August 8, 2001 To Eutopia: My brother and I were reminiscing about how we reunited after he found my web pages one day, while using an internet search engine. As we talked, we decided to check to see if it could still be done. But the web is a much larger place then it was, even a mere two years ago, and a search on my name now yields dozens and dozens of different Bruce Garretts all over the world. Flipping through the hits however, we chanced across a link to an article in your publication, titled, "The Unwelcome Prophet" (by James C. Kruggel, Vol. 3 No. 2: January/February 1999). In it, Mr. Kruggel avers he is intrigued by a thought of mine, contained in a response I wrote to a particularly vicious column by David Morrison, regarding the murder of Matthew Shepard. What struck me about reading the quoted material of mine in your publication, is that it never appeared in the New York Post's letters to the editor page, or at any rate, not in the on line version. I know, because I read it (that, "certitude of experience" thing...), and copied it to my archives. So unless a fuller version of my text made it to the hardcopy edition, it would seem that my original, somehow, found its way to Mr. Kruggel. I'm glad that someone outside of my circle of friends, besides the letters to the editor reader at the New York Post, had a chance to read it. Or at least a small part of it, because the part that Mr. Kruggel quoted, was not the whole, even of that one paragraph. I see no need to ask why, Mr. Kruggel cut where I write that Morrison himself knew faithful, settled gay couples, many of whom were (and still are) together...we'll just let that omission speak for itself. I'll grant you, my meaning fared better in your publication, then in the New York Post. Mr. Kruggel's conceit that those who value experienced fact over dogmatic "truths" are motivated by a belief that the universe is chaos and human nature unintelligible aside, he seems to have a better grasp of where the actual battle line is here then most, and his observation at the beginning of his article, that the debate about "homosexual behavior" amounts to a clash in certitude of Truth verses certitude of Experience, put me in mind of a line by Groucho Marx; "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" Probably the best retort anyone ever gave to that kind of thing was (stop me if you've heard this one before)... "And yet, it moves." -Bruce Garrett Baltimore, Maryland.