To the editors:
Other groups can take a lesson from us in setting up more opportunities for winners. We have at least two of everything, besides overlapping political groups which only exist to give more people a chance. We have two sporting leagues, two choruses, three weekly newspapers, even two little writers’ groups and two different Roman Catholic worship groups! Some of these were started because somebody didn’t get to be a big enough queen in one already existing. Still, the more the merrier. But we can take a lesson in turn from THE successful group in our culture: white hetero males, the supposed ENEMY of all minorities. Apparently, unlike the people in the minority movements, hetero white males can SUSPEND the general tendency to shoot one’s fellow human being down long enough to prevail! It must have something to do with male bonding, and ought to be looked into. At any rate it is these hetero men who actually achieve the highest queenhood in terms of honors and material rewards.
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The writer of the article gives the owner’s age too (as he estimates it, anyway), which is a queenish attack (and swinish) and taken as such by gay readers. Another example of bitchiness is the author puts in that Gay Chicago magazine won one of the disputed awards, “though the magazine is a for-profit business.” Some profit! It provides salaries for the people that work there all day, which includes the owner, none of whom are driving around in limousines, vacationing on the Riviera, buying BMWs, or offering stock in this “for profit business!”
Lewis F. Allerton
That point aside, I am troubled by some of the attitudes expressed by “Mr. Allerton” (since the return address on his letter is fictitious, I assume the name is too). His assumption that only disgruntled, resentful “queens” would question the Hall of Fame reflects an uninformed view of gay people’s diversity of opinion. (Most of the dissenters I cited had made their dissent known fairly publicly before nomination forms were even distributed, let alone before the Hall of Fame inductees were announced.) His 10 percent versus 90 percent argument smacks of ghettoization–after all, the city-sponsored Hall of Fame is paid for by the taxes of 100 percent of us, in a time of exceptionally shaky public finances. And only someone who still buys into the antiquated, homophobic notion of gay men as youth-obsessed would perceive a reference to someone’s age as an “attack.”
