My intentions are "all good" here.

First I would like to say that EVERYONE who has brought up these
"sticker choosing" topics has made very good points in that these
stickers represent VANAGON.COM and nothing else.

I think it would only be respectful to ALL list-members that we go with a sticker that
does only represent our mail-listing and those of us here in this
cyber-community.

Some of us like the "dead" and some of us like Death Metal, that is not the point.
 Nor is our sexuality or our political views ,
 the point here is that there should be no connection to those personal views.
Our stickers should not portray anything that we are not, Ron if you want to be recognized
as a gay-member of vanagon.com then maybe you can make that rainbow sticker yourself
or if those of you who feel the dead is an important representation of yourselves
being involved with the listing, then GO FOR IT! ! ! I think that is great, individuality
is the essence of life.

But i think we all need to agree that these stickers represent "THIS" community
and not other communities with their affiliations.

I want to be able to drive down the road and know whether or not "YOU" are
a listee or not, and if your not then maybe you'll see my sticker and go to
the site and join the community. I think if we affiliate these stickers with
other "communities", then some people on the list may not want to use them
and that would be an outright shame.

Cheers
JM

-----Original Message-----
From: Ron 'Coyote' Lussier [mailto:coyote@MACROMEDIA.COM]
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 9:13 AM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: Re: List sticker lobbying, my .02

> Although I support a political party, my van doesn't wear a bumper sticker
> advertising it.  I like the Dead, but would not want to have dancing bears
> on the back of my van.  My understanding, and the understanding
> of others I
> deal with regularly, is that the spectrum style bumper and window stickers
> have been adopted by the gay community.
>
> At the risk of sounding politically correct, I would like to
> suggest that we
> be a bit cautious in selecting this sticker.  I don't want to
> advertise this
> group or myself as being aligned with anything but our vans.  Vanagons are
> not male, female, gay, or even musically inclined.  They are inanimate,
> wonderfully (for the most part) designed, vans.

Karl,

As one of the few openly gay people on the vanagon list, let me emphatically
say that Ron's sticker number 4 is not a gay symbol.  The 'gay flag'
consists of 6 discrete colors, on a very precise top-to-bottom order: Red,
Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple.  These colors are never portrayed as a
spectrum.

For reference, see the following pages
   http://www.swade.net/swadepages/gallery/

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/scotts/bulgarians/rainbow-flag.htm
l

Coyote