_______________SWINGING WITH THE SODOMITES BY CAMILLE PAGLIA (08/04/98)
	I have argued throughout my last spate of nonexistent Salon columns, if not the entire decade, that the lesbian tactic of sublimating rage against all men in predictable psychoanalytical attacks on comparatively defenseless male homosexuals arouses needless animosity (see my July 7 column on the logic of quoting oneself to bolster an argument). Viciously silencing gay men simply guarantees a backlash: Dionysus will not cross-dress in flannel or protest "Ellen's" cancellation. And it will most certainly not cause me to acknowledge the irony that my own theoretical assumptions cast me, a lesbian, into the soup of my own symbolized psychosexual perversities. I am Hansel to every Gretel. (Just last week, CNN asked me to model lederhosen. You can imagine my reaction. I did, of course. There's nothing I won't do or say after years of grading freshmen composition papers. I earned my success.) Lesbians are not born. As a scholar of sexual history and trivial culture, I think the argument that lesbianism is innate is based on evidence as minuscule as the size of the average gay activist's penis. My philosophy of lesbian rights is very simple: As a libertarian, I think that government should stay out of people's private lives so that the Christian right doesn't have competition. I loathe the way lesbian pop scholars routinely conflate psychoanalysis, Jungian thought and pagan hooey in an effort to derail deconstructivist thinking. Phooey on tired old Foucault, another whining gay activist without a clitoris. I'm horrified that lesbian activists likewise conflate the oppression of women and blacks, where blacks were systematically enslaved and women were merely married. And I am highly skeptical about the actual incidences of women losing their jobs because they are female (as opposed, let's say, to them simply being obnoxious, for which men, especially black ones, get fired too). Yes, as I said in my July 31 column, "habit makes deep neural imprints." That's why I've become a one-note writer (see everything I've written for months). -- Cliff Bostock Camille Paglia asserts that she knows better than adult intersexuals what is best for babies born with ambiguous genitals. Surgery, she implies, will give them as normal and unstressed a childhood as possible. Paglia reveals that she learned everything she needs to know about intersexuality from Hugh Hampton Young's 1937 medical tome, "Genital Abnormalities, Hermaphroditism, and Related Adrenal Diseases." Did she also learn everything she needs to know about homosexuality from Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis? Why doesn't she just cite the Bible and be done with it? If Paglia bothered to speak with actual intersexuals, she would know that surgery has not provided us with normal or unstressed childhoods, much less adulthoods, and that there are many intersexuals who are grateful for having escaped genital surgery. Current medical standards call for the removal of clitorises longer than 3/8 inch long when stretched in a newborn. Have you measured your clit lately? -- Cheryl Chase Intersex Society of North America In her recent column, Camille Paglia wrote that "Habit makes deep neural imprints." I just want to comment that I think that's one of the most intelligent, thought-provoking statements I have read about sexuality and personality in a long time. It explains a lot while saying little. I don't know why Paglia insists on being so aggressive in her writings on homosexuality: She makes her points just as well (even better) when she writes with this kind of insight and subtlety. -- Carrie McCormac While I agree with Camille Paglia's statement that, "throughout this decade the gay activist tactics of derision and intimidation about orthodox Christianity arouse needless animosity without producing fundamental change," I must caution to add that queer activists have been most exquisitely blind in the area of biblical scholarship. Outside of John Boswell and a friendly priest or two, we have mercilessly let ourselves be run over by the Shiite Baptists and their ilk. We need a no-nonsense campaign that takes the fundamentalist's statements and mistranslations (Folks, there is no word for gay or homosexual in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic. The Greek word that is used defines pederasty, not modern gay relationships) and confronts them with the facts. King James was gay, the word homosexual did not enter an American Bible of wide circulation until 1946 and there is no mention of lesbians in any form or manner in either testament. God did not give the Bible to us in a Southern accent and there has been the heavy hand of an editor or two long before the Bible got into Herr Gutenburg's hands. Our Bible is a magnificent creation -- and a tool of oppression when used by the ill-trained, badly educated and self-hating. Peter did not say upon this rock I will slay the homosexual -- he said he will build a mighty church, and we have every right to enter it. -- David Bain Camille Paglia's comparison of herself to an intellectual is thoroughly unfounded. If she's really not bright enough to understand why and how gays can equate some of their life experiences with that of blacks, something is keeping her from an easily reached concept: It's not enslavement that is the basis for comparison between the two, it is the prejudice faced by both groups. It is the inclination among some people, usually outside the target group, to attribute negative qualities to individuals based on characteristics that are deservedly or undeservedly assigned to the group to which the person apparently belongs. It is the ignorance that encourages some people to respond to a different skin color or a different sexual orientation by withdrawing common civility. Blacks, gays, Asians, Native Americans, bisexuals, transgendered people and far too many others all know the reality of being treated negatively based not on their own merits, but according to the detrimental qualities attributed to them by others who do not know them, and who often actually refuse to know them. And it doesn't take a genius to figure this out. Which leaves Paglia where? -- Michael Keach Greenville, R.I. Camille Paglia may believe whatever garish lies she wants and publish them wherever she finds gullible editors. We call that American journalism. But Salon's fact checkers ought at least to correct her more outrageous untruths. (You do have fact checkers, don't you?) In her recent attacks on American lesbians and gays, no untruth is more outrageous than the claim that Paglia is "a scholar of sexual history and culture." In truth, Paglia is notoriously uninformed about the history of sex, sexuality and sexual minorities. She is equally ignorant of the history of the Christian religion, though she pretends to be its defender. Indeed, there is hardly a page in her published work that is free from gross historical errors. I make this judgment, not as a gay activist or queer theorist, but as a teacher of the history of Christian thought at Notre Dame. And as a teacher I would encourage those who still find themselves taking pleasure from Paglia's poisonous gibberish at least not to mistake it for reasonable, well-educated history. Because Paglia's only passion is not for historical scholarship, but for her own endless, tasteless self-promotion. -- Mark Jordan Professor, Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame
_______________TIARA TRIALS BY CHARLES TAYLOR (08/04/98)
	Is Charles Taylor insane? Almost every week I am slightly taken aback by what he has to say about film. But to compare "Princess Caraboo" and "Roman Holiday"? Audrey Hepburn and Phoebe Cates? I'll be the first to admit that I have enjoyed watching Cates in some films. The diving-board scene in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" is probably her best work. But to claim that she is an actress who has never given a bad performance? Did he miss "Drop Dead Fred"? Or "Bodies ... Rest and Motion"? To claim that she is an actress at all is an insult to female thespians around the world. Phoebe Cates is extraordinary only insofar as she somehow managed to marry Kevin Kline (probably with the help of those talents that were displayed so well in "Fast Times"). -- D. Dickinson SALON | Aug. 7, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| ARE THERE STAINED DRESSES IN THE GOP'S CLOSET? BY JOE CONASON

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