IGF CultureWatch

Every morning after I walk my dog, the homeless guy who hangs out next door nods to me in greeting.

"Hey," I always say in return. "How are you today?"

"I am blessed," he says.

And every day I think about that. I think: Can saying it make it so?

The new trend in psychology right now is happiness studies, or positive psychology. Some practitioners believe that happiness can be taught�to prove it, they've started teaching classes to undergraduates at Harvard and other places. The idea is that wellbeing is the capstone of certain building blocks: optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope, spirituality, generosity, absorption in work or play. You can refine your happiness skills. You can exercise them, like muscles.

This might be a problem for gays and lesbians, where sunniness is not, on the whole, encouraged. We like sarcasm. We like doomsday. We like drama. We worry that contentment equals complacent, and complacent ain't never got anyone no rights.

Anger is what leads to change. Frustration is what propels movements forward. Sarcasm is what gets you through the tough times that come when you're seen as a packet of "special rights" instead of a person.

It's better to be an unhappy Socrates than a happy pig, said philosopher John Stuart Mill, more or less.

Mill wasn't gay (He had a smart, feminist wife) but many of us wind up agreeing with him. A sunny, hopeful optimist is either going to get his ass kicked outside the local gay bar one night or his ass kicked on the courthouse steps by the religious right one day. We'd rather be smart. We'd rather be wary. We'd rather be bitter.

Despite what we call ourselves, "gay" is the last thing we are.

We're a creative people, gays and lesbians, and creativity stems from our outsider status, from loneliness, from rage and despair (think Van Gogh). We have camp and drag because we like to try on other characters for a while. We like to see what it would be like to not be us. If we're going to smile, smile, smile, than we'd rather do it in heels and glitter, or a fake beard.

And yet.

And yet the world is changing. We don't have to be as much on our guard any more. We don't have to wear our martyrdom like a glamorous coat.

We've already got embedded in our community one happiness key: doing good. It seems that seeking pleasure only places us on a hedonistic treadmill (oh, don't we know it). Drugs, sex, shopping, chocolate, smoking, drinking--these things give our senses a burst of pleasure that never translates into full wellbeing. To keep the feeling of "happiness," we must up the ante. Another hit; another, perhaps more dangerous partner; the entire menu at chocolatier Max Brenner.

We forget, I think, what in the 1980s we knew so well. Our community is strengthened by how well we care for one another. By meals we bring friends when they're sick. By groceries we shop for when someone we know is homebound. By stands we take when we're faced down by the sharp-toothed tigers of inequality.

Sometimes it seems that gay and lesbian service has stuttered to an almost-stop; that it's become enough to pay $200 to attend a glittering ball or four, and say you've done your community duty. It's enough to write a check. It's enough to nod in agreement when political leaders on television mouth our words.

But it's not enough. It's good �our organizations need money and we need to keep supporting them. But in addition to cash, we need to give them time. We need to give time to organizations and to our friends and to all those who really need our help, our kindness, our skills, our gratitude.

Writing a check just doesn't give us the same glow of wellbeing as mentoring your local, truculent teenager. It doesn't feel as good as buying your local homeless guy a meal. It doesn't lighten your heart like visiting AIDS or cancer patients in the hospital, or painting a school, or doing errands for your elderly gay neighbor who can, in turn, share with you his great stories of his younger days.

In order to give to others, though, it helps for us to realize how truly lucky we are, no matter what our situation in life is. It helps to stretch our gratitude, work out our mindfulness, do multiple reps of hope.

Even the most catty gay man, the most depressed lesbian, can, in fact be happy. We can, in fact, learn happiness.

The question now is: Do we want to?

My friends Janna and Carrie are married to each other. So are Michelle and Heather, and Amy and Beth. They are married because they love each other and have committed to each other; they are married because they can be.

All three couples live in Massachusetts, which remains, after the New Jersey decision, the only state in the Union where it is legal for gays and lesbians to marry. They are just three of the more than 8,000 gay couples who have married in Massachusetts so far.

The New Jersey Supreme Court could have gone the Massachusetts route, mandating gay marriage. It did not. Instead, in a 4-3 split, the court said that equal rights are not optional. What to call those equal rights is.

The legislature, they said, has 180 days to decide. (All seven judges agreed unanimously that New Jersey's constitution protects the equal rights of gays and lesbians-the three judges in the minority voted for marriage instead of leaving it open to the legislature.)

This is a wise decision in our political climate. Coming so soon before the November mid-term elections, a ruling that ordered same-sex marriage in New Jersey would likely have propelled forward the anti-marriage amendments that will be on the ballot in eight states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Virginia, Tennessee and South Carolina.

It could have been a disaster. We could have seen a backlash like the one that roiled the country after Massachusetts gave us marriage in 2003.

So yes, the decision was wise. Measured. It gave gays and lesbians in New Jersey access to the full rights they are entitled to, whatever that package of rights is called by legislators. I am thrilled-absolutely thrilled-that New Jersey is joining Connecticut and Vermont in giving all of its citizens the perks of marriage, including survivors benefits under workman's compensation laws, the ability to not testify at a spouse's criminal trial and tuition assistance.

But.

Equal-marriage activists are right when they say there is something special about the word "marriage."

It may seem like semantics. I myself thought that semantics was all it was, until I went up to Massachusetts a few weekends ago to play football and spend some time with Janna and Carrie, and Michelle and Heather (I need to see Amy and Beth on my next trip-sorry, guys).

I know many, many long-term lesbian couples in Chicago and New York. They own houses and condos, they have children and pets and car payments and gardens and holidays with the in-laws. They are as committed as my married friends.

I myself was in a partnership for seven years that both of us considered a marriage (this was before legal marriage was even a pipe dream). We had a ceremony; we received gifts. We presented ourselves to new acquaintances as till-death-did-we-part. Certainly, that was our intention, if not the eventual reality.

So I know that mere words-"marriage" or "civil unions" or "domestic partnership"-do not have the power to put a relationship together or take it apart.

But there's something special about the lesbian couples who are legally married, a striking difference between them and my partnered friends. There's an ease about them. A security. A relaxed sense of entitlement when dealing with officials, contractors, lawyers, employers. Marriage gives them personal and social standing that being partnered simply doesn't.

The words matter.

Not just to them. The words matter to their friends and neighbors and family members. Straight people understand about marriage. They understand what kind of commitment it is. They intuitively get the words wife, husband. They don't have to wonder after a year if the married couple is still together-they can assume they are, or else expect to commiserate over the news of divorce. They don't have to stumble over words, don't have to wonder if they say "girlfriend" or "significant other" or "partner" or what.

When faced with the words "married couple," straight people know how the couple should be treated, and they treat them accordingly. When they don't treat them accordingly, it is clear to everyone that they are discriminating.

Marriage is special. It just is. It is one of the marks of adulthood in our society, the term we use to describe the crucible that creates new families.

New Jersey isn't ready for marriage yet. Nor, obviously, is most of the country. If civil unions are what we can get right now, then civil unions are what we should continue to fight for, what we should agree to when compromise is necessary-as it inevitably is.

So it is civil unions for now. But let's not forget that we're aiming for what Janna and Carrie, Michelle and Heather, and Amy and Beth have already.

We want marriage.

Don't look now, but there are gays and lesbians in the GOP.

That's right, friends. Gay men and lesbians not only vote Republican, they work for Republicans, too.

Spooky, huh?

I know. Not really. We've known that for a while. We ourselves know that gays and lesbians are a diverse people. We don't all look alike, talk alike, think alike. We have different perspectives, different priorities, make different choices. That's all good. Being gay and lesbian doesn't define everything about who we are.

And yet it seems that certain types of Republican voters are, in fact, spooked.

I guess they haven't been paying attention on Pride, when we march down the streets of American cities, chanting things like, "We're here, we're queer," and carrying signs that say, "We are everywhere."

National Republican leaders, of course, have known that there are gay staffers and officials in the GOP. And it seems that some of them-even publicly homophobic officials-may, in fact, be supportive in private.

The Washington Post notes that when Robert Traynham, chief of staff to Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), confirmed a rumor that he was gay, Santorum responded by calling him "a trusted friend�to me and my family."

This from a man who had compared homosexuality to bestiality.

Certain members of the GOP, it seems, have a tangled relationship to actual, living gay people, treating individuals one way in private and talking about us as a group another way in public. That is, the GOP leadership was operating on a more viperous version of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." As long as people didn't ask them whether they knew and liked gay people as individuals, they weren't going to tell anyone they did.

But what I wonder is what's going on with the conservative, Republican "values voter." Did they really think that the only gay people in power in America were Democrats? Did they actually think that all gay people can be boxed in a container labeled "progressive"?

Maybe they did.

Maybe a significant part of anti-gay sentiment among conservatives stems from the idea that being gay automatically means we have values different from their values. Maybe they don't quite understand that, yes, there are gays and lesbians who are pro-choice, liberal, atheist Democrats-and then there are gays and lesbians who are pro-life, conservative, church-going Republicans.

We're on both sides of the aisle, and on both sides of many, many issues, from global warming to the Iraq war. We really are everywhere.

And so maybe the Foley scandal, awful as it was, will lead to something good.

Maybe with the Foley scandal, and the circulation of The List-a list of Congressional staffers rumored to be gay-and all the talk in the media about gay GOP staffers, maybe all those things together will lead to a values voter realization that the fact that someone is gay or lesbian tells us absolutely nothing else about them.

"Gay" doesn't tell us what someone's politics are. "Gay" doesn't tell us what someone's life is like. "Gay" doesn't tell us how much money someone has, or how they vote, or what newspapers they read, or what clothes they wear or what they look like.

Really, "gay" tells us nothing about someone except-well, that they're gay.

In November, voters might kick out Republican legislators partly because of Foley fallout. It will be hard to tell whether they are reacting so strongly because of the growing revelations that Foley himself and some key GOP staffers are gay, or because of the constant media connection made between the words "Republican" and "pedophile."

But I hope there will come a time when voters won't react negatively when they find out someone in power is gay. In fact, I hope that they won't react at all.

I hope someday that the fact that someone-even an elected official; even a staffer-is gay will just be treated as something interesting about them, like the fact of left-handedness or of a preference for chocolate ice cream.

I hope someday that the fact that there are gays and lesbians in the GOP will be unremarkable.

I hope someday that when gays and lesbians spook others, it's because we're wearing fabulous Halloween costumes, not because we happen to be gay.

Former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) has a problem, but it's not the one in the headlines.

Last week, as soon as the news broke that the congressman had sent graphic sexual texts to a former page, the first headlines (now changed online) called him a pedophile.

And even now, bloggers and some political commentators keep using the word "pedophile" over and over again.

This makes Democrats celebrate, right? Especially once Foley resigned shortly afterward. Another Republican forced to resign over some sort of scandal! And this one involves sexual advances toward children!.

But gay Democrats need to take a step back. In the short term, this may give us some salacious pleasure. But in the long term, it is not good. Here's why.

First, the (perhaps not so) obvious reason.

Foley is not a pedophile. Foley is gay.

Pedophiles are sexually attracted to undeveloped children - 6-year-olds, 3-year-olds. Some researchers even consider pedophilia to be its own perverted sort of sexual orientation. Congressional pages are juniors and seniors in high school, 16- and 17-year-olds. They've been through puberty. They're not children.

Now, I'm appalled by Foley's actions, too. They were completely inappropriate. But "inappropriate" doesn't equal "pedophilia."

The age of consent in Washington, D.C., is 16, which means that this page was legally a sexual adult. A 16-year-old young man is a much, much different target of lust than a 6-year-old boy.

If it had been a 16-year-old girl Foley was after, I don't think the media and those who consume it would have latched onto the word "pedophile." I think they would have been more likely to call this "creepy" or "sexual harassment," which it is.

It is creepy when a 52-year-old makes advances on a 16-year-old.

But when that 16-year-old is a female, no one is that surprised. After all, we sexualize young adults. Teenage girls are our fashion models, our pop singers, our national targets of lust. Americans understand why older men are drawn to very, very young women.

What they don't understand is men of any kind being drawn to other men.

But that's what we have here. Foley is a semi-closeted gay man. A few years ago, he was outed by the gay press and he would neither confirm nor deny that he's gay. He was sending provocative messages to a younger man. In the IM messages they exchanged, released by ABC News, the young man didn't quite encourage him, but didn't quite discourage him either. He might have been too young and inexperienced to know how to fend off advances.

Foley should have known this - he should never have pressed his power and age advantage.

Nevertheless, Foley is being called a pedophile only because both parties are men.

It's never good for us when "pedophile" and "gay" are joined together in this sort of unholy headline matrimony. It simply reinforces the stereotype that we are sexual predators.

So, this is the first reason this was bad for us. It allowed, once again, a gay man to be targeted as a pedophile.

Secondly, Foley is one of a very small group of Republicans who actually had a decent voting record on gay issues. In the past 10 years, he's scored in the 80s or higher on the Human Rights Campaign's congressional report card. He was a co-sponsor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. He's pro-choice.

In short, he had become a friend of ours in the legislature.

Perhaps there will be a good outcome here. Maybe a gay-friendly Democrat will take his seat in November. Perhaps this situation will also make some moderates think about conservative hypocrisy - congressional Republican leaders knew about this exchange, yet covered it up. Maybe it will remind moderates and conservatives alike that gay people really are everywhere, even hidden in the Republican ranks.

But long after the November election, those two words "gay" and "pedophilia" will remain etched in the minds of ordinary Americans.

And that's too bad, because Mark Foley's problem is not pedophilia. Mark Foley's problem is impulse control.

When it comes to same-sex marriage, it turns out that many Americans just don't care.

About 1,000 adults were asked as part of a new Associated Press/IPSOS poll about how George W. Bush is handling the country, how they might vote in the November Congressional elections, and what they thought about some top issues.

Including gay marriage.

Now a couple years ago-say, after the Massachusetts marriage debates-anti-gay marriage sentiment reached an all-time high, as much as 63 percent. People were furious and they were fighting.

But in this most recent poll, what percentage thought gay marriage was extremely important?

Only 22 percent, or about one in five.

Thirty-six percent said that gay marriage wasn't an important issue at all and 11 percent called it only "slightly important." Fifteen percent thought it was "moderately important"; 5 percent called it "very important." One percent of respondents weren't sure.

In fact, those polled adults thought that gay marriage was the least important issue they were asked about, coming after eight others including the economy, the situation in Iraq, health care and gas prices.

These adults weren't all Northeastern liberals, either, or secular city Dems. Most of them described themselves as conservative or moderate; slightly more respondents came from the South than from other areas of the United States; more of them were from the suburbs or rural areas than from cities; the large majority identified as Christian.

So. We have these 1,000 likely voters who are overwhelmingly white, mostly Christian, mostly conservative to moderate, and they're asked about same-sex marriage and THEY DON'T CARE.

They care more about social security than they do about gay marriage. They care more about terrorism. Actually, they care more about how much it costs to fill up their SUV than they do about whether someone in the next town or next state-or heck, next door-wants to marry someone of the same sex.

They're not for it. They're not against it. They just don't understand why it's an issue.

And this, my friends, is a good thing.

Really.

Conservative leaders (read: Karl Rove) have been spinning media webs for years, trying to insure that gay marriage becomes a wedge issue, like abortion. They want equal marriage to stand for everything that's wrong with America in the eyes of Mr. Mainstreet; they want it to be shorthand for everything America fears. If gays get marriage, they tell us, then no one will have marriage, because marriage will be meaningless.

These leaders hoped that Americans would be so afraid of instability caused by gays and lesbians that they would vote with conservative Republicans on every issue, no matter how misguided, in the belief that a vote for a Republican was a vote against gays, and a vote against gays was a vote against moral depravity. For a little while, it worked.

For a little while, liberals and moderate Republicans feared that gay marriage might be the issue that kept neo-conservative Republicans in the White House and in Congress for years to come.

But Americans have seen marriage in Massachusetts and they've seen civil unions in Vermont, and there are still straight people getting married and there are married straight people doing things that married straight people do.

Americans have come to realize that opening rights up to one group doesn't mean taking rights away from another.

All this might explain why, in Illinois, anti-gay activists recently stopped pushing for a referendum suggesting that the state's gay marriage ban be written into the state constitution. They were losing. So they gave up.

And in Virginia, Va4Marriage is struggling to raise money to support the passage of a same-sex marriage ban. Much of the funds they've raised so far-a measly $155,000-come from a single donor who doesn't live in the state.

A populace that doesn't care that much about an issue isn't going to fight against it.

Of course, a lot of this apathy must be because gay marriage has quietly receded from the headlines. New York turned its back on civil unions, as did California. Those defeats hurt, even though I'm betting they are temporary.

But apathy on this issue is OK for now. Don't Ask, Don't Tell is heading toward repeal. Let's take that major victory when it comes as a sign that the country really is turning around on gay rights. Let's take it as a herald for the eventual victory of marriage equality.

Because we will get same-sex marriage. And the best thing that could happen when that day comes is for America to hear the news, shrug, and just not care.

My friend Bridget Altenburg is livid.

Why?

The Army recently dismissed another Arab linguist because he was gay.

I know, I know: a lot of us were angry about that. But Bridget served in the Army for five years after attending West Point. She was a captain and an engineer. She led a unit of 35 soldiers in Bosnia who rebuilt bridges so that Bosnians could vote for their new government; she served as an aide to a three-star general in Kosovo and was perhaps the only woman at the time who was serving as an aide in a hazardous fire zone.

Bridget loved the Army and she did good work there and she would have kept serving. But like the linguist, Bridget is gay. So like the linguist, she had to go.

Bridget wasn't kicked out. She never told-she was never asked.

The general she was an aide to likely knew she was gay and didn't care. Her unit didn't care. But Bridget cared. She had come out to herself while serving and she just couldn't lie any more.

So when her five-year commitment was up, she left. The Army lost another good soldier.

Men and women like Bridget are the secret losses of the Armed Services. We hear about the egregious losses-the newest Arab linguist to be dismissed didn't tell anyone he was gay, he was likely outed by a jealous lover.

But we don't hear much about people like Bridget, whose good character makes them want to serve their country but also makes it impossible for them to do so.

The obvious "don't ask, don't tell" losses, of course, are bad enough. Not just bad-ridiculous. Silly.

Bridget points out that the U.S. soldier currently being held in Iraq for rape and murder was given a waiver for his past criminal history.

"So, you can join the military if you're a criminal, but not if you're gay? It doesn't make sense," Bridget says.

And she's right.

She's also right about the very real worry of military readiness. The armed forces have dismissed 11,000 soldiers through "don't ask," about 800 of them with critical skills-and 300 with crucial language skills. The military needs Arab linguists, of course, so it replaces the gay ones with civilians who don't have as thorough a background check or any type of military commitment, yet have access to critical military information.

Makes you feel safer, doesn't it?

Over 700 soldiers were dismissed for being gay last year alone-in the middle of a war in which the armed forces are not making their recruitment goals.

But those 11,000 discharged gay soldiers don't include people like Bridget, who couldn't bear lying any longer.

"It makes no sense," she says. "'Don't ask, don't tell' doesn't make sense from a military readiness standpoint. It doesn't make sense from a unit cohesion standpoint-nothing disrupts unit cohesion like lying. Being in the Army isn't like some nine-to-five job at Wal-Mart. You bunk with these people. They know you. If you're lying, they know."

And the myth that gay men and lesbians would start hitting on people in their units?

"That hasn't happened with any of our allies who let openly gay soldiers serve-England, Israel," Bridget says. "What do legislators think, that Americans are hornier than people in other countries?"

Besides, she points out, the military has rules about conduct, which should apply equally to gay and straight people. There is no sex in the barracks. Superiors can't date those under them. "If the head of a unit hit on a soldier, he or she could be brought up on charges-not because he or she is gay, but because it's against military law," Bridget says.

There are plenty of ways, she says, to make sure this gay-sex-everywhere nightmare doesn't happen.

But that's not what the law is about, of course.

The law isn't about sense. It's not about unit cohesion. It's not about military readiness. It's about discrimination.

And while the military is discriminating, it's losing people we need to fight for us, like that Arab linguist. And it's losing people like Bridget, who leave exemplary military careers because they are exactly the sorts of people the military wants-men and women who aren't comfortable lying.

"I don't know why I was livid when I heard about that linguist," Bridget says. "It's the same stuff that keeps happening over and over. It's a farce."

What if.

What if, posed John Tierney in a New York Times op-ed, what if the red states and blue states were divided into different countries? What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War and been allowed to secede?

"Northern liberals wouldn't be ranting at George W. Bush and Pat Robertson," Tierney wrote. "They wouldn't be frantically trying to find a candidate who appealed to the Bible Belt."

He continued, "Southern conservatives wouldn't have to fight for moral values against Godless Yankees. �Politics in both countries might be less partisan, even civil."

Imagine that world. We could leave that counterfactual Confederacy to battle Mexican immigration and impose fascist Christian rule. The North would have more equality and thus a richer culture.

Let's ignore the small inconvenient fact that red states stretch up to the northern border in the Great Plains and mountain states and imagine that a Civil War the United States lost would be a Civil War that divided us nicely in half, with the blue liberals on top and the red conservatives swimming along beneath.

Our more liberal United States would have stopped fighting over abortion years ago. It would be a non-issue now. We'd teach science in schools without ever having to explain why we weren't also teaching creationism; we'd have socialized health care like our neighbor to the north; we'd have had a woman president.

Plus all those benefits for gays and lesbians. Gay marriage would now be a given, and we would be serving openly in the military. There would be gay equality everywhere. It would be like living in Canada.

But here's the thing.

Canada's not the paradise it seems.

Last week, for example, thousands of Christians descended on Ottawa to pray for the overturning of the country's gay marriage law. Seems like something that would happen in the South, doesn't it?

Then I started thinking about trouble areas.

Illinois went easily to John Kerry. We're blue. Lincoln made his home here, for heaven's sake-we'd be the proudest of the Northern United States. Yet in Springfield, our capital, the Episcopal bishop recently signaled strong distaste for the church's new presiding bishop because she's in favor of blessing same-sex marriages.

And it's well known that southern Illinois might as well be Tennessee.

And those Southern states? They're not all as anti-gay as we imagine. A federal court recently ruled that a gay-straight alliance must be allowed to meet in Gainesville, Ga. The Supreme Court in Arkansas affirmed that there must be no ban on gay foster parents. The University of Louisville, in red Kentucky, voted to offer domestic partner benefits. The Tennessee Supreme Court challenged a proposed ban on same-sex marriage.

Let's take a look at our blue states, shall we?

A Rochester, N.Y., judge ruled that a transgender man couldn't change his name from Sarah to Evan. Connecticut's legislature said no to same-sex marriage, because residents already had watered-down civil unions. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill giving California same-sex marriage last year. The Massachusetts legislature took up a gay marriage ban.

And New York ruled that gays and lesbians didn't deserve marriage because-and this is the strangest thing I've ever heard-their unions are too stable.

The lesson?

Life for liberals-and gays and lesbians-wouldn't in fact be easier if America had no red states, because America isn't so easily divided between red and blue, conservative and liberal, Christian and secular, homophobic and gay-friendly.

Instead, we are a patchwork of local feeling, with blue municipalities tucked within red counties hidden in states that are more purple than primary-colored.

Gays and lesbians are in a battle for equality. To win any sort of battle, you need first to see the enemy truly. So let's dismiss the myth that blue states are good and red states are bad-or that red and blue states even exist as solid entities.

If the South had seceded, the North would have the same troubled mix of conservatives and liberals it does today, as would the Confederacy. Red and blue is an easy shorthand, but it's a false one. We are not a divided country. We are families struggling over issues that are important to us; we are individuals trying to get our communities to see things our way.

There is no magic bullet-not now, not in a counterfactual world where the North lost the Civil War.

There is no what if.

There is only what now?

I got a very strange phone call last week.

A woman from a marketing and design firm called. I had been recommended to her, she said, as a good writer who had done work for non-profits.

Yes, I said.

She asked me if I would be available to work as a freelancer on a three-year project for a capital campaign.

Yep, I said.

Then she said: "You know, before we go further, I should ask you something."

OK? I said.

She paused.

"How do you feel about working for an evangelical institution?"

Now I paused.

For a very long time.

"An evangelical Christian institution?" I asked. "Like a church?"

"An evangelical Christian institution," she said.

I almost laughed.

My first thought was---Are you kidding me?

But then I started thinking about other things.

There are, of course, circumstances under which I would not write. I would not write for an institution that included anti-gay work as part of its mission.

I think we have a responsibility, as talented gay and lesbian people, not to contribute our gifts toward people and institutions who actively work against us, no matter how much we need the work or how much we might get paid.

But.

But should I turn work-or any sort of association-down just because the institution is evangelical?

My kind of work, of course, is different from other kinds of work. I don't construct buildings or add up numbers, objective things that would likely produce a similar outcome no matter who does it.

My kind of work is persuasive-that is, when I write for non-profits, it's usually my job to connect with an audience in such a strong, emotional way that they will apply to the school or come to an event or call their local politco or send money.

And I was recommended to this woman because I can be very, very persuasive.

So this, really, became a serious moral question for me. Could I take a job that would involve me raising support for an evangelical institution?

I had a quick vision of sitting in a room with a bunch of suited evangelicals. Me, with my multi-colored hair and multi-pierced ears, with my liberal opinions and my willing mouth to voice them.

I almost laughed again.

Then I thought: Well, why not? An institution could be (and now I believe that this one, in fact, is) a college and I'm a strong believer in education. Actually, I know lots of good people, gay and straight, who were educated at evangelical or Catholic colleges. Some experienced openness and acceptance, some didn't.

Yet on balance, I think that evangelical schools do a lot of good work. Maybe not for us-but in the world.

That's the thing I think we forget when we have a whiplash response toward evangelicals. We don't trust them, right? We are sure that they hate us (and yes, some of them do). We are convinced that one of their primary motivations is to eliminate us and destroy our happiness. We think that the way they conceive of the role of women and families is backward and regressive. Many of us think that evangelicals are evil.

But that can't be true-or at least, it can't be true of all of them nor of all evangelical institutions.

I think this is one of our big problems. Gays and lesbians are a large voting block (some say 5 percent). Evangelicals are a larger voting block (about 23 percent). They may not need us-but you know what?

We probably need them.

Perhaps we should start thinking about evangelicals not as evil but as misguided. Think how much good that 23 percent voting block could do! They could get us universal health care! They could make inroads into immigration reform!

Perhaps we should think of evangelicals not as adversaries but as potential partners. Perhaps they need to be persuaded that their time, money and energy is better spent on real problems facing America---problems that Jesus might have cared deeply about, like poor education systems, expensive health care and few affordable housing options.

But if we never work together or associate with each other, how will we ever find common ground on these issues or any others?

Once I started thinking along these lines, I started thinking about this job as a possible educational opportunity. Maybe I could win these suited evangelicals over.

"Are you there?" the woman on the phone said.

"I don't have a problem working for an evangelical institution," I said. "But they may have a problem with me. I'm an open lesbian. I write a column in the gay press."

"Well," she said. "I don't know how much respect you would get in that room. Let me talk to them and call you back."

I haven't heard from her.

It's too bad.

I was at a bar the other day when someone I'd just met shouted at me across the table, asking me how long I've been writing my column.

"Oh, 10 years," I shouted back.

He was startled. "I thought you were in your early 20s."

He meant it as a compliment, of course, more a reflection on what I look like than on my intellectual maturity. My sister has commented on it, too. She just turned 23 and the last time I saw her, she looked me up and down and said, "You dress like my friends."

But I've been thinking lately about what it means that I and my mid-30s friends all look-and act-like our compatriots in our 20s.

Adam Sternbergh of New York magazine calls people like us "grups": grown-ups, condensed. Grown-ups who refuse to grow up. Grown-ups who aren't sure what, exactly, being grown-up means.

"This is an obituary for the generation gap," he wrote. "This cohort is not interested in putting away childish things. They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their 30s and 40s-and even 50s-clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies, content that they can enjoy all the good parts of being a grown-up with none of the bad parts (dockers, management seminars, indentured servitude at the local Gymboree)."

We hang out in bars. We watch "Grey's Anatomy." We drink the newest drinks and watch the coolest movies and listen to the same music in the same iPods as the 25-year-old sitting next to us on the train. Heck, we're probably dating the 25-year-old sitting next to us on the train.

Adulthood is even more compressed for gay men and lesbians, I think, because there are fewer of us and we tend to clump together and we follow the general American trend of wanting to be younger than we are instead of older. So instead of young lesbians and gay men aspiring to be like their wise elders, the wise elders are getting tattoos.

Is this a bad thing? Well, not really. People should be able to wear and listen to what they want, right?

What struck me in the New York article was not the riffs on our grupster clothes-I thought those were funny and true. What struck me was this sentence: "For a grup, success isn't how many employees you have but how much freedom you have to walk or boogie-board away."

That sentence struck me because oh, that, that right there, is the problem for so many of us in our 30s and 40s. We define success as freedom. And freedom means no defined roles and an overabundance of choices.

So we wake up in the morning and our choices include not just what we're going to wear or make for dinner, but whether we're going to quit today, whether we should move across country and take up snowboarding, whether we should be single again or move in with our girlfriend and whether we should go back to school and try something completely new.

We grups are a people without a map. Especially we gay and lesbian grups, who don't have the traditional heterosexual plan to follow, who may not be asked by our families when we're going to have kids or get married or settle down.

Even if we are settled down-even if we have kids-we likely don't have a plan. Instead, we are literally unsettled, insecure in the knowledge that we can leave anything at any time.

We chose this shedding of obligations and requirements because it's how our generation defines freedom. We don't want to be the company men or women. We don't want to be trapped in gender or social roles. We don't want to be the person with a lifelong regret that we had never tried to make it as a rock musician or a novelist.

So we've immersed ourselves in youth culture-and not even our own youth culture but the culture of the millennials (whose music, admittedly, is very similar to the Gen X music that we played on our Walkmans growing up). We have immersed ourselves in a youth culture where, like in all youth cultures, the driving force is the individual pursuit of our own passions, whatever passions those happen to be at the moment.

This differentiates us, I suppose, from the "Greed-is-Good" corporate types of the 1980s. If that's what being grown-up is, we don't want it-and good for us.

But maybe it's time to define what being grown-up is for us grups. Because pursuing our own passions seems to make us happy in the short term but not content and secure in the long term. Many of us are still looking for purpose. We're still trying to find our way.

I suspect that this contentment will come when we start devoting ourselves to our community-our communities-instead of the latest band.

But until we solve the puzzle of who we're going to be when we grow up, we'll continue being grups-dressing and acting like we're in our 20s, as if seeming younger will give us more time to figure life out.

I am a gay American.

Last summer, when I heard disgraced New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey use this phrase to deflect the country's attention from his extramarital affair with a man, I laughed.

Huh, I thought. Good spin.

And then I forgot about it - sort of.

Every now and then the phrase "I am a gay American" would cross my mind, and I wondered why it seemed so startling. Perhaps "gay American" seems strange because as gay men and lesbians, we are used to categorizing ourselves as outlaws - and for a long time we were, literally, living outside the law since our relationships were illegal, and of course still aren't legally validated in most states.

We are used to fighting these unfair laws. We are used to fighting the government, particularly this government, this administration. And we have relished our status as outsiders, breaking society's gender rules, creating our own culture, redefining what it means to have a family. Redefining what it means to be in love.

Every year, Gay Pride celebrates this. We find the most outrageous clothes in our closets, and we march and sway and dance to show our cities and ourselves that there is strength in numbers, that there are many, many, many of us here, and we are living the way we choose - which, it seems, it not the way most mainstream Americans want us to live. We are different, we say. And we are happy about this difference and we love this difference and we want this difference to be accepted.

And yet, even in seeking acceptance, we are the same.

I am a gay American.

McGreevey said this for the wrong reasons, but I think he used the right words. As pundit Andrew Sullivan has pointed out:

It was the announcement of a new category, a new identity. . . .After all, 'gay American' is designed to sound like 'African-American.' It insists on the fixed identity of a group of citizens. And it celebrates their public citizenship: These people are as American as they are homosexual, and their homosexual orientation is as unremarkable a feature as the color of someone's skin.

Isn't this what so many of us have been saying, but in different words? We're here. We're queer. Get used to it. We're not going away. Our identity has a culture of its own, rules of its own, joys and trials of its own. But most of us also live easily in the larger American culture. We are assimilated. We have jobs and cousins and roots in hometowns. We ride the bus. We go camping. We buy iPods. We want yards and fireplaces and granite countertops and Jacuzzi tubs. We walk our dogs and treasure our cats. We send our mom flowers on Mother's Day. We are gay Americans.

We are not fighting against our country when we battle for our civil rights. We are fighting for it. We are fighting for a better America, a more democratic America, an America that gives equal opportunity to its citizens whether black or white, male or female, gay or straight.

We don't need to move to Canada to be free to be gay. That is, we shouldn't need to move. Our fight is here. Our war is here. And if, right now, we are ashamed to be Americans - because of our country's rampant xenophobia, because of the narrow-mindedness that threatens gays everywhere - well, there is no better reason to redefine what it means to be American. Redefinition is, after all, our specialty.

I am a gay American.

The phrase makes me wish a little that Pride month was longer, that it stretched into early July, that it included Independence Day. What better time, on that most American of days, to declare that we want what all Americans want: to live our lives the way we choose, to pursue happiness, to have representation in our government, to be free from laws and social restrictions that pressure us into being something less than what we are.

I am a gay American. And I've never been more proud of that.