IGF CultureWatch

The recent death of Sylvia Rivera, an activist drag queen who threw quarters at the police during the Stonewall riot, has prompted much guilt-laden commentary about how the gay civil rights movement has pushed aside "the people who started it all." The commentary is dubious as a matter of history and wrong about the policy conclusions it draws from that history.

Here is the standard story: "On the night of June 28, 1969, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar that included a mix of drag queens and lesbians. Led by the drag queens, the patrons fought back, igniting the gay civil rights movement. Yet the new movement soon became overly image-conscious and pushed these brave heroes to the back of the bus. It's high time we repay our debt by fully including transgender issues in gay causes, including proposed legislation."

This fictionalized account of Stonewall and its aftermath has been repeated so many times by gay and transgender activists it now goes almost unquestioned. Typical of the genre is a recent Village Voice column by Riki Wilchins, executive director of GenderPAC. Wilchins describes the Stonewall Inn in 1969 as a "sanctuary" for "genderqueers," who were "unwelcome at the city's tonier gay bars."

Wilchins asserts Rivera "helped [give] birth" to the gay movement at Stonewall. Similarly, in his book The Gay Metropolis, Charles Kaiser says Stonewall was "sparked by drag queens." Despite these contributions, transgender causes are now excluded from the movement because, as Wilchins puts it, gay organizations are "determined to project an image of normalcy."

This is politics-by-guilt-trip, and it has been undeniably effective in redirecting many gay groups' priorities toward transgender issues. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force has even withdrawn its support of the only federal legislation that would prohibit anti-gay employment discrimination because the bill does not include "gender identity" within its protections.

The standard tale is error piled on error. First, it exaggerates the undeniable importance of Stonewall as a catalytic event. As the careful work of numerous historians has demonstrated, there was an active gay civil rights effort underway long before Stonewall. Gay activists had organized the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950, and in other cities later; had supported an openly gay candidate for public office; had fought the closing of gay bars; had founded a national magazine, The Advocate; had marched in front of the White House for equal rights; and had picketed businesses that discriminated against gays.

Outside of New York, according to Stephen Murray in his book American Gay, gay activists initially paid little attention to Stonewall. Only through the annual pride parade commemorations that began a year later and spread significantly in the mid-1970s did Stonewall take on the singular importance in gay history it now enjoys. At the time it happened, however, the event simply did not carry the incredible motivating force we now attach to it.

Second, the centrality of transgenders to Stonewall is probably exaggerated. Eyewitness accounts of what happened that night vary, as they usually do, and we have no videotape of the event and very few pictures.

But one thing is clear. It is wrong to characterize the Stonewall Inn as having been a sanctuary for genderqueers (unless that term encompasses non-transgendered gay men). Murray writes that "men familiar with the milieu then insist that the Stonewall clientele was middle-class white men and that very few drag queens or dykes or nonwhites were ever allowed admittance."

But don't take Murray's word for it, consider what Sylvia Rivera herself told the historian Eric Marcus for his book, Making History: "The Stonewall wasn't a bar for drag queens. Everybody keeps saying it was. ... If you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you. And only a certain number of drag queens were allowed into the Stonewall at that time." The night of the Stonewall riot was the first time Rivera had ever even been to the bar.

If Rivera is right, it seems likely the Stonewall patrons who rebelled that June night in 1969 included many (perhaps mostly) middle-class, non-transgendered, gay white males. It's possible that the few drag queens present provided all (or most of) the rebellion while the others cowered. But there is no reason to make that assumption unless we indulge stereotypes about the timidity of gay men. So a description of the riot as an uprising of drag queens may be more politically correct, but as history it seems partial.

This point does not deny that drag queens participated in the riot. They did. It only makes the point that their centrality to the event likely has been exaggerated, probably for ideological reasons.

Finally, these historical disputes have no bearing - either way - on whether "gender identity" ought to be included in gay civil rights legislation. Even if Stonewall was the single casus belli of the gay struggle, and even if transgenders were the only people there kicking shins and uprooting parking meters, so what? And even if no drag queens were present that night, what difference would it make now?

If we learned the Stonewall police had busted up a meeting of gay white racists, instead of drag queens, we wouldn't say that should make us more attentive to the concerns of racists. These matters rise or fall on their own merits, not on the relative role groups played in distant and disputed events.

And speaking of the merits, drafting legislation is an immensely complicated task that involves putting together a coalition of supporters. Gay civil rights legislation would be stalled or effectively killed in many places if transgenders were included. The choice is often between a more inclusive bill that goes nowhere and a less inclusive bill that actually becomes law. It is not "transphobic" to make this point; it is pragmatic.

These are hard realities that some people do not want to hear. We should not feel guilty because we want to make progress, least of all because someone is telling us fairy tales about our past.

GAY WRITERS, newspapers, and organizations tend to emphasize the bad things that happen in life. And 2001 was, in some ways, a bad year for gays. The fourth largest city in the country, Houston, voted to ban health and other benefits for the same-sex domestic partners of gay city employees. The military maintained -- at least officially -- its "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy despite the wartime need for personnel.

Nevertheless, tucked away in news summaries about anti-gay ballot initiatives and the latest tussles with the Boy Scouts, three little items might have escaped your attention. Each is good news, though some observers out there will manage to find the cloud in the silver lining. Here they are:

(1) Survey shows gays feel more accepted. The Kaiser Family Foundation recently polled by telephone 405 randomly selected, self-identified gays in 15 major U.S. cities. Pollsters interviewed the subjects about their experience of discrimination and their encounters with verbal and physical abuse. The survey found that 76 percent of gay people believe they are more accepted now by their fellow Americans than they were a few years ago.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation's survey of the general population, more Americans than ever before report knowing someone who is gay: 62 percent now say they have a gay friend or acquaintance, as compared to 55 percent three years ago and just 24 percent in 1983.

Gay Americans are heeding the call to come out of the closet. And that honesty appears to be paying off in the form of unquestionably softened public attitudes about homosexuality.

Skeptics will point out that the Kaiser survey hardly eliminates doubts about how deep acceptance of homosexuality really is. There are, to begin, the usual questions about survey methodology. Because the survey required gay people to identify themselves as gay (query: what survey of gay people could avoid the reliance on self-identification?) the sample might have been skewed and the results therefore flawed.

But it's hardly clear which way the "flaw" of reliance on self-identification would cut in a survey asking respondents whether they feel accepted. On the one hand, those homosexuals with enough self-confidence to reveal their sexual orientation to a stranger over the phone may overestimate the degree to which others accept them; further, they may have sought out jobs and circles of friends where they really are more accepted. On the other hand, because of their openness, these same people may encounter more overt hostility than gays who remain closeted.

Also, the survey had some bad news. Some 74 percent of the respondents said they had encountered anti-gay verbal abuse, and 32 percent said they had been subjected to physical abuse or property destruction because of their sexual orientation.

But because we don't know when these incidents occurred, and because we have no comparative data from the past, it's hard to know whether there has been deterioration on the abuse front. It's possible that as more gays come out, especially in smaller towns and rural areas, they will be easier targets for the remaining homophobes who mean to do them harm. This suggests rising acceptance may paradoxically accompany a transient rise in hate crimes.

(2) Survey says gays are richer than straights. A new online survey of 6,300 self-identified gay respondents sponsored by OpusComm Group in cooperation with Syracuse University has found that the median combined annual household income among gay couples is $65,000. That's 60 percent higher than the U.S. median household income.

This might sound like good news. It suggests that, whatever obstacles gays face in life, we have overcome them to a large extent.

But the survey met immediate criticism. Dr. Lee Badgett, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, lambasted the survey's methodology, arguing that Internet users are not representative in that they tend to be wealthier and better educated than the general population. Badgett's own research has shown that individual gay men make less on the job than straight men. On the other hand, Badgett's research has also shown that gay women earn about the same as straight women (though both groups earn less than men).

The OpusComm Group defends its methodology by pointing out that, as Internet use has become more common, Internet users have become more representative of the general population. They also say the sheer size of the sample makes it more reliable than a smaller survey would be.

What's at stake in this debate? For gay magazines and newspapers, it's about luring potential advertisers who lust after wealthy readers. For gay civil rights advocates, however, surveys like this undercut the case for employment discrimination protection. If we're already better off, why do we need civil rights laws to make us equal?

(3) Survey says gay teens are less suicidal than we thought. Two new studies debunk the common assertion of gay civil rights groups that gay teens are three times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. The studies, conducted by a Cornell University psychologist, found that gay teens are only slightly more likely to attempt suicide. Research heretofore on the topic had interviewed teens from support groups or shelters, where the most troubled youths are found.

The Cornell studies concluded that gay youth do indeed have more difficult lives. "But most gay kids are healthy and resilient," says the researcher, Ritch Savin-Williams. He adds that studies exaggerating their suicide risk "pathologize gay youth, and that's not fair to them."

Evidence, even if not conclusive, of increasing acceptance, higher levels of income, and less dramatic suicide rates may not serve the cause of portraying gays as helpless victims of homophobia in need of state protection. But, to the extent we can trust this new evidence, it gives some reason for cheer this season.

THE FOLLIES of the anti-war gay left continue. Though eclectic, anti-war commentators seem to share three things: (1) the idea that bombs won't solve anything, (2) a fixation on the "root cause" of terrorism, understood to be the United States itself, and (3) patriophobia, the irrational fear of people who love their country.

Don't get me wrong. The right to dissent is fundamental and must be protected even in times of great national peril. But we have the right to dissent from the dissenters.

The first anti-war fallacy is the old bombs-won't-solve-anything shibboleth. Consider the words of Surina Khan, the executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. In an interview for the Boston Phoenix, Khan maintains that "waging war on Afghanistan is [not] a solution." Tommi Avicolli Mecca, in a guest editorial for the San Francisco Bay Times, asks: "What has bombing accomplished?" After four weeks (!), he writes, "we haven't found [Osama] bin Laden [and] the Taliban is still in power."

Bombs certainly won't cure all the world's ills, but they can be a necessary start when you're dealing with madmen. To take just two recent examples, American military force ended Saddam Hussein's designs on neighboring countries and thwarted Slobodan Milosevic's genocide in Bosnia. Both efforts took more than a few weeks.

But suppose bombs won't solve anything. What's the alternative? Khan offers this: "At IGLHRC, we feel that the response to the murder and terror that we saw on September 11 has to be a response of solidarity and understanding."

"Understanding" for bin Laden and the serial killers he trains? "What we are practicing is good terror," bin Laden recently said on videotape, justifying the murder of Americans on September 11. "We will not stop killing them and whoever supports them."

Khan may want to "understand" people like bin Laden, but there is no substitute for eliminating them. Bin Laden has made it clear: it's either kill or be killed. How many Americans have to die before these anti-war leftists get it?

Their second delusion is to insist we address the root causes of September 11. For Khan, herself born to privilege, the "core, root problem" is the "resentment against the U.S. throughout the world" generated by America's selfish failure to "look beyond its own economic interests."

This about a country that rebuilt Europe and Japan after World War II, that intervened to save countless Muslims from Hussein and Milosevic, that has donated billions of dollars in financial aid to help poor nations feed their people and build infrastructure and acquire medicine, and on and on.

If some people around the world don't grasp those facts it's not because we've been selfish. It's because we haven't been touting our generosity.

For Avicolli Mecca, the real problem is world poverty. Yet there are lots of poor people in the world and very few of them become mass murderers. Bin Laden, himself a Saudi millionaire, is exploiting not poverty but the distrust of modernity long smoldering among religious fundamentalists.

Barbarism doesn't have "root causes"; it is humanity's default condition in the absence of civilization.

But even if poverty and resentment explained the existence of worldwide terrorism, that wouldn't disqualify us from punishing terrorists. There's a good historical case to be made that Anglo-American economic strangulation of Germany and Japan contributed to the rise of fascism and led to World War II. Should we apologize to the ghost of Hitler? Should we have responded to Pearl Harbor with "solidarity and understanding"?

The third anti-war cri de coeur bemoans the fact that some gay people actually kind of like the U.S. This patriophobia sees something sinister in the sudden visibility of national pride.

Khan, a Pakistani now living in the safety and comfort of San Francisco, links American patriotism to homophobia. "In the U.S.," she warns darkly, "people who are most active in promoting nationalism are essentially right-wing organizations." Barney Frank, war-supporter and proud American, call your office.

Perhaps the most paranoid patriophobe is Bay Times columnist Kirk Read. Read, who prides himself on "asking hard questions," announces he's "given up on queer folks having radical politics collectively." But, he reports, "it's been truly spooky to walk through the Castro and see American flags in nearly every business window." Viewing the words "United We Stand" on the outside wall of a Castro gym, Read wants to "spray-paint 'Wake Up' on top of it."

My God! Patriotism on unashamed display in the heart of the Castro! What horror is next? Standing for the national anthem?

Read says he's been "clench-jaw pissed off for the past month" - not because thousands of his fellow citizens are dead, mind you - but because he dislikes the calls for national unity, because he's been asked to donate to the Red Cross, and because he continually hears the song "God Bless America." All this threatens to ensnare us in "the mainstream lockstep of jingoism and war mongering."

Now I'm not much of a flag-waver myself, but I don't sniff a Nuremberg rally in every breeze rustling Old Glory. I'm glad the men who fought our wars to preserve Read's right to dissent weren't so easily spooked.

To most gay Americans the U.S. is basically a good country that sometimes does bad things. To the anti-war gay left, however, this is basically a bad country that sometimes does good things. The war has exposed the fundamental cleavage between them and the rest of us as never before.

IN A GAY COMMUNITY united in support of a just and necessary war against a network of mass murderers and the theocratic dictatorship shielding them, a few isolated voices have distinguished themselves by their mushy-headed disapproval. For these gay-left writers, the real enemies are not Islamic extremists who crash planes into office buildings but U.S. "militarism," gay assimilation, "unthinking patriotism," children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, a president prone to malapropism, and American wealth.

Consider a recent article by the author Michael Bronski. Shortly after the September 11 attack, some gay activists prematurely celebrated when it was believed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" - the policy of discharging openly gay service members - might be suspended during the crisis. Yet Bronski says he is "frightened" by the possibility that gays might be allowed to serve just now. "Why," he asks, "would any gay and lesbian group be happy that 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' be lifted?"

Bronski nostalgically lauds the gay liberationists of the late 1960s and early 1970s who sought "social justice, anti-racism, [and] anti-militarism." He avers that gay liberation groups of that era would never have "advocated for the right of American homosexuals to fight in Viet Nam [sic]."

Bronski contrasts this with present-day gay-rights groups, who want the "'right' to be just like everyone else," including the right to defend the country when it's attacked. This is the familiar charge of assimilation, the worst possible offense in the liberationist catalogue.

Instead of wrapping themselves "in a flag of uncritical and unthinking patriotism," writes Bronski, gay groups ought to supply "draft counselors" to young gay men who might want to resist a future draft.

Someone should tell Bronski it's not 1968 anymore and the Vietnam war is over. September 11 was the bloodiest single day in American history, with thousands of civilians killed by a foreign enemy on American soil for the first time in 185 years. Whatever the ideological fixations of a bygone era - and Bronski is wrong as a matter of history to suggest gays in the 1960s weren't fighting to end discrimination in the military - many gay Americans today want very much to serve their country. That's true even - no, especially - when it's directly threatened.

However flawed, Bronski's world-view is at least coherent, a charge that can't be leveled at the next nervous Nellie of the left. Matt Lum, writing in the Texas Triangle, reports it's been "disconcerting" to see "all these red, white and blue flags flapping in my face everywhere I go."

With all the self-satisfaction of someone who imagines he's just discovered a verity, he snickers: "All this talk of freedom and opportunity, the American spirit. For some."

Lum pronounces himself "suspicious" when students recite the words "One Nation, Under God" during the Pledge of Allegiance.

Next, Lum takes shots at President Bush for saying the terrorists "misunderestimated" him and for predicting a "winning victory," as if a verbal miscue matters next to the administration's widely acclaimed, adroit handling of complex diplomatic and military strategy. I suppose this elevation of form over substance - of words over policy - is what we should expect of a generation raised on Bill Clinton's politics.

After creatively observing that "this whole thing seems to be more about beef and petroleum than anything else," Lum closes: "Practice peace, people."

Guess what, Mr. Lum? You have the "freedom and opportunity" to criticize a sitting president at a time of supreme national crisis precisely because, when the need arose, your forebears had "the American spirit" at which you sneer to give their lives to defend your rights.

I guess we can't expect the same self-sacrifice of Lum, who's discombobulated by waving flags. But it's a little bit too much to admonish us to "practice peace" when we're still shoveling up the ashes of 5,000 dead.

Perhaps the most tortured reaction comes from gay-left activist Pokey Anderson, writing in Houston's OutSmart magazine. The September 11 attack, she writes, quoting a wise and knowledgeable uncle, "'is the fruit of our calloused arrogant affluence flaunted before helpless people for decades and decades of their sufferings.'"

This about a country that has given away more of its hard-earned riches than any before in history, that rebuilt Europe and Japan after World War II, that saved millions of Muslims from dictators like Hussein and Milosevic, that has donated billions of dollars in financial aid to help poor nations feed their people and build infrastructure and acquire medicine, and on and on.

If some people around the world don't grasp those facts it's not because we've been flaunting our affluence. It's because we haven't been flaunting our generosity.

Anderson urges against "blindly bombing" innocent people in a mad desire "to lash out at somebody, anybody."

She wrote those words before we began the military response, which has demonstrated beyond doubt that we're not blindly bombing Afghanistan. In fact, given the circumstances, we've been almost unbelievably restrained in our efforts not to harm innocents, even at the expense of quickly eliminating the terrorists who threaten us with every passing day.

A truly militarist nation, lashing out at anybody and blinded by flapping flags and unthinking patriotism, would have disposed of the matter with a couple of well-placed nukes.

The real question is why Anderson or anyone else might have imagined we would blindly bomb innocent people to begin with, so that she found it necessary to caution against it. The whole idea of needlessly killing people seems to me against our history. Why would anyone assume the worst about us?

The answer, I think, is this: To most Americans, including most gay Americans, this is basically a good country that sometimes does bad things. To some on the left, however, this is basically a bad country that sometimes does good things. The war has exposed that fundamental cleavage as never before.

Finally, rather than use "old methods" like "bombing and dirty tricks and saber-rattling" in response to the terrorist strikes, Anderson advises that we rethink our opposition to "numerous treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol" on global warming and attend gatherings like the recent "World Conference Against Racism," memorable mostly for its anti-Semitism.

I have some news for Anderson. Osama bin Laden and his syndicate will not be satisfied by a more equal distribution of wealth or more global warming treaties or more conferences denouncing racism. They are not motivated, as some on the left imagine, by the left's own long list of grievances against the West.

No, Mr. Bronski, Mr. Lum, and Ms. Anderson, they just want you dead. And they want you dead because you live in a strong country that defends religious pluralism and individual liberty, which they abhor.

Now would you please let the rest of us get on with the business of figuring out how to defend you against them?

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." Straight from the First Amendment, those may be the most important words in the English language for gay Americans. It might be a good idea for some yahoo politicians around the country to read them. I have in mind two politicos in particular, the Governor of South Dakota and the mayor of Oklahoma City, who'd apparently prefer a First Amendment that doesn't apply to homosexuals. They're both fully prepared to sacrifice sound public policy rather than let gays enjoy free speech.

The First Amendment created gay America. For advocates of gay legal and social equality there has been no more reliable and important constitutional text. The freedoms it guarantees - including the freedoms of speech and association - have protected gay cultural and political institutions from state regulation designed to impose a contrary vision of the good life. Gay organizations, bars, newspapers, radio programs, television shows - all these would be swept away in the absence of a strong First Amendment.

Evenhanded and detached from passions to an unusual degree for a jurisprudence, the First Amendment sheltered gays even when most of the country thought we were not just immoral, but also sick and dangerous. In an era of almost unrelenting hostility, law professor William Eskridge has written, the First Amendment supplied "an appealing normative argument in both the political and judicial arenas." The shelter afforded by the First Amendment allowed gays to organize for the purpose of accumulating and applying political power, a precondition for the effective exercise of other important liberties.

In its protection of the rights of those accused of crime, the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause is the First Amendment's only serious constitutional competitor for pride of place in assisting gay-equality advocates. The criminal procedure protections it guarantees have been powerful weapons against state prosecutions of gay people for a variety of criminal offenses, including the violation of sodomy laws.

Yet even these protections did not significantly reduce arrest rates of gay people for consensual sexual crimes until gay political power forced police departments to consider our interests. The development of gay political power, however, has depended in the first instance on the liberty of gays to organize in groups free of state regulation impinging on their internal affairs, including the content of their message and the composition of their membership.

This freedom, in turn, depends on a strong and principled First Amendment committed to protecting unpopular opinions and speech by individuals or groups the state disdains. Government generally cannot discriminate against a person or group based on the content of their message.

Somebody better tell that to South Dakota. As do many states, South Dakota has an adopt-a-highway program that allows private groups to clean up a stretch of road in exchange for a public sign touting the group's contribution to beautification. Hundreds of groups participate.

The state rejected an application from the Sioux City Gay and Lesbian Coalition, however, saying the state does not allow official roadside signs for "advocacy groups." That is news to groups like the College Republicans, the Yankton County Democrats, the Wheat Growers Association, and the Animal Rights Advocates of South Dakota who have adopted stretches of highway and had their groups' names enshrined on the state's roads. It's not that the state forbids participation by advocacy groups; the state forbids participation by advocacy groups whose message it does not like. This the First Amendment, with its requirement of government content-neutrality, does not permit.

Faced with a likely lawsuit based on the First Amendment, Gov. William Janklow at first threatened to cancel the entire program rather than let the gay coalition participate. In the end, he "compromised" by allowing the gay coalition to participate but ordering the state to take down every group's roadside sign. The loss of this public recognition will eliminate a significant incentive for groups to get involved.

Another chop-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face move recently came from Oklahoma City. There, the city took down banners on city utility poles heralding the annual gay pride parade, sponsored by the Cimarron Alliance Foundation. The controversial banners displayed a rainbow flame over the name of the group. The city said the banners were inappropriate because of their (here's that word again) "advocacy." Yet the city had no problem allowing other religious and social advocacy groups, like an anti-drug organization, to pay to have their own banners placed on city utility poles.

Under threat of a lawsuit charging a violation of the First Amendment, the city relented and allowed the gay pride banners to reappear this year. Mayor Kirk Humphreys just couldn't understand why. "We are not talking about free speech here," he opined. "We are talking about paid advertising." He said the city was free to pick and choose the messages that appear on public property, just like private companies can choose the messages that appear on their property.

He is doubly wrong. First, advertising is a form of free speech. Second, when it comes to rights guaranteed by the constitution, government is emphatically not like private companies. The Constitution is a constraint on the state, not on private groups.

Now the city proposes to ban almost all advocacy on city property rather than let gay groups' messages appear in the future. Whether the new policy will stand up in court is a large question. What's certain is that, once again, the First Amendment has frustrated an attempt to single us out for silencing.

IF YOU'VE BEEN THINKING how nifty it would be to convert to heterosexuality, there's good news and bad news. The "good" news is a recent study concluded that, for a very small number of gays, it's possible. The "bad" news is don't bet on it. Whether or not you were born gay, you will almost certainly die gay. So you'd better learn to like it.

Proponents of so-called "reparative therapy" - the effort to make homosexuals into heterosexuals through a variety of techniques, including counseling and religious instruction - have treated the study as a vindication of their efforts. Gay political groups have reacted with horror, attacking the lead researcher himself as biased. Some news outlets described the study as "explosive."

However, it turns out the furor is much ado about very little. The study makes an exceedingly modest conclusion based on questionable methodology.

First, it's important to know what the study did not conclude. It did not conclude that conversion is possible for most - much less for all - gay people, even if they want to change. It did not conclude that homosexual orientation is a matter of choice, like whether to have the chicken or the beef in a restaurant. It certainly did not validate a particular method of conversion.

In fact, Robert Spitzer, the professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who led the study, does not endorse conversion efforts at all. Indeed, he was one of a group of pioneering psychiatrists who successfully lobbied to have homosexuality removed from the official list of mental disorders in 1973. If there's nothing disordered or sick about a trait, why change it?

What the Spitzer study did conclude is that (1) some (2) "highly motivated" (3) gay people can achieve (4) "good heterosexual functioning" (5) for a limited time (6) after more than a decade of effort. Each aspect of this rather limited conclusion deserves closer scrutiny.

Spitzer's study, which has not been published and has not been professionally reviewed for validity or methodology, is based on telephone interviews conducted with 200 people who claimed to have changed from homosexual to heterosexual attraction for a period of at least five years. Each interview lasted approximately 45 minutes, during which the subjects answered 60 questions about their sexual attractions and behavior in the period before and after their effort to change.

That's it. There were no face-to-face interviews; no tests for physiological reactions to various sexual stimuli; no objective verification of the respondents' answers; no long-term study; and no control group.

Of the 200 self-professed converts to heterosexuality, Spitzer concluded that only 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of the women had actually accomplished their goal.

Moreover, this was a very select group of people. It was not 200 gay people taken off the street at random and put through some conversion exercises to see what the outcome might be. Two-thirds of the participants were referred to Spitzer by "ex-gay ministries" that teach homosexuality is sinful or by a notoriously anti-gay outfit called the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. These groups have a vested interest in showing their effectiveness, so they're likely to submit for review only their strongest candidates.

Also, there's a good chance many of the participants had been indoctrinated with powerful and repeated doses of anti-gay ideology and religion. Such people are likely to be "highly motivated" (to borrow Spitzer's description of them) to report they've successfully changed even when they haven't.

We can't even be sure they were ever really "gay" at all. It could be that many of them were basically straight but had an occasional, experimental gay experience in their teens or 20s causing them so much guilt they decided to "change" so it would never happen again.

But since we know so little about the participants, having been acquainted with them over a telephone line for less than an hour each, it's hard to say anything about them with confidence.

The male participants claimed to have been trying to change for fourteen years; the women, for twelve years. That's about one-fifth of the adult years of the average person's life span.

And what was the return on this huge investment of time and energy? For the one-year period before the interviews, they achieved "good heterosexual functioning," defined by the researchers to mean having an emotionally satisfying relationship with a person of the opposite sex, having satisfactory sex with that person at least once a month, and rarely or never thinking of gay sex while doing it. Only 11 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women interviewed reported a complete absence of homosexual attraction. Even these figures are almost certainly high, since they are entirely self-reported.

What this study really proves is that, after a heroic and protracted effort, it is possible for a person suffering from an extraordinary level of internalized homophobia to refrain from having gay sex for a limited period of time. It shows that behavior can be modified; it does not show that a person's basic sexual orientation can be altered.

We didn't need a study to reach that conclusion. The long and tragic history of efforts to "repair" gay people - from electric shock to hormone injections to hectoring lectures about damnation - have amply demonstrated that it's possible to ruin gay people's lives. Unfortunately, this limited and flawed study will only fuel that destructive fire.

Religious conservatives instinctively understand the damage George W. Bush is inflicting on the dying and discredited anti-gay aspects of their world-view.

By appointing Scott Evertz, an openly gay man, to head the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, Bush has crossed an important political and cultural threshold. Incredibly, some gay leaders and writers - who once predicted Bush would never hire an openly gay person - have missed the significance of this moment.

Just as it took a scion of wealth to bring us a New Deal, a Southerner to end segregation, an ardent anti-Communist to open diplomatic relations with China, and a Democrat to end welfare as we knew it, it will take a conservative Republican to cement the gains made by the gay civil rights movement over the years. Bush's action both reflects and reinforces the emerging national consensus that gays should have an equal place in the life of the nation.

Evertz becomes the first openly gay person ever appointed by a Republican president. He also becomes the first gay person to lead the federal AIDS office. Either of these alone would be significant; together, they are a watershed.

The appointment not only proves Bush's oft-professed willingness to hire people regardless of sexual orientation, but it also signals the importance he places on combating AIDS. Just before the Evertz appointment, Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that AIDS is a national security issue. When Republicans call something a matter of national security, you know we mean business.

Evertz will report directly to Margaret La Montagne, Bush's domestic policy advisor, which means he will have access to the highest levels of decisionmaking in the White House. He will also be part of a task force of heavy-hitters - including Secretary of State Colin Powell and gay-friendly Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson - who will address the long-ignored international aspects of the AIDS epidemic.

It's instructive to review the reaction of some gay politicos who toiled mightily to find fault with Bush despite the appointment. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, the organizational embodiment of the gay left in Washington, conceded it was "an historic, positive step," but devoted more than half of its press release on the subject to criticism of Bush's proposed budget freezing or barely increasing some elements of federal AIDS funding. This reaction was predictable.

Far more disappointing was the response of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), usually a more sensible and centrist voice for gays in Washington. HRC spokesperson David Smith pooh-poohed the appointment of Evertz, comparing it with the alleged 152 openly gay appointees under Bill Clinton.

Yet none of the Clinton appointees served in a position more critical to gays than the one Evertz will hold. Few, if any, of Clinton's gay appointees had the direct access to the White House that Evertz will have. Personally, I'd rather have one openly gay person serving as the AIDS czar than a hundred appointees under Clinton, the most important of whom labored over patents, housing, and relations with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

The most tortured reaction from the left criticized the appointment because it supposedly represents - I love this - identity politics. Thus, "Queer in America" author Michelangelo Signorile, whose career has skillfully exploited identity politics, has suddenly found Jesus on the issue: "[T]here are pitfalls and limitations to identity-based politics," he announced in a column, "and we're about to find out the hard way."

Similarly, a board member for the Milwaukee gay community center worried the appointment would reinforce stereotypes about gay men: "I almost would have rather heard that a woman was heading [the AIDS office]."

Never mind that many of the country's top experts on AIDS are gay men (who are still disproportionately afflicted by the disease) and that not one of Clinton's three appointees to the position was gay. For people like Signorile, Bush is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

Religious conservatives have a far better grasp of what's happening now on gay issues in the GOP. They were furious at news of the Evertz appointment and became downright apoplectic when it was learned, just days later, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had hired another openly gay man to screen applicants for jobs in the Defense Department.

James Dobson, an influential evangelical leader, charged that Bush is "creating confusion and frustration for millions of pro-family, social conservatives." The Family Research Council complained that the appointment "sends the wrong message [about homosexuality] to the American people." Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition indicted the Bush administration for being "absolutely disloyal" to religious conservatives and for "stab[bing] us in the back." Robert Knight, on behalf of Concerned Women for America, accused Bush of "advancing the homosexual agenda through appointments."

The most noteworthy reaction on the right came from Republican leaders in Congress, who said ... nothing. Knee-jerk homophobes in the GOP today, like hold-out segregationist Democrats in the 1960s, are increasingly isolated politically.

When the history of the gay civil rights movement is written, the spring of 2001 will mark an important season of consolidation. It was then, the history will say, that a Republican president finally had the courage to defy the anti-gay rogues in his own party. Though such progress is reversible, Bush, cautiously but perceptibly, is truly "advancing the homosexual agenda," which is, after all, about nothing more than equality.

JUST WHEN YOU REFLECT on how bad things have been for gays in the United States, something reminds you how much worse it could be. Not long ago, a small town in Mexico barred "dogs and homosexuals" from the local beach. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has banned gays from his country's book fairs and publicly calls us "dogs." In some Islamic countries, homosexual acts are still punishable by death. It puts in perspective Congress' failure to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Now comes the Oscar-nominated film Before Night Falls to expose the horrific denial of individual rights in Cuba since Fidel Castro seized power 42 years ago. A few stalwart admirers of Castro in the U.S. have demonstrated against the film (which is, if anything, too easy on the dictator). One protestor told a newspaper that, while he hadn't actually seen the movie, he had been informed it contained "lies" about Cuba. The irony is that such unauthorized protest in Cuba itself would have landed him in jail.

Directed by Julian Schnabel, Before Night Falls chronicles the life of the gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (played superbly by Javier Bardem). Arenas, born into poverty in 1948, initially supported the Cuban revolution with its promises of free education and medical care. His first book even won a prize from Castro's cultural watchdogs.

But the romance of revolution soon died. One of the regime's first acts was to prohibit assemblies of more than three people. The news media quickly came under state control. The government recruited a network of spies in neighborhoods across the country to report dissident activity. Those who dared to criticize the government - even if they were generally sympathetic to communism - were imprisoned. Denounced as "counter-revolutionaries," some were forced to admit guilt for their political "crimes" against the state in show trials worthy of Stalin.

The Castro regime has also been ferociously anti-gay. As early as 1965, the Cuban government began sending homosexuals to prison farms and labor camps where they were brutally mistreated. According to early gay-rights activist Frank Kameny, newspaper accounts of these camps triggered the first pickets in front of the White House by gays, who held up signs asking, "Cuba persecutes gays; Is the U.S. much better?" Repression in Cuba was thus used to shame the U.S. government into treating gays more tolerantly.

Nevertheless, in the 1960s and 1970s Castro had his devotees among American gay civil rights activists allied with the New Left. Some even went annually to Cuba as part of the "Venceremos Brigade" (VB) to help harvest the country's sugar cane crop.

While assistance was welcome, officials openly worried about the inclusion of gay Americans in the VB. A 1972 policy statement described gay Americans as "particularly dangerous at this time because they join a cultural imperialist offensive against the Cuban revolution."

The same policy statement denounced homosexuality within the country as "a social pathology which reflects leftover bourgeois decadence" that "has no place in the formation of the New Man which Cuba is building." In other words, homosexuality was an artifact of capitalism that had to be purged.

Arenas himself felt this turn of the screws. As an associate informed him, the Castro government distrusted artists and writers because they create beauty and totalitarians cannot control beauty. Arenas' work was soon censored by authorities. He was forced to rely on literary admirers to smuggle his manuscripts out of the country for publication. Arenas and his circle of gay intellectual friends were closely watched by informers and frequently harassed by police.

Before long, Arenas was imprisoned on false charges of molesting a child. After managing to escape, he was captured and returned to prison, where he was tortured and placed in solitary confinement.

Such experiences have not been unusual for gay Cubans under Castro's rule. In 1970, an anonymous group of gay Cubans managed to sneak out a letter to gay civil rights activists in the United States. In the letter, they revealed how Cuban authorities persecuted gays through methods ranging from "physical attack to attempts to impose psychic and moral disintegration upon gay people." These facts, the letter noted, were "quite in contradiction with the success stories being told abroad" by some of Castro's left-wing gay apologists.

Of course, life for gays in the U.S. was no picnic in the 1960s and early 1970s. But the deprivations, punishments, and denials of basic liberties in Cuba went far beyond anything experienced here. As the gay Cubans' letter concluded: "If in a consumption society, run by capitalists and oligarchs, like the one you are living in, homosexuals experience suffering and limitations, in our society, labeled Marxist and revolutionary, it is worse."

Arenas tried desperately to escape his nightmarish country, once attempting unsuccessfully to float to Florida on an inner tube. Others have used makeshift rafts and even balloons for the same purpose. Arenas himself finally fled to the United States during the 1980 Mariel boat-lift along with thousands of other "criminals," including many gay Cubans, released by Castro.

So while we bemoan the remaining barriers to full equality in the U.S., we are fortunate to live in a country where the basic guarantees of free speech, free press, assembly, and due process apply even to us. As bad as it might seem sometimes, nobody is jumping on driftwood in the open seas to get out.

ONE OF THE ENDURING HOPES of my life is to find an issue about which the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force is right. But life, being a vale of tears, has confounded me. So it is that NGLTF has reacted to President Bush's proposals on education with error not matched since the group declared its solemn opposition to the Gulf War ten years ago.

Bush's education reform package includes two features designed to give parents greater choice about whether to send their children to private schools rather than to failing, violence-ridden public schools. One part of the package would give families vouchers in the form of coupons or checks to pay for attendance at private schools or better public schools. Similar vouchers are now available to 25,000 students in local school districts around the country, including in heavily Democratic cities like Cleveland and Milwaukee.

The other part of the reform package would allow parents to deduct up to $5,000 of their annual income to pay the educational expenses of each of their children attending private elementary or secondary schools. Some combination of tax deductions and/or tax credits for private schooling is now available in four states, including liberal-leaning Minnesota.

The basic idea behind these school-choice measures is simple. First, parents concerned about the quality of their children's education should have a meaningful opportunity to send their kids elsewhere. Second, because more parents will have more choice, schools will have to compete for students and for the dollars those students bring. Competition, the theory goes, brings excellence.

The jury is out on whether the theory meets the reality, in part because there have been so few school-choice experiments and in part because they have been on such a small scale. One concern is that vouchers and tax credits will have the effect of draining money and the best students away from the poorest school districts, making them even worse than they are now.

A second concern is that such experiments violate the principle of separation of church and state. Many parents, after all, will undoubtedly choose to send their children to private religious schools.

While the first concern about potentially harmful effects on public schools might be valid, I confess I am mystified by the second. How can it violate the Constitution to let parents use their own money to send their own children to schools of their own choice? We might as well say it offends the Constitution to let people drive to Sunday worship service on public roads or with government-subsidized ethanol in their fuel tanks.

Least compelling of all are the concerns about school choice expressed in a recent press release from NGLTF. "Funneling public tax dollars to private schools," the press release begins, "poses risks to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students and teachers as well as the children of GLBT parents." Bush's program, it hyperventilates, "threatens the safety" of gay students and gay parents and endangers the "job security" of gay teachers.

NGLTF Executive Director Elizabeth Toledo points out that vouchers will often be used to send children to religious schools that are free to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. In most states, gay students can be banned altogether from private schools and gay teachers can be fired. Toledo adds that "public schools are accountable to the public, to parents, to elected school boards and ultimately to the U.S. Constitution," whereas private schools are not.

Just where has all of this public accountability gotten us? It's true that private schools, including sectarian ones, might not be ideal for gay students, teachers, and parents. But, one always has to ask, compared to what?

Public schools in this country have not exactly been havens of tolerance and understanding for gay folks. Most public schools, even in some of the nation's largest cities, like Houston, do not forbid discrimination against gay students or openly gay teachers. Vicious taunting and teasing of kids thought to be gay are typical in public schools. Worse than that, gay kids are often pushed, hit, and spat upon. Many school districts and administrators are immune (or nearly immune) from lawsuits when they ignore anti-gay abuse, which, of course, they commonly do. A religious school that teaches the sanctity of traditional marriage but that at least guarantees the physical safety of a gay child is surely preferable to a public school where he is beaten on the way to the school library to peruse "Heather Has Two Mommies."

Private schools are accountable to a force that can be far more pervasive and powerful than government in a free society: the marketplace. Gay parents are free to withdraw their children from schools that aren't sufficiently tolerant. Parents of children being taunted or beaten for suspected homosexuality can take their money elsewhere. Schools will have to compete for the best teachers by giving them better salaries, regardless of sexual orientation. The market for private education will respond to these preferences by providing venues more hospitable to gay concerns.

It's no accident that private business has been far ahead of national, state, and local governments in barring discrimination against gays and in offering health and other benefits to gay couples. The market doesn't care much about sectarian morality. It cares about money, and money knows no sexual orientation. There's every reason to believe that a freer market for education, as Bush proposes, would provide a happier and safer environment for us all.

WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH finished his GOP acceptance speech, with its stirring proclamation, "I believe in tolerance," the first song to play was a Latin tune recently popularized by Ricky Martin. It was the perfect ending to the closet convention.

Bush never spelled out who should be tolerated or what form that tolerance should take. It wasn't a line meant for women or racial minorities, since Bush's party had already openly embraced them and it would be odd for a modern politician to say he "tolerates" women and racial minorities. That leaves gays to be tolerated. Gay Republicans welcomed yet another in a parade of subtle signs that their party wants them. Others were free to interpret it differently.

"I believe in tolerance" is a long rhetorical distance from Pat Buchanan's declaration of a "culture war" at the same convention just eight years ago. But there is something peculiar and halting about this new brand of GOP tolerance. It asks gays to come inside - but to sit still once there.

Tolerance doesn't hate gays. In fact, it loves them - in the closet. Despite all the hoo-ha from skeptical gay organizations and activists, that is progress.

Under Bush's tolerance, gays will not likely be arrested in their homes because the anti-gay Texas sodomy law he supports is only a "symbolic gesture," he says. The new tolerance preserves symbols of disapproval but is embarrassed to act on them.

So gays can serve in the military as long as they keep quiet. Bush and Cheney Don't Ask as long as you Don't Tell. That's the bargain the military struck with gays under President Clinton. It has written the closet into American law. And after a fashion it suits the new Republicans just fine.

The closet, often defended as a situs of "privacy," is prized real estate for both moderate homophobes and ashamed gays. It is a space in which the former may declare he's tolerant and the latter may pretend he isn't despised.

The closet is detested by true-believing gay-haters who would prefer to pursue and punish the homosexuals they find there. The military's anti-gay witchhunts are a model for this. So are strictly-enforced sodomy laws. Bush is not a true-believing gay-hater.

So Republican Jim Kolbe, the most respected and respectable openly gay member of Congress, was allowed to speak to the delegates. It was better than eight years ago, when no openly gay person spoke to the convention. It better than four years ago, when a gay person whose homosexuality was known to his friends but not to delegates, spoke.

Kolbe's speech was purchased at the price that he could not acknowledge his homosexuality, or talk about gay issues, or even use the word "gay," from the lectern. Tolerance could let an openly gay man speak under the illusion that he isn't gay. He could be out and in the closet at the same time.

So Mary Cheney, the openly gay daughter of the party's vice presidential nominee, was allowed to sit with her parents and watch the convention festivities. Gay activists, in an understandable but somehow pathetic yearning for affirmation, scoured seating charts to determine whether Mary's partner had been allowed to sit near her. She wasn't there. That would have put Mary on a par with her sister, whose heterosexuality was shamelessly paraded before TV cameras in the form of her two children. Tolerance isn't ready for equality.

Lynne Cheney, Mary's mother, announced how proud she was of her "hard-working" and "decent" daughter. But then she denied her daughter had ever publicly acknowledged her homosexuality, an assertion so contrary to the public record it had the ring of pathological self-delusion. Tolerance prefers not to acknowledge publicly what everyone knows. If it can't have the reality of the closet it will have the form.

Here's how one tolerant observer described the new ethos in a message posted to a Website: "Most of us don't care what they [gays] do in the PRIVACY of their own homes. We do care when they get in our faces about it and [we] wish they would shut the hell up and mind their own business!!!"

Here is the same idea stated more delicately: Gays should have "no standing in law." That assertion, from the Republican platform, states the doctrine perfectly. It's not really that gays should be persecuted; it's that they shouldn't be recognized at all.

The Republican Party, the organizational embodiment of conservatism in this country, has learned a valuable lesson from its two consecutive defeats in presidential elections. Homosexuals are among us and they will not be eliminated by any means acceptable to the American people. The question now is, what is to be done with them?

One option is to pursue a religious crusade against gays, arresting them in their homes, investigating them, praying for their souls when they speak, and calling them "errant," as Jerry Falwell put it. Another option is to welcome gays into the institutions of American life, like the military and marriage, connecting gays with mainstream values. Bush hinted at the latter option when he said that his "tolerance" came from, not despite, his religious faith.

For now the party has decided to rest on an unstable middle ground. Like the closet itself, it's better than some conceivable alternatives, and it's an undeniable improvement over where we were, but it's not a stopping place.