Chasing ... Cutting

[jbor]

----------
>From: "Terrance Flaherty" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>

>> 
>> > Also, could be another
>> > reason why they choose him, not their homosexuality but
>> > their need to be imprisoned, controlled.
>
> jbor replied:
>>
>> Is this a pertinent characteristic of homosexuality, in your opinion, then?
>> Sounds like bigotry to me. I don't believe that Pynchon is a bigot.
>
> This is very typical of your replies. You ask if TRP is a
> bigot, but it is my statement or interpretation of his text
> that you object to not anything he has written or said.  In
> other words you say my statement sounds like bigotry to you.
snip

The constant identification of homosexuality as a sexual aberration, lumping
it in with S&M, bondage and submission, and some or other type of
death-as-sex instinct -- and so dismissing it as sign or symptom of "evil"
-- which you in particular seem fond of but not exclusively so, *is* very
close to bigotry. Again, your interpretation of the sequence relies on this
stereotype of the 175s' "need to be imprisoned, controlled." Why are they
any different from any other "liberated" prisoner, except for that
homosexual label with which they have been numbered, and by which they can
be identified as a discrete group in the text?

It's the sort of tactic which Ombindi uses on Enzian at 319-20 too, so
that's what I'm basing my contention that Pynchon *isn't* a bigot on (and I
think that Ombindi is using this definition of "the Deviations" rhetorically
and half-seriously as well). Again, I left room for you to elaborate in case
you hadn't explained clearly what you were trying to get at, but you've
decided to go berserk and get all self-righteous about it instead.

If you can't stand the heat ....

It might also be pertinent to consider the close of the 175-sequence, where
the "175-Stadt Chorale" goes "skipping away down the road singing some
horrible salute to faggotry" on 668, and which, as someone contended
recently, seems to contain a rather disparaging stereotype. The second line
of the song clinches it, I think, and is a statement of their humanity which
Blicero's "spectre" has given them a model for, and the strength to assert:

     If *I'm* a degenerate, *so* are *you*. . . .

This is pretty close to Pynchon's sentiment on the issue, I would imagine.