handed. Lefthandeness was deviant as recently as the preWW II era: my mother was educated by nuns through 8th grade, who discouraged use of the left hand by smashing kids' knuckles with rulers at every infraction. The result is my mother has "two right hands": she's ambidextrous but her handwriting's "terrible", as she describes it. Writer James Baldwin's preacher father thought his son was claimed by Satan because James' hairline was marked by a prominent widow's peak. James was also gay. For years I wasn't even aware the human-made world is set up for righties: I only felt a vague awkwardness when I had to open a door, etc. It must be me, I'm a klutz, I'd think. From the sinister keyboard of Ron Rizzo