speakman@mprvaxa (10/21/83)
The author of the remarks from guest@sfucmpt has demon-
strated that, the technological conceits of the net notwithstand-
ing, a washroom stall can be erected around any forum, allowing
the patrons furtively to spatter their ignorance and hatred upon
its walls and slip away undetected, never having been exposed
with their intellectual (if not actual) pants down. This stuff
is venom, glandular in origin and requiring periodic venting; we
can expect more of it.
It is also instructive. Our anonymous vandal enunciates
three now classic tenets of the hard-core homophobe :
- Sexism. "One man, one woman", the order of the subjects is
not incidental.
- Equation of promiscuity with the *cause* of disease. The
insidious shift from the term "spreads" to "causes" is par-
ticularly pertinent in the discussion of AIDS where the
equation is extended on the l.h.s. to include homosexuality
itself and then, by the transitive property we have ...
(left as an exercise; the argument should be familiar by
now).
- Fear and loathing of same-sex sex.
To my mind this last is the hardest nut to crack. Coming out,
however daintily done, is fundamentally and irretrievably a sex-
ual declaration. And the imagination of same-sex sex is, for
many people, a private chamber of horrors and the source of much
of the vitriol reserved for lesbians and gay men. Before this
will change, the imagination at large must become educated and
supple enough someday to embrace images and dreams of homosexual-
ity and trade in them freely to dispel the squalour in the hearts
and minds of folks like guest@sfucmpt.
But how can this be accomplished? And by whom? Certainly
not the anonymous guest@sfucmpt. How about the anonymous box
9294 or box 8595 or box 1417?
Tony Speakman @ MPR, Burnaby, BC, Canada.laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (10/25/83)
Well, part of the trouble is terror (I like the private chamber of horrors) of same-sex sex, but of sex itself. The old idea that sex is nasty, terrible, sinful and wrong is rather well entrenched even among people who claim to be liberated. There are 2 extremes which you can find in any goup of 5 or more (randomly selected) people, as far as I know. One is "sex is so bad and horrible that we really shouldn't do it" and the other is "well, if they say its so bad, then it must be real good so i want lots and lots of it!". The strange thing is that these 2 camps, all the while, incite each other on. The more people who find the thought of sex somewhat deadly or repellent the more other people will thinkt hat it must be a commodity that they should get more and more of. And by the time these latter souls have discovered that "to hell with relationships, there is nothing in life but sex" then they have pretty well justified the first groups claim about how terrible and impersonal promiscuity makes you. And the cycle goes on, and on, and on... Meanwhile the whole society gets sex on the brain. And people like advertisers encourage it. Sex gets mixed up with love, and power, and responsibility, and counteless other things to the point where i am sure that archeologists digging up Western Society 3 millenia from now are going to be convinced that our whole lives were expressions of sex and sexuality. And still we cannot talk about it! Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura