On Wed, 19 Dec 2001 16:13:46 -0500, Jeffrey Jullich <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
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.
Let's not be inexact, Jeffrey: I myself am a communist, as several times I
have stated, and I am NOT a liberal. Neither do I wish to allow anybody ,
for your knowledge, to tell me that I belong to any "dark shirt-ism", since
in fact I belong to a red-shirtism, if this information is of any help to
you.
I would never commit the error to distrute dark-shirti-sm epithets "a
destra e a manca" to whoever passes by). When it comes to politics, people
might have, as I have, strong views on it.
As an Italian, and as a writer, I can accept jokes, and irony, (I make it,
I take it, fine!) , and I certainly welcome the grotesque as I welcome
Backtinian attitudes ( of the Carnival-esque kind), BUT by no means I
would stand or accept manoeuvres to mis-represent my political views.
Those views, for me, came before my poetry. Those views, for me, represent
my ethics.
I hope I been explicit enough.
And I am also sure the people involved in this list hold several (many)
different political perspectives and belong to no coalition (unless you are
too part of it, without knowing...) . This is not a massonic lodge. We have
pluralism, here, and people to me seem to respect it fine, up to now.
Regards, Erminia
>
>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.
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