Why lesbians aren't gay: the old stereotypes about homosexuals have been discarded - in favor of new ones - contrasting behavior and attitude characteristics between gay men and women

A warm Saturday afternoon in late May brings all of Chicago to the lake-front. In the Wrigleyville section of Lincoln Park, softball teams with names like "We Are Everywhere" and "The 10 Percenters," compete with an intensity that should shame the Cubs. Girded for battle with sliding pads, batting gloves, and taped ankles, the short-haired women advance the runner, turn the double play, and hit the cutoff woman with a practiced efficiency that evokes admiring shouts from the women spectators.

Meanwhile, on a grassy lakeside bluff a few blocks to the south, the men of the New Town neighborhood bask, golden, in the sun. If ever a rogue urge to strike a ball with a stick is felt by any of the elegantly sprawled multitude, it is quickly subdued. The absence of athletic strife is certainly not the result of any lack of muscle tone: many have clearly spent the dark months in thrall to SoloFlex and StairMaster. But now, the sun is shining and the men are content for their sculpted bodies to be rather than do.

WHAT ARE we to make of all this? What does it say about human nature and American society that so many enthusiasms of the average lesbian and the average gay man diverge so strikingly? More immediately, why do the media refuse to notice it?

As with any other large collection of people, numerous fault lines divide homosexuals, but the most striking is the one separating gays from lesbians. (I use "gay" to refer only to male homosexuals. The media's habit of applying the word to female homosexuals is blatant male chauvinism. As one lesbian activist succinctly put it, "We're not gay, we're angry!") The current fashion of lumping together as "gays" everybody from Liberace to Martina Navratilova does something less than justice to public discourse.

The handy table of tendencies on the next page will of course be denounced as reflecting stereotypes. And yet the real stereotypers are the media themselves, which, in their endless and infinitely predictable rehashes of "Gays: Sinners against God or Victims of Society?" depict homosexuals as merely one-dimensional martyrs to prejudice. Whether portraying homosexuals as perverts in the past or as victims today, the press has always found it less taxing to preach morality than to try to understand reality.

Many journalists seem unable to distinguish between perceptive observations about the average traits of a group and blanket assertions about each and every group member. Thus, even carefully worded summations of the obvious like, "Men tend to be more aggressive than women," are triumphantly refuted with, "So, you think Mister Rogers is more aggressive than Mrs. Thatcher? Huh? Huh?"

Ignorance Isn't Bliss

THE most useful of all conceptual tools for thinking about both the similarity and the diversity of human beings is the probability distribution (better known as the bell-shaped curve). But rather than help educate the public to think in terms of bell-shaped curves and individual variances, the press instead warns us to abstain from noticing average differences between groups on the theory that such knowledge might bias our treatment of individuals. Of course, these proponents of unsullied individualism often rhetorically clump humans into the grossest possible stereotypical categories (e.g., Gays, People of Color, The Marginalized, Anglos, Homophobes, the White Male Power Structure). Worse, this taboo endorses ignorance. Since the media spend so much time telling us to be oblivious to facts, it's not surprising that they themselves are suckers for frauds, like that now notorious media cliche, "10 per cent of all men and women are homosexual."

One of the cruelest effects of ignorance about homosexuals' propensities is the heartbreak it causes both a homosexual and his or her parents when the adult child finally reveals the Surprising Truth. We are told that if only the parents didn't hold outdated prejudices, the surprise would not be disappointing. Disappointment, however, is inevitable: the desire to pass on your genes to grandchildren is bedrock human nature. What is far more avoidable, though, is the surprise. A more worldly awareness of those likes and dislikes that correlate with sexual orientation could (although no such correlation is absolute) frequently allow parents to slowly get used to the likelihood that this child won't ever make them grandparents, but can still make them proud and happy in many other ways.

It's important to note that the different inclinations of gays and lesbians do not follow easily predicted lines. In roughly half the traits, homosexuals tend to resemble the opposite sex more closely than the heterosexual contingent of their own sex. For example, many heterosexual men and lesbian women are enthusiasts for golf as well as other hit-the-ball-with-a-stick games like softball and pool. In a sympathetic recent account of lesbian athletes, a female sportswriter estimated, not implausibly, that 30 per cent of the Ladies Professional Golf Association touring pros were lesbians. In contrast to straight men and lesbians, pre-menopausal heterosexual women tend to find golf pointless; witness the fact that only one out of nine wives of PGA touring pros plays golf herself. And gay golf fanatics are so rare that it's difficult to even find an exception to prove this rule (which might explain why golfers wear those godawful pants).