wdc@mit-eddie.UUCP (William Cattey) (06/14/84)
Hello! The last time I submitted to net.motss was in January, just after getting a job at BBN. That was when I cast off my pseudonym of Felix and introduced myself as Bill Cattey. Since then I have watched net.motss submissions slow down to a trickle, and then come back to a comfortable stream. I like the way net.motss seems to have a small number of articles all of which I feel like taking the time to read. I confess that I have unsubscribeed to net.singles because I found myself skipping over ALL the articles. My thanks to everyone who submits to net.motss for somehow keeping the newsgroup trim and interesting. My submission (which will be a long one in keeping with my tradition) begins a new topic. I will be looking at two questions I hear a lot and used to ask a lot: "Is he cute?" and "Is he gay?" It struck me as odd that whenever someone would tell me about someone I had not met, the first two questions I would ask were "Is he cute?" or "Is he gay?". I noticed that I chose to ask these two before asking such things as where the person lived, what they did for a living, what sorts of things they liked to do. I concluded that, since these other two questions were the ones I asked first, they must be important to me. Cute and gay, are the central ideas in these important questions. Yet when I thought a little more, I realized that I didn't know what I really meant when I said gay and when I said cute. What is going on here? I am asking first and most often about two ideas I don't even have clear in my mind! As an experiment, I stopped asking those questions for a while. Instead, I asked more specific questions, trying to find one that felt like it was addressing the real issue. I remember one situation particularly vividly: I was thinking about a person on the other side of the room. I kept asking myself "Is he gay?" and then asking myself what did I mean by "gay", and why was it important to me that he be gay. After a while here is what I found out: I had used the words gay and cute to express two complicated masses of feelings and ideas. They were indeed important to me. I had to sort them out before I could communicate them to anyone else, or even understand them myself. The sorting out began. I started by noticing that if I were to ask someone, "Are, you gay?" the answer I got back would not answer the question I really wanted to know about them. I also noticed that cuteness was closely tied to the first impression I would get of someone. Although I will continue to refine and sort out these two masses of ideas and feelings, I have reached some major conclusions: What I mean by gay and by cute is not the same thing as what most other people seem to mean. I have been with people who wear the label gay who are not what I was looking for when I said gay! Others who are physically attractive, are not my idea of cute! Last week I stopped asking "Is he gay?" because I realized, that for what I was looking for, the right "strait" person would "make an exception". Some of them have. I discovered that I had become afraid of asking people who wear the label "strait" if I could love them. I found out (painfully) that it was easiest to have sex with gay men, and then to have sex with strait men, and then much much harder to be able to exchange feelings with either a gay or strait man or woman. When I asked "Is he gay?" I wanted to know if it was safe for me to let my emotional guard down in the presence of the person. Someone cute turned out, for me, to be someone I felt an emotional and physical attraction to. Many of them turned out to be physically attractive, but few of them turned out to be safe for me to let my guard down to. It is said that "Gays are obsessed with physical beauty, and youth". There seems to be much confusion about gay relationships. Are gay people more or less cruel? What is the meaning of sex to gay people? Who are gay people anyway? I think that insight into these questions may come from thinking about questions like "Is he cute?" and "Is he gay?". Bill Cattey wdc%mit-eddie@mit-mc wcattey@bbnf ...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!wdc