Minorities of the world unite

Whenever I hear white heterosexual men complaining about how hard they have it nowadays, I tend to dismiss it as the usual self-pitying whining of ruling-class wannabes when their privileges are challenged. But the other night when I went to Kilroy's to meet some friends for a 21st birthday celebration, what I saw and heard there made me begin to wonder.\nFirst, I had trouble getting in. I had to show the bouncer my Homintern card to prove my good standing in the International Homosexual Conspiracy (Our goal: Total World Domination by the Year 1962). She apologized: "We're just trying to keep out the, you know, undesirables." \nWhen I walked in, the bar was full of black homosexual females; not a white heterosexual male was to be seen, including my friends. The sound system was blaring out a black homosexual leftist female rapper whose rhymes mainly involved castration, impotence and vaginas with teeth.\nI was a bit perplexed. Kilroy's has traditionally been a bastion of white heterosexual maleness, a place where white heterosexual males could go and just be themselves, free from the prejudice of a hostile society. Getting the rest of my homosexual credentials from home, I spent the next few hours making the rounds of Bloomington's downtown bars. The Bluebird, the Crazy Horse, the Irish Lion, the Video Saloon, Kilroy's Sports Bar, Yogi's, even Uncle Fester's and the Pit Stop were packed with black homosexual females.\nOnly in Bullwinkle's -- traditionally Bloomington's most liberal bar -- did I find a few white heterosexual males, huddled in a dark corner and drinking themselves into oblivion. If they even set foot on the dance floor, they told me fearfully, the DJ would stop the music and scream sexist imprecations at them. At that moment the manager approached the table, told them they were disturbing the other patrons by their presence, and ordered them to leave.\nA satisfied smile crept slowly over my lips. The insidious forces of diversity had done our work well. A phone call to headquarters confirmed that Nikolai Lenin, the Pope, the Elders of Zion and an Audioanimatronics robot programmed with the brain paths of Nelson Rockefeller were flying in on a morning Concorde. Now nothing stood in the way of our liberal-fascist agenda of teaching gay marriage in kindergarten, compulsory rap music in all churches and a gender-neutral third-person pronoun for the English language. \nThen, I woke up.\nNow, can we get real? Few of the straight white men around IU who complain they get no respect were even born during the lifetime of Martin Luther King Jr., or before the Stonewall Riots that inaugurated the Gay Liberation Movement, or before the Miss America protests of 1968 that put the Women's Movement in the public eye. Those who are more than 30 years of age still have had a good long time to adjust to the fact that half the human race is female and that the days when rape was just a friendly guy's way of getting acquainted with a gal are officially done. \nThe brute fact of America's ethnic diversity, which whites have been trying to deny for more than two centuries, is not going away. And you're just going to have to share the world with those who aren't exclusively heterosexual.\nBut probably the most important thing to remember for males of whatever sexuality, for whites of whatever sex, and for heterosexuals of whatever sex or race, is that rights are not the property of one group, to dispense to others in return for decorous behavior or good manners. If they were, straight white males as a group would have lost theirs long ago.