From: "Shelly Roberts" Date: Thu, 13 Nov 1997 00:56:58 +0000 Subject: ROBERTS' RULES: Numbers 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.)