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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!cca!emacs!joe
From: joe@emacs.UUCP (Joe Chapman)
Newsgroups: net.motss
Subject: Re: no wonder we look bad
Message-ID: <13@emacs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 11-Feb-86 16:04:12 EST
Article-I.D.: emacs.13
Posted: Tue Feb 11 16:04:12 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Feb-86 17:10:23 EST
References: <500@drutx.UUCP> <515@mhuxm.UUCP>
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Organization: Uniworks Inc., Wellesley, MA
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<>
[ Topic: dirty personals in gay publications and the notion that
this makes us look like sex maniacs. ]

It might be instructive to recall the response of a gay poet to being
called a gay poet: ``What does this mean?  That I like to write about
sucking cock?'' he sputtered.  ``Or is it that I exhibit the infamous
`gay sensibility'?''

Gay people are people who exhibit romantic and sexual attraction to
members of their own sex.  This is the common denominator.  One might
reasonably expect a publication aimed at the gay community to contain a
sexual element, and one might further expect people---gay or straight,
male or female---who advertise in personal sections to employ a subtly
different approach from midwestern teenagers looking for a date for the
prom.

For Christ's sake, I vote in every election, play the organ at church,
give to the United Way, help little old ladies across the street, and do
unusual things with my free time in the evenings, for which latter vice
a majority of the citizens of this Republic would like to see me killed,
imprisoned, quarantined, assaulted, subjected to Freudian analysis, or
pitied.  Guy Hocquenghem and others have pointed out that there has to
be something more than the simple notion of sex between partners of the
same gender which accounts for the absurd reaction of society most of us
have encountered.  I think that to argue that the primary common
identity of gay people is something else is to participate in all of
this madness.

OK, it's good to talk about ``gay issues''---the infringements on civil
rights, the menace of AIDS; it's good to have fun dishing Dynasty; it's
good to patronize gay-owned establishments; it's good to talk about
things other than sucking cock in net.motss.  But it's not good to
forget that gayness is fundamentally sexual, and that the other aspects
we discuss here are a sort of political and cultural accretion.

(Personal note: I'm leaving my company to become a wealthy consultant
like Steve Dyer, and my participation on the net in the near future will
be sporadic at best.  (1) So I've gotten the last word.  (2) It's been
real.)

Joe Chapman			-- "We were kids.  It was too early in
cca!joe	(pro tem.)		    the cultural matrix for actual
				    screwing."