(Been here before? Wouldn't you rather skip most of this and go to
the mailform? No? OK, you had your chance, turning rant mode on with a clear conscience ...) Maybe
you're reading the name on this profile and thinking "yes! another progressive person I can recruit for my
protest group"? If so, cool your jets, slick. I have little use for liberalism or political correctness.
Let's get something straight. When a man says that he doesn't want to accept backrubs from another man, that's
not homophobia, even if somebody else is self-absorbed enough to think that he has the right to take offense at
that. If a straight guy turns a gay guy down for a date, that's not homophobia, no matter how cute the gay guy
thinks that the straight guy's backside is. When an old roommate of mine started getting death threats because
of his sexual orientation, and our poor excuse for a resident assistant thought that it was funny that somebody
had put a pink triangle on our door (the badge the nazis put on gay death camp prisoners), that was
homophobia. Oh, and for those of you who think that I need to stop being such a grumpy old sourpuss about the subject, let's share a few images for you to enjoy. Yes, there are some subjects on which I have no sense of humor, and don't want one.
A "redneck two-fer", as some would put it; of the two residents in our room, one (me) was Jewish and the other
was gay. I guess the theory was that if my roommate didn't get the reference, I'd be able to explain it to him?
But the worst thing that you could say about the guy was that ... you know what? I can't think of anything bad
to say about him. He was a cool guy, and here he was in this miserable redneck college town, getting threatened
with a hate crime because of something that was nobody else's (expletitive deleted) business. How exactly does
it become an imposition on somebody else if he and his consenting boyfriend choose to pursue a relationship?
However "conservative" the offending parties might have wanted to pretend that they were being, they were being
nothing of the sort. The idea that one is entitled to be left alone in the privacy of one's home lies close to
the core of why this country was founded in the first place; the suggestion that one is not is as un-American
a notion as any that one might ask for.
That's the point of the webring id you see. It's not an affirmation of political correctness, it's an angry
denunciation of something that irritation with PCers can make some of us forget - that sometimes the
"non-mainstream" person is the one who is in the right, and that sometimes we improverish ourselves by
forgetting this. One could note just how restricted a life a Midwestern boy has to live just to avoid
the suspicion that he doesn't like girls. Forget about taking theatre lessons, or admitting that one enjoys
poetry, or acknowledging that one is partially of French (or worse, Greek) ancestry; one isn't even "allowed"
to know how to cook - leaving one on a steady, malnourishing diet of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
when one is between girlfriends and can't afford to eat out. Not that one would ever dare to eat out by
oneself at a place that doesn't serve rib tips, mind you. Or be heard using the phrase "mind you". And
one's clothes had better be faded and shrunken - no "real man" knows anything about some "effeminate"
thing like "seperating laundry", or "coordinating colors". Or would dream of saying that he's more
interested in listening to Beethoven than in watching the Bears lose again, or ...
The life that one is allowed to live on these terms, just to avoid the fixations of a reactionary bigot,
becomes so constrictive as to preclude, not merely the possibility of an interesting life, but even a
competent one. How stupid does it get? Let me give you an example. I'm bringing some books back to the
library, a good large stack of them, some of them much older than my grandparents, and relatively fragile.
I pick this precious cargo up as common sense would dictate - from below, leaning the stack into me, as
securely as I can transport them now that my usual bag has torn. I get stopped. "Joe, you aren't going
to carry them like that, are you?", I get asked. "Uh, yeah, why not?", I respond. Somebody explains to
me that I mustn't do that, because boys carry their books by their sides, under their arms; the way I
was carrying them was 'girly'. "Uh, if I do it that way, they'll come tumbling out. I have too many
books for that". Doesn't matter, as far as our nosy friend is concerned. The one right way is the one
right way, and I'd better start doing it that way if I don't want people to talk, I'm told, by somebody
who seems greatly upset that I've started ignoring him.
"Blow it out your a**" doesn't even begin to cover this one. What we are asked to give up, for the sake
of proving our manhoods to this reactionary crowd, is much the same as what their politically correct
counterparts on the Left expect us to give up - the capacity to be anything more than an automaton, with
all decisions down to the tiniest detail made for us by convention. We are asked to give up our sense of
initiative, our minds and ultimately our souls, and in either case based on the same bad premise - that
the responsibility for a bad attitude lies with the one that it is directed against, not with the one holding it.
Have I wandered off the topic into a pet peeve? Not at all. To the amusement of people like Mr.Cherry,
I have observed that while "my own personal ox is not the one being gored" when the Gay community is
libeled by such absurd accusations as the one that all homosexuals are pro-pedophilia, I do take it
personally because it's clearly morally wrong for one person to defame others in such coarse terms,
and because when my friends are attacked, I should take that personally. Much snickering then will
often follow, usually from the aforementioned willfully malnourished people in ill coordinated clothes.
"So, you are gay?" No, but I find the lack of emphasis on mindless notions of what masculinity should
be more than slightly refreshing and oh, by the way, so have my girlfriends, none of whom seem to have
had any problems with the fact that I was able to clean my own home without adult supervision.
My interests are mostly found in the arts and sciences, in areas that don't fit into stereotyped ideas
of what the male sex role should be. Heterosexual males, often intimidated by those ideas, will often
back away from those interests; homosexual males seldom seem to care, and good for them. Their
indifference to this mindless fashion opens doors for them that those who feel that they have
something to prove often close for themselves, quite foolishly. As for myself, I'd rather live
life as a man than as a robot, and if that should mean than unusually many of my friends should
turn out to not share my sexual preferences, so what? That's the significance of that Webring ID
- not in what I seek, but in what I have the sense to not throw away.
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Why a contact form, instead of just leaving the ring open? Largely because this is 2005,
instead of 1995. At the time of this writing, I don't even know if Mr.Cherry is still alive.
His has sort of descended into the category of stories that can be amusing to tell, but still
carry a more than slightly disturbing undertone. A thinking individual, I would say, would have
to be bothered by the thought that not only would Fred accuse somebody of things as hateful as
Naziism and support for child molestation for no better reason than their sexual orientation
or lack of support for a very questionable political cause (the legalization of prostitution),
but that he could find so many who were so willing to go along with that. That's something that
a lot of us badly need to think about, because the implication is that a lot of the enlightenment
and acceptance out there is a mirage, more perhaps than even one's native cynicism might lead one
to expect. That thought, however, is not going to bring new applicants in by the busload, which
is why this mailform is needed.
Realistically speaking, Mr.Cherry is not the hot button topic that he was during his heyday in
the 1990s, and applications to join this ring are going to be spaced far apart. Checking in once
every two weeks for applications which might arrive once every two years is going to get old after
a while, but so would having ringcode in place, and not hearing back about one's application for
a few months gets fairly old, too. The solution to this problem that I'm going with is to say
"if you want to join, please contact me, and ask me to open the ring for you", and that's what
this form is for - helping us to manage to be in the same place at the same time.
Before we continue, let us understand each other clearly. When I decided to not give the Halls
of Eternal Disbelief a guestbook and didn't put any mail links on that site, that wasn't an
accident or an oversight, that was a conscious decision and my prerogative. If you use this
contact form in an attempt to get around that choice, making use of a resource put in place
for the convenience of applicants to this ring as if it were a mailform for the Halls, sending
what you know is going to be unwelcome e-mail, I am not going to be a good sport about your
little hack. In fact, I'm going to be downright vindictive about it, starting with a reposting
of your message and address in a location of my own choosing, and maybe using the IP tracing
function and contacting your ISP. The sending of what you could reasonably be expected to know
would be unwelcome e-mail falls under the definition of "harassment" at most ISPs, schools,
businesses and institutions and I will pursue that complaint.
Should you be posting this from work, meaning that your ISP is your employer and that this may
mean that you lose your job, and maybe your kids don't go to college, I hope that you will not
be laboring under the misconception that I'm going to care. You should have thought about that
before barging your way in where you have no business being. To sum up what a lot of us feel in
the wake of the 1990s: "Enough is enough". I'm tired of hearing from loudmouthed, dullwitted
individuals who've decided that they will not be ignored.
That much having been said, if you do have legitimate business with this ring and need to get
in touch with me, feel free to use the mailform below and any messages should get forwarded to me, if for some reason you don't want to sign up for my ring management list, which would probably be the quickest and most reliable way of making contact with me. The graphic
below is fed off the provider of this mailform. If you don't see a Bravenet graphic, their server
is down and you should not attempt to use this form, as your work will go to waste if you do.
Some of the images on this former Webring.com profile are being hosted for free on TinyPic, ImageSync and AllYouCanUpload.
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