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WARNING! THE FOLLOWING IS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL, AND MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED OR 
REPRINTED COMMERCIALLY WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION.  COPYRIGHT 1994. SHELLY 
ROBERTS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  FOR PUBLICATIONS WISHING TO CARRY Roberts' 
Rules, PLEASE CONTACT AUTHOR DIRECTLY AT shellyr@bcfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us

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Roberts' Rules
by Shelly Roberts


What's The Difference?

I've forgiven TJ for being heterosexual. And she's absolved me of any 
responsibility to her around my particular life choices.  Which is good, 
because we're really close friends.

We once were also business partners, trying to create an advertising agency 
out of a couple of untended dreams, and way too little capital.  Just at a 
time when the financial ground under New England feet was shaking and 
crumbling. There wasn't enough business to keep us in business. But, in spite
of our differences, there was enough friendship to last.

She, her husband, and her two teenage-boy children left the state we were in 
and headed innocently into Oregon. I headed for warm South Florida fortunes.

Now TJ visits us once a spring to get a tan. (They don't specialize in 
sunshine in the Pacific Northwest.) And also to get her yearly fill of
female. When you're surrounded by that much testosterone for fifty weeks, 
you're due a little estrogen relief. So TJ spends her days beaching, her 
evenings cooking us gourmet meals, none of which call for hot dogs or peanut 
butter as a key ingredient, and her nights talking women-stuff.

She loves it. We love her. We don't have to cook for the week. We eat well, 
watch sappy movies in the afternoon when I'm done writing, or go touring, and
generally, it feels like we go on vacation together. Which is great for Judi 
and me, because we don't pay airfare, and TJ buys the groceries.

One outdoor afternoon on Ocean Avenue, feasting on Miami Beach warmth, the 
tourist array, and the hideously guilt-inducing satisfaction of News Cafe 
burgers and fries, I decided to talk Oregon. (Florida is facing yet another 
self-righteous religious fanatic attack and it's always helpful to get 
perspective from a winning arena.)

"So, what was the Oregon fight like from a straight person's perspective." 
I queried, mental note-pad poised for helpful hints on our local struggle. I 
didn't get any. Instead, I got umbrage. 

"You can't do that to me!" 

"Do what?"

"Ask me a question like that. It presumes that we're different.  It separates
us."

Phew! Hard to disagree on that. Haven't I spent hours of ink, haven't we all 
spent hours of effort, telling the Thems that we weren't different? That we 
were just the same as everybody? That we were just like them and they 
shouldn't treat us any differently?

But I realized in that conversation, in fact, that we are different. Oh, not 
the way David Koresh wannabe's want us to be. Not so much in sexual practice,
as in survival practice. We, in circling our wagons, have crafted ourselves a
culture. Not, as author Frank Browing suggests, a Culture of Desire, but a 
Culture of Struggle. One that gives us common ground even in our fractioned 
diversity, a common perspective from which to voice our shared experiences, 
hopes and fear. When Browing asks what a gay North Carolina Pig Farmer, and 
a New York City drag queen have in common, meaning "nothing," I say to him 
what I said to TJ: "Lots!"

The differences aren't so much genetic as societal.

I asked TJ if she knew who Kate Clinton was. Did she like to listen to 
Romanovsky & Phillips? Did June mean anything more to her than National 
Watermelon month? Had she heard of Stonewall? Read anything by Michaelangelo 
Signorelli? Or Jewelle Gomez? Where had she put herself on the Kinsey scale? 
Had she considered weighing herself on such a scale? Could she recite
the dialog from the movie, Lianna, by heart? Or seen Desert Hearts? If
I referred to "the kiss" on LA Law, would she know what I was talking
about? Sure, she knew about Harvey Milk, but did the name David Kopay
ring a bell? Did her magazine rack hold 10 Percent? Or Out? Or Lambda
Book Report? Did San Francisco hold a special place in her heart for
anything beyond dungenous crab and cable cars? Had she studied Loulan?


I didn't mean to exclude her, but as we talked, it became clear to us both 
that there were differences in our lifestyles. And it didn't revolve around 
either of our stereotypes. When my son was young, I spent as many hours as 
she did baking cookies and at PTA.   And since she's moved to Oregon, she's 
learned to operate a chain saw.

While we were swabbing our fries, we came to an understanding. It wasn't 
necessary for us to be exactly the same in order for us to share love, and 
honor. Our human qualities, the ones that were the same, like laughing, and 
crying, and loving and dying, and most of the one-to-one emotional 
interactions in between, were enough to forge strong links.  And that there 
was still sufficient space to allow for our diversity. That it was okay for 
us to be not-exactly-carbon-copies, because out of that difference could come
respect.

I guess I hadn't thought of us like that before. Not until TJ demanded that 
I not make myself different from her, did I began to examine the reality of 
our differences. The richness and value of a culture that I hope we're not 
willing to sacrifice in the name of assimilation. Someone asked Frank 
Browning on my radio show, if he thought that our culture could survive the 
success we seek. He said he didn't know, but that since he thought it would 
"take a couple of hundred years for us to achieve that success, what 
difference did it make? We'd all be gone by then."

If he'd have asked me, or TJ, after our afternoon on South Beach, I think we 
would have disagreed. We'd have said that it will be the combination of the 
richness of our cultural differences and similarities that will create the 
acceptance we're after.

I can't wait till TJ's next visit. I know we're going to continue this 
conversation. And by then, I should have worked through enough cholosterol 
angst to order another burger. Her, too. It's something we have in common.