HIGH GEAR

DECEMBER 1976

Page 16

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POLEMIC

By DAVID AKERS This here's talkin' at some militant fags I know."

Well, my oppressed brother and sister, I have penetrated a devious and remarkable stratagem which has been wrought upon the language. In reaction to the rich and timehonored epithet system devised by our linear cousins, we at last devised our own. For some time, I did not understand why ours lacked a certain fullness of sense. But I come to you now with a possible answer. As ours is received in the market of ideas, the traders of words, laughing, will fall on their faces, and be satori'd miraculously by the equal absurdity of their own epithet system.

So the great us-vs.-them conflagration rages, stoked on the fuel of each side's paranoia. They call us queers, or is it homosexuals, now? and we, the oppressed minority, righteously call them homophobes and heterosexists, hoping that the pseudotechnical ring of such words, adding the authority of science and progress to our rancor, will back them into straits of despair. Yet we remain yoked to our own paranoia and rage, as enslaved by our reaction, as by an oppressor.

The key is reaction. It is just, when oppressed, to react. It is pointless, however, to continue reacting in established, rigid patterns when such reaction is outmoded, or even counterproductive. We, of various liberationist bents, risk such rigidity, and our language reflects it, particularly. Whenever, the ruling gods of psycho-social jargon ordain a new mode of analysis, be it

, racism, sexism, or ageism, the mode is immediately slurped up into whatever epithet system appropriate. It seems almost axiomatic that any such legitimate conceptual tool will be most used by those who would legitimize their own rage, as well. And it is used, and it is used, and used, and used, until the tool has turned the language

over so often that the threads are stripped on both.

Such language is the jargondomain of boarded-up White House, hyperevolved research assistant, or psycho-sociopolitical theorist hack. Words such as sexist, ageist, chair-one, ad nauseum, at best, are coming to signal an authoritarian, paranoid sort of ritual indoctrination; at worst, they sink to a petulant, ad hominem "nyah-nyah!" The abuse of these words must eventually be discredited by the contradictions inherent: diversity and orthodoxy will not jive. We, who base a significant part of our case on the merits of social and cultural diversity, must not become frozen into a posture of puritanical, rigid orthodoxy; we must not turn our language into a strident, silly exercise in outraged, reactionary cant. A world of reaction will collapse under its own weight.

The gay culture we build has to stand strong on its language foundations. If we are to achieve such a goal, we must work with a different determination: rather than change the "oppressor,' we heal ourselves. For we must build our culture ourselves.

The above represents the view of the author and is not the view of the editorial staff of High Gear.

LOT

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OPEN CHRISTMAS EVE

By David B. Akers

I do not hope to end my wars, I merely mean to know them; and if I bare my battle scars,

it's better than I loathe them.

By David B. Akers Memory debates one more Friday night.

At the back of sight, morning sun awaits.