IGF CultureWatch

Lesbians are funny.

Just a few years ago, this wasn't obvious. Lesbians were stereotyped as angry and whining. In fact, lesbians were thought to take things way too seriously, to become offended by any slip of the tongue. It was dangerous to talk to lesbians, because if you said something wrong, they might choke you with their flannel shirt, or run you over with their motorcycle.

Remember this joke?

Q: How many lesbians does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: That isn't funny.

Gay men had camp. Lesbians had anger.

We were the gay community's wet blanket.

But now lesbians are starting to be seen in a new light. We've got Rosie (who, OK, sometimes falls into the anger category, but still - she produces the Big Gay Sketch Show.) We've got Lily Tomlin. We've got Kate Clinton, Suzanne Westenhoefer, Marga Gomex, Julie Goldman. We've even sort of got Margaret Cho, who identifies as queer and bisexual, though usually seems more like she's a gay man in drag.

Best of all, we've got Ellen, who almost single handedly has helped America find lesbians to be endearingly funny.

Here's a joke from her, back when she did standup: "My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is."

See? Lesbians are funny. And not just to other lesbians. Lesbians are funny to THE ENTIRE WORLD (or at least the English-speaking, non-fundamentalist part of it. Westenhoeffer has made the point that people in the Bible Belt often will just not find lesbians funny, no matter how funny the lesbian actually is. Their morals keep them from laughing.)

Why the change? Why are lesbians seen as funny now when they were seen as angry before? Well, it partly must be because of Ellen's wide audience and general folksiness. But it may also be due in part to the changing role of women.

Vanity Fair's April cover story examined the reasons why women comedians are now appreciated more than ever. It used to be, they say, that women were not considered funny at all (maybe because men valued male cut-ups, but women with wit were frightening and liberated). Women as a group were thought to have no a sense of humor.

But expectations for women and women's roles are changing. As women are more accepted in every level of society, they become more accepted as comedians, too. And women are more likely to let themselves be funny, and to hone their humor.

Or maybe there's an easier answer. Cable. "There are so many hours to fill, and they ran out of men, so then there were women," Nora Ephron joked to VF.

But straight women have an added burden. No longer is it enough that they are funny - now they have to be sexy and glamorous as well, in order to make it big.

As Vanity Fair points out, "It used to be that women were not funny. Then they couldn't be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty-even sexy-to get a laugh."

Female straight comedians have to be sexy. But lesbian comedians? Lesbian comedians have a pass. They can be attractive - Ellen certainly is - but they don't have to take the stage in stilettos and a cocktail dress. Audiences understand that lesbians aren't out to attract men, so they're not held to the same high beauty standards as straight women comedians.

Lesbians are outsiders, so they are expected to poke sharp fun at political figures and "regular" people. They are expected to have a quirky, non-mainstream, even shocking perspective.

And they are more free to have the range of physical attractiveness that men have. When's the last time that a male comedian was expected to be handsome?

Lesbian comedians are lucky that way. They don't have to be sexually seductive in order to seduce the audience into laughing. Instead, they can be more like Lucille Ball, emphasizing the comical over their cup size.

The fact that lesbians are becoming more accepted as funny is lucky for the gay community, too. Laughter is a great way to win people over. It's how outsiders have insinuated themselves into the mainstream from time immemorial.

Someday, our funny women might help us laugh all the way to our full civil rights.

Rain had snarled Nairobi's traffic, so after waiting at a standstill for almost two hours, our driver Daniel roared over the divider, faced the oncoming traffic for a harrowing few seconds, and pulled into a side road.

It was really more path than road, alternating between muddy ditches and dust. But we weren't the only ones to take it. So many of us did that we were only prowling around at about three miles an hour, giving us plenty of time to look at the locals - and for the locals to look at us.

This could have been one of the Nairobi slums where post-election violence ripped lives apart a few months ago. A ditch between houses colleted waste; children were without shoes. The buildings huddled close to the road, so close to us it seemed we could touch them if we stuck our arms out wide enough.

The locals lined up to watch the parade of cars go through, and it felt like a parade, like a festival, with people smiling and waving at us and all of us waving back.

One woman caught my attention. She had a butch energy about her, and was wearing a rugby shirt, a long, patterned skirt, a bald head and a vivid smile. She was in her mid-twenties, I thought, or perhaps five years younger.

When the van stopped, waiting for traffic ahead to move forward, she sauntered around to the front of the van, stopping at the open window of a pretty, dark-haired woman I'll call Ann.

"Hello," the Kenyan purred, sliding her elbows onto the window. "How are you?"

I almost laughed in shock and recognition. If she had said, "How YOU doin'" in a dark lesbian bar, it would have sounded exactly the same - as a come on.

"Fine," Ann said briskly. She's straight - I'm not sure she saw it as anything but a friendly gesture. "How are you?"

"I'm gooood. And what's your name?" The van moved forward with a jerk. The Kenyan stayed alongside it for a while, fingertips resting on the van, but then fell behind.

A few minutes later, the van stopped again, and the Kenyan, unhurried, took her place again at the window.

"What's your name?" she asked again, in an intimate voice, and then said, "My name is Caroline." The two of them could have been alone. Ann, flustered perhaps, reached into her bag and handed Caroline a rose. We had vases of them in our hotel rooms.

Caroline pressed it to her chest and turned in a circle. Her face glowed. "I'm in love!" she said. "Marry me!" She called out to a friend, "She gave me a rose!"

Sex between men is illegal in Kenya and punishable by jail time. Sex between women is completely invisible and simply doesn't officially happen.

Homosexuality is considered to be un-African, either a curse bestowed by an angry enemy or a Western disease. Former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi once said, "Kenya has no room for homosexuals and lesbians."

This attitude is not only wrong - it is dangerous.

An American I met while in Kenya does HIV research in Nairobi - he said that a startling number of "men who have sex with men" weren't aware that HIV/AIDS was transmitted through sex, and could be partly prevented through condoms. And, he said, it's difficult to target a community for education, awareness and treatment when you don't know who exactly they are.

Africa's commitment to fighting AIDS doesn't extend to allowing gays and lesbians civil rights in order to help educate them. There is strong hostility to gay organizing in Kenya, as there is in much of Africa, even for health reasons. So most gays and lesbians go to cruising spots, or to places known for their gay clientele, and then home to their wives and husbands.

They are invisible, or try to be. But they still exist.

Caroline exists.

The rose was still clasped to Caroline's chest when the van started moving again. She reached out with the rose to touch it, and ran forward a few steps when it started to pull away.

"What an intense young man," the only male in our group said.

"She was a woman," all the women replied at once.

The van started moving faster, having reached a portion of clear road. Caroline was left behind, a single hand in the air, waving goodbye.

Civil unions are a failed experiment.

I didn't say that. Lynn Fontaine Newsome did.

Newsome is president of the New Jersey State Bar Association, and she was testifying in September about the effectiveness of the civil union law in New Jersey.

Needless to say, she doesn't think they are working well.

Nor does Ed Barocas, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, who said, "By creating a separate system of rights . . . the civil union law has failed to fulfill its promise of equality."

And in the end, neither does the New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission itself, which concluded last week that the idea of civil unions confuses the public and establishes a "second-class status" for the gays and lesbians who are bound together under them.

Civil unions are a failed experiment. We have tried them, and they have failed.

This is important, because state governments are often considered labs for the federal government. The idea is, try something out on a smaller scale in the various states. If it works, consider it on the federal level. If it doesn't work, try something else.

New Jersey is instructive because of the sheer number of problems the law has had in its year of existence. The State Supreme Court instructed that gays and lesbians must be treated equally, leaving it up to the legislature to determine how.

The legislature, in turn, granted gays and lesbians civil unions instead of marriage.

New Jersey has 2,329 couples in civil unions and 56 who have affirmed unions from other states; the New York Times reports that 568 couples have complained to Garden State Equality that they have not, in fact, been treated equally.

Those complaints have ranged from human resources computer systems having no category for "civil unions" to military members who are afraid to be "unioned" lest they be outing themselves under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," to companies directly violating the law because they didn't understand that unions granted the same state rights as marriage.

Happily, not only do we have a few failed civil union experiments (Vermont experts testified as well), but we have one very successful equal marriage experiment: Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts experts who testified said that their state had none of the issues of New Jersey.

Before the provocative results of these experiments, many of us felt that civil unions might be a fine idea. Like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, we thought - just give people their full rights and call it anything you want. Who cares if it's called marriage? A word is just a word. If labeling this packet of rights "civil unions" is what it takes to bring equality to gays and lesbians, then for heaven's sake, call that packet "civil unions."

Unfortunately, the experiment of New Jersey proves that the words matter very much.

Civil unions really are perceived as separate and unequal, both by the people who get "unioned" and by the lawyers, officials and civil servants who need to deal with the tangles civil unions create.

Additionally, though, New Jersey gives us an inefficiency argument that might help sway fiscal (if not social) conservatives. Why force thousands of businesses to change established forms, computer programs and policies to accommodate civil unions, when forms, programs and policies are already in place for marriage?

Wouldn't just calling gays and lesbians "married" be easier for everyone concerned?

In a way, it's great that New Jersey decided on civil unions first, because they took the time to review the policy. Civil unions in New Jersey gave people a chance to see what a world with heterosexual marriage and homosexual civil unions looks like - by watching New Jersey struggle with it, we've gotten a chance to kick the tires and look under the hood, to discover the certainty that this vehicle won't move anyone forward.

Now we have proof. Marriage is more than just a word that will make us "feel" equal - marriage is a word that will actually move us toward equal. Which means we can no longer be contented by presidential candidates who tell us that they will give us all of the rights without the word.

I mean, just imagine the tax payer dollars that would need to be paid to change thousands of federal forms to include "civil unions" when "marriage" is there already and is a word everyone already understands.

Civil unions are a failed experiment. There is no need to try it on a national level - it has already been tried and failed. We need federal marriage.

Jorge, my super, sat on my couch the other afternoon, having tea and pie. My building's heat was out again, but this time the problem was serious: the boiler had cracked. Jorge was waiting for a mechanic of some kind to come, and so I invited him in.

"You don't have children?" he asked. I knew he had five, all of whom still live in Ecuador.

I shook my head.

"You need children for a family," he said.

"I want children," I said.

He nodded and shrugged a shoulder. "Well, it's OK," he said. "In America, it's OK. You have children at 30, at 35, older. Plenty of time here to have children," he said.

We went on to other things, but part of me has fixated on that idea since. Plenty of time to have children? Can that be true?

I never thought I would have biological clock panic, but I am, a little. Partly it's because a couple months ago my age tipped toward 40 - I'm 36. But mostly it's because

1. I really do want children and always thought I'd have them and

2. as of this month, nearly every single one of my close female friends either has children, is pregnant, is trying to get pregnant, or is trying to adopt or thinking seriously about adopting. How did this happen?

Nineteen months ago, when I moved to New York, none of my Chicago friends had children, and none of my New York friends did, either. Most of my friends with kids were college friends who lived in other states, and whom I communicated with mostly through Christmas cards or reproductions of sonograms.

In Chicago, I was living a youthful life. I played flag football. I went to performance art. I hung out with friends. Children seemed very, very far in the future.

But then, toward the end of my time there, I dated a great girl who adored her many nieces and nephews. I fell in love with them and with her simultaneously; for the first time I understood the small joys a daily life with children could bring, and the deep closeness and respect and love you can feel for someone who partners with you in raising them.

She - they - were my only Chicago regret.

Since our time together ended, I've been thinking more and more about having kids myself. And then single women I was close to started having - or trying to have - children on their own, or adopting - or beginning the process.

Now, almost every conversation I have with a friend has babies or children in it. On the one hand, I now feel very comfortable with adoption, which means Jorge is right - I do have plenty of time to have children.

On the other hand, I feel very, very ready to have them. I've got a solid career and a lot of energy and happiness. Plus - and I hope this sounds the way I mean it to - I kinda want to raise kids during the same period my friends are raising them.

I already feel like my life is revolving a bit around children. Having them (or adopting them) myself while my friends are sharing experiences and babysitting and kid's clothes and strategies seems perfect.

Yet - I don't want to be a single mother. I'm sure I can do it. My own mother did it very well, and thousands of women raise wonderful children on their own. Also, single motherhood can always happen unexpectedly, for a variety of reasons - even if I were partnered, it could happen to me. But I would rather start raising kids within a loving partnership, for my own sanity.

At the moment, I feel very, very far from such a thing, and I've realized something lately - I actually want children more than I want to be partnered. And the idea of finding a partner to have a child is just as distasteful as having a child to save a partnership.

So what will I do?

For the moment, I'm just waiting. I'm listening to my friends as they explore their options. I study various fertility processes. I flip through adoption websites. I read up on adoption law, and what would happen if I had a child first and then found a partner who wanted to adopt my child later. I advocate for full marriage rights for gays and lesbians, so that the whole process will be easier. I go on dates with women who have children, because if it worked out, that would kill two birds.

I want to raise children - I'm not particular about whether I give birth to them or not. A dear friend tells me, "You can make that happen. That will happen. You have time."

Time, she says. I have time. And Jorge, too: "Plenty of time here to have children," he said. I try to relax in the fact of that. But as I watch the children of my friends get older so quickly, time seems race by.

Meet Mike.

Mike is 30, has a girlfriend, and on the evening we talked on the phone, he was preparing to do laundry at his local Laundromat.

And, oh yeah - Mike is a seminary student and minister with the evangelical Church of the Nazarene.

Mike called me because he's writing a paper on homosexuality, and I've written about being gay and Christian. And he's writing that paper, he said, because he really didn't understand the issue. He doesn't know anyone who is openly gay.

"I didn't grow up in a Christian family," he said, "After becoming Christian I jumped right into all the evangelical Christian nonsense, 'hate the sin, love the sinner,' all of it.

"But in the past two years, I started to think about how this sets up a divide between two groups - you're a sinner and I'm not. Your homosexuality makes me more perfect. That's not how it works. That's where I get frustrated."

He is writing the paper, he said, with two assumptions:

1. Theologically, for his church, homosexuality is a sin (I know, I know, but bear with me. Mike understands it's a selective reading of the Bible - but he's leaving theology for another day.)

2. As he says, "God loves everyone, regardless of - well, everything."

Given those two things, he said to me, he is looking for a third way. A way for his church (and he himself is the minister of a small congregation) to keep its theology while also welcoming gays and lesbians into the pews. A way "to value people as people."

How would that happen? What would that look like?

At first, I couldn't imagine it. Without new theology, how could gays and lesbians be comfortable in evangelical churches? How can we worship at a place that calls our deepest, most important relationships "sinful"?

I sighed. "Honestly, it would be a giant step if evangelical churches just didn't stand in the way of equality for gays and lesbians," I said, more or less (I was taking good notes when Mike talked, but the pen trailed off the page when I myself had the floor).

"Conservative churches can keep their beliefs- it's your church, you can do that. Just don't actively fight for the legislation of discrimination."

"So you can't see gays and lesbians worshipping with us and being part of a community?" Mike said.

"No," I responded. "Not unless they're incredibly self-hating."

But then Mike showed me where he thought his "third way" was.

What if the Nazarene Church could buy into the idea that yes, you can hate the homosexual sin and love the homosexual sinner; and you can hate the heterosexual sin and love the heterosexual sinner?

What if, instead of eliminating this deeply held belief, they expanded it to include everyone, so that everyone was equally a sinner and in the same ways? Where you value the worth of all people?

This is radical stuff Mike is saying. I liked him for it.

"Isn't there a way we can worship together?" he asked again.

"Huh," I said. "Maybe then there is a third way - and maybe some churches are currently practicing it."

Most mainline denominations, like Methodists, don't marry gays and lesbians and won't ordain them (or else they are nearly in schism over these questions, like the Episcopals).

But even though the denomination doesn't honor gays and lesbians, individual churches can and do.

I worshipped happily at a Presbyterian church in Chicago that couldn't marry gays and lesbians or ordain us as ministers. Yet the pastor asked after my girlfriend and we were invited to events as a couple, there was a gay and lesbian group, and I never had to worry about viciousness from the next pew if I held my girlfriend's hand during the service. The minister never condemned gays and lesbians from the pulpit, and in fact talked about us in a loving, flattering light.

That church honored my humanity. And although that is not the same as equality, it was warming enough that the church became a home. That position now seems regressive for mainline denominations, but it would be a leap forward for evangelicals.

Mike thought for a moment. What if, he said, "There was a switch of emphasis. Instead of someone being gay or straight, if there was an emphasis instead on Christ, why couldn't you bring your girlfriend to worship?"

He added, "I feel like, if you lived nearby, we would be friends. And I would hope you and your girlfriend were comfortable worshipping with us."

I wish I could relate here every second of our conversation. I wish I could convey how unexpectedly affirming it was to listen to an evangelical minister as he struggles over this issue.

We don't know about this struggle, we don't hear about it. We assume that all evangelicals hate us - but then there is Mike, who is looking for a way to welcome gays and lesbians within the context of his beloved religion.

And then Mike said the most heartening thing of all. "Know that I'm not the only one. There are more evangelicals where I am than most people realize."

To me, his words sounded like a miracle.

It's easy to sneer at Larry Craig.

Maybe too easy.

He practically has a target tattooed on his forehead-or perhaps I should say on his ass.

It's fun to sling arrows at that target. It's such an easy one to hit. So, well, wide.

Heh heh.

Why not laugh? After all, the guy is a hypocrite, right? He says over and over again that he's not gay - and yet he plead guilty in June to disorderly conduct in a men's room, legal jargon for saying that he was trying to solicit sex from another man.

He plead guilty to trying to have sex with another man-and yet he has been remarkably unsympathetic to gay issues, voting against us being treated equally in marriage, the military and the workplace.

He says he has done nothing wrong and has nothing to be ashamed of-yet rumors that he has slept with (or tried to sleep with) men have been persisting at least since 1982, when he sent out a strange, preemptive press release denying he had slept with Congressional pages (strange because no one had accused him of anything). What is a preemptive press release but a sure sign of feeling ashamed?

He proclaims that the officer's accusations are unfounded-and yet not only did he plead guilty to June's encounter, but another man came forward in May to say that Craig had sex with him in a public bathroom in Washington's Union Station in 2004.

Zzzzing! Let's get him. Hypocrites are fair game. Let's trot out our sarcasm and our best one-liners and see if we can be the one to make people laugh the loudest.

And yet . . . And yet. I find the smile freezing on my face when I put his behavior in context.

Because the Larry Craig story is the worst thing to happen to gays and lesbians in a very long time.

It it makes me uneasy that men who want to have sex with men are still being targeted in public restrooms by police officers. The whole arcane ritual these sex-seekers do (which now is hardly a secret, since every major news organization has done a bathroom expose this week), including using shopping bags to hide their legs and a slow dance of toe-tapping and hand-waving are clearly designed so that innocents don't need to worry about being targeted or exposed to sex they don't want.

But this is not just about the police sting. It's about the media and the public's reaction to news of the police sting.

America isn't coming off a week of sleaze with the understanding that people who are the most anti-gay are usually so because they are terrified of their own closet impulses. Mr. Red State isn't sitting back in his easy chair and thinking, "Those gays sure have a raw deal. Maybe this wouldn't happen any more if they were just given the chance to live openly, marry, serve in the military, and work without fearing discrimination."

America is coming off a week of sleaze that showcased "gay" men having illicit, "disgusting" bathroom sex. Our respectability and normalcy both slipped a few notches, thanks to Larry Craig.

In a week when we should have been focused on the happy news that Iowa had declared gay marriages legal for a few hours; in a week when we should have been promoting, once again, our stability, seriousness, and ability to commit to family life; in a week when we should have been able to sit back and applaud as an Iowa judge made his case for our equality, we instead were forced to listen, over and over again, to graphic dissections of the sex habits of some men who have sex with men.

Instead of being won over by the sweet sight of two young men kissing with happiness after being wed, Americans instead turned away in disgust while watching bathroom exposes which painted gay men as agents of sexual and moral degeneracy.

This is not good.

Once again, we are being defined by what we do sexually instead of who we love, who we commit to, what we believe in.

No, I can't laugh at Larry Craig, because his downfall hurts us more than any of his anti-gay senate or congress votes.

I can't shoot an arrow at Larry Craig because it is not an arrow at all, but a boomerang, and it takes down all of us.

We were having Margaritas, and my friend Luke paused in the middle of a tirade against evangelicals.

"Oh, wait," he said. "Um, are you religious?"

I hate this question.

Because "Are you religious?" implies a yes-or-no answer: yes, you're religious; no, you're not.

I'm not comfortable in either category, so I'm never sure what to say. Do I give them the long answer? Or do I mutter "No," which is shorthand for "I'm not evangelical or born again," which means: "I'm not the kind of Christian you're worried about."

I don't even know, honestly, about calling myself Christian. I go to church, but I think a lot of my brothers and sisters in the pews would likely be suspicious of my suspicions about dogma.

On the one hand, I went to seminary for a short time and take Christianity very seriously. On the other, I wrestle with the fundamental tenets that make Christianity what it is and not something else: the resurrection of the body; the idea that one Middle Eastern man saves every one from sin and he himself is God; the virginity of Mary; a personal God who keeps his ear open to each of our problems.

Back in the early days of Christianity, all of these things were up for grabs. I would have been comfortable being Christian then (well, philosophically comfortable. That whole martyrdom thing is another story).

Yet there is another side of Christianity. The idea that God is love. The conviction that one should practice radical compassion. The very challenging notion that we should treat others the way we would like to be treated. The sentiment that individuality should never rise above working for and with the group.

This is very difficult stuff. But this is what connects me to the belief system that is Christianity. Because Buddhism, though a completely different religion on a dogmatic level, has some similar underlying beliefs, I tell people I am Christian-Buddhist, so I don't scare them away.

I first started doing this about a dozen years ago, when I was visiting New Orleans. I still wore a cross then, so often that I would forget that it rested against my collarbone. I was being hosted by a friend, but when she took me to the lesbian bar in town, I noticed that her friends were shooting me odd looks.

"What is it?" I asked my friend finally.

She shifted feet. "They think you're here to convert them," she said. "That you're not really a lesbian."

I put the cross in my pocket.

In the minds of this pack of lesbians, Christianity equaled gay hate. In the mind of my friend Luke, who is straight, Christianity equals a shutting down of conversation.

I hate the evangelicals for that.

This, of course, is very un-Christian of me. But the Religious Right has taken something beautiful and tough and twisted it into something ugly and easy.

The most vocal segment of the Christian church at the moment has two heads: the Pope, who takes every chance he gets to try to kick out of the Catholic Church anyone who disagrees with him so as to ensure it's "purity"; and evangelical Christianity, led by people like the late Jerry Falwell, who looked on the Civil Rights movement with disdain, called Bishop Desmond Tutu a fraud, and said that 9/11 was caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians."

As Luke pointed out, instead of approaching ideas that are new to them with compassion and curiosity, these figureheads of the Right instead try to kick these ideas-and people-out of the way by declaring that God doesn't like it.

As if God's likes and dislikes were as easy to discern as flavors of ice cream.

All of this means that my closet Christianity helps no one (well, except maybe my dating life). What the world needs is more diversity in Christianity, not less. Christians need to know that being Christian isn't an automatic Get Out of Jail Free card when it comes to intolerance; gays, lesbians and others on the left need to know that "Christian" doesn't equal "enemy."

So Luke asked me if I were religious.

"Yeah," I said. "I am." And I gave him the long answer.

I was in the Burger King by the World Trade Center site when the wall of televisions turned to CNN flashed the news that General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had declared that "homosexual acts between two people are immoral." That's what he believed because that's how he was raised, he said.

The restaurant wasn't crowded, but it was full. People stood up and walked from their seats to stair at the TV and listen. Not just me, a lesbian. Not just the small pack of young gay men in a corner. But a white woman cradling a baby, who leaned back against her husband. A trio of older black women. An aging Chinese man and his wife and a younger woman, maybe their daughter. A couple of men who were speaking some sort of Slavic language, maybe Czech.

They gathered close so that they could hear, because even though it was a story below us and across the street, the WTC site is noisy, spidered with large machines gunning their engines and making reverberating grinds and groans as they dug and flattened and moved the sacred earth.

They were strangely solemn, the ones that gathered there. I watched them, watching. The stood with their arms crossed, silent. CNN could have been announcing a disaster somewhere. That was the tenor of the crowd.

The fall of the Twin Towers is still very present in New York. It is not a faded photograph, but a lived memory. Those of us who live or work in Lower Manhattan, as I do, walk by the site as a matter of course, as we come up from the subway, or go shopping at the discount department store Century 21. Even New Yorkers who don't go downtown much hear something WTC-related almost daily on the news, from first responder health issues, to bickering over the proposed memorial, to new remains found.

New Yorkers don't feel one way about anything, of course. There are 8.2 million of us.

But the one thing that affects every one of us is the missing World Trade Center. Its absence is present, all the time.

And one thing that most New Yorkers seem to understand is that those men and women are fighting for us, because of what happened here at this ground that is now a construction site. We might disagree on whether they should be in Iraq at all, but we all can agree that 9/11 was certainly the catalyst.

We watched General Pace-who was himself born in Brooklyn-compare homosexuality to adultery. And then we watched as another Marine, Eric Alva, one of the first wounded in the Iraq War, a man who recently came out as gay, we watched him thoughtfully tear down Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It's bad policy, he said. It hurts unit cohesion because you can't be honest with the people who are supposed to care for your life like your own.

"He's got it right," one of the women watching, said. This is an instance, I think, of America being ahead of our policy makers. Don't Ask, Don't Tell is a dinosaur. People on the ground in the military know it. Americans watching the military desperately trying to meet recruiting goals know it. The media knows it, which is why the Chicago Tribune asked Pace about Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the first place. Even the men who crafted the policy know it.

The only person who doesn't seem to know it is General Pace. His argument, that gay acts are immoral, doesn't even make sense in this context. Soldiers aren't allowed to "fraternize" with each other already-there are military laws against that sort of thing. So we're not talking about homosexual acts of any kind. What we are talking about is homosexual people-and Pace already thinks that homosexual people should be allowed to serve. That's why he supports Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Pace also says that the military shouldn't look the other way when faced with immoral acts. But, uh, if the military thinks that homosexuals themselves are immoral, than that's exactly what Don't Ask, Don't Tell does-looks the other way and pretends that they're not there.

Back at the Burger King, various CNN experts were weighing in on Don't Ask, Don't Tell, accompanied by video of our soldiers in the Middle East.

The man with the wife and child gestured out the window, his voiced raised slightly. "It's not fair," he said. "Those gay soldiers are fighting for us, for this." He glanced toward the World Trade Center. His wife nodded. If General Pace had been there, I wonder if he would have nodded, too.

Ann Coulter wasn't even brave enough to directly say it.

She didn't call presidential candidate John Edwards a faggot, not exactly.

At the end of the speech she was giving at the American Conservative Union Political Action Conference, she said, "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I - so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards."

She was probably pointing to actor Isaiah Washington, who referred to Grey's Anatomy co-star (and gay man) T.R. Knight as a faggot. But Washington, at least, apologized to the community and met with gay leaders. He checked into rehab because-well, because that's what stars seem to do when they commit big social gaffes.

Ann Coulter, though-Ann Coulter, when confronted, just continued making jokes. On her website, she says, "I'm so ashamed, I can't stop laughing."

Really, Ann Coulter? Really?

I mean, come on.

Sure, you're a right-wing pitbull who has made her name by attacking anything and everyone to the left of fascist. And yes, you once said Al Gore was a fag, though because you did it in an almost gentle half-insider kind of way, it came across as a fag hag's idea of a joke instead of a venomous attack like this one. And indeed, your crowd of young admirers cheered you on as you said it, laughing, as if they had never heard anything as funny as a serious candidate for president, a former United States Senator, being deeply insulted by a cheap throwaway line.

But-Ann Coulter. Really. Is this what you want the future of politics to look like? The future of democracy? The future of America? Do you really want serious debate about a very serious issue-the issue of who will be elected to lead our country-do you really want this debate to be hijacked by a round of playground bully-type name calling?

It seems to me, Ann Coulter, that someone with your brains and quick wit could certainly do better than saying, "Nyah, nyah, your guy's a faggot!" to a national audience.

But maybe Ann Coulter can't do better, not any more. Maybe she's bought her own hype. Maybe she thinks she is the woman she plays on TV. Maybe she thinks its enough, now, to be outrageous instead of outrageously smart, or outrageously pointed.

Ann Coulter, after all, is theater. She's not even a real person. She's like those World Wrestling Federation guys in tight shiny, skin-revealing outfits who pretend to be fierce and powerful but really have to plan out all their moves beforehand so they won't get hurt.

Maybe she felt that her influence is fading, that the Republican party is slowly but surely pulling away from the social conservatives who are weighing them down until they are almost drowned.

Her influence is fading. There is no question now. Her influence faded right before our eyes as, one by one, Republicans lined up to denounce her. The Republican presidential candidates denounced her. The Christian Defense Coalition denounced her. Even the Right half of the blogosphere, led by RedState, called for an old fashioned shunning, to let Ann Coulter know she was no longer one of their own.

In fact, the Red State recall of Ann Coulter has been amazing. They have made it clear that this sort of name-calling has no place in our national debate.

Good for them.

And good for us.

Because we gained something from Ann Coulter's gaffe. We saw Republicans and conservatives of all stripes come forward to say that calling someone a faggot is wrong. We saw them realize that in fact they can't say anything they want about marginalized people. That there is a line and they don't want to cross it. We witnessed our Red State brethren take a step back from the precipice of Coulter-Hannity-Limbaugh insanity, and instead say, "Wait a minute. This is not what we want. This is not who we are."

Welcome back to the table, Republicans.

Ann Coulter, you should listen to your party. You should apologize. Calling someone a faggot to get your audience to laugh doesn't just hurt gays and lesbians and their families, and doesn't just hurt John Edwards. It hurts Republicans. It hurts the political debate. It hurts Democracy. And it hurts America.

I've been watching with interest the uproar around the (now pulled) Snickers ad that appeared during the Super Bowl.

You know the one: two men are in a garage; one guy, who is hungry, I guess, from slaving over a car engine, pulls out a Snicker's bar and starts eating; the other, looking at it lustfully, starts chomping from the other end, until they end up in a liplock worthy of Lady and the Tramp.

After a brief-but endless-pause, they jump away from each other, and one yells, "Quick! Do something manly."

So they each rip out patches of their own chest hair.

Gays and lesbians-led by our tigers at GLAAD-weren't pleased by this ad. Nor were folks on the Right, who protested because they found it homoerotic.

Honestly? I found the ad funny.

I mean, not funny in a laugh-out-loud kind of way, but funny-cute. And funny-sexy. And funny-interesting. It was something that caught one's attention, which is the point, really, of ads.

But most people just found it uncomfortable and not funny at all.

Which is telling.

To me, the Snicker's ad was not making fun of gay men as much as it was making fun of homosexual panic, that strange mental condition that forces otherwise sane, rational men into making fools of themselves in order to prove that, really, they're not gay!

"Those silly men!" the ad exclaims. They're so cuckoo that they'll mutilate themselves--or drink engine oil, as they do in an alternate ending-in order to avoid the appearance of enjoying the lips of another man. But we're not fooled, because that second of lust, of erotic interchange, seemed so real, that we know they're trying to blind themselves to the obvious. After all, they don't wipe their mouths. They don't spit. They don't even look disgusted, or shamed---just shocked.

So maybe they're not gay. But for that one moment, each of them sure was turned on by another guy. And we were turned on by them being turned on-which is why anti-gay groups had a problem with the ad.

So why did gays and lesbians have a problem? Hmmmm.

Well, sometimes, I think that we gay and lesbian people can be a little-shall we say-defensive. As soon as something seems kind-of-gay, or sort-of-lesbian, our antenna go up. We watch more closely. We look for others' reactions. We wonder: What should I think about this? What is this saying? Is this good for our community, or is it bad? Is this pro gay or against? How will it affect how the culture sees us? How is it playing in Peoria?

We have good reasons to think this way. Our American culture can be homophobic, as we all know. And that homophobia can turn to violence and discrimination, which are the twin devils we are really concerned about when we splatter the H word around in the media. Here, though, that sensitivity is misplaced.

The real problem with the ad was not the ad itself, but the Snicker's website, which for a while showed videos of famous football players watching the ad and wincing when the men kissed. In some ways, of course, these clips just reinforced the ad's point-straight men are pansies when they see men kissing. They can't handle it, it makes them act stupid and immature, and that's a crazy and strange reaction.

But what those added materials really did was completely subvert-that is, turn around-the ad.

The ad by itself? Actually pretty gay positive.

The ad with the additions of squinch-nosed football players? Clearly not gay positive at all.

This makes me think that the ad in itself was gay positive enough-and uncomfortable enough-and ambiguous enough-that someone at Snickers thought that we ought to be told how to feel about the ad. Because otherwise we might find it homoerotic.

So they put in these clips of football players-real manly men, as we all know-making disgusted faces. That way, it would all be clear. Snickers wasn't for men kissing! Snickers thinks that men kissing is goopy! Blech!

I wish that Snickers would have pulled the video clips of the football players and kept the ads. The clips told us what to think. But the ads spark an important discussion. And we should have let that discussion happen.