Subject: ROBERTS' RULES: Numbers
From: "Shelly Roberts" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 1997 00:56:58 +0000

ROBERTS' RULES 

by Shelly Roberts

PLAYING THE NUMBERS.

"Hello. Hello. Is this thing on? Okay, everybody, listen up. We're
gonna do a headcount. So would you all please position yourselves so
that you are standing in full view of a census monitor. They are the
ones in the bright rainbow tee shirts that say "Sense?Us?" holding the
clip boards. 

"Great. Now would anyone who is lesbian or gay please raise your
hand. That's right. That's right. Up high were everyone can see 'em.
Keep your hand in the air till you are acknowledged by a monitor and
have received your "I Count For Something" sticker. You two. Yes. You.
In the back with the good haircuts and Tommy Helpfinger matching
everything...could you just step out of the shadows for a minute so
you can be accounted for. Thank you. We're, none of us, going to leave
the room till every last one of us is in the tally. Great. Okay. Now
we're doing this thing!" 

Wouldn't that be wonderful! A simple world-wide hand-raise, then we'd
all know for sure. And we could see how many red-headed size 14's we
have. And how many nerds and geeks. How many football players. Of
either gender. If only it were that easy. 

I'm going to quote you some statistics I probably really don't have
to. I'm sure you already have them memorized: 

One in every ten homo-sapiens hasengaged in homo-sexual behavior. 

Thirty-three percent of all teen suicides are among lesbian and gay
teens. 

Seventy-five percent of all lesbian couples stopped having sex
regularly after three years. (At least with each other. Oh, sorry.
That's the guys. Lesbians nest and become faithful friends.)

Oh, I know there are more, but these are the ones that come
imprinted on the back of your membership card. 

Hasn't anybody ever stopped to wonder where these numbers came from?
Or who did the guestimating?  Or how long ago? They've been around
forever. I've been hearing them since I first came out, and THAT was,
as you know, some time way before the Crimean War. 

Mark Twain once said, "There are lies. There are damn lies. And
there are statistics." Like: Everyone who ate tomatoes before 1733 is
dead. Or, that 97.8326 percent of all of the people in prisons and
jails, and mental institutions have, at some time in their life, eaten
tomatoes. And... if you put a goldfish you've just named "Irving" into
a bowl of tomato juice, uh-huh, Old Irv will go belly up in a mere
matter of a fin flap. Ergo: Either tomatoes aren't all that healthy,
or Mr. Twain wasn't very far off his mark about being manipulated by
numbers. 

The next time I see on more of sorrowful sociologists lamenting the
self-inflicted demise of our post pubescents, I'm gonna demand new
info. I mean, really. Surely since we fought the Battle of Stonewall,
at least one or two of the potential resigners watched Ellen and
decided, since she wasn't alone after all, not to jump. Couldn't we
get some new numbers? Some good news ones for a change? 

And about that 1 in 10 homoratio, that our detractors would diminish
to equal the birth rate of the unicorn? Sure it gives us great
satisfaction to think that as of this writing, if one of us is born
every eighty seconds, there are 585,151,359.2 of us singing in our
world-wide choir. But what if it's higher? 

Or, what if k.d. or the internet gave perfectly straight and narrows
permission to get wider? That could be real good news. 

And about those sex statistics for lesbians. Who counted? When? Did
they grade on curves? 

Someone asked me, the next morning, after Willy Boy was there at the
HRC dinner hugging Elizabeth, our-hera-of-the-week, Birch, if the
President of the United States had really asked everyone to come out.
In case you missed it, he did. Right there in front of CSPAN and
everybody. He gave the Basic Glezbiology 1.01speech about all the
surveys saying that people have more trouble hating us when they
actually know one of us. So we should make sure more of them knew more
of us. It was pure Billyspeak for "Come out. Come out. Wherever you
can." It was wonderful and it was party line. OUR party. 

Hearing it gave me a great idea about those damn statistics. 

He's the head of the government, right? And he can tell bureaucrats
what to do? So, maybe he could issue an Executive Order to the
bein'-counters to take an accurate official tally. 

I know a whole lot of lesbians who would like to have new numbers on
that sex after the first three years thing. And we could see if all
this coming out we've been doing for the last decade has made any
progress toward keeping our teens off the kevorkian record books. 

Of course, the count would be a government study, so we'd have to
multiply the results by at least three. Imagine. 

One billion, seven hundred fifty five million, four hundred fifty four
thousand, seventy seven point six of us. Wow! 

Now that'd be one heck of a pride parade! I'm beginning to like 
playing this numbers game.

 - - - - - 

(C) 1997. Shelly Roberts. All rights reserved. Must be reprinted only
in its entirety. A one-time simultaneous print right is hereby granted
to subscribing newspapers; all other rights, including electronic or
digital reproduction are reserved. Shelly Roberts is an
internationally syndicated columnist, and the author of the newest
best-selling Roberts' Rules of Lesbian Break Ups. (Spinsters Ink.)