IGF CultureWatch

Originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1999.

Review: Children, commitment and consequences are among the forces that press straights to shoulder the full responsibilities of adulthood. Being a parent may not be an obligatory part of the formula, but it's still time gay male culture got in touch with its inner grown-up. [Books reviewed: Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, "Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America"; John-Manuel Andriote, "Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America"; Daniel Mendelsohn, "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity"; and Robin Hardy and David Groff, "The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood".]

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TO BE A HOMOSEXUAL in 1999 is to stand on the curb during the New York gay pride parade and feel your eyes water, faster than you can stop them, as row after row of openly homosexual police officers march by, in full uniform. Behind them, supporting them, the NYPD marching band:this from a police force whose members, some of them, had been known to turn their backs on their homosexual colleagues in earlier marches. To be a homosexual in 1999 is also to watch as, later in the same parade, a flatbed truck rolls past bearing a banner proclaiming WWW.RENTBOY.COM. On the platform, a dozen or more dancing hustlers wear only biker shorts or briefs. In due course they liberate themselves from their clothing altogether. They cover their crotches with their hands but offer generous glimpses of the goods. Later, some of them are told by on-duty police officers to leave or face arrest.

It was odd to see these two species, the men (and women) in their NYPD blues and the boys in their birthday suits, marching in the same parade, as though they had anything to do with one another. Odder still was that they had a great deal to do with one another. Some of these homosexual men become gay boys when they take off the blue uniforms after work and go down to the bars in Chelsea. Some of these gay boys become homosexual men when they put on creased trousers and report for their day jobs.

In individual gay men, the tension between the competing identities of ordinary adult citizen and "boy" - as in, "He's one cute boy, for 35" - can be energizing and endlessly amusing. Individual people, after all, can have it both ways, up to a point. In the struggle to define the public image of homosexuality in America, however, the two make war. The gay establishment tells heterosexual America: "We are just like you." And the boys, grinning, say just as loudly: "Like you? The last thing in the world we want is to be like you!" For 30 years, the identity paradox - the uneasy coexistence and sometimes open warfare of the adult culture with the "boy" culture - has turned the gay rights movement into a battle with itself.

"No book before has attempted to follow the germ of rebellion which began with Stonewall, as it blossomed in other cities into a national political movement," write Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, both of the New York Times, in their introduction to "Out for Good." Having conducted about 700 interviews with 330 people over seven years, they intend, they say, to record "a definitive history of the movement," beginning with New York's landmark Stonewall riots of 1969 and ending in 1987, when the AIDS crisis was in its ghastly full bloom. No book as ambitious as this one can be perfect. On the whole, however, the authors have succeeded in what they set out to do. The story - and it is a big, dense, messy, colorful, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, depressing story - is told with political acumen, reportorial vividness and narrative flair. The book is a remarkable accomplishment. Not least remarkable is its demonstration that the gay rights movement has been at least as decisively shaped by its internal struggles over identity as by its struggles with its opponents on the outside.

Though some black civil rights leaders huff and puff to repudiate any resemblance between their struggle and the gay-rights movement, the similarities seem hard to deny. Homosexuals faced legal discrimination and Jim Crow-style laws: As recently as 1967, the New York State Liquor Authority forbade bars to serve homosexuals, and one of the first activist campaigns in 1969 sought to "integrate" a Los Angeles restaurant (Barney's Beanery) that displayed a "Fagots [sic] Stay Out" sign. Police harassment was a constant feature of gay life, and a sex arrest often meant the end of a job or a career. (This problem is not yet solved. In Texas a year ago, two men were arrested for having sex at home.) In 1977, citing Leviticus, the Ku Klux Klan called for the execution of all homosexuals.

Particularly in the 1970s, gay churches were burned by arsonists, rebuilt, burned again. In 1973, 32 people died when an arsonist torched the UpStairs bar in New Orleans; one man who survived was notified on his hospital bed that he had been fired from his job as a schoolteacher. There was, and is, a drumbeat of violence, which is a sort of terrorism. Although it is true that homosexuality is not a race and, unlike ethnicity, has behavioral components, it is also true that, since the 1970s, racial discrimination and anti-black sentiment have been driven not by skin color racism, as such, but by fears of a stereotyped "black lifestyle." The supposed "black lifestyle" centers on crime, drugs and idleness, whereas the supposed "gay lifestyle" centers on promiscuity, disease and political extremism; but the aversions engendered by the two clusters of anti-social stereotypes are not so very different.

Why, then, has the gay movement so utterly failed to attain the gravitas and moral traction of black civil rights? A lot of reasons; and boys prancing around in the altogether must be prominent among them. To the consternation of many straight people - and many lesbians - gay men were doing everything in their power to be seen as sex-obsessed party animals. "Gay liberation," say the authors, "had somehow evolved into the right to have a good time - the right to enjoy bars, discos, drugs and frequent impersonal sex." One gay leader is quoted as saying, "Never forget one thing: What this movement is about is f-ing."

The party ended in July 1981, only 12 years after it began. "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals," said a New York Times headline on July 3. Even before AIDS, as John-Manuel Andriote, a Washington-based journalist, notes in "Victory Deferred," urban gay men were infected with diseases - gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis - at rates otherwise seen only in Third World countries. By the late 1970s, even before AIDS emerged, one doctor with the San Francisco public health department was warning, "Too much is being transmitted here."

"Victory Deferred" does not deliver quite what its subtitle ("How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America") promises; its real concern is how AIDS changed gay activism in America. About "gay life in America" - about the sick and the dying, and about the hearts and lives and tears of homosexual men and women - Andriote says little. Rather, his book is a comprehensive survey of institutional responses: how care-giving organizations, arising overnight, strained to the breaking point and beyond; how a few hardscrabble AIDS groups became, after the government started spending big money, 18,000 organizations, many of them run by expense account professionals; how, with astonishing success, desperate and outraged homosexuals created what amounted to their own Food and Drug Administration. Andriote is more diligent than literary, and he has a weakness for bureaucratic sentences like, "AID Atlanta was the only gay community-based ASO among the eleven RWJ sites to be selected as the program's coordinating agency." Still, he is encyclopedic and knowledgeable. People who want to know how a community mobilized in the face of an unprecedented crisis will want to start here.

In recent years, as the epidemic has receded toward survivability, homosexual thinkers and activists began to rise from the bedsides of the ill and consider the questions that AIDS had only temporarily suppressed. The boy culture seemed deeply implicated in the health crisis. But was it really to blame? In 1997, a group of activists and academics, calling themselves Sex Panic!, argued that AIDS hysteria and conservative backlash, among gays as well as straights, were reviving sex phobia and repression. Robin Hardy, writing with David Groff in "The Crisis of Desire," takes this view. Hardy was a writer and activist who was HIV-positive but died, still healthy, in a hiking accident in 1995. He left behind an unfinished book, which his friend Groff, a writer and editor, has completed with skill. Sometimes the book rages, sometimes it ponders; to Groff's credit, however, its moods seem to belong to one author, not two, and the writing is never less than accomplished. For Hardy, gay identity and gay promiscuity are more or less the same thing. The unfettered exploration of sexual pleasure is liberating not just for homosexuals but for everybody, representing "progress toward a society that values pleasure." Before AIDS, he says, "We believed we were at the beginning of a new age in human relations - and we were." Even today, promiscuous but safe sex is "far more effective - not to mention affirming - than strategies of closure, repression, penalization of promiscuity and enforced monogamy put forward by the state and by some of our big-time thinkers." Hardy regrets having HIV, but he does not regret the sex that gave it to him. "Communal sex," he writes, "is to gay men what golf is to, well, other kinds of men: they find beauty and bonding in it."

It must be said that Hardy is, for the most part, more thoughtful than that. But it must also be said that Hardy's vision seems strange to those of us who lead a different sort of life, who put commitment ahead of sex and who consider ourselves no less authentically gay for doing so. One wonders, too, if it isn't childish to condemn medicine, government and society for their indifferent and moralistic responses to AIDS while complaining about the loss of the sex.

To Daniel Mendelsohn, a classicist and a writer of distinction, falls the task of confronting the paradox that Hardy pushes to one side. "The Elusive Embrace" is that rare thing, a genuinely beautiful essay: a musing meditation on gay culture, on Greek language and myth, on his own family and life, that is not so much written as braided. The voice is intimate, probing, often of a loveliness that brings you up short: "His nostrils were delicate, like snail shells; they trembled when he spoke, if you got that close. I asked him out. His dark hair, when I finally kissed him, was glossy and smelled sweet, like a child's."

Mendelsohn writes: "For a long time I have lived in two places." One place is at the edge of New York's Chelsea, the Mecca of the gay boy culture; the other is in a town an hour away, where Mendelsohn and his friend Rose are raising her young son Nicholas. In the city he is a cosmopolitan who can melt into the anonymous adventurism of the streets; in the town his intimate encounters are with spittle and pediatricians. Why, he wonders, does he never think of straight men as "boys," which is the way he would think of them if they were gay? The answer, in a word: Nicholas. "Children are the secret weapon of straight culture: they have the potential to rescue men from inconsequentiality. Fatherhood has the power to confer authenticity on men; it can be what saves them from eternally being boys themselves."

Playfulness, says Mendelsohn, is what distinguishes gay style from straight style. "Desire and sex are just an expression of an almost willful insistence on constant play," he writes. "Without anyone but yourself to be responsible for - to wait for - there is no reason, really, not to play." Yet he is glad to have Chelsea, the playground, to return to between long visits with Nicholas. "You move between two places," he says. "Gay identity hovers between strange extremes."

This will always be true. The boy culture will never vanish, nor should it. Straight men have poker nights and football outings; gay men have dance clubs and the Halloween high heel drag race. But the balance will shift and is shifting already. Any culture is infantilized, necessarily, when its members are denied the power to enter into adult commitments - to own, to vote, to defend one's country, to marry. Black men, recall, were once "boys," when they were denied the full prerogatives of citizenship and of adulthood. For gay life in America, the epochal change going on just now is the emergence of an agenda advancing not the right to have fun but the right to assume responsibility; to serve in the military, to mentor and rear the young and to marry.

Of those, marriage is the most important. One day America may allow homosexuals to enter into the single most important commitment that adults make, the formal bond to another human being for (one hopes) life. When that happens, gay culture's long adolescence ends. Mendelsohn is right: Children make men out of boys. But so does the bond of marriage. So, for that matter, does feeding your wasted partner, carrying him up the stairs, wiping the vomit from his mouth and embracing him in the darkness. "In sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part": These are words spoken by grown-ups.

Originally appeared in National Journal, October 16, 1999.

ON AUG. 30, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the results of the first study of HIV infection rates among young urban men, ages 15 to 22, who have sex with men. The news was not good. In the seven major cities studied, 7 percent of young men were infected - and, bear in mind, these are young young men, still at the beginning of their sexual lives. Ten percent of the 22-year-olds were infected. Among African-Americans, the numbers were higher still. "We're not back to the mid-1980s," when the virus was spreading rapidly, says Dr. Linda A. Valleroy, a CDC epidemiologist who worked on the study. "But it continues."

It is hard to know for sure, but new infections of HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) appear to have stabilized at about 40,000 cases a year, according to the CDC. The vast majority of those cases were avoidable. HIV, after all, is not easy to catch. So why have infection rates stopped declining? What is going on out there?

Jim is 23. He is a man of medium height and light build, with wavy auburn hair and an agreeable face that is lent a triangular shape by his prominent cheekbones. His mother and father became acquainted while using and, for a time, dealing drugs. Later, after his mother was clean, she warned Jim ceaselessly about the dangers of drugs, warnings that he heeded. After her marriage to Jim's often jobless father ended, she raised Jim and his five siblings. His father got involved with crystal meth, borrowed money from Jim, did jail time for shoplifting, and then disappeared. Jim thinks his father may be living in Tijuana, Mexico.

His mother was happy for the first year or so after the divorce but then became manic-depressive and, at times, abusive. She would rage and throw things and hit; she would curse men and predict that Jim would turn out as bad as the rest of them, just wanting sex. For stability, Jim turned to school and church. But he told some church people that he saw nothing wrong with two men marrying each other; by then he was having homosexual fantasies. The pastors barred him from participating in church services and skits for younger children. Jim gave up on religion.

School, however, went well. He was admitted to the University of California (Berkeley). Freshman year, at a gay and lesbian community center, he told a coming-out session that he was unsure of his sexuality. A 28-year-old man offered him a ride home and expressed attraction. They had sex without a condom. "I was in denial about the fact that maybe there were bad people in the world," Jim says. "I wanted to believe that everyone was good. That's what kept me going - thinking that good things were going to happen, and people were essentially good."

Afterward, Jim rushed to have an HIV test and to receive counseling: "All of the education you could imagine," he says. "They really tried to help me make a better decision." An anxious week later, the result came back. Negative.

Jim next fell for a straight man in his dorm, to no avail. He imagined a relationship with an ideal man, but did not know where to find such a man or how to pass from sex to a relationship. He would meet men in sex clubs and exchange phone numbers (after exchanging glances, and more), but nothing ever seemed to come of it. "I would try to date them, but it would always wind up not working."

As the months passed, he despaired of finding a partner, grew depressed. He saw no hope for combining passion with intimacy and began to rely on sex for a sense of human contact. In the fall of 1997, he took to frequenting parks and the booths in porn shops. "Afterward, I felt guilty and kind of dirty, but at the same time it didn't last, so I had to go back. I started to get addicted, basically, to anonymous sex with lots of people."

By the time he was 21, the sex clubs were a fixture in his life. He used protection, but condoms broke. They broke more and more often, so that he sometimes wondered what was the point. "In terms of unsafe sex," he says, "there was a progression."

In November 1997, he entered a period of numb despair. "Since I'd had so much failure with all these different relationships, I just lost hope at that point. It was like I didn't care any more. I was giving up, a little bit." That month, he probably had 100 unprotected encounters.

Every so often, alarms rang and red lights flashed. On five occasions during the past few years, broken condoms or absent condoms would send him, panicked, to clinics, where he received counseling and medication to reduce the odds that the virus would take hold. Each time he would shudder with fear and with sickness from the drugs, and he would swear to change. Each time, the results brought a reprieve. Negative - negative - negative.

But, as he danced on the tightrope, he began to feel giddy. "Part of me felt that if I was having so much unprotected sex and I hadn't contracted HIV, I thought maybe I had a natural immunity to it." In 1998, he tried to be more careful about protecting himself, but he spent the summer hustling for money to pay for his apartment and for school. (All this time he was a successful undergraduate at Berkeley.) Meanwhile, the unpaid sex with strangers continued.

More warnings: In the spring of last year, he was raped in a sex club and bled for a week. Two months later, after a porn-shop encounter, the bleeding resumed. He was in the hospital for three days before it stopped.

Part of him was rational and tried to take control. He would swear abstinence but break down after a month. He was often moving between apartments and felt rootless, isolated. His gym workouts were increasingly making him an object of pursuit. This year, in the spring, he says, "I kind of went a little bit haywire." He would visit the sex clubs three times a week, having multiple encounters, many of them unprotected. "When I got in a certain mood, it triggered me to want to have sex, and I didn't want condoms to get in the way."

In June, yet another warning: The health department called. One of his recent sex partners had contracted HIV; the department suggested that Jim get tested. He did. Still negative.

"I felt good about that," he says. "I started to realize it was an addiction. I had to have sex every day in order to feel good about myself." At last, urged by counselors, he began attending Sex-Addicts Anonymous. A week into the program, however, he slipped, and failed to use protection. On July 1, as he swore "never again" yet again, he came down with a bad case of something like the flu. Once more, he went to be tested. This time, he was full of dread.

"I had this feeling it was going to be positive," he says. In mid-July, the results came back. He had HIV.

The weeks since the virus invaded him have brought despondency, regret, guilt, "a lot of fear and anxiety." To talk to him now is to hear him look back on his own recent life as though across a gulf. Three combatants now struggle to control him. One is the earnest and chastened young man who is going on to graduate school in psychology, and who says: "I guess I'm just wishing that I'll be able to find some kind of peace and happiness before I die. And contentment of some sort."

Another is lust, a demon that still roars and rages and breaks its bonds. Thirty-seven days after his positive diagnosis, Jim lost his self-control and had another unsafe encounter with the man who he thinks may have given him the virus. And 37 days after that, he went to a park for sex, and a condom broke. "I haven't been able to get past this barrier of 37 days," he says, sheepishly.

The third combatant is the human immunodeficiency virus. Jim is obtaining treatment through a clinical trial. The enemy is brutally stupid and brutally cunning. HIV is, yes, easy to avoid. But viruses are ingenious exploiters of vulnerabilities. One sort of vulnerability is an open sore or a compromised immune system; another sort is neurosis, folly, or the intoxicant of lust.

At the margins of neurosis, folly, and lust, human self-destruction is restrained not by self-control but by the embrace of institutions: the stabilizing influence of family, the calming influence of church, the settling influence of a sexual culture in which marriage is legal and expected. To Jim, those institutions all seemed, or were, vanishingly remote. They failed him and he failed them. Because his story is not so very rare, the virus will survive and even thrive. So, I hope, will Jim.

At one point in a long telephone interview, Jim asked leave to wash his face. Later I asked: Were you crying? No, he replied. "I feel like I've already cried a lot." One scarcely knows whether to hold Jim or to hit him. In the end, one simply cries, and hopes.

Originally appeared September 4, 1999, in National Journal.

NOT LONG AFTER THE END of the Second World War, a young man named Shiu-kee gathered up a few things and set out to walk from a small village in the Guangdong province of southeastern China. The young man possessed almost nothing in the world, and he hoped to make a better life in Hong Kong. He was not the first young man in his family to make this journey. His elder brother had been vouchsafed the family's scant capital and was sent across the border, where he established himself in business. But the brother broke his promise to return his stake to the family so that others could follow. Shiu-kee thus set out with empty pockets, hoping for the best.

He was a married man with a baby son. Through a matchmaker, he had been paired with a village girl named Yuk-king, whose mother saw Shiu-kee as a hard-working, if poor, young man. The bride and groom met for the first time on their wedding day.

After a few years in Hong Kong, Shiu-kee managed to start a small business, a workshop that made heavy cotton blankets. His prospects looked promising, so he sent for his wife and son to join him in Hong Kong. Middle-class life seemed within their grasp. But then the workshop burned down. The family had no insurance and received no help from the elder brother, and, of course, they were too proud to beg. Thus it was that, in 1961, a baby named Kam-ho was born in a government resettlement building: a warehouse for the dispossessed in a country that does not believe in safety nets.

Kam-ho and his six brothers and sisters and his mother and father - nine of them - lived in one small room, the walls bare concrete, the floor also bare concrete. There was no kitchen or bathroom, no plumbing or central heating. Light was provided by an overhead bulb. They used toilets down the hall and fetched water in pails and cooked over a brazier outside on the mezzanine. They slept over and under one another, sometimes in shifts. In this place Kam-ho spent his early and middle childhood, until his parents, little by little, established themselves as small dealers in the jade business. Finally, they were able to move the family into a small but gloriously middle-class apartment.

Education being paramount in that part of the world, Kam-ho worked devotedly in school and went on to earn a diploma from Hong Kong Polytechnic. He got a job in the tour business and traveled a good deal, and in Tibet he met an American woman. They were both in their 20s and believed they were in love. They got married and lived in Hong Kong for a while, but she hankered for home. In 1990, she brought him to America.

Kam-ho's parents were not pleased that he had married a foreigner, and who would blame them? In the space of only a generation, the family had gone from the world of oxen and arranged marriages to the world of cell phones and multicultural love matches. Still, they were glad that their son had settled down, and they took some pride in his American success. In America, he became known by the English name given him by a teacher in grade school. Kam-ho became Michael.

He became a travel agent, and his wife did this and that, and they lived in a condominium in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. But the marriage did not go well. They tried to nurse it along, but the task was hopeless, and in 1993 they split, painfully.

Eventually it became clearer why their partnership had not worked out. Michael's ex-wife wound up, some years later, living in St. Louis with a girlfriend. As for Michael, he was given a book by a gay co-worker, who had noticed that Michael couldn't keep his eyes off the gardener. The book was a guide for people coming to terms with their sexuality. Michael began another journey.

In 1910, on the other side of the world from Guangdong, a 17-year-old girl named Sara and called Sadie set out from a small town in what was then Austria-Hungary (now it is in Poland) for the port in Hamburg, where she boarded the S.S. Pennsylvania, bound for New York. According to the ship's manifest, Sara carried $20 with her. She intended to join her sister in New York City and work, the manifest said, as a ``parlor maid.''

Her life, like Michael's parents' lives, would not be easy. The sister died in a fire, leaving Sara on her own, with not much by way of education or skill. She married an Austrian man and had four children, but he was a bigamist and had another family. His visits grew rare, and eventually he abandoned Sara altogether. She worked patchily until President Roosevelt's Aid to Dependent Children program was established in 1935 (the program later became Aid to Families with Dependent Children). After that, Sara got by on welfare and charity. The indigent single mother is not, after all, such a new creature in American life, nor is the ``deadbeat dad.'' Sara's third child, a boy nicknamed Sol, never knew his father.

The boy Sol grew up poor. He played stickball in the streets and went to school with his hair full of stinky kerosene to kill lice. But his grades got him into New York's City College, which was still, in those days, a notable institution. He married a vivacious girl and, with the help of the G.I. Bill (he had done an army stint in Korea), entered and graduated from Yale Law School.By the time Sol began practicing law, he had become Oscar, the name on his birth certificate. In his mid-30s, he and his wife lived in a sprawling house they had built on an acre in a fine Sun Belt suburb. Like Kam-ho, Sol had transformed himself in the space of a generation. Actually, in both cases, not even a generation: in the time, rather, that it takes a young man to set off on his own.

Oscar's three children grew up knowing nothing of stickball in the streets or kerosene in the hair. They knew only green playing fields and fragrant shampoo. They might have been removed from their grandmother Sara by two aeons instead of two generations; she remained crabby and Old World, with a heavy accent, till the end. They all attended Ivy League universities. One of them, in time, moved to Washington, D.C. There, in time, he met Kam-ho, who had become Michael.

Today, over a breakfast of orange juice and cereal, the two of them sit on Michael's back patio in the summer and listen to the cicadas sing. Michael's house is not a suburban McMansion, but it has a dishwater, disposal, central air, and two bathrooms (mirabile dictu - plumbing!). Michael owns it and makes a good living running a travel agency. Even so, he is not finished reinventing himself. He has been going to school at night, learning about computer networks. That, he figures, is where the future lies, and he is still young, and this is America.

His parents from Guangdong and Hong Kong, being traditional Chinese who are well advanced in years, believe him to be single and unattached. They ask, often and anxiously, when he will find someone and settle down. They do not know the truth, which is that he has found someone and settled down, because in their world to have a child living as he does is unthinkable, even incomprehensible. Oscar, for his part, knows all about his son. But he was born in America. His mother, Sara, probably would not have understood, and probably would never have been told.

If Michael had stayed in Hong Kong, he might today be unhappily married to a woman. He might be longing in his heart for--for something. Or perhaps he would be single and furtive. What he could not have been is simply himself, living, among his friends and neighbors, as he desires to live.

If Sara had stayed in Poland, she and her children would probably have been killed and her grandchildren never born. By leaving Europe in 1910, she fled, unknowingly, the gas and the fire that consumed the Jews, and she chose, unknowingly, to live. She chose life for her grandson Jon, who chose, and was chosen by, Michael.

America is not what America is because of its venturesome entrepreneurs or its efficient retail sector or its family values or its Judeo-Christian heritage or its rule of law or its constitutional government or its idealistic (sometimes) foreign policy or its melting-pot tradition. Such things are no doubt important. They are American things. But they are not what makes America a dream rather than just a place.

America is a dream because it is a country where you become someone new. In merely the time it takes you to grow up or to watch your children grow up, you can traverse a greater distance than the Hebrews and Egyptians and Greeks and Romans traversed over the course of a civilization's rise and decline. America is a place that remakes you, and that in so doing remakes itself. It is a place where two men, from worlds far away and far apart, sit together on the back patio in the summer, listening to the cicadas sing.

Delivered at the Log Cabin Republican national convention, New York City, August 28, 1999; televised on C-SPAN.

THE INVITATION HAS ME SPEAKING about an "independent vision," and my first reaction on receiving it was, "This guy's not a Republican but we're inviting him anyway." But in fact it's an extremely apt topic, and I'll take the next ten minutes explaining why I think it's so appropriate at the moment.

The bottom line is this: I'm 40 on my next birthday, which is longer than I ever thought I would live. But, in particular, I never thought I would live long enough to see the opportunity that now, at this moment, and in just the last very few years, is opening itself to gay and lesbian Americans.

The center in this country may soon belong to us. The old dynamic where we were the fringe and the centrist position was that we were strange, is very, very rapidly crumbling. And let me also add that the center is where the future is. In many ways the most profoundly interesting and deeply felt pro-gay, non-gay politician in the country is not a Republican and not a Democrat. It's Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota, whom I've had the pleasure of interviewing. This is a man who stood up in a campaign debate against two much better-funded candidates, a Republican and a Democrat, and when asked a question about gay rights said that he felt it was dreadful and ridiculous for the government to prevent, for example, a gay man from visiting his sick lover in the hospital; he said that the government should not be against love.

That's not the way Republicans and Democrats talk, but it is the way radical centrists talk. And the radical center, I think, is where we will go and where we will belong, and where the American public increasingly is. To get there, however, requires a kind of new vow of political independence, and thus the "independent vision."

We, I think, meaning gay people, are moving towards the center, but slowly -- and I think not quickly enough, given the extraordinary opportunity that now arises. And that happens mostly as a matter of a historical accident. I recently finished reading a marvelous book called Out for Good, by Adam Nagourney and Dudley Clendinen, a history of the gay movement since 1969 -- a book that's been mysteriously given the back of critics' hands. What comes out of this book very clearly, when you take 30 years of gay history in a single gulp, is the extent to which this movement was born of extremes -- on both the gay left and the right. As you know, the initial activists, the people who were willing to be openly gay, were predominantly of the left and far left. And also, you know, the only conservatives who were willing to talk about homosexuals, who weren't just too embarrassed to do it, was the radical right. So the initial gay groups had names like The Gay Liberation Front, and had their roots in '60s and '70s radicalism.

Now these people of course were important, courageous, bold, and were there when we needed them. But I think also that in 1999, thirty years later, the movement has basically paid its debt to the radical wing of the movement. And it's time to move on.

We are in fact moving on. But we have a hangover from our historical roots: dependence of two kinds. First, political. And second, intellectual.

The political dependence is that fact that from the beginning the gay movement has been linked at the belly button with the Democratic Party. And you all know all about that. And you probably also know the consequences, which I think have not been particularly good for gays and lesbians. It means that because gays are predominantly identified as Democrats, Republicans have typically had no use for us because they weren't getting our votes anyway; that moderates also had no use for us, because they were so turned off by some of the extreme rhetoric and by some of the extreme behavior that they saw from gay and lesbians. And perhaps worst of all, the Democrats used us as doormats, for the most part.

When looking at Bill Clinton's behavior as President, I'm often reminded of how masterly Ronald Reagan was in dealing with the Religious Right. He kept them happy by throwing them a few bones. He would give a speech, now and then, about the need for school prayer, knowing the Supreme Court would never allow it. And he'd give a speech, now and then, about abortion and how terrible it is, knowing again that the Supreme Court would never actually allow him to change the policy. And with a few words, he would keep the Religious Right happy, and they managed for eight years not to notice that he hadn't done a thing for them. [applause]

It was brilliant, and Bill Clinton, being Bill Clinton, noticed it and I think has done the same thing with gays, who also have not noticed that after eight years, not only has he basically not done a thing for us, but we now have two extremely anti-gay pieces of legislation on the books: the Defense of Marriage Act and the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. [applause]

I certainly think it's nice to be met with in the White House, and it's nice to have the odd appointment or two, the ambassadorship to Luxembourg. I'm all for that. But I don't think it's enough. The significance of what you people are doing, and what Rich Tafel is doing, is not, in fact, the overt significance. The overt story line is that you folks are opening up the Republican Party to embrace homosexuals. You're often derided for that work because the Republican Party again and again all but says, "Don't bother, we don't want you." So why would you want to join a club that doesn't want to have you as members?

The real significance of what you're doing, however, is creating the possibility of a homosexual swing vote. There is a large block of people in this country who are gay, who are not deeply committed to either party, who vote Republican, or who are Democrats who will vote for Republicans or who will vote for people like Jesse Ventura, radical centrists. When those people have an alternative to the Democratic Party, both parties will have to fight for us -- and that may be beginning to happen now. In effect, what the Log Cabin Republicans are doing is making the world safe for gay independence, and making it possible to be a genuine gay independent. And only when that happens, [applause] only when we are free to swing and the parties have to bid for us, does our power becomes real.

Meanwhile, by the way, notice what is happening to the Religious Right. They only have one place to go, which is the Republican Party, and because they are now not getting what they want, they are in the same position that we used to be in. They're talking about separatism. More power to them, say I. [applause]

Beyond the political swing vote, however, more important and more fundamental to liberating ourselves from dependence is creating an intellectual center. Now, of course, intellectual sounds awfully airy and abstract, and I don't just mean the Queer Studies people and people like that. I'm talking about a place where you can go, for example, if you are comfortable with basic bourgeois values, like marriage; if you're comfortable with religion; if you believe that basic liberal (small 'l') institutions -- markets and property -- are basically good things that we should keep; if you believe that prosperity is as important in the long-run as equality, and in fact that the two must go hand in hand; and if, finally, you are not a revolutionary, if you don't feel the need to radically reform American society at its roots, if in fact you feel pretty darn happy to be here, and you feel that it's basically the most decent society that the world has ever produced.

If you think all of those things, you need a place to go where all your ideas seem to make sense. And as you all know, the signals from the gay movement have been at best diffident to these ideas and sometimes outright hostile. If you believe that abortion is not particularly a gay issue, you may be puzzled by some of what you hear from the activists, and you will certainly by puzzled by what you hear from the Queer Studies community, and many of the Marxists and so on who run that establishment in the academic institutions.

But on the other hand, if you're a member of this intellectual swing vote, you're probably also in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s.You're of a generation that's used to being out. You have no intention of going back into the closet and pretending to be straight.And you have no intention of ever insisting on anything less than full equality. Full equality means serving in the military, it means being able to get married, it means not being arrested in your home, as two men were in Texas this year, for making love. You simply won't stand for that; it's not on the table.

You need a place to go if you have these ideas, and I think that, too, is beginning to happen -- and really quite recently, in the '90s. To me a landmark was the publication of Bruce Bawer's book A Place at the Table in 1993. Andrew Sullivan's book Virtually Normal has been extremely important. And we're seeing these ideas now come out in various places. I think of Elizabeth Birch as fundamentally an ally in the center, which is where I think we need to be.

The center at the moment, as we've seen from the behavior from the congressional Republicans in impeachment, has become the great terra incognita of American politics and of American thinking. It's an amazing phenomenon to me.Politicians, and the parties, seem to be unable to find the center even if they trip on it. It's just an extraordinary thing; there's an enormous vacuum that's been created. To get there, I think, an important thing we can do, and are beginning to do, is to develop an intellectual critical mass that says to ourselves and to the public: to be a homosexual does not mean that you have to throw away the standard compact with American society. You can be pro-family, you can be pro-church, you can be pro-responsibility. You can also be pro-equality.

I'll end by telling you briefly about an effort that some of us are making to carve out a this intellectual radical center, this independent place, and begin to create a beachhead. We're calling it the Independent Gay Forum, a name that's modeled on the Independent Women's Forum, though I think the group is quite different. And it's small, we don't have much money. We're just a group of basically writers and thinkers, informally associated, who looked around about a year ago, and said, Hey wait a minute, there's now a critical mass of people out there, of writers -- Bawer, Sullivan, David Boaz, Walter Olson, me, Stephen Miller, Paul Varnell, you could go on -- who don't feel at home with the radical left, who don't feel at home with the radical right, who are writing things and saying things.

So we've created a Web site where we are pulling these ideas together and posting new material every week. There's quite a bit of it out there. You can find the Web site at the address www.indegayforum.org. And what you'll find there are articles where we attempt -- there's no orthodoxy, no single point of view -- to explore the ideas in this radical center.

For instance, why carrying concealed weapons can be a very good thing for homosexuals, as a self-defense strategy. Entirely apart from how you feel about gun control, in 31 states, you can get a license and carry a gun. Now only the most law-abiding people in the country do this, because you have to pay a $100 fee, in many states you have to take a gun safety course, you have to not have a criminal record, you can't have any mental problems, and so on. I know three gay people who will personally say that either their lives were saved or that they avoided very long hospital stays because at that critical moment, when the bashers were coming at them, somebody had a gun.

You can find writing about partner benefits, and why, yes, partner benefits may make sense for homosexuals; but that we as homosexuals ought to oppose partner benefits for heterosexuals, because those benefits really are a substitute for marriage and really do undermine the family. And indeed, when gay marriage is legalized, we ought to be against partner benefits for homosexuals as well.

You'll find criticism of the right wing. You'll find, for example, David Boaz's landmark New York Times piece pointing out, as no one had ever done, that the pro-family right has virtually nothing to say about divorce. He counted their publications and discovered that they have reams of stuff on the homosexual threat to the family, but they never want to talk about divorce. Which do you think is the greater threat to American families?

You'll find attacks on the quota mentality among many of the leading gay groups, for example, who want to say that 50 percent of the board for the Washington march, I'm told, has to be of certain colors, certain genders and so on -- and why that's bad for us. A lively debate on hate-crimes laws. Et cetera.

All this, I think, is beginning to come together in an intellectual safe place for independent thinking. And I suppose the message I want to leave you with is that what I fully expect to happen in the next ten years is a convergence of independent thinking and a convergence of independent political activity that means, finally, we will be the swing vote, and we will be the people you have to capture in the center. And that, I think, is the key to our future.

First appeared March 20, 1999, in the National Journal; slightly revised.

MY FRIEND TOM is running, possibly for his life. It is a sweet summer evening in San Jose, and he and a colleague have just left work and are walking through a dicey neighborhood when they catch the eye of some young men, as many as 20 of them, sitting around an old car in a driveway. "Hey, you fucking faggots!'' one of the young men shouts. Tom and his colleague walk past, quickly, but their persecutors rise like a flock of gulls and follow, shouting taunts and threats: "When we're done with you, they'll find your fucking bodies!'' The two pick up the pace and the men come after them. ``Run,'' says Tom, but the gang breaks into pursuit while Tom, trying to hold the pace, gropes in his backpack. The two reach a streetlight and there, where everybody can see, Tom suddenly stops, turns, and levels a semiautomatic handgun.

Oh.

At that point, the young men chasing my friend lost their enthusiasm for blood sport. Tom and his colleague left the neighborhood as fast as they could. And if there had been no gun? "There's no question in my mind,'' says Tom, "that my friend and I would have been at least very seriously beaten, and maybe killed.'' I asked how the gang reacted to the gun. Tom says their leader demanded officiously: "Have you got a permit for that?''

Tom didn't have a permit, which is bad -- but then he probably couldn't have gotten one if he had tried, which is also bad. California is among the states where, if you want permission to carry a concealed weapon, you have to prove that you are of ``good moral character'' and that you have some special reason to carry. Tom could have shown that he was of good character, but he had no special reason. Until, of course, the reason arose one summer night.

As recently as a dozen years ago, almost every state was like California. Today, by contrast, almost half of all Americans live in the 31 states with so-called ``shall issue'' laws, which require the authorities to approve a permit for (typically) anyone over 21 who is mentally sound, has no criminal record, pays a fee, and takes a gun-safety course. Florida began the stampede in 1987. Before then, about 17,000 people in the state had concealed-weapon permits; today, about 250,000 do. The Daytona Beach News-Journal notes that a number of local judges have permits. ``I became convinced that some of these people might become dangerous,'' one judge told the paper. ``So I took a firearms course, got the permit, and kept a weapon handy in the courthouse.''

Any time now, a national majority will live in ``shall issue'' states. Colorado, Missouri (with a referendum in April), Nebraska, and Ohio (with a new Republican governor) are all candidates to switch to ``shall issue'' this year, with the noisy support of the National Rifle Association. Grover G. Norquist, a conservative activist who expects to join the NRA board later this year, busies himself lobbying for concealed-carry when he is not busy lobbying for lower taxes--both issues, he says, being sides of the same conservative coin. "The more people who view themselves as independent of the state,'' he says, "the more people who are available to the center-right coalition.''

In effect, and to the horror of many liberals and gun- control groups, America is now running an uncontrolled national experiment in self-policing. There are something like 70 million handguns in the country, and the odds have increased dramatically that today you passed one of them in the street.

So what do we know about the results of the experiment? First, that about 1 percent to 5 percent of a state's population typically take out concealed-gun permits. Second, we know what does not happen: America does not turn into the Dodge City of myth, with fender-benders becoming hailstorms of lead. (Actually, Dodge City, Kan., wasn't the Dodge City of myth. It was much safer than today's Washington, D.C., with homicides running to one or two per cattle-trading season and marshals mostly concerned, writes the historian Roger Lane, ``with arresting drunks and other misdemeanants.'') People who are willing to register with the sheriff, pay a fee, and take a gun-safety course turn out to be unusually law-abiding, safer even than off-duty cops. In Florida, only 0.13 percent of concealed-carry licenses were revoked from 1987-97 for criminal activity of any sort. No murders seem to have been committed by people carrying licensed guns in public. The ``shall issue'' law may actually deter bad behavior, since if you get into any sort of trouble you can lose your license.

What is harder to say is what we all want to know. Do concealed weapons, lawfully carried, reduce crime, or increase it?

The most comprehensive study of the subject is also the most controversial. John R. Lott Jr., an economist at the University of Chicago Law School, assembled data for all 3,054 U.S. counties over 18 years (1977 through 1994) and controlled for all sorts of variables. ``This study uses the most comprehensive set of control variables yet used in a study of crime, let alone any previous study on gun control,'' he writes in his book More Guns, Less Crime, published last year by the University of Chicago Press.

The title gives away the punchline. ``When state concealed-handgun laws went into effect in a county, murders fell by about 8 percent, rapes fell by 5 percent, and aggravated assaults fell by 7 percent.'' (Note: This is after controlling for other variables.) ``On the other hand, property-crime rates increased after nondiscretionary laws were implemented. . . . Criminals respond to the threat of being shot while committing such crimes as robbery by choosing to commit less risky crimes that involve minimal contact with the victim.''

Moreover, and maybe more surprising, Lott also finds that women and blacks -- who are, for different reasons, disproportionately vulnerable to violence -- benefit disproportionately from ``shall issue'' laws. Thus, for example, each new concealed-gun permit issued to a woman increases women's overall safety three to four times as much as a new permit to a man increases men's safety.

In 1997, two economists, Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt, found that people who install LoJack radio-tracing systems in their cars pay about $600 each for devices that, by deterring auto theft, save society more than 10 times that amount. The trick is that LoJack is hidden; the thief doesn't know which car has it (steering-wheel clubs, by contrast, just displace theft to unprotected cars). If Lott is right, concealed guns have the same sort of effect. In Oregon, he finds, each new concealed-carry permit saves the state $3,500; in Pennsylvania, $5,000. So law- abiding people who pack heat are doing the rest of us a favor.

If Lott is right. Predictably, other scholars have found all sorts of things wrong with his work. ``Lott's research is so fundamentally flawed in a number of different ways that his research really can't tell us anything about what the effects of these laws are,'' says Jon Vernick, of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. Also predictably, and somewhat annoyingly, the results of concealed-gun studies tend to coincide with the authors' predisposition toward gun control generally. Gun nuts love ``shall issue.'' Gun-control nuts hate it.

This is annoying because it is so obtuse. The question of whether guns should be available readily is completely distinct, logically and empirically, from the question of who should be carrying guns around. As it happens, I've lived in two countries with strict gun laws, Japan and Great Britain, and if I could press a button and make America's guns vanish, I would do so in a blink (and I'd repeal the Second Amendment while I was at it). It turns out that a country with few guns is a better place to live than a country with, say, a fifth of a billion guns.

But the fact is that America is awash with guns, and this fact is not going to change in my lifetime, and criminals carry guns already. A rational country would make guns harder for criminals to get (that's gun control) but easier for lawful citizens to carry (that's "shall issue''). By contrast, the current policy in states such as California--easy to get, hard to carry--is perversity incarnate.

In 1999, the debate is not about whether ``shall issue'' causes much harm -- by now we would have heard of any mayhem -- but whether it does much good. So why in the world are liberals clinging to opposition to concealed-carry? No doubt because the gun debate has been infected by the culture wars, and people have taken up sides, and liberals feel obliged to revile any proposal supported by the likes of the NRA and Grover Norquist. This is a pity, as thinking with one's knees usually is. Liberals should be on Tom's side.

Originally appeared November 21, 1998, in National Journal.

AT A MOMENT when Washington's eyes are fixed on Kenneth Starr and Saddam Hussein, I make bold to ask you to divert your attention, for just a few moments, to two other men, named John Geddes Lawrence and Tyrone Garner. In the occasionally great state of Texas, in the sometimes peculiar United States of America, the two of them are scheduled to be arraigned before a judge on Nov. 20 -- the day this column is published -- for the crime of having sex in the privacy of Lawrence's home.

At about 11 p.m. on the night of Sept. 17, Harris County sheriff's deputies entered Lawrence's unlocked apartment in the suburbs of Houston. They had received a tip, which was false, that an armed intruder had broken in. They found not a robber but Lawrence and Garner having sex. Under Texas' law, homosexual (but not heterosexual) oral or anal intercourse is a class C misdemeanor carrying a fine of up to $500. So the police arrested the two men. One of them, according to their attorney, Suzanne B. Goldberg of the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, was trundled out of the apartment in his underwear. Before bail was arranged, they spent that night and the next day and some of the next night in jail.

Well, the law is the law, right? "If we just say, �Let this thing go away,'" Harris County District Attorney John B. Holmes Jr. told the Houston Chronicle, "then we're not really complying with the law and I'm not comfortable with that." Next up, the trial, the probable conviction, and a court battle that gay activists hope may end in the overturning, at long last, of Texas' 119-year-old sodomy law. "I've always said that the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it," Holmes said insouciantly. Nice that he could be so cheerful. "The defendants, like anybody who's arrested by the police, have had their lives turned upside down," says Goldberg.

Today, 19 states have sodomy laws, five of which specifically apply only to homosexuals and all of which are effectively enforced only against homosexuals. "One of the arguments used for anti-sodomy laws is that they are never used," Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said in an interview. "This Texas situation totally rebuts that."

I know, you have enough on your mind right now without worrying about the odd priorities of law enforcement in Texas. Still, let me suggest a few groups of people who ought to care about ridding the country of sodomy laws.

One group, of course, is homosexuals. My partner and I, for example, don't much enjoy being class 6 felons in the state of Virginia, where he lives. Civil libertarians should care, and do. I want to suggest, though, that several other groups of people?conservative moralists, respecters of law, and you? should also care.

Conservative moralists now find themselves in a pickle. On the one hand, the elections this month gave them a poke in the eye. Christian Right governors lost in two conservative Southern states; Matt Fong, the Republicans' failed Senate challenger in California, got in trouble when it became known that he had given $50,000 to the Rev. Louis Sheldon's anti-gay Traditional Values Coalition. The Republicans who did best were centrists who eschewed judgmental rhetoric, notably the Brothers Bush.

One response would be for Republicans to give up moralizing. They can't, though, because their most loyal voters are moralizers; and, much more important, they shouldn't, because the country needs to hear what the moralists have to say. In the long run, the politics of vacuous nonjudgmentalism ducks issues that voters need to decide: who is accountable for crime and social rot, what to do about teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock childbirth, and so on. Wherever personal lifestyles have public implications, morals talk is essential.

But the moralists have a problem, and it is one that Barry Goldwater would recognize: Every time they open their mouths, they scare people. They sound intolerant, censorious, crabby. Somehow, they need to convince the voters that they know the difference between promoting morality and legislating it. Coming out for the repeal of sodomy laws furnishes them with just such an opportunity.

Lately, religious conservatives, having painfully learned that anti-gay rhetoric has become a wedge issue against Republicans more than against Democrats, are trying to turn the tables by insisting that it is they who are oppressed and who favor real toleration. "We just want to be left alone to raise our families our way," they say, "with equal rights for everybody but no special rights for anybody." So why are the voters unconvinced?

On ABC's Nightline in July, Janet Folger of the Center for Reclaiming America, a Christian conservative group, said, "No one wants to take away from the rights that every citizen enjoys, the equal rights that are enjoyed even by those in the homosexual community. ...But what the problem is... (is) in special rights." In that case, should homosexuals "enjoy" the "equal right" to make love in private? Well, it turns out, some equal rights are more equal than others. Pressed on whether she supported criminal sodomy laws, Folger danced all around the room before finally owning up: "I guess if you're looking at sodomy laws, there are sodomy laws on the books that I very much support."

Those sodomy laws are America's last true Jim Crow laws. To criminalize the expression of intimacy between consenting adults, in the privacy of their homes, is malice dressed up as morality. Now imagine that the Christian moralists stepped forward and called for the repeal of sodomy laws, proclaiming, "We think homosexuality is sinful, but it's a matter for the pulpit, not the police." By showing that they do, after all, take seriously the distinction between moralizing and criminalizing, conservatives could earn some of the credit they need to gain the public's trust on moral issues.

People who value respect for law should also care. In Paula Corbin Jones' sexual-harassment suit against President Clinton, the law demanded to know the name of every woman other than his wife with whom Clinton had "had," "proposed having," or "sought to have" sexual relations during the whole span of his career, beginning when he was attorney general of Arkansas. When the law behaves like that, the public decides that maybe lawbreaking isn't so bad. And when the law busts adults for expressing intimacy in private, it begs to be despised.

A third group should care: people who want America to be a better and more just place. Many such people pooh-pooh sodomy laws on the grounds that they are rarely enforced. But they are enforced, often indirectly. In July, the North Carolina courts revoked Fred Smith's custody of his two children partly because his relationship with his partner involved illegal acts. The laws are enforced directly, too, and not just in Houston.

One warm spring day in 1995, in Topeka, Kan., Max Movsovitz parked his car in Gage Park and busied himself with some paperwork. He knew he had parked in a spot where gay men meet one another, and he was open to such a meeting, but he also knew that the police conducted stings there and he had no intention of either soliciting sex or engaging in it in the park. After a while, a man drove up and started a friendly conversation, soon steering the discussion to sex. He said he was looking for friends and asked what Movsovitz was into. Movsovitz acknowledged that he liked oral sex. Oh, said the man, would you do that to me? Movsovitz agreed. The undercover officer arrested him on the spot.

Unbeknownst to Movsovitz, in Topeka it is illegal to agree, while in any "public place," to have same-sex relations, even if the sex is to be conducted at home. If a woman meets a man in the park, lets him chat her up, and accepts his invitation to go home for a little you-know-what, that is perfectly legal. Movsovitz, on the other hand, was convicted and, this past summer, lost on appeal. He was fined $ 199 and was ordered to stay out of Gage Park for two years. The local newspaper reported his arrest for "trying to solicit homosexual sex acts from plainclothes police officers in Gage Park." He told me: "I was stunned. I always say it was like getting punched in the stomach. I was like physically -- I couldn't eat. It was just so humiliating and infuriating. Nothing like this happens in my family."

This year is the centennial of Oscar Wilde's release from prison, where he served more than two years for sodomy. After 100 years, Lawrence's and Garner's 24 hours or so in jail no doubt represents some sort of progress over Wilde's two years in jail. But in Topeka's Gage Park, the stings are still going on. In Houston, a sodomy trial begins.

Originally published in The Wall Street Journal June 2, 1998.

IN 1996, NYNEX, now part of Bell Atlantic, began offering health benefits for partners of employees in long-term, committed homosexual relationships. "We wanted to be fair to our employees," says a company spokesman. "If same-sex domestic partners could get married, then there would be no need for this policy."

Paul M. Foray, a cable splicer with 28 years on the job, applied for the benefits last year but was turned down. The reason: His partner was a woman. On May 18 he sued Bell Atlantic in federal court, charging the company's policy violates U.S. laws against sex discrimination.

"Given the fact that his domestic partner is female," the complaint says, "Foray was denied benefits because he is a male." If the courts agree with himand his argument is plausibleit will become legally risky for companies to offer partner benefits to gay employees without also offering benefits to heterosexuals who are, to use a quaintly judgmental phrase, "shacking up."

Mr. Foray's suit is the first of its kind against a private employer, but state and local governments are under the gun already. In 1996 Oakland, Calif., set up a gay-only partnership program for city workers, but the state labor commissioner ruled last year that excluding heterosexual couples constituted illegal discrimination. In April, after a long battle, Oakland gave up and opened its program to unmarried heterosexuals. In February, the city attorney of Santa Barbara, Calif., likewise opined that gay-only benefits were illegal, and the city extended its program to include heterosexuals.

Why doesn't Mr. Foray marry his partner? Through his lawyer, he says, quite reasonably, that that's his own business. Unmarried cohabitation suits many peoplemore and more of them, in fact. Since 1985, the number of unmarried opposite-sex couples living together in the U. S. has doubled, while the number of married couples has risen by only 7 percent. The proportion of unwed cohabiting couples who have children under 15 (now about one third) has grown even faster.

For some people, cohabitation works; but it is not the same as marriage. Research suggests that cohabiting women are more than twice as likely as married women to be victims of domestic violence, and more than three times as likely to suffer depression; cohabiting partners tend to be less sexually faithful and less likely to invest together. "Partnership" is less durable than marriage, which shouldn't be surprising. Marriage, after all, is much more than a legal certification of a pre-existing relationship; it uses a thousand subtle social mechanisms - like rings, weddings and joint invitations - to help bind couples together.

Mr. Foray's discrimination complaint suggests that he understands this. His filing says that Bell Atlantic's policy is "imposing burdens on the employee such as the need for health tests, the need for a marriage ceremony, and the need for a divorce proceeding to terminate the relationship." What a bother. Hawaii's domestic-partner law, which applies to straight and gay couples, allows the "reciprocal beneficiary" relationship to be terminated by either partner without the other's consent or even knowledge.

The trouble is that there are a lot more heterosexuals than homosexuals. In companies where partner benefits are offered to all, two thirds of the users are typically heterosexual, according to the Spectrum Institute, a group that advocates "inclusive definitions of family." So, with or without Mr. Foray's lawsuit, the attempt to reserve "partnerships" for same-sex unions is likely to prove unsustainable. Gay activists who want partner benefits are more than happy to ally themselves with heterosexual supporters of such benefits; the "pro-family" lobby dislikes unmarried partner benefits of any sort. There is no one to lobby for the most sensible policy: restricting partner benefits to people who can't legally marry.

Thus, all three of the states and all but a handful of the municipalities that offer domestic-partner programs for their workers include opposite-sex couples; so do the large majority of corporate programs. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's new proposal to give domestic partners in New York City most of the civil benefits of marriagefrom jail visitation to joint burial in the city cemeterymakes no distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals.

The sad irony is that the option that clears up the whole mess most humanely gay marriage is also the option that social conservatives are least willing to consider. Society should send a simple message: If you want the benefits of marriage, get married. To legalize same-sex marriage and eliminate domestic partner programs would reinforce that message instead of undermining it. Instead of marriage-lite and regular marriage, there would once again be only marriage.

I don't expect that social conservatives will wake up tomorrow morning and embrace gay marriage. They will instead fight rear-guard actions against partner benefits to little avail. Marriage will be weaker as a result. Being against gay marriage and being pro-marriage are not, as it turns out, the same thing.

Originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal November 29, 1994.

IF YOU LISTEN CAREFULLY, you can hear the sound of a taboo cracking. In September, William Bennett told the Christian Coalition: "In terms of damage to the children of America, you cannot compare what the homosexual movement has done to what divorce has done. It is not even close." Last month, when Rep. Steve Gunderson (R., Wis.) publicly came out of the closet, Rep. Newt Gingrich pronounced the matter of no political importance. Then this month, The Washington Blade quoted Mr. Gingrich as saying that the GOP's stance on homosexuality "should be toleration."

Maybe Republicans are ready, at last, to decouple the debate about family from the obsession with homosexuality. They now have the chance to build pro-family policies that embrace all responsible Americans, homosexual and heterosexual alike. In pleading for those policies I address myself to Republicans not because I am one (I'm not) but because Republicans are uniquely positioned to build a stable, principled and humane position between the politics of intolerance and the politics of radicalism. And if they let the moment slip by, the cost to society may be steep - as we have seen once before.

During the debate on race in the 1960s, Republicans stood on the sidelines and on occasion pandered to racist whites. "We Republicans had a great history, and we turned it aside," Jack Kemp wrote in 1993.

Republicans could have constructed stable, principled ground between the politics of white backlash and of affirmative action. They could have severed the cause of color-blindness from the taint of white bigotry. Instead, racial policies tumbled into the morass of color tests, race-norming and ethnic entitlements - policies that exacerbate and institutionalize racial tensions. All Americans, black and white, suffer as a result.

Now another historic window opens. This time the issue is homosexuality and the family. At a stroke, the pro-family movement could enlarge its tent, disarm the charge that "family values" means intolerance and, most important, bolster the family itself.

To recognize this opportunity, pro-family advocates must first acknowledge reality. To wit: Homosexuals exist and are not going away. Any policy insisting that homosexuals lead lives of loveless celibacy or furtive secrecy is futile and inhumane, to say nothing of unrealistic. Because fewer and fewer homosexuals are willing to hide, the old deal - homosexuals pretending to be heterosexual and heterosexuals pretending to believe them - is off.

"That may be," say anti-gay activists, "but homosexuality is a threat to the family." But this is a canard. Divorce, illegitimacy and infidelity are the enemies of the family. Homosexuality is a peculiar and rare human trait that affects only a small percentage of the population and is of little inherent interest to the rest. To see it as a threat to the family, you need to believe that millions of heterosexual Americans will turn gay if not actively restrained - an absurd notion. And it is perfectly possible to venerate the traditional family without despising those who are, for whatever reason, unable to have one.

Yet two claims made by anti-gay activists are true. Many activists on the gay (and nongay) left are hostile to traditional institutions in general and the family in particular. And the American family is in trouble. Half of all new marriages end in divorce; 30% of children are born out of wedlock and a fourth live in fatherless homes. Sexual license has had dire consequences - illegitimacy, child abandonment, child poverty and more.

Those facts underpin all of the country's most serious problems. But they have nothing to do with homosexuality. Whatever one may think of gay people's sexual practices, they do not produce illegitimate children or account for more than a tiny fraction of divorces. Conversely, condemning homosexuality does no good for the beleaguered family. Indeed, anti-gay rhetoric is today an obstacle to dealing squarely with the crisis of the family, on both sides of the debate.

On the one side, blaming homosexuals for the decline of the family leads the family's friends to avoid the real issues. It fools them into believing they are talking about saving the family when in fact they are merely talking about hammering homosexuals. David Boaz of the Cato Institute recently counted reports and articles by "pro-family" groups and discovered that they devoted obsessive attention to homosexuality while virtually ignoring divorce. This is pro-family?

In the other side, blaming homosexuals for the decline of the family also allows the enemies of the family to avoid the real issues. Instead of confronting the real problems, they can point to the ugly rhetoric of anti-gay activists and say: "See what `family values' really means? It means beating up on people who are different and snooping in our bedrooms." (In just that same way, advocates of ethnic entitlements have been able to point to racists and say, "See what `colorblind' really means?")

In recent years an alternative has emerged, a principled, pro-family but not anti-gay position:

"No," family advocates might say, "we are not anti-gay. We are pro-responsibility. We welcome open homosexuals who play by the rules of monogamy, fidelity and responsibility. And we frown upon heterosexuals and homosexuals who do not play by those rules.

"We believe that marriage and fidelity are crucial social institutions that channel lust into love and caprice into commitment. We believe faithful relationships are not only good for children but help keep men settled and help keep the burdens of caring for one another off society's shoulders. And we support extending these norms to all Americans, gay and straight.

"We do not insist that homosexuals `change,' which is impossible, or that they live lives of lovelessness and despair; we do ask that they - and heterosexual Americans - settle down into patterns of responsibility. We believe in the genuine universality of family values. We embrace all who embrace those values, without regard to sexual orientation."

Here is a fully consistent and staunchly pro-family position, one whose benefits are manifold. It elevates family values to genuine universality. It separates the real issue (responsibility vs. license) from the phony one (straight vs. gay). It hurts radical activists by putting them in the position of arguing for license rather than for toleration of minorities.

This paradigm opposes partner benefits for unmarried heterosexuals, who should get married if they want the benefits of marriage. But it may accept partner benefits for homosexuals, who can't get married but should be encouraged to settle down. It holds that the two-parent family is special and should be favored by public policy - not at the expense of homosexuals per se, but at the expense of single people (including homosexuals) and childless couples (again including homosexuals).

This view doesn't require family advocates to like homosexuality, but it does require them to accept the importance of settled relationships for homosexuals. No easy sell, perhaps, but consider the alternative. More non-fringe, non-radical homosexuals emerge into public view every day. As the stereotype of the homosexual as antisocial deviant crumbles, a party or faction that tolerates gay-baiting rhetoric in the name of "family values" makes "family values" look more and more like common bigotry.

That would be tragic, since there is no problem more urgent than shoring up the family. But as long as family advocates imply that it is better to be an adulterous or licentious heterosexual than a faithful and monogamous homosexual, the chance to rescue the pro-family position from the taint of intolerance goes unclaimed.

Originally appeared March 31, 1994, in the Windy City Times.

ON FEBRUARY 24, the Wall Street Journal ran a curious ramble on homosexuality ("Morality and Homosexuality"). The twenty-one theologians and scholars* who wrote it purported to "articulate some of the reasons for the largely intuitive and pre-articulate anxiety of most Americans regarding homosexuality." They then presented an article that demonstrated no reasons at all. It was, in fact, one of the better demonstrations to date of the poverty of the emerging "thoughtful" anti-gay position.

The authors take the view that homosexuality is sinful, unnatural, "contrary to God�s purpose." This is, of course, a flat moral claim, which one simply takes or leaves. But taking it leads them to a cruel and untenable position. Gay people should be expected to exercise "discipline of restraint" by not engaging in "homogenital behavior." In other words, homosexuals should be celibate or should fool heterosexuals into marrying them.

This is an astonishing demand. Homosexuality is not about what you do in bed, it is about whom you fall in love with. The authors assert that issues of human sexuality should not be viewed as mere "matters of recreation or taste," and of course they are right. I know of no homosexual who regards his love as a "matter of recreation or taste," any more than heterosexuals do. Human beings need food, they need shelter, they need love; love is a constitutive human need. That is why homosexuals view the social repression of their love not as the discouragement of a whimsical vice but as an act of scalding inhumanity.

To prescribe such repression without impeccable reasons is at best obtuse, at worst savage. "Morality and Homosexuality" tries to find reasons. It conspicuously fails.

The article deplores homosexuality as a form of license, bracketing it with "permissive abortion, widespread adultery, easy divorce." This is not, of course, an argument against homosexuality; it is an argument against license. Between homosexuals, legal marriage is forbidden and open commitment is stigmatized. No wonder, then, that license flourishes among gay people. If the authors of "Morality and Homosexuality" want to ask gay people to live responsibly in committed, stable relationships, then that is reasonable. But they oppose all gay relationships as immoral, and they loathe gay marriage. It is not wantonness which offends them; it is homosexuality.

They affirm the importance of marriage and family. So do I; so do most gay people, some radical activists notwithstanding. But again, the defense of family implies no coherent argument of any kind about homosexuality. How, precisely, is homosexuality a threat to "husband, wife and children, joined by public recognition and legal bond"? If some small percentage of the population forms same-sex relationships, how is that the downfall of the family? Divorce, illegitimacy and adultery are enemies of family. Homosexuality is not. It is a rare human trait of no great importance except to those who possess it.

Then come vague and muttered intimations that "civilization itself depends on the making" of "certain distinctions." One assumes that these intimations are vague and muttered because the presumed argument ? that acceptance of a few homosexuals will ruin civilization ? is implausible on its face. Now, it is possible that acceptance of homosexuality, like any other social change, may have some ill effects on society. So did the adoption of the automobile. But if the authors believe that the social damage done in accepting homosexuals will be so great as to outweigh any benefits to gay people and to society, it behooves them to show why. They do not.

Unable to point to any plausible mechanism by which homosexuals will destroy society or the family, the authors mumble about "seduction and solicitation" of the young, "predatory behavior," and so on. If the insinuation is that homosexuals are likelier than heterosexuals to molest or seduce children, that charge is a libel which, even if true, would argue only for the current policy of punishing sex offenders. If the insinuation is that some more people may turn out to be gay in a society where homosexuality is accepted, that claim is both speculative and inconsequential. We do not torment left-handed people even if doing so would make a few more of them right-handed. We let people be as they are, provided they do no harm.

"Morality and Homosexuality" shows no harm. It merely assumes harm. By gliding unctuously from praise of cherished norms ? family, civilization, self-control ? to vague insinuations against an enemy group, it recalls a standard technique of anti-Semites, who praise patriotism, community and national security, and then proceed as if it were obvious that Jews threaten those things.

It is good that the writers of "Morality and Homosexuality" feel the need to find reasons for their dislike of homosexuality. From the point of view of sensible gay people, the substitution of anti-gay arguments for anti-gay sneers is one hopeful sign. Another is the sight of twenty-one theologians and scholars reaching for reasons to dislike homosexuality but grasping only straws.

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* The signers of the original Wall Street Journal piece, styled as the "Ramsey Colloquium," include: Hadley Arkes, Amherst College; Matthew Berke, First Things; Gerard Bradley, Notre Dame Law School; Rabbi David Danin, University of Hartford; Ernest Fortin, Boston College; Jorge Garcia, Rutgers University; Rabbi Marc Gillman, Hebrew Union College; Robert George, Princeton University; The Rev. Hugh Haffenreffer, Emanuel Lutheran Church, Hartford, Connecticut; John Hittinger, College of Saint Francis; Russell Hittinger, Catholic University of America; Robert Jenson, St. Olaf College; Gilbert Meilaender, Oberlin College; Jerry Muller, Catholic University of America; Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Institute on Religion and Public Life; Rabbi David Novak, University of Virginia; James Nuechterlein, First Things; Max Stackhouse, Princeton Theological Seminary; Phillip Turner, Berkeley Divinity School (Yale University); George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Robert Wilken, University of Virginia. The group was organized by Neuhaus's Institute on Religion and Public Life.

Originally appeared May 10, 1993, in The New Republic.

AT 10:30 ON A WEEKNIGHT in the spring of 1991, Glenn Cashmore was walking to his car on San Diego's University Avenue. He had just left the Soho coffee house in Hillcrest, a heavily gay neighborhood. He turned down Fourth Street and paused to look at the display in an optician's window. Someone shouted, "Hey, faggot!" He felt pain in his shoulder and turned in time to see a white Nissan speeding away. Someone had shot him, luckily only with a pellet gun. The pellet tore through the shirt and penetrated the skin. He went home and treated the wound with peroxide.

Later that year, on the night of December 13, a 17-year-old named John Wear and two other boys were headed to the Soho on University Avenue when a pair of young men set upon them, calling them "faggots." One boy escaped, another's face was gashed and Wear (who, his family said, was not gay) was stabbed. Cashmore went to the hospital to see him but, on arriving, was met with the news that Wear was dead.

This is life--not all of life, but an aspect of life--for gay people in today's America. Homosexuals are objects of scorn for teenagers and of sympathy or moral fear or hatred for adults. They grow up in confusion and bewilderment as children, then often pass into denial as young adults and sometimes remain frightened even into old age. They are persecuted by the military, are denied the sanctuary of publicly recognized marriage, occasionally are prosecuted outright for making love. If closeted, they live with fear of revelation; if open, they must daily negotiate a hundred delicate tactical issues. (Should I bring it up? Tell my boss? My co-workers? Wear a wedding band? Display my lover's picture?)

There is also AIDS and the stigma attached to it, though AIDS is not uniquely a problem of gay people. And there is the violence. One of my high school friends--an honors student at Brophy Prep, a prestigious Catholic high school in Phoenix--used to boast about his late-night exploits with a baseball bat at the "fag Denny's." I'm sure he was lying, but imagine the horror of being spoken to, and about, in that way.

If you ask gay people in America today whether homosexuals are oppressed, I think most would say yes. If you ask why, they would point to the sorts of facts that I just mentioned. The facts are not blinkable. Yet the oppression diagnosis is, for the most part, wrong.

Not wrong in the sense that life for American homosexuals is hunky-dory. It is not. But life is not terrible for most gay people, either, and it is becoming less terrible every year. The experience of gayness and the social status of homosexuals have changed rapidly in the last twenty years, largely owing to the courage of thousands who decided that they had had enough abuse and who demanded better. With change has come the time for a reassessment.

The standard political model sees homosexuals as an oppressed minority who must fight for their liberation through political action. But that model's usefulness is drawing to a close. It is ceasing to serve the interests of ordinary gay people, who ought to begin disengaging from it, even drop it. Otherwise, they will misread their position and lose their way, as too many minority groups have done already.

"Oppression" has become every minority's word for practically everything, a one-size-fits-all political designation used by anyone who feels unequal, aggrieved or even uncomfortable. I propose a start toward restoring meaning to the notion of oppression by insisting on objective evidence. A sense of grievance or discomfort, however real, is not enough. By now, human beings know a thing or two about oppression. Though it may, indeed, take many forms and work in different ways, there are objective signs you can look for. My own list would emphasize five main items. First, direct legal or governmental discrimination. Second, denial of political franchise--specifically, denial of the right to vote, organize, speak or lobby. Third--and here we move beyond the strictly political--the systematic denial of education. Fourth, impoverishment relative to the non-oppressed population. And, fifth, a pattern of human rights violations, without recourse.

Any one or two of those five signposts may appear for reasons other than oppression. There are a lot of reasons why a people may be poor, for instance. But where you see a minority that is legally barred from businesses and neighborhoods and jobs, that cannot vote, that is poor and poorly educated and that lives in physical fear, you are looking at, for instance, the blacks of South Africa, or blacks of the American South until the 1960s; the Jews and homosexuals of Nazi Germany and Vichy France; the untouchable castes of India, the Kurds of Iraq, the women of Saudi Arabia, the women of America 100 years ago; for that matter, the entire population of the former Soviet Union and many Arab and African and Asian countries.

And gay people in America today? Criterion one--direct legal or governmental discrimination--is resoundingly met. Homosexual relations are illegal in twenty-three states, at least seven of which specifically single out acts between persons of the same sex. Gay marriage is not legally recognized anywhere. And the government hounds gay people from the military, not for what they do but for what they are.

Criterion two--denial of political franchise--is resoundingly not met. Not only do gay people vote, they are turning themselves into a constituency to be reckoned with and fought for. Otherwise, the Patrick Buchanans of the world would have sounded contemptuous of gay people at the Republican convention last year, rather than panicked by them. If gay votes didn't count, Bill Clinton would not have stuck his neck out on the military issue during the primary season (one of the bravest things any living politician has done).

Criterion three--denial of education--is also resoundingly not met. Overlooked Opinions Inc., a Chicago market-research company, has built a diverse national base of 35,000 gay men and lesbians, two-thirds of whom are either not out of the closet or are only marginally out, and has then randomly sampled them in surveys. It found that homosexuals had an average of 15.7 years of education, as against 12.7 years for the population as a whole. Obviously, the findings may be skewed if college-educated gay people are likelier to take part in surveys (though Overlooked Opinions said that results didn't follow degree of closetedness). Still, any claim that gay people are denied education appears ludicrous.

Criterion four--relative impoverishment--is also not met. In Overlooked Opinions' sample, gay men had an average household income of $51,624 and lesbians $42,755, compared with the national average of $ 36,800. Again, yuppie homosexuals may be more likely to answer survey questions than blue-collar ones. But, again, to call homosexuals an impoverished class would be silly.

Criterion five--human rights violations without recourse--is also, in the end, not met, though here it's worth taking a moment to see why it is not. The number of gay bashings has probably increased in recent years (though it's hard to know, what with reporting vagaries), and, of course, many gay-bashers either aren't caught or aren't jailed. What too many gay people forget, though, is that these are problems that homosexuals have in common with non-gay Americans. Though many gay-bashers go free, so do many murderers. In the District of Columbia last year, the police identified suspects in fewer than half of all murders, to say nothing of assault cases.

And the fact is that anti-gay violence is just one part of a much broader pattern. Probably not coincidentally, the killing of John Wear happened in the context of a year, 1991, that broke San Diego's all-time homicide record (1992 was runner-up). Since 1965 the homicide rate in America has doubled, the violent-crime arrest rate for juveniles has more than tripled; people now kill you to get your car, they kill you to get your shoes or your potato chips, they kill you because they can do it. A particularly ghastly fact is that homicide due to gunshot is now the second leading cause of death in high school-age kids, after car crashes. No surprise, then, that gay people are afraid. So is everyone else.

Chances are, indeed, that gay people's social class makes them safer, on average, than other urban minorities. Certainly their problem is small compared with what blacks face in inner-city Los Angeles or Chicago, where young black males are likelier to be killed than a U.S. soldier was in a tour of duty in Vietnam.

If any problem unites gay people with non-gay people, it is crime. If any issue does not call for special-interest pleading, this is it. Minority advocates, including gay ones, have blundered insensitively by trying to carve out hate-crime statutes and other special-interest crime laws instead of focusing on tougher measures against violence of all kinds. In trying to sensitize people to crimes aimed specifically at minorities, they are inadvertently desensitizing them to the vastly greater threat of crime against everyone. They contribute to the routinization of murder, which has now reached the point where news of a black girl spray-painted white makes the front pages, but news of a black girl murdered runs in a round-up on page D-6 ("Oh, another killing"). Yes, gay-bashing is a problem. But, no, it isn't oppression. It is, rather, an obscenely ordinary feature of the American experience.

Of course, homosexuals face unhappiness, discrimination and hatred. But for everyone with a horror story to tell, there are others like an academic I know, a tenured professor who is married to his lover of fourteen years in every way but legally, who owns a split-level condo in Los Angeles, drives a Miata, enjoys prestige and success and love that would be the envy of millions of straight Americans. These things did not fall in his lap. He fought personal and professional battles, was passed over for jobs and left the closet when that was much riskier than it is today. Asked if he is oppressed, he says, "You're damn straight." But a mark of oppression is that most of its victims are not allowed to succeed; they are allowed only to fail. And this man is no mere token. He is one of a growing multitude of openly gay people who have overcome the past and, in doing so, changed the present.

"I'm a gay person, so I don't live in a free country," one highly successful gay writer said recently, "and I don't think most straight people really sit down and realize that for gay people this is basically a totalitarian society in which we're barely tolerated." The reason straight people don't realize this is because it obviously isn't true. As more and more homosexuals come out of hiding, the reality of gay economic and political and educational achievement becomes more evident. And as that happens, gay people who insist they are oppressed will increasingly, and not always unfairly, come off as yuppie whiners, "victims" with $50,000 incomes and vacations in Europe. They may feel they are oppressed, but they will have a harder and harder time convincing the public.

They will distort their politics, too, twisting it into strained and impotent shapes. Scouring for oppressions with which to identify, activists are driven further and further afield. They grab fistfuls of random political demands and stuff them in their pockets. The original platform for April's March on Washington called for, among other things, enforced bilingual education, "an end to genocide of all the indigenous peoples and their cultures," defense budget cuts, universal health care, a national needle exchange program, free substance-abuse treatment on demand, safe and affordable abortion, more money for breast cancer "and other cancers particular to women," "unrestricted, safe and affordable alternative insemination," health care for the "differently-abled and physically challenged" and "an end to poverty." Here was the oppression-entitlement mentality gone haywire.

Worst of all, oppression politics distorts the face of gay America itself. It encourages people to forget that homosexuality isn't hell. As the AIDS crisis has so movingly shown, gay people have built the kind of community that evaporated for many non-gay Americans decades ago. You don't see straight volunteers queuing up to change cancer patients' bedpans and deliver their groceries. Gay people--and unmarried people generally--are at a disadvantage in the top echelons of corporate America, but, on the other hand, they have achieved dazzlingly in culture and business and much else. They lead lives of richness and competence and infinite variety, lives that are not miserable or squashed.

The insistence that gay people are oppressed is most damaging, in the end, because it implies that to be gay is to suffer. It affirms what so many straight people, even sympathetic ones, believe in their hearts: that homosexuals are pitiable. That alone is reason to junk the oppression model, preferably sooner instead of later.

If the oppression model is failing, what is the right model? Not that of an oppressed people seeking redemption through political action; rather, that of an ostracized people seeking redemption through personal action. What do you do about misguided ostracism? The most important thing is what Glenn Cashmore did. After John Wear's murder, he came out of the closet. He wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times denouncing his own years of silence. He stepped into the circle of people who are what used to be called known homosexuals.

This makes a difference. The New York Times conducted a poll on homosexuals this year and found that people who had a gay family member or close friend "were much more tolerant and accepting." Whereas oppression politics fails because it denies reality, positive personal example works because it demonstrates reality. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it," Queer Nation's chant, is not only a brilliant slogan. It is a strategy. It is, in some ways, the strategy. To move away from oppression politics is not to sit quietly. It is often to hold hands in public or take a lover to the company Christmas party, sometimes to stage kiss-ins, always to be unashamed. It is to make of honesty a kind of activism.

Gay Americans should emulate Jewish Americans, who have it about right. Jews recognize that to many Americans we will always seem different (and we are, in some ways, different). We grow up being fed "their" culture in school, in daily life, even in the calendar. It never stops. For a full month of every year, every radio program and shop window reminds you that this is, culturally, a Christian nation (no, not Judeo- Christian). Jews could resent this, but most of us choose not to, because, by way of compensation, we think hard, we work hard, we are cohesive, we are interesting. We recognize that minorities will always face special burdens of adjustment, but we also understand that with those burdens come rewards of community and spirit and struggle. We recognize that there will always be a minority of Americans who hate us, but we also understand that, so long as we stay watchful, this hateful minority is more pathetic than threatening. We watch it; we fight it when it lashes out; but we do not organize our personal and political lives around it.

Gay people's main weapons are ones we already possess. In America, our main enemies are superstition and hate. Superstition is extinguished by public criticism and by the power of moral example. Political activists always underestimate the power of criticism and moral example to change people's minds, and they always overestimate the power of law and force. As for hate, the way to fight it is with love. And that we have in abundance.