IGF CultureWatch

Should California students learn that homosexual Californians have no flaws? A bill that just passed the state Senate could make that happen. Textbooks would have to treat lesbians and gay men with the same kid gloves the law now requires for members of other minorities. Equality demands many things, but not this.

The bill begins from a sound premise: that history classes should not be biased. California's schools went through a long period where students learned California and U.S. history without knowing about the contributions women or people of color had made to that progress. Up until 40 years ago, when the role of Native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos and others were brought up, they could be-and were-characterized in social studies classes in stereotypical and demeaning ways.

That's why, in 1965, California began the effort to make sure that our students' introduction to history was not also a course in Prejudice 101. If children are to learn repugnant stereotypes, they shouldn't get their information in school.

Much of the bias came from simple exclusion. Prejudice against certain groups made accomplishment much harder for them. But equality is a powerful motivator. As far back as 1913, the NAACP established its first branch in California. In 1918, four women were elected to the California Assembly. These, and many other documentable facts, were accomplishments precisely because they went against the overwhelming prejudices of their day. They are surely worth teaching to students. The rarity of such accomplishments, should not be used against them, and, in fact, demonstrates how steeply tilted the playing field was.

The 1965 changes to the Education Code served as a corrective, prohibiting biased curricula. But well-intentioned laws, like great civilizations, have their rise and fall. What began as an attempt to solve the problem of curriculum bias against minorities and women has evolved into its converse: a project to avoid anything that "reflects adversely" on them. That language is existing law. And whether related to lesbians and gay men, Latinos, women or anyone else, it is a license to whitewash.

Prejudice against Latinos should not cause Cesar Chavez to be left out of California history, but neither should it require that he be presented as a saint. Father Junipero Serra's shortcomings are part of his legacy, as are Leland Stanford's and Hiram Johnson's. Chavez should be treated no differently. Would it reflect adversely on women if Kathleen Brown's history-making run for Governor were described as a debacle? Possibly. But it's true.

These questions are hard enough when it's clear you are talking about a particular minority, but the discussion is even more complicated for homosexuality. It was not until the 1950s or so that American lesbians and gay men began to assert themselves publicly as homosexual. Remember, Oscar Wilde's famous trial for sodomy in England was premised on his defense that he was not a sodomite. Prior to 1950, it's extremely hard to know who was homosexual without resorting to exactly the sorts of stereotypes-rumors and gossip about bedmates, non-conforming gender behavior, cross-dressing-that the Education Code rightly condemns.

But for over a half century now, we have had people who comfortably identify themselves as gay. Moreover, it is now becoming clear that, whatever New York and San Francisco may think, the struggle for gay equality in this country had its genesis in California, and particularly in Los Angeles. Gay L.A., a major work of local history by Stuart Timmons and Lillian Federman, will be released later this year. It is the first book to fully document L.A.'s monumental contributions to the modern gay rights movement, and it will be a fine source for developing textbook material.

Knowing California's central role in the history of gay equality is one thing. But that's quite different from saying that students who learn the parts played by key figures like Harry Hay and Morris Kight should be prohibited from also knowing that those men could be a couple of very pissy queens. Should textbooks rely for their information about Hay and Kight or Harvey Milk solely from the gay community's hymnal?

Certainly, textbook authors should not go out of their way to find flaws. But neither should they have to avoid the obvious ones for the sake of not reflecting adversely upon someone's group. Even positive prejudice is still prejudice.

Many of the criticisms aimed at SB 1437 are due to the fact that it accepts the current statutory language as its starting point, and adds sexual orientation to the list. Sadly, the bill's author, Senator Sheila Kuehl, is being blamed for the existing law's excesses.

Minimizing bias is a respectable, even an essential goal for all education. That part of the law is important, and gays should be included in it. But steering textbooks away from "adverse" reflections on individuals because of race, gender, or any other group identity is a fool's errand, and bad history to boot.

Not surprisingly, what the press and public most noticed about state superior court Judge Richard Kramer's opinion ordering same-sex marriage in California was - well, that it ordered same-sex marriage in California. (The decision is now on appeal.) Lost in the furor, however, was the dog that did not bark: a less controversial approach that the judge passed over and failed even to explore.

There are at least two enormously significant omissions from the opinion. While the court's reliance on Perez [a 1948 California Supreme Court decision overturning the state's ban on interracial marriage] is core to the opinion's reasoning, there is virtually no mention of the California Supreme Court's other landmark opinion relevant to this case, Gay Law Students v. Pacific Telephone and Telegraph.

In that decision, over a quarter of a century ago the state's highest court ruled for the first time that gays are specifically entitled to equal protection under Article 1, section 7(a) of the state constitution. In a case about the rights of lesbians and gay men, the lack of a citation to this longstanding key authority is remarkable, and may indicate a continuing fear, even among those like Judge Kramer who are willing to engage the issues faced by lesbians and gay men, of addressing their concerns directly, rather than through analogous law that is more settled on a high level of scrutiny, but less explicit about gay equality.

In addition, the court fails to mention the fact that there are two distinct equal protection clauses in California's constitution. Article I, section 7(a) provides that "A person may not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law or denied equal protection of the laws. . ." The second is an independent and more specific provision, found in subdivision (b): "A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens."

Recognizing this distinction provides yet another way this case could have been decided - and goes to the heart of the political arguments that same-sex marriage cases now inflame. There are, in short, two ways courts have been dealing with the problem of discriminatory marriage laws - the Massachusetts model and the Vermont model - and California's equal protection clause would permit a court to take either path.

The Massachusetts model is the most politically volatile. Courts examine exclusionary marriage statutes and, doing their constitutional duty, acknowledge the rights of same-sex couples. In doing this, they exercise their longstanding and fundamental authority to counter the majoritarian prejudice against minorities by invalidating the laws that advantage the majority at the expense of the minority. This is well within the core reasons courts in this country are independent of the political branches - even if, as in California, judges are subject to regular retention elections.

However, as is well known, the bias against homosexuality is still virulent and explosive. More important, it can lead to the constitutional backlashes that now characterize this debate in many states, as well as in the current Congress. Same-sex marriage decisions spark deep and abiding anger in many people, who lash out at "activist judges" who are claimed to be "making law, not interpreting it."

The Vermont model offers a way to temper this. Baker v. State focused on the Vermont constitution's common benefits clause which, like Article 1, section 7(b) of California's constitution assures that some groups of citizens will not be given special benefits. The court in Baker ruled clearly that lesbians and gay men are entitled to equality under this constitutional provision. But rather than invalidating the law in the first instance, the court left it up to the legislature to decide how best to fulfill the promise of equal benefits. The Vermont legislature then did what legislatures do - compromised a bit by retaining opposite sex-marriage, but creating civil unions for same-sex couples.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rejected just such a compromise in its second Opinions of the Justices, ruling that marriage and only marriage would truly be equal. That is, of course, true. But it also has very high political risks. The most obvious downside was illustrated in Hawaii, which was the first state whose high court ruled that same-sex couples were entitled to equal marriage rights. In 1993, the high court ruled that the state's marriage law violated the rights of same-sex couples. The case set off a furious debate over same-sex marriage across the country and resulted in the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act by the U.S. Congress, which allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other states.

The decision also created a backlash in Hawaii itself, where voters amended their state constitution to guarantee that same-sex couples were not, in fact, entitled to equal marriage rights. While the state subsequently passed a domestic-partnership-like law for same-sex couples, it remains the first state that amended its constitution to guarantee inequality for homosexuals.

At the very least, the failure to even examine this second section of California's equal protection clause exposes some of the dangers of the take-it-or-leave-it school of judicial decision-making in such highly combustible political contexts. While Judge Kramer's opinion is neither wrong nor unjust, it is perhaps incomplete. It is entirely possible that he would have chosen the Massachusetts model, even after having considered and rejected the Vermont option.

Judge Kramer's opinion several times includes language that a "superstructure of marriage-like benefits for same-sex couples is not remedy," and, "the State's position that California has granted marriage-like rights to same-sex couples points to the conclusion that there is no rational state interest in denying them the rites of marriage as well." Still, a decision coming to that conclusion, which does not address at all another, quite obvious constitutional option, is certainly open to the question of why the other differing constitutional provisions were not separately examined.

A word like "homophobia" should not be used lightly. Not all people - maybe not even a majority - who have qualms about the idea of homosexuality are actually afraid of lesbians and gay men. But for those people who truly do hold a deep and irrational terror about homosexuals, "homophobia" is the only word that will do. A recent episode of the ABC-TV reality series Wife Swap offers up Exhibit A.

For those who have not seen the show (and prior to this episode, I was among them), Wife Swap takes two families and has them "trade" wives for several days. At the end of the show, the families are restored, and they sit across a table from one another to discuss their experiences. On the Feb. 9, episode, a self-described "traditional Christian" family, the Gillespies, traded their mother, Kris, for Kristine, one half of a lesbian couple who are raising a daughter.

The traditional Kris is a tightly-wound woman who is a stay-at-home mom in a "millionaire suburb" in Texas. Her children are well-behaved, obey orders, make their beds and set the table for dinner each night with place mats and silverware in exactly the right places. The children are not allowed to see PG-rated films, and each member of the family has a personal Bible that they bring to the dinner table for nightly readings.

Kristine, in contast, has a laissez-faire liberal approach to parenting, letting her daughter watch PG-13 movies on the TV in her bedroom (forbidden in Kris's home). The front lawn is barely alive in her lower middle class Arizona home, and there's not a place mat to be found - which is probably okay, because paper plates don't go with place mats.

The differences among families are the show's very heart, but this episode revealed something much less superficial: real homophobia. The theme begins early. When Kris first gets the chance to rifle through her new home, she finds a book on defiant children, and sighs. Then she finds a book on lesbian parenting, her first indication that she's not in Texas anymore. She holds the two books up, and rhetorically asks if there might be a connection.

At the end of the show, when the families discuss what they have been through, Kris states, quite clearly and repeatedly, that she was worried the whole time that the lesbian now living in her home would try to molest her daughter. Kristine is devastated by this, and when she confronts Kris with how this is insulting, Kris says she was only trying to "protect" her family. Kris also goes a step further and says that, in her opinion, Kristine and her partner, Nicki, are "depraved."

This is a word she uses three times in the show, twice to Kristine and Nicki's faces. Very few people, when discussing homosexuals, will actually use such a word. It describes people who are monstrous, ungoverned, inhuman. This is the sort of abusive insult that only the most extreme will use, and seldom to the face of someone they purport to be describing. Kris's multiple use of it on the show, directly to Kristine and her partner, was stunning.

While the lesbian moms - and even the Christian kids - admit to being a bit changed by the experience, Kris is adamant that all this experience did was reaffirm how happy she is with her own life and her own husband. The underlying appeal of shows like this (including the current run of makeover shows, and even the A-list reality shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race) is in the balance of transformation and reaffirmation - how something dramatically out of the ordinary can both change us and prompt greater appreciation.

But Kris was not about to be changed. Her fear and loathing of homosexuals is a constant - an important constant - in her life, and nothing, not even experience, will change that. Kris is literally afraid of homosexuals in the most blatant and unabashed way. Her fear that Kristine would molest Kris's daughter had no basis in fact or reality - something quite obvious to anyone watching Kristine interact with Kris's family. That fear arises solely from notions that Kris holds about what homosexual people are like.

People like Kris cannot be changed or persuaded. In fact, she actually demonstrates a certain amount of pride in her feelings of fear. Even if Kristine did not actually molest - or intend to molest - her daughter, Kris's fear of this remains justified in her mind, a feeling not only appropriate, but necessary. To her, the problem is people who lack her fear of such depraved individuals.

The Wife Swap producers may not have intended this message. Indeed, their focus seems to have been on extreme opposites, playing up, for example, the Gillepsies's Christian beliefs while editing out any mention of the fact that Kristine and Nicki are also Christians who attend church weekly. But the show was a rare display to mainstream America of what real homophobia looks like. And it is something that should inspire real fear.

The depravity Kris sees is nowhere in evidence. It is an understood depravity, not something arising in fact. It is a definitional state, it can not be forgiven, can not be washed away, can not be overcome by any amount of goodness, ordinary humanity, decency, or anything else.

Open lesbians and gay men have changed lives and minds. But some minds will be forever closed. What a shame for them.

WE ARE ALL Tinky-Winky now.

And I mean that in the scariest sense.

Jerry Falwell has expressed deep concern that a children's TV character named Tinky-Winky on the popular show, Teletubbies, is homosexual. The evidence is quite convincing to Falwell, who lays out his case in the February edition of the National Liberty Journal. Tinky-Winky has the voice of a boy but he carries a purse. Further, according to Falwell, "He is purple -- the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle -- the gay-pride symbol."

It's been a long time since a prominent real American has denounced a television character, so there's certainly reason to have a little fun with this. And at least when Dan Quayle went after Murphy Brown, the discussion could sound serious. This time around, it's tough to get too high-minded when you're castigating someone named Tinky-Winky, and explications are coming from a production company called Itsy Bitsy Entertainment.

But there are two reasons to take this story very seriously.

First, it gives the lie to one of the religious right's most frequent arguments about why they are not being mean-spirited and bigoted about homosexuality?hating the sin, but loving the sinner. This argument is often stated another way. The objection to homosexuality, it is claimed, does not have to do with sexual orientation, but with sexual conduct.

Lesbians and gay men have long known that was simply disingenuous, and Falwell now shows that it is. I doubt that, even taking his fevered imaginings to their most absurd lengths, Falwell believes Tinky-Winky was having sex with anyone. In short, this case is not about Tinky-Winky's sexual conduct, it is about Tinky-Winky's sexual orientation. Falwell's condemnation of Tinky-Winky is based only on factors he believes suggest Tinky-Winky could be identified publicly as gay --use of a color associated with gay rights, the triangle that gays adopted from their Nazi persecutors, and use of a "purse" by a "boy," neither of which can reliably be determined in the fanciful world of the Teletubbies.

In all of this, sexual conduct is entirely absent, and, given the character, is nearly unthinkable. How could this case, then, be about anything other than sexual orientation entirely independent of sexual conduct? And if that's true, then how is Falwell's objection to homosexuality not simply prejudice against people who do no more than identify themselves publicly as homosexual, without taking anything else about that person into consideration? Does Falwell believe, could Falwell believe that Tinky-Winky is a sinner without having had sex? And if he's not a sinner, why is he a bad role model for children?

That leads to the far more important reason this story is worth consideration. Falwell is not alone in spending an awful lot of his free time worrying about who is and who is not homosexual. Since he cannot look at sexual conduct to "prove" his case, he has to look for other evidence. But that search for evidence, the very need to search for evidence, should be troubling, and not just for lesbians and gay men.

When the desire to root out homosexuality becomes so relentless that even whimsical TV characters are under suspicion and investigation, how can heterosexuals escape the frenzy? The stigma about homosexuality has long been the chief problem in closed environments like the military, where heterosexual women in particular have been suspected of being lesbian. This places on them a burden of "proving" their heterosexuality. But how does a heterosexual prove heterosexuality? That question continues to plague the American military.

But Falwell helps us understand that this isn't just a problem in the military. Against a prejudice this dogmatic and about a factor that is so deeply personal and subjective, every heterosexual is vulnerable. On the day the Tinky-Winky story broke, the popular television series, "Dawson's Creek" aired an episode in which a high school boy is suspected of being gay -- for reading a poem he wrote that could be interpreted to mean that. Or it could have had the meaning he thought it had when he wrote it, which was not at all about secret homosexual desire. Similarly, shows like "The Simpsons," "Seinfeld," "Friends" and many others have explored, in comedic ways, how heterosexuals react when suspected of being gay. In Falwell's world, homosexuality is something everybody has to worry about.

This is one of the ways prejudice about homosexuality is different from prejudice about race or gender. Few white people are suspected of being black or Asian, and very few who do not intentionally want to do so are mistaken for a member of the opposite sex. Yet anyone can be suspected of being homosexual. Anyone.

And once suspected, the entire array of discriminatory behaviors -- from discomfort in the workplace to firing, from rude comments to physical violence -- are available. Lesbians and gay men know this from long experience. I'm sure many other lesbians and gay men are having the same mixed feelings I am seeing how the prejudice can run out of control. Heterosexuals shouldn't have to prove to anyone their sexual orientation in order to escape prejudice. But neither should homosexuals, or television characters or anyone.

Tinky-Winky is probably going to be fine, as will the children who watch him or her or it. But as long as the Falwells of the world continue to obsess about sexual orientation, Tinky-Winky's plight illustrates how our basic humanity is under attack as morality itself is being reduced to cartoon size.

"Oh God, our maker, we gladly proclaim to the world that Jeanne and Ellie are loving partners together for life. Amen."

By saying those words to bless the relationship of two women, Reverend Don Fado and 94 other United Methodist pastors (as well as 71 other clergy members who lent their names in absentia) could lose their clerical jobs. Fado acknowledged this at the holy union ceremony they all jointly presided over on January 16. "If anybody wants to file charges against us, this is what the charges are for; for praying this prayer."

The ministers did not marry Jeanne Barnett, 68 and her partner of 15 years, Ellie Charlton, 63. They simply proclaimed, as a body, that Jeanne and Ellie have committed themselves to one another for life. More important, it seems, they "gladly" did so. If they had scornfully done so, or had done so filled with bitterness, hostility, grievance or alarm, well, that might have been all right.

There are many issues at work in this ceremony: questions about morality and love, religion and politics, equality and "special rights." But one fact may say more about this event than any other?it took place in Sacramento.

Historically in this country, the movement for gay rights has come from big cities like Los Angeles and New York -- and, of course, San Francisco, not a big city in numbers, but the cosmopolitan equal of any city in the world. The concentration of gay men living in such cities helped drive the movement for gay equality. There was a certain spirit, if not necessarily safety, in numbers. This fact, however, often put cities at odds with more rural areas, as gay rights laws were introduced in state capitals.

But now the questions about justice and fairness first raised in the cities are coming up everywhere. Lesbians and gay men in Bakersfield and Victorville may have had more to risk by coming out than their counterparts in West Hollywood and the Castro, but the compromises of the closet are tedious no matter where you live. It's something like a full-time job to keep track of all the fabrications and half-truths, and that's wearying, whether you work on a stock exchange or a dairy farm.

So it should be less surprising than some might expect to know that the holy union ceremony did not come from the organized gay rights establishment in San Francisco or Los Angeles. In fact, it did not originate with anyone who is actually homosexual. In St. Mark's church in Sacramento, Rev. Fado heard his church leadership's command that no Methodist minister could bless a same-sex relationship. The patent unfairness was too obvious for him to ignore. How could he have permission to bless a house, a car, a pet, but not the relationships of some of his own parishioners, children of God who had made a lifetime commitment based in love and faith?

It was only when Rev. Fado asked his congregation if any same-sex couple would step forward that Jeanne and Ellie came into the public eye. Neither woman views herself as a gay rights activist. When asked the question, both laughed timidly. The best they could say, Ellie confessed, was that they identify themselves as "quiet advocates for change."

It is those quiet advocates who demonstrate how profoundly the successes of the gay rights movement have changed the movement. Anti-gay leaders like Gary Bauer and James Dobson may rail against homosexual "extremists" and "radicals," but they have little to say about homosexual moderates and conservatives. People like Jeanne and Ellie wanted only to live their lives decently and honestly, and endured furious and unwanted publicity to demonstrate how hard it is for a same-sex couple to achieve the modest respectability every married heterosexual couple takes for granted.

They are not alone. Across the nation, millions of same-sex couples, every day, quietly negotiate the preposterous half-rules and unspoken protocols they are expected to live by. And they are joined by millions of heterosexuals like Rev. Fado, who are finding it harder and harder to maintain a separate set of rules for lesbians and gay men.

That is why the scene for these new gay rights battles will increasingly be places like Sacramento, or Laramie, Wyoming, or Hawaii or Vermont. A decade ago, author Neil Miller published In Search of Gay America, and found people across the country willing to talk about being gay in every corner of the country, and in every walk of life. Those people are still there, and by the simple example of their lives, their friends and co-workers, relatives and ministers may be more ready than ever to support them.

In other words, the gay rights movement isn't just for activists any more. No one was ever excluded from the movement, but in the early days a lot of people passed. Political activism isn't in everyone's blood.

But justice is. That's what drove Rev. Fado to issue his challenge, and it's what drove Jeanne and Ellie to accept. But it's also what made buses and carloads of people come from Modesto and Fresno, Yreka and Oregon to show their support. The hundreds of people who surrounded the Convention Center in a "Circle of Love," as well as the thousand or so who attended the ceremony, probably couldn't name a gay radical. But by just being present in Sacramento, their quiet advocacy was moving the mountains radicals have been talking about for decades.

WHO GETS VIAGRA? Should doctors refuse to prescribe the new virility pill to a man whose wife uses birth control? Should unmarried men be prohibited from taking the drug? What about gay men?

For decades now, gay men have been lectured to by heterosexuals that the purpose of sex is procreation. The possibility of creating life, it is said, stands as the moral foundation of sexuality. Since same-sex couples cannot hope to conceive a child, their sexuality lacks any chance of being moral. And it goes without saying that this sort of moral sexuality can only occur within a valid marriage, which, given the current rules of marriage is yet another reason same-sex couples are supposed to be excluded from having moral sexual relationships.

This tissue of an argument has been the thin flag of gay-rights opponents for a long time, but now it may stand or fall on the wild popularity of Viagra. That drug has caused a sensation across the country as men have flooded doctors and pharmacists with requests. It reportedly works for up to 70 percent of impotent men, a home run for the drug's manufacturer and a boon for the sex lives of couples across the nation.

But how many of those couples will be using Viagra with the intention of having children? From front-page stories, it appears to be very few. Common sense explains that men in their prime reproductive years tend not to be the ones who have impotence problems.

The question of reproduction, however, is all but absent from the rush of attention Viagra is getting. What heterosexuals are interested in, of course, is the drug's ability to enhance physical intimacy, not the possibility of children. And there is nothing wrong with that. Sexual intimacy is one of the most important parts of any relationship, and it is a factor independent of fertility. The importance of sexual intimacy detached from fertility was also the driving force when birth control pills for women became widely available in the 1960s.

These two pills -- one for women and one for men -- reveal the paradox that lesbians and gay men have to negotiate every day. Heterosexual couples, who can biologically have children, don't have an obligation to, while homosexual couples are criticized for not living up to the biological norm that heterosexuals don't have to live up to. More pointedly, heterosexuals are permitted to celebrate their nonprocreative sexuality on magazine covers and prime-time TV shows, while homosexuals are expected to apologize for theirs.

Viagra's popularity isn't such a long step from the tolerance that President Clinton's alleged sex life has garnered among Americans. If anything, the constant drumbeat of reporting on this story reveals how little most Americans actually think about reproduction as a moral argument. The list of moral grievances surrounding Clinton's alleged sexual escapades is a long one, but no one has yet argued that our famously heterosexual president is immoral because he lacked procreative intent.

Would heterosexuals be willing to live by the moral rules that they apply to lesbians and gay men? Should Viagra be limited to legally married couples who want to have children but cannot because of the husband's impotence? Or is sexual intimacy such an important part of an adult relationship that impotence should be viewed as a problem that should and now can be cured?

In this, as in all things, there should be one rule for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. Whichever one heterosexuals think they can live with, homosexuals will live with, too.

1.

There were fourteen of us at the family dinner table. Among us we represented four generations

We were at my sister's house just outside of Victorville, part of a growing community in Southern California's high desert, about two hours east of Los Angeles. It was a little above 30 degrees outside, and the sky was a clear window on a million stars.

My sister and parents, as well as a number of my uncles and aunts had moved here partly because of the affordable housing, partly because they are golfers and their neighborhood is built around a lovely golf course, and partly because it is the kind of quiet community that is the antithesis of the city none of them ever liked. They are endlessly satisfied with the distance they have put between themselves and Los Angeles. In most of these details, I am very different from my family.

Still, I come up to visit them often. They are my family, and I enjoy spending time with them. But they are also something else to me, they are my ground. A large part of the country is made up of people like them, people who do not often get involved in the political rhetoric I am used to-the rhetoric of the media, of academic debates, of the centers of power. People like my family, suburban, church-going people, are consumed with the day-to-day details their lives demand, and have little time for things like the Big Picture, the Effect that Society has on Individuals, the Law. I have always been drawn toward Big Picture issues.

But in the small things, the family rituals, I share a great deal with them. My family is located squarely at the heart of the middle class, and so am I. In that among other things, I am much like them. And here among these people I loved, having one more in a lifetime of family dinners, I noticed something that struck a chord in me, not because it was unusual, but because it was so very usual that it went without any comment at all. As I looked around the table, I realized that of the fourteen people busily loading their plates and talking, five of us were gay.

And no one cared.

The cast of characters was for the most part as familiar to me as the photographs on the walls of my apartment. My grandmother and parents were there, as were my sister and brother-in-law. Two of my seven uncles were with us: One sat next to his wife, while the other was there with his long-time male partner. My sister's stepson Rick had brought his girlfriend. Early in the evening Rick's brother called to let us know he would be there, too. When he arrived, he introduced us to the young man he had brought along as his date. Since in my family there is always enough food, my sister set another place at the table for the additional guest with little fuss or concern.

The fact that he and his date were the same sex was no big deal.

Just before dessert, my aunt Ann and uncle Fred dropped by. Even among my family, who, with rare exceptions are politically conservative Republicans, these two have always been especially conservative. I have long been uneasy with both major parties, but am a registered Democrat, and sometimes adopt democratic party positions I don't wholly support so Fred and I will have something to argue about. The never-ending political debates between Fred and me are a family tradition as anticipated and invariable as turkey on Thanksgiving, and Ann is always there to chide me with some argument Fred might have forgotten. Our debates are usually loud and intense; whatever the details, we both care deeply about politics. Because of our political passions I have long felt a special kinship with Fred and Ann, and they have always felt close to me. Most of the rest of the family discusses politics only reluctantly.

In making her greetings to everyone, Ann, as usual, saved her special zeal for my uncle's partner. He is, in fact, one of those people who came into the family's enthusiastic embrace easily. While my family generally accepts all comers, in the natural course of things some are more loved than others. My uncle's partner was a favorite from the start.

2.

This domestic picture will be an affront to some people who are homosexual. I have long been aware that the family I come from is not like the families many lesbians and gay men were brought up in and had to escape, the families the Mad Pats at the notorious 1992 Republican Convention thought they could use as a weapon against lesbians and gay men. While that strategy backfired badly for the party the Pats were trying to help, it remains true that because of the disquiet these people exploit, many gay people are unable to have the kind of relationship with their family that I have.

That said, I bring my family up for a very specific reason. They are not alone. They and hundreds of thousands of families like them are too often absent in the discussion about gay rights, not as weapons against gay people, but as their imperfect allies. The public discussion of homosexuality tends to take place at the extremes-since the loudest objections come from radical conservatives, the opposition tends to be equally intense, equally extreme. While this makes for symmetry, the fervor on both sides sometimes excludes people like my family who have a more moderate interest in the issue. Those people, who are neither particularly articulate nor especially inflamed feel as if they have no place in the ring.

I think these families and family members should be acknowledged-people of good faith who, while they are not champions of gay rights, have found a way to respect and accept their lesbian and gay members as well as they can. In some ways, that kind of unexpressed but lived support is more important than all the manifestos and the blood-boiling demonstrations.

Those families and those children can have the relationship they have because giants paved the way, lesbians and gay men who took what, for the time was a radical position in a wholly uncomprehending world--that they should be accepted in their entirety, regardless of their sexual orientation. The almost unbelievable bravery of Harry Hay and Frank Kameny and the other men and women who can be counted as founders of the gay rights movement in America helped to change the way we think about people who are homosexual.

New leaders are always emerging, but some of them do not always recognize that there are differing styles of activism. Since the mid-nineties, a number of high-profile lesbians and gay men have proudly been calling themselves Queer. This is particularly true in the gay press. While groups like Queer Nation have come and gone, there continues to be a number of activists who seem to be most satisfied when they can make others most uncomfortable.

When it comes to use of the term "queer," I am one of those who feels uncomfortable.

3.

There is no shortage of lesbians and gay men who employ this in-your-face attitude toward the world at large. But what is it supposed to accomplish?

It is true that linguistics are a part of the strategy of identifying as Queer. When minorities embrace the words used against them, they mitigate, to some extent, the use of the words as weapons.

But that strategy has never been fully successful. African-Americans once tried to defuse the word "nigger" in a similar way. But despite their best intentions, the word never lost its force as an expletive, as any member of the Ku Klux Klan can attest. "Nigger" still pierces, still causes harm.

A second reason for lesbians and gay men to identify themselves as Queer is to exercise some control over their position in the world. Rather than having a name imposed, the group chooses its own. Even if the group chooses a name that already exists, it is still a form of empowerment, or at least is said to feel that way.

Whatever its value, though, this tactic has the potential to try the public's patience. Minority groups are not like nations or states; they do not have a unified government that can decide once and for all what the country and its people will be called. As group members debate, editorial rooms across the country do their level best to keep up.

It is in this context that I have wrestled with myself over whether, as a gay man, I am Queer. I have decided that I am not. "Queer" is the word of the Other, of the Outsider. I do not feel like I am outside anything due to my sexual orientation.

4.

The generations of lesbians and gay men who lived in the time leading up to the Stonewall riots in 1969 were radicals by definition. They said out loud what at the time was unsayable - that sexual orientation should not matter. While sexual orientation is obviously a difference among people, people are different in a multitude of ways. Hair color, for example, is a more obvious difference than sexual orientation, since it is immediately visible. But we did not create a systematic or legal hierarchy of preferred over less-preferred and non-preferred hair color, granting blondes and brunettes rights that are unavailable to redheads, requiring people who choose to marry to marry someone whose hair color is different than theirs, or the same. Hair color is one of thousands of differences that can be noticed but carries no legal or normative weight.

Since the pioneering sex studies in Germany early in the Twentieth Century, those arguing for equality for lesbians and gay men have asserted that sexual orientation is not a sickness or pathology, that it is another neutral difference that should be treated neutrally. For most of the last century, the established society disagreed, said that sexual orientation was a difference that mattered, and would be treated under law as if it mattered.

Since Stonewall, though, the law has made considerable strides toward neutrality. Equality was the ultimate goal, the elimination of the laws that treated homosexuality and heterosexuality differently. Bit by bit that equality is being recognized. As Barney Frank has observed, movements like that mid-nineties Colorado explicitly to deny equality to lesbians and gay men arose in part because tolerant cities like Aspen enacted their equal-protection guarantees. Colorado For Family Values, the group which backed the Colorado constitutional amendment, wanted to return to the inequality that its members were comfortable with because they felt that inequality slipping away. If the gay rights movement had not had its successes, CFV would not have been necessary.

Like members of CFV, those who want to identify themselves as Queer are capitalizing on the significance of the surface difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Some have been outspoken in their focus on this difference.

But to say that lesbians and gay men are different from heterosexuals is no more than a tautology. The game of definitional difference can be played on a number of axes. In addition to being gay, for example, I am also male, of Italian background, and am Catholic; I practice law and write for a living, am reasonably well-educated, and a baby boomer. To some extent, each of these is as important to my identity as my sexual orientation. Therefore, I could identify myself at any given moment as a gay man, a male, an Italian (or more broadly a Caucasian), a Catholic, a baby-boomer, a lawyer or a writer, and would be telling the truth.

But by choosing one group to identify with, I would also be leaving out a great deal. I am no more male than I am Italian or Catholic or lawyer or writer or homosexual. All fit together in some way that adds up to me. Therefore, while I do claim membership in all of those groups, and while some are more important to me than others, it would be too easy to lose sight of the whole if I were to grant one group status as The Group I identified with. To me, each is an adjective about me, none is me.

Each of us belongs in a lot of groups, many of which overlap. Any individual could draw a Venn diagram of the dozens or hundreds of groups she or he belongs in, and the intersection of all those circles would be a group of one.

The poet Maya Angelou has made this point explicit:

"In my work, in everything I do, I mean to say that we human beings are more alike than we are unalike, and to use that statement to break down the walls we set between ourselves because we are different. I suggest that we should herald the differences, because the differences make us interesting, and also enrich and make us stronger. [But] the differences are minuscule compared to the similarities. That's what I mean to say."

Experiences of love and loss, trust, betrayal, jealousy, injustice, joy and pain, comfort, rage--all these are points at which we can touch one another as people because they are experiences every one of us shares. One of the jobs of the artist has been to explore those touching points, to bring us together from our varied and diverse particulars into a single place where we can recognize something we have in common. Hamlet, for example, is a Dane, a heterosexual, and a male, but he is also the embodiment of something that transcends all human categories, the human dilemma of indecision. The particulars of his story are interesting and relevant, but in his very particular story we can also find something universal, something all of us know. From the moment Shakespeare created his Hamlet, agonizing with the decision he faces, generations of individuals who have encountered this ambivalent hero have seen something of themselves on the stage. Anyone who has ever had to choose a restaurant or a video to rent knows on a trivial level how hard it is to finally decide to act. And everyone knows how difficult the larger decisions are - what profession or job to enter, where to live, who to trust, or to love. Hamlet's truth about the difficulty of decision defies gender and race and sexual orientation, and everything else.

5.

Balancing our similarities and differences is the juggling act of identity. The current focus on the ways lesbians and gay men differ from heterosexuals simply reinforces the walls between us, and leaves no gate. In this, lesbians and gay men dishonor the success of those whose work has so much changed the world.

A generation ago, I could not have had the dinner with my family that I did. What my family and I have in common would have been destroyed by a single difference. To maintain a relationship with them, the burden would have been on me to lie. In my family, those days are gone. The five gay men who were at that family table could be honest, and we were not penalized for our honesty. And the family as a whole was benefited by remaining intact, by keeping all of the bonds between us alive. We could find some reassurance in our similarities while taking advantage of the differing viewpoints each brings to the family's dynamic.

That is only one measure of what the very loose phrase "gay rights" means. It is my understanding that the goal of the gay rights movement all along was to allow lesbians and gay men to live their lives irrespective of their sexual orientation, not superrespective of it. This was difficult to do when heterosexuals focused - sometimes obsessively - on homosexuality. Lesbians and gay men know their sexual orientation is a part of their make-up, but it isn't any more important to them than a heterosexual's sexual orientation is to them. Sex is certainly a part of an ordinary life, but most people - lesbians and gay men included - spend more time watching TV than having sexual intercourse. Most people spend more time on hold waiting to talk to a live customer service representative than having sexual intercourse.

But by identifying as Queer, lesbians and gay men do exactly the same thing that the most virulent homophobes do, make their sexual orientation hyper-important, more important than any single factor should be in a complex human personality. By marking ourselves as Outsiders, we deny what we have in common with others.

Lesbians and gay men in the past were radicals because they had no other choice. That is no longer true. Because of decades of radical work, millions of people are able to view homosexuality now within the context of ordinary human variations, and like my family, pay it no mind. That seems to me to be the goal achieved. It has clearly not been achieved everywhere, but we are far enough along the road that the choice to avoid a radical identity is available.

Some lesbians and gay men may choose to follow the path of the sexual outlaws, determine that they prefer to be the Outsider. This pose has long been a kick for the young, whether straight or gay. But in adopting that pose in the modern world, lesbians and gay men will have made a choice that no one else imposed. In that they will be less like the gay sexual outlaw John Rechy proclaimed himself to be and more like pop icon Madonna. Whatever else can be said about Madonna's various choices of persona, she has made each one as a choice and not let anyone else dictate what part her sexuality plays within her identity. As a gay man in the sixties, no one gave Rechy that choice.

The act of making an identity has always been a difficult one. The surface advantage of group identification is that an identity comes prefabricated. Choosing an identity off the rack saves a great deal of time and hard emotional exploration. The downside, of course, is that an off-the-rack identity was designed for the mass-market, does not have the individual in mind. Thus, some people who are homosexual find that they are criticized for not being "gay enough," of departing from the party line in certain instances, of not wearing their gay identity properly. But that is because, unlike the tailor-made identity, one bought in the current department store of identities will only come close to the actual proportions of its wearer. The small gaps and sags may be tolerable to an individual, but the purchaser must know he or she is buying something that was manufactured for millions. And like all uniforms, it comes with expectations.

6.

For the most part, homosexuality is no longer outside the law. While there are certainly laws that still need to be changed - some dramatically - the strategy for change may need to be rethought. While confrontations were required in the early days because a majority of people were simply dead to the problems faced by lesbians and gay men, confrontations are less necessary now, and in some cases are probably harmful.

That is because confrontation is a strategy for those who are not being heard. Lesbians and gay men do not want to argue with the heterosexual majority because we like arguing; the point is to persuade a majority that the law is unfair when it treats them differently than heterosexuals, and to get those who disagree to change their minds. That is how the Constitution's First Amendment is supposed to work. Confrontation is a last resort. It is dramatic, extreme, a battering ram to bust down a door that will not open. Confrontation is the antithesis of persuasion.

But in most cases, the doors of discussion are open to sexual orientation. After all of the work that has been done, particularly in the last two or three decades, most people are aware that lesbians and gay men have a grievance, and will listen, even though many will not agree. The work that is left, then, is not acknowledgment that lesbians and gay men exist; the task is to change what minds can be changed.

Radicals, though, continue to live in a world where they believe they are not being heard at all. They treat the world as if it were populated only by their polar opposites. This is as true of the religious radicals as it is of the gay radicals. Both sides hurl images out of their own personal horror movies into the debate. The crusades in Colorado and Oregon were not so much about homosexuality and religion as they were about sado-masochism and the Spanish Inquisition. Grotesque images of chained and (barely) leather-garbed San Francisco parade-goers were pitted against the sour faces of paranoid preachers and the bruised bodies of the victims of gay-bashings. No matter which side you talked to, the end of the world was imminent. The same strategy pervaded the debate over the American military's "don't-ask-don't-tell" policy. The military's argument was a simple one: removing the ban on open lesbians and gay men would destroy our armed forces. The prejudice against lesbians and gay men is so powerful, it was argued, that heterosexual service members would ignore their too-fragile military discipline, violence and chaos would be unstoppable, and the country would be left defenseless.

Most people are aware that such apocalyptic thinking is just self-dramatization in a world that adores indulgence. There is no winning with the extremists. It should be clear by now that the Mad Pats of the world will never accept open homosexuality. But they do not need to. No political issue is ever settled finally. There are no public questions whose resolution will command 100 percent of the population. In that sense, politics is not mathematics. From the death penalty and abortion to requirements that all drivers wear seat belts, no law completely satisfies.

But it is a mistake to attribute the intransigence of the relatively small numbers of zealots to the public at large. Lesbians and gay men have many friends among the voters, even among religious voters, and many more whose vague fears can be answered. Oregon's law was defeated by a majority in that state, and before being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Colorado initiative won by only a slim margin.

Those numbers are important. By even the best counts, only ten percent of the population is homosexual. That means that there are millions of heterosexuals who have already come to understand the issue of inequality lesbians and gay men face. Even the loss in Colorado could have been won if a few thousand votes had been different. Persuading those numbers is a far different task than the homosexual pioneers faced.

The people who have yet to be persuaded are going to be like my family. Grand Theories about Justice and Social Change will not do the trick with them, and visions of the apocalypse leave them cold. They do not much care for theories. They respond to what is in front of them, to what they can see and feel. They are not interested in how lesbians and gay men are different from them - that much is obvious. They want to know about the common ground. Lives become connected not through difference, but through similarity. Connected lives become interesting because of difference, but they do not initially connect at that level. Remember the first stages of love, where so much time is devoted to revelations such as, "Oh, you like Rocky and Bullwinkle, too."

There are many more people yet to make those connections with. The task is finding where the connections can be made. Sexual orientation is no longer so all-important that it overrides everything else about a person. My family used to think that. They do not anymore. My gay uncle and his partner are just like the rest of my family, sexual orientation aside. The news is that sexual orientation can be set aside. Being gay makes my uncle and his lover interesting, but other things make them interesting, too.

Some lesbians and gay men, especially the artists, may balk at the implication that in certain ways they are quite ordinary. To a generation brought up to worship individuality, this is anathema. But there are many things that make each of us unique. Sometimes it is very nice to share small and common things, to just watch TV with someone or talk about sports, or help a sister making cookies in the kitchen. It is on those ordinary battlefields that what is left of this war can be won.

It is a great burden to make your life always and everywhere extraordinary. Homosexuality used to be that kind of a burden. But homosexuality no longer makes anyone extraordinary by default. Perhaps the new radicals regret that sort of specialness and are trying to reconstruct it. There are probably, though, many more valuable ways in which they are unique. What lesbians and gay men have lost in forced distinctiveness, they have gained in options. They do not have to approach politics only from the outside-there are gay lobbyists and elected officials as well as street protesters.

The battle for gay rights has not left the streets and the books, but it is now being waged inside a million private homes, too. The assumption that heterosexuals are irretrievably opposed to gay rights is unfair, one more stereotype that hinders this debate. Heterosexuals of good faith have every right to find such an assumption as offensive as lesbians and gay men have ever found any stereotype about them, and for the same reasons.

I am not a Queer because I do not have to be one. I am not that different from most people in this country. As a gay man who is other things besides, I stand my best chance of finding a connection with someone, of starting a conversation, of changing a mind. That exposure is one of the fundamental principles of coming out-reality undermine the fears that invisibility permits, and opens the possibility of dialogue. It is in those plain and often tentative encounters that I and millions of others can make our contributions.

It is unfair that the burden is still on lesbians and gay men, but that is a reality we cannot wish away. But this residue of injustice cannot be compared to the injustice those who came before us faced. The world is listening now because of what those pioneers did, and to assume anything less is to deny what my heroes have accomplished, those men and women whose work in a hostile world gave me the gift of a family I love. Those men and women were radical so I would not have to be.