When you ask somebody out, you’re essentially laying your cards on the table. It can be quite a risk – especially if you’re asking out a co-worker or some other kind of person you’re going to run into on a daily basis. (Co-workers are even more risky, due to the slight but real chance that the co-worker will feel uncomfortable and may misinterpret subsequent friendliness as sexual harrassment.)
I find it far preferable to figure out, without actually taking the risk of asking out the woman I’m interested in, whether this woman is available and might be willing to go out with me. F’rinstance, if I see a ring on her left ringfinger, I say to myself, “Aha! She’s married,” and she need never know that I had the hots for her.
So maybe StGermain could just ask her vet something more innocuous, like whether he likes broadway musicals.
Esprix, Otto, Tracer - I’m not a terribly self-confident person, thus the “minimizing risk” thing. He did at one time engage me in a long conversation about how he didn’t like eating alone, the pain of cooking for one. Then he asked if I ever tried a local chinese place. I told him I used to eat there until I saw a roach on their buffet. It wasn’t until I was driving home that I thought that maybe he was leading somewhere. Remember, I’m flirting impaired.
Sorry to hijack the thread.
I know the Nazis forced homosexuals to wear pink triangles during World War II (much in the same way that they forced jews to wear yellow stars of David). I also know that the pink triangle is now regarded as a symbol of gay pride, in defiance of the Nazi practice.
But from my (admittedly faulty) memory, it also seems that the use of the pink triangle as a gay pride symbol didn’t start until the late 1980s, long after the rainbow had been identified with gay rights even by “mainstream” news sources.
So, my question is: Was it that one scene in Mel Brooks’ To Be or Not To Be that brought the pink triangle into the gay public consciousness?
Oh, and StGermain: Sounds like he’s totally hot for you. Start looking around for where you want to have the wedding. (Okay, I’m kidding. But, seriously, it does sound like he either (A) wants to go out with you on a date, or (B) wants to go out with you as a friend.)
I am severely flirting impaired. When the clue bus hits me, it’s gotta back up and run over me a few times before I even begin to get it. But when he complains about eating alone and mentions a resturant, that’s a clue.
Yes. Yes it was. Absolutely necessary to the survival of the human species, and you’d better be damn glad I said it, missy, or you’d be typing from a smoking crater right about now.
It’s what brought it into my consciousness, in fact. I was something like 14 when that movie was released and it was the first time I had heard that homosexuals were rounded up by the Nazis. The pink triangle as a symbol of gay pride was first used, according to Completely Queer: the Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia, in the 70s. The example offered is its use by a “‘coalition of conscience’ study group within the New York Civil Liberties Union to stress opposition to bigotry while fighting for municipal civil rights legislation.” Traditionally the triangle was point down. When ACT UP adopted the slogan “silence=death” for whatever reason they flipped the triangle point up.
True enough, but it also sounds like this guy’s fishing for info from her.
This worked for me, once - there was a guy I thought was flirting with me at my bank, and while he was cashing a check we were chit-chatting, so I purposely mentioned I’d been to Woody’s for Halloween, which is Philly’s premiere gay bar.
My understanding has always been that in the beginning of the gay rights movement the lambda was chosen as a symbol, but it didn’t catch on. Then the pink triangle was reclaimed for its historical value, but some deemed it too oppressive. Eventually, the rainbow flag caught on for being more positive.
I’m <i>trying</i> to start an Urban Legend that the government secretly started the trend of rainbow stickers, to facilitate rounding them up into camps later. Think it’ll catch on?
I’ve read all the stories Esprix notes in response, but as it happens just last night read this in a new book, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America.* In an entry titled April 1970, New York:
So once more, in the eternal battle of style versus substance, style triumphs.
Interestingly, back before the 1970s, LISP programmers sometimes referred to themselves as “Knights of the Lambda Calculus.”
(The Lambda Calculus is a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with which LISP is intimately connected. I do not know when Church invented the Lambda Calculus.)
