hartwell@CSL-Vax.ARPA (Steve Hartwell) (09/17/84)
The issue of sensitivity to special interest groups has been ground
into a fine powder, notably in net.religion and net.women, and does
not need to be rehashed here.
The issue is sensitivity, which you may misunderstand to be acceptance.
This is a special interest group WITHIN the framework of the homosexual
lifestyle, not in defense of it. And particularly not the abusive and
obnoxious baiting of k. arndt.
That arndt is rude and abusive makes his arguments secondary. I just don't
care to respond to the archtypical question "How long have you been
beating your wife?", which leaves no channel open to consider the
possiblility that perhaps I don't beat my wife at all.
And I am not going to respond to the "Whatsa matta, can'tch take it?"
gambit. I put up with this shit all too often as it is, and I do
not want to read it here. So go ahead and label this group "the one
where we all sit around and repeat the [so-called] gay dogma" and leave
it alone. Or shut up and listen for a few weeks. Listen to how gay
men and women respond to arndt's petards, and learn from it. Because
what we had to say was precisely how we feel about his off-centered
gambits: IRRITATED. This has nothing whatsoever to do with an
intellectual response. Some fathead quotes from Masters and Johnson
and he calls it "data", and you are impressed. Well, we live within
this gay framework which arndt is supposedly so well-read on, and we
know infinitely more about it than he ever will, no matter how fucking
logical we would have to be to suit him. Living my life as a gay man
has nothing whatsoever to do with logic, and being asked [baited] into
justifying our lives with logic to you or anyone is YET ANOTHER example
of the straight world telling us how to act in "their" universe.
We don't want to prove that we are 'right' any more than the Creationists
need to; in this sense, we are certainly no better than they. Then,
they are debating with the Evolutionists over an absolutely academic
[historical] issue, while we are living (and loving) today and plan
to continue to do so.
Let arndt do his sniveling elsewhere.
--
Steve Hartwell, Computer Science Lab, Stanford University
{ucbvax,decvax}!decwrl!csl-vax!hartwell, hartwell@SU-Shasta.ARPAnewton2@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA (09/18/84)
There seem to be two schools of response to Ken Arndt's remarkably effective provocations- one is thoughtful and sometimes includes rueful acknowledgment of his sometimes-telling sallies, as well as rising manfully (whoops..) to the forensic challenge. The other is response is typically just wild-eyed apoplectic maniacal sputtering. ~e I guess I prefer the former style, both intrinsically and because it inspires more confidence in the worth of the rejoinder. I hope and trust that Ken Arndt (curiously well-read in a [pardon me] discipline he rejects) still lurks beyond the campfires of the newsgroup and will continue his occasional hyena raids. Maybe if folks toss him some meatier rhetorical bones he can be domesticated into MOTSS best friend over time. At least he writes amusingly, shockingly and well.