IGF CultureWatch

WHEN THE SUPREME COURT held that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) may exclude openly gay scoutmasters, many gay civil rights advocates howled. One writer said the result "lent legitimacy to the bigotry of ... institutions all over America." That's one way to describe the function of the First Amendment. I prefer to think of it as something free people should cherish.

The First Amendment protects people, like me, who say and believe good things. It also protects people, like the BSA, who say and believe some bad things. It guarantees freedom of speech, and the concomitant freedom to choose your friends and associates in order to promote your views. It doesn't say, "You have freedom of speech - unless a majority of a legislature in some state can be persuaded otherwise." It doesn't "lend legitimacy" to any belief. Only we, as a people, can do that, through our own words and actions.

Why would we protect a freedom to say and believe bad things? It's not because there's no difference between saying and believing bad things and saying and believing good things. One reason we protect people who say and believe bad things is that we're not very confident about our ability to distinguish between good things and bad things for all time. We should pause when we reflect that, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, "time has upset many fighting faiths." Ideas once thought unassailable are now heretical.

Here's an example: New Jersey once had a law forbidding private, consensual gay sex. It was considered a good thing. But because of the First Amendment, those who disagreed were able to persuade New Jersey that the law was wrong. Now the old state sodomy law is considered bad, even terrible.

In fact, New Jersey has stood the old sodomy law on its head, forbidding discrimination against the very people it was once confident were criminals. It is that anti-discrimination law that brought the Scouts to the Supreme Court.

The BSA disagrees with New Jersey's new, improved view of gays. It also disagrees with New Jersey's egalitarian views about females and atheists because it doesn't welcome them, either.

If the Constitution is to protect us, it must protect people we don't like, too. Otherwise, its protections are a lunchtime snack for democratic majorities.

There's self-interest in this high-minded devotion to the BSA's right to discriminate against us. In the past century, democratic majorities have given us sodomy laws, a ban on military service, gay marriage bans, anti-gay adoption laws and much else. With a nod from those same majorities, the police have used their power to raid gay bars, censor gay publications, and harass law-abiding citizens for dressing the wrong way.

Gay equality advocates, as we have learned repeatedly from painful experience, are not often in firm control of the outcomes of democratic decision making. We may have our way today, but tomorrow the barbarians will be back at the gates pressing in.

The remedy for this uncertainty is to withdraw from democratic decision makers certain spheres of private life they have no business regulating. So commercial establishments, as public accommodations that have always been regulated by law, may properly be told not to discriminate. But non-commercial private membership organizations - like the BSA, or the HRC, or the NGLTF - should be allowed to further their missions as they see fit without state interference.

What's most culturally interesting about the case is that the BSA sought constitutional protection from the proponents of gay equality. The constitutional shoe is on the other foot. It's not gays seeking protection from raiding police officers now; it's homophobes seeking protection from raiding gay rights laws.

We should never confuse having a right with what is right, however. People should have the right to burn an American flag as political protest, but I don't think it's ever right to do so. The BSA may have a right to discriminate against gays, but that does not make their discrimination right.

As in the controversy over Dr. Laura, it's the role of conscientious people to expose bigotry. In fact, it's their right to do so. Just as we may urge sponsors not to subsidize a television program we think is wrong, we may urge local governments and charities not to sponsor a private membership organization that has fought tenaciously to discriminate against us.

In the short run, the BSA won't likely fold under such pressure. The group's membership is up and withdrawing sponsors have so far been replaced by new ones. There are probably still more parents out there who would prefer BSA to keep its anti-gay policy because they fear their children will be molested by gay scoutmasters than there are parents who think that fear is irrational and don't want their children to be taught to prejudge.

But, as even the supposedly anti-gay majority Supreme Court decision recognizes, "the public perception of homosexuality in this country has changed" in the direction of "greater societal acceptance." If we keep exercising our rights, our First Amendment rights, to move the country our way, the BSA won't be turning to courts to keep us out - they'll be turning to us to keep them around.

A SPECTER HAUNTS THE "QUEER" LEFT: the normalization of gay life. Over the past decade, in movies, on television and in the theater, gay people have enjoyed unprecedented visibility. Further, the representations of gay people in these media have been fairer than ever before in showing the diversity of gay life.

Consider movies. Starting in about the mid-Nineties, fairness began to creep in. Priest and Philadelphia treated us to ordinary people who are sincere, responsible, hardworking, devoted to friends and family, and gay. These movies strongly suggested that in a better world, that last attribute would be among the least important facts about the characters. Their troubles stemmed from others' prejudice, not from their homosexuality. In movies like the Academy Award-winning American Beauty, it's homophobia that creates the problems.

Look at TV. Television shows from Frasier to Friends have woven gays into the story lines without much fanfare. Comedy Central regularly features openly gay comics. The "Will" of Will & Grace is an openly gay lawyer who dresses conservatively, lacks stereotypically gay mannerisms and gestures, and has all the usual vices and virtues you'd expect in a sitcom character. Will's hilarious friend Jack does have campy flair but at least he's seen as no more self-absorbed than any other character.

You would expect the American Family Association, the television reverends, and the various other anti-gay monitors of our culture to criticize such routine portrayal of unexceptional gay characters. And so they do; the routinization of gay life subverts every stereotype their prejudice feeds upon. But if you think they are alone in their alarm at the emergence of the ordinary homosexual, you are wrong. They are joined, for somewhat different reasons to be sure, by the self-described queer left.

The novelist Michael Cunningham, in a film review not long ago for the New York Times entitled "Just Your Ordinary (Gay) Guy," wrings his hands at the thought of masculine, "assimilated" gay men who are "just like everybody else, except for one little thing." Cunningham praises the character Diego in the film Strawberry and Chocolate. He likes the fact that Diego is "swishy and coy," worships the opera star Maria Callas, fusses over his collection of French teacups, and suffers unrequited love for a straight man. He praises the character - many of whose traits would fit neatly into the worldview of Lou Sheldon and the Traditional Values Coalition - as a "step in the right direction" in the portrayal of gay characters.

Other examples of this type of cultural criticism abound. There's the recent piece in Harper's in which the author lambastes periodicals like Out and Poz for showing clean, contented, freshly scrubbed gay women and men. Where's the unseemliness, the sex advertisements, the fetishists? asks the contemptuous writer. Pat Robertson might have asked the same thing.

The queer left saw cultural shift coming and tried to head it off at the pass. In her 1995 book, Virtual Equality, Urvashi Vaid denies that homosexuals are "just like" heterosexuals and describes gays as almost a subspecies of Homo sapiens, with their own peculiar values and ideas. In The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Daniel Harris laments the demise of gay camp and kink. A few years ago, a columnist writing under the pseudonym "Orland Outland" for San Francisco Frontiers magazine, bitterly criticized gays "who have put their own sense of being alien behind" them.

You may remember Luke Sissyfag, the former ACT-UP activist who once distributed graphically illustrated condom packages to schoolchildren, regularly pranced before cameras in lipstick, eyeliner, and pink plastic hair barrettes, and championed the idea of a natural gay "queerness." He now calls himself Luke Montgomery and appears on fundamentalist radio programs to decry the "gay lifestyle" as "totally devoid of any moral character" and consisting of nothing but rampant sex and continual drug use. He says anti-discrimination laws are "fascistic," promoted by a gay community that doesn't feel good about itself.

Some say Luke's present and past personas are inconsistent; I say they are perfectly consistent. If there is one person who literally combines in one body the fear felt by both the queer left and the anti-gay right that homosexuals might one day be considered ordinary members of society, it is surely he. Whether he's trashing us or defending us, it's all the same. He wants gays to be seen as somehow special.

And that's just it, isn't it? Behind all the talk of revolutionary values, the need for a "sense of being alien," the supposed subversion of gender roles, lies the fear of being ordinary. It is the childlike need to have everyone's attention. If it is ordinary to be gay, there's nothing special about you on that account. You have no secret rings or rites, no hidden passages or esoteric language, no distinct set of values, no special insight into human suffering or longing. You're only an individual who must make your own way in the world, unable to depend on the safety of belonging to an elect tribe.

It is mythologizing and harmful to show gays as the queer left has romanticized us - as sexual revolutionaries, with alien natures and values, threatening and iconoclastic, angry, ennobled, and enlightened by our oppression, not "just like them" in the sense that matters. But we are better, and bigger, than that. We need not fear being ordinary.

Like other gay conservatives, I spend a lot of time on critiques of the gay left. Turnabout is fair play, so here's some advice to my gay conservative compatriots:

COME OUT. Years ago, when I was still substantially closeted, a straight friend observed that it's hard to change the world from a hiding place. He was right. All conscientious gay women and men should make coming out a top priority. But I think gay conservatives have an especially great obligation to do so. We know there's no gay lifestyle, no gay or "ungay" thought or idea. We must convince the rest of the world, including some gay people, of that. You can't do so unless you're seen and heard.

Of course, there's some risk of rejection or career impairment in being visible. But you should be dedicated in your life to something other than your own wealth or career. Otherwise, you may one day find yourself sixty, rich, and empty.

GET INVOLVED. Conservatives, by disposition and ideology, are reluctant to be "activists." Unless it's got a hammer and sickle tattooed on its forehead, we tend to think it's benign or just foolish, and hence disregard it. But the truth is, if you're gay in America today you're something less than a full citizen, even if you drive a Mercedes and drink 25-year-old port. It will take work, our work, to change things.

Join political and civic organizations. Write to newspapers and magazines when you read something wrong or offensive. Engage the gay left and the religious right in debate. And don't quit at the first sign of trouble or resistance.

DON'T WHINE. Lots of my conservative gay friends say they hate going to pride parades and other gay events because everybody there is in drag or leather thongs and tit clamps. They also lament the dominance of the left in gay organizations. They say that such people represent only a small fraction of all gays and that this distorts the picture the rest of the country gets of us.

They're right that the parades and the outlandish public behavior and dress that often occur at them do not portray most gay lives, but they're wrong to stay away. The antidote to the false impressions created by the parades and other public events is not to stay home and disdainfully watch them on TV; the answer is for us to go ourselves. The answer is to ensure that at such events, and in gay organizations and media, we are present to provide the necessary corrective. We cannot blame anyone else - certainly not the "marginal" elements of our community - for misrepresenting gay life. By our silence and our absence, we have allowed that false picture to be painted.

TOLERATE DIFFERENCE. While we're on the subject, this is probably a good time to repeat the truism that not all gays, not even all gay conservatives, wear suits and ties and act like proper ladies and gentlemen. We should be striving to secure equality for all gays, including those who dress and behave differently from the mainstream.

We can still criticize theatrical excesses, such as public nudity, and we can still condemn real moral wrongs, such as pedophilia. But we will have to respect the right of others to craft their own public image. It may not be the image we would choose for ourselves, and we will want to counter it with more representative depictions of gay life, but we must grasp that we are part of a diverse and colorful movement.

FOCUS ON THE REAL ENEMY. This I promise you: when the bullies are menacing your bloodied body, the person standing betwixt you and eternity will not likely be your Heritage Foundation debate partner. It will be that bull dyke with a nose ring who thinks a single-payer health-care system is really cool. Even taking into account the stifling effect of high taxes, counter-productive social welfare programs, crime, and the encroachment of "hate speech" regulations, the most organized threat to our civil rights today comes from the religious right. A gay leftist may think you're overbearing or self-righteous, may call you names and grossly misunderstand you at times, but I've yet to hear one request the state to lock you up under the rubric of a sodomy law. So let's try to keep our squabbles with the gay left in perspective. When you get frustrated, remember the line from an old movie: they may be rancid butter, but they're on our side of the bread.

EDUCATE. Many, though by no means all, gay political leaders and writers have only a dim view of what gay conservatives stand for. That fact is both disappointing and a measure of how much work we must do. Yet the animosity and suspicion with which the gay political establishment views us is partly understandable: the only people they've ever known as "conservatives" told them they were immoral, unnatural, or worse.

We must painstakingly correct their impressions of us and fill in the large gaps in their understanding of our ideas. And we must emphasize again and again that we stand with, not against, them in the pursuit of equality for gays.

IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THE SHOWERS, doesn't it? Sure, some experts defend the military's anti-gay policy with abstruse concepts like "unit cohesion." But those are just words. Behind the words is sexual anxiety about homosexuals. A retired Marine commandant who helped design President Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy recently said on national television that he would be uncomfortable sharing "body heat" with a gay soldier on a cold battlefield.

It's tempting to laugh at the paranoia behind that kind of talk. But there is a serious question of sexual privacy here, one that has to be addressed if openly gay soldiers are to serve their country.

The argument has to start with a recognition of what the U.S. military is and what it is not. It is the most powerful and efficient killing machine in the world. That's a good thing for the liberties of more than 250 million people.

The U.S. military is not an extension of civil society in smart uniforms and shiny medals. Rights that civilians take for granted are routinely denied to military personnel. They are told when to wake up, when to go to sleep, where to live, what to do, what to say and what not to say, and they are stripped of privacy. These, too, are good things for the rest of us. Whatever we do in any area of military policy must preserve the effectiveness of our fighting force.

Defenders of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" argue that mixing gays and straights in the military's atmosphere of forced intimacy will threaten that effectiveness. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, sociology professor Charles Moskos offers an analogy to male-female relations. "Nowhere in our society are the sexes forced to undress in front of each other," he observes. So we segregate men from women in the military. "If we respect women's need for privacy from men, then we ought to respect those of heterosexuals with regard to homosexuals," Moskos argues.

Opponents of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" tend to dismiss this sexual privacy argument, and the male-female analogy in particular. One snickering response is that heterosexual men will now get the same unwanted sexual objectification they've given women for centuries. Unfortunately, that answer only reinforces the concerns it laughs at.

Another bad response goes to the other extreme, suggesting that gay soldiers will be asexual models of propriety. Let us in, it is suggested, and we won't make sexual advances or suggestions; we won't even look at our comrades in the showers.

Please.

Back in the real world where real people feel real sexual attraction while living and working in close quarters, what will it mean to have an openly gay man among all those glistening, athletic heterosexual male bodies?

We must first recognize that the issue is not, "Shall we let gays serve?" Gays have always served in the military and always will. The issue is, "Shall we let gays who serve be honest about being gay?"

We can segregate men from women, or exclude women, but either way we'll know who is who. The military can't effectively segregate gays, can't effectively exclude gays, and can't always know who is who. That makes the whole question different from rules governing men and women.

Under present policy, the straight soldier doesn't know who might be leering at him in the shower. So he has to wonder about everybody - hardly a reassuring prospect. Under a policy of openness, he'll have a better idea who might find some of his 2,000 body parts especially appealing. Thus, he can take whatever modest precautions are available to minimize his exposure.

Although openly gay soldiers will not be sexless, my hunch is they'll be hypersensitive to the perception that they're constantly on the make (a perception straight men don't always mind when it comes to women). So, unlike straight men drooling after women, openly gay military personnel will likely be especially careful not to let their eyes wander or their hands linger in places they're not welcome.

The male-female analogy also misses the gay-straight dynamic in important ways. In the male-female context, the anticipated sexual aggressors (heterosexual males) are in the majority. Their aggression is often approved and even encouraged by their peers. Under those circumstances, the need for formalized separation from the objects of their desire is understandable.

In the gay-straight context, on the contrary, the anticipated sexual aggressors (known gays) are a tiny minority of the whole. Their aggression is disapproved by their peers, and therefore far less likely to occur or be as intimidating when it does.

Because straight men and women are the overwhelming majority in the military, the expected problems associated with mixing them in close quarters would be frequent and widespread. Mixing straights with a tiny number of openly gay personnel, on the other hand, would occasion comparatively few incidents. To say it would impair the military's effectiveness is silly.

Too, the military separates men and women because it rightly assumes that at least some of the attraction between them will be mutual. We separate straight men and women because they can't keep their hands off each other.

Yet straight men, some of whom recoil even at homosexual body heat, would be the first to say they'll be strictly hands-off with gay men. I say let's take them at their word.

Originally appeared January 3, 2000, in the author's syndicated column, "OutRight," before the Vermont legislature's enactment of a bill providing for "civil unions."

Some will say the Vermont Supreme Court has freed a few of us at last. It might be more appropriate to say it has bound us at last. Further, in determining that gay couples must be treated legally the same as straight couples, the Vermont court has lighted a path to equality that emphasizes gays' similarity to straight Americans, avoids civil-rights dogma, and reinforces the primacy of marriage. That's not a bad day's work for a court that sits in a state with about as many people as Memphis.

Before we get too excited, however, it's important to note what didn't happen in Baker v. State. The Vermont court didn't require that state to recognize same-sex "marriages." The state has to give a gay couple the same rights and obligations as a married straight couple, but the state doesn't have to call it marriage.

Indeed, the state doesn't have to do anything right away. Vermont now has a "reasonable period of time" to weigh its choices - during which an effort might be made to override the court's opinion by amending the state constitution, as happened in Hawaii. For complex reasons beyond the scope of this column, it's also doubtful other states would have to recognize a Vermont-sanctioned gay relationship whatever it's called.

Finally, because of its reliance on an uncommon provision of the state constitution, the opinion will have little immediate precedential value in other state or federal courts. So Dorothy, you're still in Kansas.

Yet the Vermont opinion marks important progress in thinking about gay equality - progress that goes beyond both homophobic prejudices and stale civil-rights ideology.

The gay civil rights movement focuses on achieving civil rights, but has not much considered corresponding civil obligations. Marriage is not so lopsided. To be sure, it offers a host of advantages, ranging from health benefits to inheritance rights. But it imposes a concomitant obligation to care for the other participant, even after the relationship ends. As the Vermont court said, marriage offers "the right to receive, and the obligation to provide, spousal support, maintenance, and property division in the event of separation or divorce."

Most domestic partners laws in the country provide a nice portion of legal right (like health benefits) but require little more than signing a document. No wonder no one thinks of domestic partnerships like a real marriage.

Vermont's state-sanctioned same-sex relationships, whether called marriages or domestic partnerships, will be very different. They will grant hefty privileges and charge a hefty price - the same as any marriage. That's a first. It means we're getting some balance in the law.

The Vermont court's rationale for its result is also instructive. The court emphasized that "the marital exclusion treats persons who are similarly situated for purposes of the law, differently." Gay people, the court is saying, are like straight people in all relevant senses. So the law can't treat them differently.

This simple conclusion gives the back of a hand to any notion that gays are significantly different from mainstream America - whether that notion comes from the religious right or from the progressive left. We were successful in Vermont because the court saw the importance of our similarity, not the centrality of our difference.

The Vermont court also eschewed the reliance on feminist theory found in many gay-rights decisions and commonly espoused in the gay civil rights movement. The court repudiated the idea that the marital exclusion is just another form of sex discrimination (as the Hawaii Supreme Court concluded), for example. It found no evidence that "the authors of the marriage laws excluded same-sex couples because of incorrect and discriminatory assumptions about gender roles or anxiety about gender-role confusion."

In other words, it is possible for the law to treat men and women "equally" - as by prohibiting both to marry members of their own sex - and yet still single out gays for discrimination. Thus, the Vermont court showed that an approach to gay equality, at least in some cases, need not be tethered to feminism.

Similarly, the court rejected an approach that would treat gays as a special protected class under the law. Under the protected-class approach favored by the civil-rights establishment, courts aggressively overturn laws disadvantaging the class. In this case, the Vermont court conceptualized marriage discrimination as fencing gays out of an important institution. Thus, the court reaffirmed the importance of social inclusion without obsessing about gays' beleaguered status as a minority.

Further, the Vermont court achieved its historic result without undermining marriage's privileged position as the primary means by which our society encourages stable, committed human coupling. It's clear, for example, that nothing in the opinion commands the Vermont legislature to create a domestic partners system for opposite-sex couples who want to shack up but don't want to commit to marriage. And nothing in the opinion opens marriage to groupings of three, four, or five people or to connubial bestiality.

Finally, the Vermont court models a sensible, incremental approach to major social reform. The opinion points to the long list of legislative changes in the state - eradicating sodomy laws, adopting anti-discrimination statutes, protecting adoption rights, etc. - that render senseless the continued resistance to equality in the area of marriage. Those changes came serially, not all at once. One change laid the groundwork for the next.

Similarly, gay "marriage" will now be the law in one state, not all, allowing the rest of the country time to adjust. We may still be in Kansas, but Topeka won't be quite the same.

FOR ANYONE who thinks gays should stand irredeemably apart from society - either because we ought to be outcasts or because we ought to be revolutionaries - the past decade must have been a frustrating one. The political causes that most defined our movement in the 1990s sought to weave gays into the larger fabric of American life. We fought to be Boy Scouts, to join the military, to worship God and preach His word, to raise children, and yes, even to marry each other. We wanted to be a part of these traditional institutions, not apart from them. We wanted a place at the table.

No author better crystallized this deep and widespread yearning than Bruce Bawer in his 1993 work, A Place at the Table, the decade's most important book on the gay movement. Containing few wholly original arguments, it nevertheless articulated better than any book before or since gays' rightful place in our culture. Although reasoned and mostly restrained in its rhetoric, the book drew a torrent of criticism that never seemed to rebut its underlying message. And although Bawer advocated no single political agenda, he fueled a self-conscious movement of gay moderates and conservatives that is still redirecting gay politics.

Most books go unread. When read, they are misunderstood. When understood, they are forgotten. But A Place at the Table was different. Why? For starters, the book made some simple yet compelling points. First, it argued that gays are a varied lot, found across the spectrum of life. Second, it declared that no one should be allowed to define how gay individuals should live, think, act, or dress based on a gay "identity." Third, it observed that "America is basically a tolerant nation," and the wisest approach for a despised minority, then, is to foster understanding, not antagonism. Fourth, it urged that mainstream gays - those not caught up in a subculture fixated on identity and separation - have an "obligation" to be visible.

Bawer strongly advocated legal equality and tolerance for homosexuals but emphasized that these were not enough. Full acceptance in our families and in our social institutions was necessary. He thus saw the importance of improving the whole of our lives.

Next, consider the book's effect on critics, especially those who rightly saw it as a threat to their conception of gays as a band of social rebels who would undermine every cherished traditional value - from sexual sobriety to free enterprise. They may have hated the book, but they could not ignore it, as the volume and vituperation of their often-misplaced criticism amply demonstrated. In a year-end roundup of gay-themed books for 1993, one critic for San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter called the book "terrible," but nevertheless "important" because of its widespread impact. Gay professor and author David Bergman chided Bawer for allegedly failing to appreciate "the great spectacle of human difference," but acknowledged that Bawer had expressed "what many people feel." A recent collection of essays, The Columbia Reader on Lesbians & Gay Men in Media, Society, & Politics, snidely dismissed Bawer as "a newly hatched gay figure" but included an entire chapter titled "A Place at Which Table?"

Finally, even more telling is the effect of A Place at the Table on what Bawer called the "silent majority" of gays. In the early 1990s, gay women and men were coming out of their closets from every nook and cranny of America. This wave included a lot of people who were uncomfortable with the prevailing notion of gays as a radical, sex-obsessed fringe. What they saw to their dismay was a gay movement that often reinforced that stereotype, failed to reflect their outlook and attitudes, derided religion, deliberately offended middle America with its language and dress, and increasingly called itself "queer."

Bawer spoke to this generation in a way no one had before. One of my gay friends recently recalled that, as he read A Place at the Table alone in his living room, he came across passages that literally caused him to jump up on his couch and shout "Yes!" It was an experience shared by many others for whom reading the book was a revelation. Finally, someone was speaking for them and to them. Bawer told them they could, they must, be a part of a cause that had somehow always seemed alien.

So in the wake of A Place at the Table, this new generation got involved in politics through groups like Log Cabin Republicans and made the moderate Human Rights Campaign the largest and richest gay political organization ever. They insisted that gay organizations put issues like marriage at the top of the agenda. They went back to church. They published their own essays in Beyond Queer, a book that self-confidently "challeng[ed] gay left orthodoxy." They set up a popular Web site, the Independent Gay Forum (www.indegayforum.org), for their writings. They refused to sit still for lectures - from either the gay left or the religious right - about who they should be and what they should think.

A Place at the Table wasn't solely responsible for all of this. Much of it would have happened anyway, sooner or later. But the book brought it together, nurtured it, and sent it on its way. Bawer's world, to a very large extent, is now our world; his methods, our methods; his goals, our goals. He wrote the book of the decade and changed gay politics forever.

MY DICTIONARY defines "racism" as "racial prejudice or discrimination." If that's right, there's no other word for what happened recently at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's annual "Creating Change" conference, held in Oakland. By supporting it, NGLTF has crossed the line of common decency and skirted the boundary of the law.

On Saturday, November 13, I showed up for a conference workshop provocatively entitled, "Challenging Issues of Race, Class, and Gender Within the Movement: How to Work With Our Allies Without Killing Them First." The conference guidebook promised that the workshop would address "the links among economic, social, and cultural attacks on People of Color within the LGBT movement."

As about 20 men and women of various races gathered, one of the workshop co-chairs announced that the program guide had mistakenly omitted a notice that this session was to be for "people of color" only - one of several sessions so designated at the conference. Hearing this, the approximately six white women and men present got up from their chairs and walked silently out of the room.

Stunned, I asked aloud if I was being told to leave because I am white. "Yes," answered the co-chair quickly and without elaboration. I left. A sign was then posted outside the door to the room that read, in large Magic Marker: "The Workshop 'Working w/Our Allies' is part of the people of color track. Hence, it's open to people of color only. Thank you." The word "only" was underlined twice for emphasis. The irony of excluding allies from a session about "Working with our Allies" was evidently lost on the leaders of the workshop.

I then approached NGLTF Communications Director David Elliott, a capable and articulate spokesperson by any standard, who confirmed that the Task Force backs race-based exclusion for some workshops at the conference. Why? I asked. "When one of our coalition allies requests a safe space we will respect that request," he responded.

"Safe" from whom, I wondered. From like-minded whites who want only to help fight continuing racial prejudice? It turns out that "safe space" is an Orwellian euphemism employed since at least the 1970s to justify all manner of race- and sex-based exclusion at events around the country. It has been used, for example, to exclude men from the annual Texas Lesbian Conference and to exclude both men and transgendered women from the annual "Womyn's" music festival in Michigan.

Would the Task Force support a presenter who allowed only white people to attend? No, responded Elliott, because "we're not dealing with an equal playing field." Well then, under this leveling no-whites policy, would NGLTF support the exclusion of Jews (a group targeted for racist genocide in this century)? I asked. There was a long pause. "I don't know the answer to that," he said.

OK, well, is NGLTF concerned that it may have violated federal and state laws prohibiting racial discrimination? I continued. After all, the event was held at a taxpayer-funded convention center and NGLTF opened the conference to anyone willing to pay the $200 registration fee. An even longer pause ensued. "We've never thought of that before," Elliott finally answered.

NGLTF could argue, of course, that it is a private organization legally entitled to include or exclude anyone it wants on any basis it wants, "discriminatory" or not. But then that would sound uncomfortably like the arguments we hear these days from the gay-excluding Boy Scouts - arguments NGLTF has harshly criticized.

Back inside the actual workshop, a less high-minded defense of excluding whites was heard. (I know this because I obtained an audiotape of the proceedings.) When a couple of attendees questioned why whites were not allowed in, the response was frank: "I think it's a good learning experience, even though it is rude, that they [whites] experience what we experience," answered one participant. An eye-for-an-eye, anyone?

Another attendee asserted that the leaders of NGLTF, a "white-run organization" in his view, "would ask the white people in the room to leave because that was their [NGLTF's] commitment to being anti-racist." War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and racism is anti-racism. "We ought to allow white people to do their work," he continued, "and their work is to give us space. And it's compensatory."

I don't contend that racial discrimination has historically inflicted anywhere near the damage on whites that it has on racial minorities. It hasn't. But I do contend that, wherever and against whomever it is enforced, it needlessly divides and engenders resentment. It denies the humanity of the person it is practiced against, whatever the color of that person's skin. It's especially distressing that the left, which led the fight to end racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, is today either silent about racial double standards, or worse, actively supports them.

In the last 50 years, the gay civil rights movement has come full circle. We have gone from a movement that excluded people on the basis of race, to one that embraced racial non-discrimination, to one that established racial quotas to ensure minority representation, to one that excludes people on the basis of race. Dress it up and excuse it however you will, it is fragmenting us, and therefore weakening us.

A COMMON CHARGE against gay conservatives is that we are narrow and selfish, ignoring the needs of the disadvantaged. A typical example of this criticism is a recent article by Richard Goldstein in New York's Village Voice. Goldstein dismisses gay conservatives as "a recent arrival in the movement," then chides the Log Cabin Republicans for including too few poor, black, and female members. Finally, he upbraids Andrew Sullivan, the most prominent gay conservative in America, for focusing on gay marriage instead of things like "justice" and economic "security" for oppressed people.

Among progressives, words like "justice" and "security" are placeholders for a broad range of policy choices. As one recent and especially articulate letter to San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter put it, "our struggle for equality should include the struggle for universal access to health care, a guaranteed living wage, affordable and adequate housing for all," and so on. The writer reasons that these are "gay rights issues" because "we are everywhere." Gay conservatives, whom he disparages as out-of-touch, upper-class white males, are then faulted for not backing his policy preferences.

These critics are dead wrong about the gay right. As a matter of fact, gay conservatives are not "new arrivals" to the movement. Contrary to the widespread pop-history about the Stonewall riot, the American gay civil rights movement did not begin in any radical upheaval of the late 1960s. Embarrassing as this may be to some, many of the organizers of the movement in the 1950s were middle-class, white, male, and distinctly "assimilationist" (read: conservative) in their approach to gay civil rights. While it's true that there were also dedicated communists among these pre-Stonewall organizers, some, like Dorr Legg, were lifelong Republicans. They risked losing their freedom, jobs, families, and homes to a far greater degree than we do now.

Further, the undeniable demographic imbalance in the movement has not been limited to gay Republicans. As Stephen Murray notes in American Gay, even radical "queer" and AIDS street-theater groups have been mostly white and middle-class. Of course, there is no reason to conclude from this history that only conservative, wealthy, white males should lead the movement today.

Aside from its errors of history and fact, the left's critique of gay conservatives suffers more serious theoretical weaknesses.

First, it operates from an unworkably expansive definition of what constitutes a gay issue. If, as some would have it, anything that affects the life of any gay person anywhere is a gay issue, then there are no issues that aren't gay issues. It may make strategic sense occasionally to take sides on other issues in order to form political alliances (and the ideological tilt of those alliances will vary). An all-encompassing conception of gay civil rights, however, would make it illegitimate to focus on narrowly defined gay concerns.

That has profound consequences. Any organization that took this definition seriously would get little done for gay civil rights since it would constantly be distracted and divided by important peripheral questions. To avoid being unduly narrow, we become impossibly wide.

Even granting this limitless conception of gay civil rights, why are gays more qualified to hold forth on race and class issues than, say, a union of bricklayers? Sure, we're not incompetent to talk about them; but we're not more competent by virtue of being gay, either. To avoid being selfish, then, we become arrogant.

Second, accepting the notion that every conscientious citizen (gay or not) should be concerned about the problems of beleaguered groups, the next question is how to deal with those problems. Bromides about justice cannot mask how complicated the inquiry now becomes.

Consider the above-mentioned proposals, for example. There's a good argument that state-controlled "universal access to health care" would mean rationed and inefficient health care, with less incentive for entrepreneurial investment in lifesaving treatments and drugs for diseases like AIDS. A government-mandated "guaranteed living wage" - essentially a dramatically higher minimum wage - would be inflationary and would depress employment, hurting the lower classes most of all. "Affordable and adequate housing for all" is pleasant-sounding code language for things like rent control. Yet rent control discourages private investment in low-cost housing, hardly a boon to the poor. It goes on and on like that.

Third, even on strictly gay issues, the critique of gay conservatives' priorities badly misfires. Same-sex marriage, for example, offers more to Goldstein's disenfranchised constituencies than he imagines.

Allowed to wed, poverty-stricken gays will have an opening to the array of advantages marriage provides, including health care, tax breaks, testimonial privileges, and Social Security benefits. The generally higher physical, emotional, and financial health enjoyed by married couples will finally be available to disadvantaged gays - people that are in far greater need of those benefits than rich white boys are.

Women, whose desire for variety in sexual partners is on average lower than men's, are disproportionately more likely to access the benefits of same-sex marriage. Why belittle this simple measure of justice and security for gay women?

What we have is not a debate between a generous group of people who care about the downtrodden and a stingy group of people who don't. What we have, among other things, is a complicated debate between distinct visions of how to help them. That's a serious discussion, unlike the polemical one Goldstein and friends want.

THE MURKY MUCK OF compassionate conservatism is clearing up, and the emerging picture isn't always pretty. Texas Gov. George W. Bush's public statements so far in support of criminalizing gay sex, for example, reveal that his views aren't very compassionate. They're not really conservative, either.

The statements are all the more important as a signal about Bush's attitude toward gays because, although numerous states still have laws that forbid sodomy, only a handful aim solely at gay sex the way the Texas law does.

To be fair to Bush, he inherited his state's anti-gay sodomy law. Although it's been around for decades in one form or another, the current version was adopted by a Democratic state legislature in 1993 as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the state penal code. Then it was signed by a Democratic governor, the sainted Ann Richards, who opposed the measure but did almost nothing to stop it. Still, Bush cannot escape the consequences of what he is saying about it now - and neither can we.

Those who support anti-gay sodomy laws come two ways: hard and soft. The hard-on-sodomy position holds that gay sex should be illegal and those who practice it should be thrown in jail. The hard-liners are fully prepared to have the cops barge into your bedroom, arrest you, and haul you away to make license plates. It doesn't bother them that full implementation of their vision of a moral society would assault the traditional conservative principle of limited government. Rigorous enforcement of anti-gay sodomy laws would require the erection of a police state.

Bush is more flaccid when it comes to sodomy. He has promised to veto any attempt to repeal the Texas sodomy law, which he defends as "a symbolic gesture of traditional values."

Yet Bush has never called for actual enforcement of the law. Thousands of gay Texans violate it every night with little fear that a Bush-inspired Gestapo will kick down their doors. Although last year Houston police did arrest two men having sex in a private home, the incident was so bizarre that it was the exception that proves the rule of non-enforcement.

Implicit in Bush's endorsement of the sodomy law as a mere "symbol" and "gesture" is the idea that it should not be enforced. This soft defense is disingenuous. It says to the religious right, "I share your values." It then winks at everyone else and whispers, "But I don't really mean it." It's the kind of politics that promises something with its fingers crossed behind its back. Is this compassionate conservatism in action?

It is certainly not compassionate. Just what "symbolic gesture" does an anti-gay sodomy law make? It is a signal sent from one segment of the population to another and is clear as can be: You are so dirty and disgusting that even your most intimate, loving moments are a stench in our nostrils. It is a form of caste politics.

If you publicly denounce someone as a criminal, the compassionate act is then to jail him to protect him from the mob you've aroused.

But Bush's position is not conservative, either. The father of modern political conservatism, the 18th-century British statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke, would be aghast at Bush's support for a criminal law he is not prepared to enforce.

"A penal law not ordinarily put in execution seems to me to be a very absurd and a very dangerous thing," Burke argued during a passionate speech urging tolerance for religious minorities. He reasoned that if the law at issue punishes a genuine evil it would be irresponsible not to administer it.

However, if its object is not the suppression of some real wrong, "then you ought not to hold even a terror to those whom you ought certainly not to punish." If it is not right to enforce the law against an offender, Burke argued, then "it is neither right nor wise to menace" him with it. "Take them which way you will," he said of unenforced criminal laws, "they are pressed with ugly alternatives."

A real conservative in the Burke mold would either have the courage of his convictions and enforce the law or drop the matter. The existence of sodomy laws as a middle-finger gesture from the traditional-values majority to gay citizens proves Burke's insight that unenforced criminal laws are a menace and a terror to those they target.

What issues politely from the mouth of a politician may finish crudely on a Wyoming plain. If Bush wants symbols, let him ponder Matthew Shepard on his fence. There's the anti-gay symbol of this era.

Shepard didn't get to that spot by accident. He got there because two boys grew up in a culture that judged gays symbolic criminals; because, as young men, they learned it was their place to execute that judgment, even if the law was unwilling to do so; and they learned that in part because - rather than standing up for real decency, the kind that encourages citizens in a diverse and free society to live side-by-side in peace - influential people like George W. Bush indulge a fake and pretentious decency, the kind that plays at moral judgments it no longer believes in.

I may side with Bush on everything from taxes to China, but as long as he thinks I'm an outlaw in my own land, he won't get this Republican's vote.

I OFFER YOU A CHOICE between two hypothetical worlds. Neither of them has ever existed or is likely to exist as far as I can see into the future. But thinking about them as alternatives sheds some light on this enterprise called the gay civil rights movement.

In the first hypothetical world, imagine that we have eliminated every last bit of legal discrimination against gays. We have ended the ban on gays in the military, eradicated anti-gay sodomy laws, and passed laws protecting us from discrimination. Every state has tough hate-crimes legislation. We can legally marry and adopt children in every jurisdiction. We have, in short, secured the entire legislative wish list of most of the movement.

There's only one problem. In this first world, we still face widespread moral condemnation and, hence, social disapproval for being gay. Most gay kids still grow up in families where homosexuality is considered shameful. That shame still translates into unusually high suicide rates for gay youth. Most religions still teach homosexuality is an abomination and that gays are going to hell. Walking down the street holding your lover's hand is still guaranteed to get you nasty stares, maybe ugly insults, possibly physical assault. The law welcomes us, sure, but our families, neighbors, and associates don't. The reigning moral view is that we're deeply wrong.

In the second hypothetical world, imagine that we have erased the moral distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Families think nothing of having a gay kid. They celebrate our relationships as they would any straight child's. Friends regard sexual orientation as unimportant. Most major religions welcome us as God's children and teach that our love is not a sin any more than heterosexual love is. Few look twice when we walk hand-in-hand down the street.

Yet the second world is not perfect, either. It retains legal discrimination. Some states have anti-gay sodomy laws. We have no protection from discrimination. There are almost no state hate-crimes laws. We can't serve openly in the military and can't marry or adopt children. The reigning legal view is that we're second-class citizens.

Which would you choose - the world of pure legal equality or the one of full moral and social acceptance?

Gay civil rights organizations at all levels are almost entirely focused on achieving legal equality. That's understandable. After all, organizations rely on verifiable achievements to raise money. Either this good piece of legislation passes or it does not; either that anti-gay bill is blocked or it is not. We know where we stand with laws. We can look them up in books.

It's a lot harder to measure how we're faring in the hearts of the people around us. The victories and defeats there don't tend to be up or down, black or white. They oblige us to examine how we are doing on the moral plane - the plane on which people actually live and make judgments about others.

Are we or are we not fully part of the society around us? Are we or are we not really wanted and welcomed there? These questions are a lot harder to answer than: Did the civil rights bill make it out of the subcommittee on judicial affairs yesterday?

Partly for that reason, ultimate success in the moral dimension also matters more. If we were equally accepted in the lives of the straight people around us we wouldn't need a law to protect us from discrimination in employment or housing or education. We wouldn't need a hate-crimes law because criminals wouldn't target us for being gay. The sodomy law might remain on the books, but at least no one would ever think to enforce it, much less use it as a public argument against us. Marriage discrimination at the legal level might remain, but our relationships would be as celebrated and supported as any straight marriage.

On the other hand, does anyone really think we'll feel that much more secure in a world soaked in anti-gay hatred just because some legislature passes a hate-crimes law? Will our co-workers respect our worth as equals just because Congress passes a non-discrimination bill? Will anyone respect a marriage they see as founded on abominable sin? Legal victories can seem significant on paper but be almost worthless in practice.

Further, a world characterized by social and moral equality leads more directly and naturally to legal equality than the reverse. You can imagine that a world devoid of sodomy laws would nevertheless retain a lot of bigots. It's harder to see how a world largely free of bigots could retain sodomy laws.

It's not that legal equality is unimportant. It is terribly important. For one thing, it grants some security against a still-hostile world. It can also help to fuel social acceptance. But legal equality by itself will never substitute for the equality we must win in the hearts of the people we live beside.

In June 1963, at the height of tension over black civil rights, President Kennedy said that the country must begin to see racial equality as a moral issue. If gay men and women are to be fully a part of the life of this country our struggle, too, must be seen foremost as a moral one.