To the Editor:
I read with more than mild amusement your article of Jan. 11 (The Dartmouth, "Gay comm. Searches for identity), in which the organization formerly known as the Dartmouth Rainbow Alliance finds itself amidst yet another debate over nomenclature, the latest in a long line of changes to the group's name.
It seems that the more time passes, the more letters are appended to the new name of the organization in the spirit of inclusiveness -- creating a veritable alphabet soup of identity. Indeed, Alexis Jetter was quite correct when she said that the organization should have a name that can be pronounced. For a group such as the LGBTQC (etc.), whose members span all races, ethnicities and cultures, the complete inclusivity that the officers seek is an unattainable cause. To try to devise a single string of letters to acknowledge each specific representative of the very diversity on which the non-heterosexual community prides itself is a fruitless effort, since one can always find a person who identifies him/herself by a qualifier which has not been included in the organization's name.
To illustrate, one can devise a string of letters no less than two lines long to include all the different self-identifiers for gay men alone, and this does not even include lesbians, bisexuals, and others. Moreover, consider non-heterosexual persons whose primary language is not English -- why exclude their languages' identifiers from the group's name? Would a Spanish-speaking homosexual not feel excluded from the organization?
The LGBTQCABCDEFG...(as I am lately fond of calling it) would do well to expend less time and energy in trying to devise a specific all-inclusive name, and instead use their time to integrate their presence more fully and publicly into the Dartmouth community. In this way they can show the campus population, both heterosexual and non-heterosexual alike, what ought to be the most vital aim of the group. That, in the end, the members of the organization fall under the same identity as everyone else -- "human beings."
