Queer Activism Important

To the editors:

I hope Noah Oppenheim ("Reading `Clit Notes,"' Opinion, April 3) does not really speak for "many others" when he claims he's for "queer rights" but doesn't want same-sex desire to become too acceptable--purportedly because our society is not ready for this sort of "cultural integration."

I do not see how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people can become "equal" members of society if they are ordered to keep their sexuality private, as Oppenheim would have it. The queer community can never be the "isolated moral and ethical enclave" that Oppenheim wishes it to be because youth from straight families often grow up to realize they are not heterosexual. I am not convinced that these separate queer and "wider" cultures can exist.

Furthermore, same-sex desire should not force one to join a new community; there are different gradations between the labels "gay" and "straight." Forcing a person to acknowledge same-sex desire only in certain settings splinters that person's identity. As to Oppenheim's notion that the "foundations" or "biological footing" of our society--families--will be threatened if homosexuality is accepted: many gays and lesbians form happy families; and please let me know when heterosexuality appears to be going extinct.

Another distortion in Oppenheim's column is the comparison between past movements for racial/gender equity and the current pro-queer movement. Oppenheim inherits the subtler arguments of those who would keep women in the kitchen and blacks at the back of the bus because they felt society was not ready. At one point, America looked unready for gender and racial equality; radical activism changed that. If America looks unready for non-heterosexual orientations to be accepted, it is because we are hopefully in the process of moving towards acceptance.

Finally, isn't Oppenheim taking the BGLTSA pro-sex posters a bit too seriously? Didn't he, in a previous column defending the pictures of barely-clad women on his walls, discuss in a public forum a kind of sexuality that others might find objectionable? The BGLTSA's posters opened Gaypril in a funny and upbeat way.

If Oppenheim thinks those posters are the sole "consciously constructed image that the queer community on campus wants to project," he should read the long list of serious events being scheduled for Queer Harvard Month, listed on posters around campus, and go to some. REBECCA REIDER '00   April 5, 1998