Erminia Passannanti wrote:

> >In fact, all this discourse about the arrogance of the white male in gay
> affairs . . .

> >when a white male chooses a non-white counterpart it is most of the time for
> being sodomized not to sodomize,

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You're weirding me out.

When I first began noticing Leo Bersani's name in these posts and what was
developing, I tried to trust that you all must have been joking, and that it
was just a game of raising the pitch of rhetorical exaggeration to more and
more untenable levels into caricature, back to the joke of Brecht's posthumous
poem, as a sort of in-the-know masquerade, --- irony, --- where enlightened
people will pretend to be crude as a way of further magnifying crudity's
wrongs.

. . . But now I see you all (PoetryEtc) are quite sincere in this
Louis-Ferdinand Céline Brown Shirt-ism you're writing.


When the "son of genet" posts came through a couple of months ago, filled with
bizarre, scatological imagery about homosexuality, I back-channeled the
moderator and objected to --- or expressed my astonishment at --- the list's
entertained welcome of that sort of hate.  I gave up when I realized the
moderator was impervious to seeing homophobia as homophobia, as long as it was
coming from a colleague and all within the liberal coalition.

I had already had the same experience with Gary Sullivan and company over
Jacque Debrot's similar hate literature, only to find that the self-styled
liberals there were incapable of insight and finding anything wrong in their
cohort.

In that early case (Sullivan/Debrot), I came to feel that I was up against
something more like their "criminal insanity", a constitutional, psychological
disability to tell the difference between right and wrong.

Since then, though, there've been other surprises: in the US, there was a big
ad campaign for a new television series, ~Smallville,~ about Superman's teen
years in Kansas.   I never really was able to decode, visually, what I was
looking at in the still ads: a bare chest, yes, a red squiggle . . . and had to
be told.  In the opening episode, high school boys took friends out into a
field and hanged them like scarecrows from barbed wire fences, stripped them
bare-chested and painted Ss on their chest.

What was even more chilling was that the (heterosexual) who recounted this
reported it as somewhere between neutral and good television.

As soon as a gay man spoke to me about ~Smallville,~ the recognition was as
immediate as mine: Mathew Shepard, the gay male who was strung to an outdoor
fence in Kansas (or thereabouts) and left to die, one recent murder that
recieved great national attention.

Chilling, because of the total ~obliviousness~ or blindness of the heterosexual
to what he was describing, what it ~has~ to evoke in the recent American memory
bank, and chilling that TIME-Warner, the owner of the series, could be
distributing this as a harmless sci fi the audience was ~supposed~ to let pass.



Gradually, it's becoming undeniable, for me, that there's been a ~licensing,~
somehow, of homophobia among liberals, and that that impunity runs especially
high throughout the on-line poetry communities.

In Erminia's case, it's sort of inassailable, because "she" uses false names
on-line, so there's no saying who, where, why is behind that e-mail address.

But I would have thought the "public record" nature of lists would have kept
some sort of inhibiting cap on the hateful fantasias you bubble over with.
They say: a little education is a dangerous thing.

No wonder "evil" has to be defined.  There's no intuitive sense of right and
wrong demonstrated.


You're scary.