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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!tektronix!uw-beaver!ubc-visi!mprvaxa!speakman
From: speakman@mprvaxa
Newsgroups: net.motss
Subject: On remarks from guest@sfucmpt
Message-ID: <338@mprvaxa.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 21-Oct-83 10:53:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: mprvaxa.338
Posted: Fri Oct 21 10:53:05 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Oct-83 01:22:37 EDT
Organization: Microtel Pacific Research, Burnaby BC
Lines: 66






          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.