Out in the Mountains

From All Angles: Down for the Count

Hugh Coyle

(Note: This series intends to look at con-
troversial questions _from a number of vari-
ous perspectives,
sometimes not so seriously. Several grains
of salt are recommended before reading.)

Q: How many gay people does it take to
screw in a lightbulb?
A: Who knows? They're so hard to count!

Over the past few months, counting gay
people has become something of a national
obsession. Newspaper reports tout studies
which show that anywhere from one to
twenty percent of the population might be
classified as “homosexual,” while lesbigay
activists and D.C. park officials argue over
whose tallies are more accurate for the
Great March on Washington in April. Our
opponents insist that there really aren't very
many of us, and we shout back that “we're
here, we're there, we're everywhere!”

Let's say for the sake of scientific inquiry
that there really aren't so many gay people in
the general population - like maybe one in a
hundred. This is what various right—wing
conservatives would like John and Jane Doe
to believe. Of course, if John or Jane Doe
were sensible citizens, they'd instantly dis-
miss all the right-wing fuss over gays and
their “agenda” by reasoning that such as
small number of people could hardly pose a
threat to national security. Any group of
people which feels threatened by one per-
cent of the population must be suffering
from paranoid delusions of one kind or an-
other, and we'd have to be rather imbalanced
ourselves to take such claims seriously.

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With this in mind, it would be best for the
conservative n'ght—wing to fully embrace and
even endorse studies showing higher per-
centages of gay people. Such a move would
serve to strengthen the urgency of their call
to arms. Why, Jerry Falwell could triple the
amount of money he's making with the
“queer menace” book if he were to validate
his perceived invasion with charts and sta-
tistics. He could even hire someone like Ross
Perot to present them in provocative in-
fomercials to the American people.

Of course, it's not very difficult to push the
numbers of gay people higher. For starters,
you could look at how various researchers
define the term “gay.” Some so—called so-
ciologists claim that you're only gay if
you've got ten or more years of steady ex-
perience behind you. This leaves out most
of the twenty— and thirty-somethings like
myself who haven't clocked enough hours
to be considered bona fide homosexuals.

Such a statistical fallacy also ignores the
large number of gay and lesbian youth hiding
in fear in our nation's high schools. Studies
have shown that an inordinately high number
of those kids will try to kill themselves in
their teen years as a result of the guilt and
shame heaped upon them by certain seg-
ments of society. Some of these kids will
succeed, and that probably suits the right
wing just fine. It means the numbers of gay
people in society goes down, and that the

hate—filled messages of the religious right are V

getting through effectively.

While we're looking at the morbid side of
things, we could also figure in the number
of deaths attributable to AIDS in the gay
community. This brings up an interesting
irony. Before the onset of the AIDS pan-
dernic, you didn't see or hear much about
gay people. If the disease were indeed a di-
vine act meant to silence the gay com-
munity, it's had the opposite effect. Gay
people are more vocal and visible than ever
before. The fact that more showed up at the

recent March on Washington than ap-
peared in previous marches suggests that
our ranks are growing, not diminishing.

Another easy way to boost the gay count is
to start acknowledging that lesbians exist,
too..All too often these scientific studies
get hung up on men and their sexual hab
its, as if women didn't exist or matter at all.
Has anyone stopped to ask why all these
predominantly male researchers are so ob
sessed with male sexuality? How come no
one seems to care if there's a lesbian rev-
olution in the works? If the right wing
alarrnists knew what was what in the les-
bigay world, they'd know that the women
pose a more serious threat to moral order
in the country. Goddess only knows how
many lesbians there are waiting for the
men to wipe themselves out in the cross-
fire and clear the way for a new, ma-
triarchal order.

In the end, all this talk of numbers obscures
the real issues anyway. Basic civil rights re-
quire no quota for implementation, and nei-
ther do certain special rights. If they did,
you wouldn't see all those handicapped
parking spaces out in front of the grocery
store, would you? Then again, if we follow
the right wing's logic on this, we should just
let the small percentage of people who are
physically challenged fend for themselves.
After all, there aren't so many of them that
we should be worried about their rights, and
it only costs taxpayers money to reserve
those parking spots that decent God—fearing
people could be using instead.

The way I see it, if there were even only
one gay person in all the world, I'd be
among the fust to wish for a partner for
him or her. That's how order and balance
in nature should be understood and main-
tained. From this, we really have but one
lesson to learn: if there's only one thing
which gathers its strength through num-
bers, then let it be love. V

Burlington

Lynn Goyette, M.s.,M.A.
Feminist Counseling & Psychotherapy

Lesbian & Gay Affirmative

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