Date: Sat, 13 Dec 1997 17:51:25 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: M-TH: lesbian invective


Thought this might liven things up a bit....

Doug

----

>Date: Sat, 13 Dec 1997 14:39:56 -0500 (EST)
>From: Jeanne Bergman <jbergman-AT-dti.net>
>To: Multiple recipients of list <aidsact-AT-CritPath.Org>
>Subject: Larry and Lesbians
>
>I am SO glad that Larry Kramer, the same Larry Kramer whose gift to Yale
>(happily refused) specified NOT Gay and Lesbian Studies but only gay MALE
>teachers and gay MALE students with gay MALE writers as their subjects,
>admires my lesbian community and its morals SO much.  And I am SO open to
>hearing Larry berate me and my monogamous little circle of goddess
>worshipping, home-loving wymym for being afraid to stand up to our
>sex-driven, virus-spewing brothers.   Gee, Larry, if we only had your
>courage...
>
>I'm one of tens of thousands of dykes who have long been subjected to
>Kramer's wholesale dismissal and snarling contempt for our AIDS and queer
>activism, for our caring for gay men and others with HIV, and for having
>the nerve to be visible in a domain in which he said we had no right to
>speak or act.  I've also lost so many men--and women--to this epidemic.
>Many of the men we dykes have cared for and buried are the men who helped
>me and other sex-positive women enter (respectfully) previously male sexual
>spaces, who turned their subterranean venues over to us for a night a month
>or a week, and who supported our struggles to expand the visibility and
>rights of sexually active and sex-positive lesbian, bisexual, transgender
>and SM women against the miserably prudish, loom-hugging,
>crib-death-welcoming stereotype of lesbian culture that Kramer suddenly
>celebrates.  It wasn't where or with how many those boys fucked that got
>them infected, and in overwhelming numbers they learned how to remain
>sexually active without infecting others.  Our history with them, not fear,
>and our continued affirmation of a diverse sexual world is why we  joyously
>and furiously stand with Sex Panic! and oppose brutal, homophobic assaults
>on our sometimes shared/always complementary sexual cultures--assaults
>Kramer has the gall to evoke lesbians in condoning.  Most of us are
>theoretically sophisticated enough to know that sexual liberation isn't the
>road to freedon, but we also know that sexual repression--as in police
>repression, not Freudian repression--is the right hand of fascism, and
>Kramer is its pinky ring.
>
>Like so many other misogynists, Larry Kramer can't really conceive that
>women have autonoumous and complex sexual desires, that we could actually
>do dirty things with each other in the absence of men.  That's why after
>years of spitting on us, he's now rehabilitating us as good role models for
>those bad boys at the Bijou.  But lesbians are sexual, and like our
>brothers we need realistic education and strategies for preventing HIV
>transmission, not bullshit moralism from the likes of Kramer.  Like men, we
>have an extraordinary range of desires and experiences; many fewer of us
>have had the opportunity the explore those desires or to feel unashamed
>about our experiences.  Those of us who have--even those of us who now find
>ourselves in intensely committed (but still nasty) pairs--know that those
>desires and experiences are worth fighting for.   Kramer can suck my dick.
>
>--Jeanne Bergman
>
>======================================>Housing Works Inc. - Advocacy Department
>594 Broadway, Suite 700, New York, NY 10012
>http://www.housingworks.org - jbergman-AT-dti.net
>======================================



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