saquigley@watmath.UUCP (Sophie Quigley) (06/25/84)
While you're in a question-from-straights-answering mood Steve (or anybody
else for that matter), I'd like to ask a question that has been puzzling me
for a while.
MY understanding of the lesbian community is that there is a subgroup of
lesbians who choose to be lesbians for "political" reasons. These are
usually women like Ellen who consciously choose to be lesbians because they
think that men are creeps (to put it lightly). From the litterature I've
read by some of these women, the point (or reason or whatever) of this
switch is to rediscover female sexuality which has been buried under male
propaganda of what sex should be like: foreplay + intercourse (+ washing
oneself (-:).
This view of sexuality is usually accompanied by a different philosophy of
how the world should be, a place where caring and emotions are important,
etc.....
It also seems (and here I am not as aware of the actual reality as I am
in the case of lesbians, so correct me if I am wrong) that there is a
subculture in the gay culture which is the complete antithesis of this
lesbian ideal: power is the basis of sex and a great emphasis is put on
anonymousness, sex for sex' sake with no place for feelings, promiscuity
etc (i.e the image that most "straights" have of gays), in other words
everything that political lesbians loathe in "straight" men pushed to its
extreme.
Obviously lesbians and gay men do have common interests since they are
both discriminated against by society at large, so as there is power
in numbers it is in their interest to join forces to try to achieve
better rights in society. However the philosophies of these two
subgroups seem to be so irreconciliable (that of the political lesbians
and of the "promiscuous" (let's say) gay men, not of lesbians and
gay men in general) that I wonder how they manage to work together when
their ideals are so different. I was just curious as to whether this produces
a rift into the gay culture, whether these two subcultures just ignore
themselves except to join forces to get things accomplished, or whether
there is hatred or debating going on about ideals etc.... I have never
seen any mention of this problem anywhere in the lesbian litterature I
have read and I am wondering why. Can anybody enlighten me?
Sophie Quigley
...!{clyde,ihnp4,decvax}!watmath!saquigleywetcw@pyuxa.UUCP (T C Wheeler) (06/28/84)
Sophie is asking the same questions that have bothered me for some time. Would someone please enlighten me? I have seen the same divisions in the Gay and Lesbian communities and I have not been able to understand how the sub-cultures manage to reconcile their differences. Going back to my other submission, and the four groups I have in mind, I guess the third group, the one I babbled about at length, represents this sub-culture that Sophie may have in mind. The sex for sex sake crowd. T. C. Wheeler