IGF CultureWatch

First published June 22, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Although little noted at the time, one of the most interesting aspects of last year's Senate debate on the so-called Federal Marriage Amendment was the relative absence of overt criticism of gays and lesbians and their relationships.

Instead, amendment supporters focused primarily on how the amendment would solidify the association of parenthood with marriage and would benefit children by assuring them an optimal family of two opposite sex parents.

As Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) expressed it, however disingenuously, "This amendment is not about prejudice. It is about safeguarding the best environment for our children."

Even some of the most conservative amendment supporters seemed to go out of their way to explicitly disclaim even a jot of anti-gay sentiment. For instance, lead sponsor Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) averred, "Gays and lesbians have the right to live the way they want."

And arch-conservative Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) emphasized during floor debate, "I do not believe it is appropriate for me to judge someone else's behavior. That is between them and their Lord."

What accounts for this shift in rhetorical emphasis from attacking gays as immoral, sodomical, perverts to a seemingly benign desire merely to help children?

In a fascinating article ("The Federal Marriage Amendment and the Strange Evolution of the Conservative Case against Gay Marriage," in the April issue of the journal PS: Political Science and Politics), former GOP intern Frederick Liu and Princeton University Professor Stephen Macedo suggest that one reason surely is that just a year earlier the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas had struck down all state anti-sodomy laws, removing any judicial legitimacy for conservative efforts to legislate anti-gay animus.

Perhaps more importantly, there was virtually no public outcry following the decision. One need only contrast that reaction with the uproar that followed the court's Brown v. Board of Education anti-segregation decision, or the Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision, still controversial after more than three decades.

A third reason would have to be that public opinion polls have shown a gradual decline in the number of Americans who view homosexuality as "always wrong" from nearly two-thirds (73 percent) some 30 years ago to barely half (53 percent) today.

And certainly a contributing factor would have to be the widespread criticism of Pennsylvania's gift to statesmanship Sen. Rick Santorum (R) as bigoted and intolerant after he harshly criticized the Lawrence decision, lumping homosexuality in the "everything is permitted" category with polygamy, incest, adultery, and bestiality.

Those might or might not induce a thoughtful conservative to rein in his vituperative attacks on gays but it turns out there was more to it than that.

In interviews with a number of aides to Republicans senators, co-author Frederick Liu found that there was a deliberate and concerted effort by Senate Republicans to avoid explicitly moralistic and religious arguments associated with the Religious Right.

One GOP legislative aide described her senator as "a religious man" whose opposition to gay marriage came first but who then "put words to it" afterwards that completely avoided any religious arguments.

Another legislative aide said his senator decided not to include in his floor statement references to "the Judeo-Christian tradition" that were in his original draft.

Yet another staff member acknowledged that her senator felt he could not reveal his religious reasons for opposing gay marriage for fear his constituents would view him as homophobic.

And what of Sen. Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum? Liu and Macedo report that even though Santorum was a fervent supporter of the amendment, the Senate GOP leadership decided not to have him be a lead sponsor, hoping thereby to evade the kind of criticism Santorum himself experienced.

In a way it is good news if nationally prominent politicians feel that they cannot with impunity directly attack gays and lesbians or even gay and lesbian relationships.

But there is a downside as well. If legislators - and voters - reach their positions about gay issues on the basis of a religious commitment but offer only what we might call "social policy" arguments for their positions, then any counter-arguments we make to refute or disprove those arguments will have no effect on their position.

The legislator, and supportive voters, are immune to counter-evidence because "evidence" was never the reason for their position in the first place. The legislator will simply repeat his argument so long as he thinks it sounds plausible and when that is no longer possible he will simply hunt around for some different "social policy" reason.

You can encounter the same problem in discussions with religious fundamentalists. One woman assured me once that homosexuality was obviously unnatural because even dumb animals didn't do it. When I listed a number of species in which homosexuality has been observed, she shot back, "Well, they're just dumb animals. What do they know?!" Evidence counted only when it supported what she already believed. Counter-evidence had no significance.

How we conduct our legislative lobbying and public discussion in light of this fact is a knotty problem, but being aware of it is a necessary beginning.

First published June 8, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s critics of so-called "crime comic books" mounted a campaign against the conspicuous violence and brutality in many comics which the critics charged could and did lead impressionable young people to engage in violent and criminal behavior.

The most comprehensive attack was a widely discussed 1954 book called Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Fredric Wertham, a senior psychiatrist for the New York City Department of Hospitals and director of mental hygiene clinics at Bellevue Hospital.

I once read that Wertham also claimed that some comic books promoted homosexuality so I wondered what Wertham said. Not a lot, it turned out. His 400 page book devoted only six pages to homosexuality, primarily in what he called "the Batman type of story." But what he said was interesting.

Wertham does not claim that Batman and Robin are homosexual, but that "the Batman type of story" - meaning an adult plus youth crime fighting team - could stimulate "children" to have homosexual fantasies without realizing it, and could reinforce homosexual fantasies in adolescents who have already developed homosexual feelings.

Wertham's discussion is not very clearly organized, but drawing on popular stereotypes about homosexuals and then-prevalent theories of sexual psychopathology, he points to four aspects of the Batman comics to support his claim.

First, there is the paederastic structure, if not content, of Batman and Robin's relationship. "The Batman type of story helps to fixate homoerotic tendencies by suggesting the form of an adolescent-with-adult or Ganymede-Zeus type of love-relationship."

Second, Batman and Robin live in a suspiciously elegant, dandified home. "At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and 'Dick' Grayson. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. ... It is like a wish dream of two homosexual living together." So Noel Coward!

It is worth noticing that Wertham has to reverse the usual structure of his argument here. In crime comics, it is the criminals who are fascinating and likely to be imitated. But in the Batman comics it is the heroes who are attractive - far too much so - and likely to be imitated.

Third, Wertham's sharp eye detects ostentatious genital display. Batman is an example of "the muscular male supertype, whose primary sex characteristics are usually well-emphasized." As for Robin, he is "a handsome ephebic boy, . . . usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident."

Fourth, just as homosexuals were thought to hate women, Wertham views Batman as "anti-feminine." There are only "masculine, bad, witchlike or violent women" he says, and "if the girl is good looking she is undoubtedly the villainess. If she is after Bruce Wayne, she will have no chance against Dick." Wertham seems to intend the snickering joke.

Wertham had no trouble finding homosexuals - in therapy, of course - who said they had read Batman comic books and counted them among their favorite reading. And for Wertham that seems to close the case. But Wertham's argument runs into two crippling objections.

Most obviously, millions of children and adolescents read Batman comic books without feeling or developing any homosexual fantasies or desires, yet Wertham offers no theory about why the homosexually "seductive" comics had absolutely no impact on the vast majority of readers.

Then too, although Wertham lays stress on the idea that the comics "seductively" can arouse unconscious homosexual fantasies, the evidence he offers contradicts that. All of the young homosexuals he discusses seem to have been aware at an early age that they were in some way or other attracted to men.

So Wertham has the causation backwards. The simplest explanation is that far from the "Batman type of story" being able to make some young men homosexual, young homosexuals would be attracted to Batman comics and project their early, perhaps inchoate sexual feelings into the comics while young heterosexuals simply do not. End of story.

There was no need to postulate mysterious psychiatric mechanisms such as "unconscious" homosexual fantasies and "fixated" homosexual "patterns" and no evidence that such things even existed.

In response to the widespread criticism and threats of legislative action, the violence and horror comic books were significantly toned down and criticism of those abated. But the suggestion that Batman's household had a homoerotic character continued to shadow the series.

Finally, in 1964, Batman editor Julius Schwartz decided to try to scotch the rumors once and for all by getting rid of the faithful butler Alfred Pennyworth.

According to Mark Cozza Vaz's history of Batman comics, Tales of the Dark Knight, Schwartz recalled: "Many people were questioning why three males were living together. So I said, 'Okay, I'll kill off one of the males and put a woman in there!' And the woman turned out to be Aunt Harriet, the aunt of Dick Grayson. . . . I guess that was pretty drastic, killing off Alfred."

But happily within just a few years the Batman television program decided that it wanted to include Alfred, so Alfred was duly revived from the dead, once again to serve the original ambiguously non-gay duo.

First published May 25, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

The celebration of gay pride originally confined to the end-of-June Gay Pride parades has now expanded to include the entire month of June as Gay Pride Month, so it seems appropriate to say something about the celebration of gay pride and how to do it better.

Over the years I have held a variety of views about gay pride:

1. Being gay is simply a natural characteristic like having blue eyes or brown hair. There is no rational basis for feeling pride about things that are just the way we turned out and that we had nothing to do with accomplishing.
2. Gay Pride is a healthy and reasonable response for gays in a society where many people still view being gay as something to be ashamed of or embarrassed about or discreetly silent about. It promotes a positive message to closeted gays and skeptical heterosexuals to counter and neutralize the negative messages promoted by anti-gay elements.
3. Although being gay is not itself a valid basis for pride (see No. 1), people can take legitimate pride in how well they handle being gay: How comfortable they are with being gay, how well they integrate being gay into their character and daily life, how adeptly they deal with other people, how much they achieve as an openly gay person.
4. Gay Pride is so 1970s. The slogan was invented back when the main gay activist goal was to lure gays out of the closet and promote a healthy self-esteem. But our current goals are civic and social equality for gays and gay relationships. The old slogan doesn't address those newer goals. Instead it sounds as if we were stuck in some sort of narcissistic time-warp.

Take your pick.

But what I miss in most organized Gay Pride celebrations is any real effort to go beyond the mere assertion of gay pride, any sense that something follows from that either to solidify the gay pride we assert or to give gay pride some focus or direction. It is as if we satisfy ourselves with shaking our pompoms and shouting "Gay Pride." But what follows from that?

So it seems to me that our gay communities should make some effort to use Gay Pride Month to promote our goals, increase our effectiveness, heighten our awareness, lure people into greater involvement and promote community contacts.

I was led to this line of thought when a friend recently asked if there were any Gay Pride Month events that were "must see." I honestly could not think of any. That surprised me. And I think we are missing an opportunity. For instance:

• Some political, business or social service groups could invite a well-known gay or gay-supportive figure to give a speech on an important current gay issue. Think, for instance, of Barney Frank, Camille Paglia, Gavin Newsom, Andrew Sullivan or Evan Wolfson. The idea is to have an event that would draw a large number of people, stimulate thought and add to their political/social awareness.
• Gay and gay-friendly religious groups could join together to hold an ecumenical Gay Pride Month religious or "spirituality" service. Many people are religious or "spiritual" and such an event might help people find ways to integrate their religious beliefs and their sexuality. It might also foster a willingness by the various religious groups to work together toward common goals.
• Gay Pride Month would be a good time to hold an annual community forum featuring four or five prominent local gay community functionaries - political activists, business owners, heads of social service agencies - to discuss "The State of the Gay Community," share their concerns, answer questions about their businesses or organizations, listen to suggestions and criticism and so forth.
• A few years ago Chicago started a program designating one book that it encouraged everyone to read. Gay communities could do the same thing. The idea is to give everybody one thing in common to provide a basis for conversation. Possibilities: Mary Renault's The Persian Boy, Sheila Ortiz Taylor's Faultline, Eric Marcus' Making Gay History, or George Weinberg's timeless Society and the Healthy Homosexual. I think all of these are in print and in paperback.

If you are not impressed by any of these ideas, create your own. The point is to use Gay Pride Month to create circumstances where gays and lesbians get to know a few more people, learn a little more, develop a greater appreciation of the community they are a part of and experience something in common beyond the mere datum of being gay.

Aristotle observed that statesmen rightly try to promote friendship more than anything else. That would be good advice for our community leaders. People who may not be moved to do anything on their own or for themselves may be more likely do things with their friends and for their friends.

First published May 18, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Recently, our fair city of Chicago issued a report by an ad hoc group calling itself The Chicago Task Force on LGBT Substance Use and Abuse.

The original advocates of the report deserve credit for wanting to address a long-standing problem in the gay community. But the final report, long-delayed and over-edited in order to offend no one, was so infected with drug treatment industry myths, mealy-mouthed social worker jargon and such feeble suggestions for dealing with the problem that it was almost useless.

The report called for a "safe, visible, sustained and supportive dialogue on the topic of substance use and abuse." It confidently asserted that "not all substance use is problematic." It preachily admonished us all to be "supportive and nonjudgmental about ... substance use and abuse" and urged us to "find common ground on which to define when substance use becomes abuse."

Well, no. I don't plan on being "supportive and nonjudgmental" or to regard "substance use" as non-problematic, or to try to "find common ground" with users who disagree. Here is what we know: Many drugs can and do cause long term physical and mental damage to the user, damage not immediately apparent. And some drugs increase a person's desire to engage in sexual behavior with high risk of HIV infection.

One recent study in the Journal of Urban Health as summarized by the Gay Men's Health Crisis newsletter found that "Drug use was significantly associated with higher numbers of sex partners, higher social isolation scores, and participation in unprotected receptive anal intercourse."

Another study found that people who used meth with other drugs such as cocaine and ketamine "reported more unprotected sex with more partners of ... unknown status. Heavy drug users also had higher scores on tests of impulsivity and negative self-perceptions."

A third study of meth and cocaine use concluded: "During periods of drug use, high risk sexual behavior increased along with the increasing frequency of drug use. ... To reduce and prevent risks of HIV, no level of use of these drugs should be considered 'safe.'"

What is the solution? There is no solution. Drug use is not going away. All we can do is promote strategies to limit the wider use of drugs. Clearly, we must find out what messages can best persuade current users to stop, discourage young people from starting and break the connection between drugs and the social aspects of being gay. Important steps to take include:

• Publicize - without exaggeration - the effects of the various drugs.This includes the biochemistry of how they work, the physical effects they produce, the behaviors they can lead to, and long term physical and mental impact. Drug dealers seldom provide that information.
• Be judgmental! Instead of being "supportive and nonjudgmental," be judgmental and non-supportive. The capacity for judgment is why God - and evolution - gave you a brain. Use it or lose it.
• Don't let people get away with the fiction that they are not responsible for their drug use. "Addiction" is a loaded word used to convince people that they are not responsible for their actions - that it is the drug's fault. But when we say people are "addicted" to a drug we only mean they like to use it and don't want to stop enough to actually stop. The same is true of the so-called "disease" of "alcoholism."*

In fact, people on their own can and do stop using drugs all the time. Cigarette smokers stop smoking, heavy drinkers cut down or stop drinking entirely, cocaine users stop using cocaine and meth users stop using meth. They just have to want to enough.

For many people, drug use as a way of avoiding coping with other problems in their lives: a hostile or unsatisfying home environment, stress at work, boredom due to a lack of any real interests or goals, personal fears or insecurities, a failure to develop enjoyable social contacts.

As psychologist Jeffrey Schaler pointed out five years ago in Addiction Is a Choice (Open Court, 2000), "I've witnessed over and over again that focusing on clients' drug-using behavior is no way to help them give up drugs. ... It's only by talking about their problems-in-living and encouraging them to confront and solve those ... that the drug use subsides."

Making this more widely known might encourage people to address their problems instead of using drugs as a coping or avoidance technique. The more that people understand their own motivations - and know that we are on to them - the more likely they are to act rationally.

Finally, young people have had too little time to learn from painful experience that the seeming benefits of drug use are immediate and the costs tend to be in the long run. And, of course, some adults never seem to learn. How we communicate that information effectively is a problem. But weak, permissive task force reports seem a counter-productive way to start.

---

*See, for elaboration, Herbert Fingarette, Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (University of California Press, 1988).

First published May 11, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Every once in a while you hear some half-educated person announce ostentatiously that there were no homosexuals before the late 19th century, or even that there was no homosexuality before then.

When you hear that you know you have encountered someone who has read one or another of a small group of gay academics called "social constructionists." SC (for short) claims that since our sexual "identity" (watch this tricky word!) is created by our social and linguistic context no one could have been "homosexual" before the term was invented in the late 19th century.

But there is something fishy about saying there were no homosexuals before the late 19th century. It is easy enough to point out that there were people who engaged in same-sex acts. When the SC theorist replies "Oh, but they didn't understand themselves to be homosexual," we can respond that they certainly knew they desired same-sex partners. If the SC theorist replies, "But they didn't have the specific identity of 'homosexual' because the word didn't exist," the response has to be, "Well, duh!"

So what starts out looking like a fascinating claim about the history of sexuality turns out be a much less interesting claim about language. The assertion makes a much weaker claim than it pretends to. It is a kind of bait and switch game. It is as if someone offered to sell you an airplane, but it turned out to be a model airplane.

As sociologist Stephen O. Murray commented in American Gay about SC theorists, "I can think of no other group whose academic elite is so bent on challenging the masses' quest for roots as gay and lesbian historians are."

The late Yale University historian John Boswell was a favorite target of SC theorists because he gave his book Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality the subtitle "Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the 14th century." Gay!

There are problems with Boswell's effort to exculpate the Catholic church from its responsibility for fomenting homophobia, but some of the criticism centered instead on the objection that there could not have been any "gay" people before modern times since the term "gay" was not widely used for homosexuals before the 20th century.

In two long, later articles Boswell cited copious evidence from classical and medieval sources of widespread awareness that some people had primarily same-sex desires, were fully aware of their predominant desire for same-sex partners and that people were sometimes categorized in terms of their desires.

As Boswell summarized:

"While ... premodern societies did not employ categories fully comparable to the modern 'homosexual/heterosexal' dichotomy, this does not demonstrate that the polarity is not ... applicable to those societies. ... A common thread of constructionist argument ... is that no one in antiquity or the Middle Ages experienced homosexuality as an exclusive, permanent or defining mode of sexuality. This argument can be shown to be factually incorrect."

Although Boswell originally defined gays as people "conscious of erotic inclination toward their own gender as a distinguishing characteristic," Boswell later concluded that not all earlier gay people necessarily saw their sexuality as something that distinguished them from others in their society, so he revised his definition of "gays" to the simpler "those whose erotic interest is predominantly directed toward their own gender."

That is, after all, pretty much what we all mean when we say someone in the past was homosexual or gay. We could add that many such people were surely aware of their desire as a distinguishing characteristic, even if it was not always the primary one.

Historian Louis Crompton agreed with Boswell in his comprehensive gay history, Homosexuality and Civilization:

"Michel Foucault and his followers have argued that the 'homosexual' is a modern invention, a mental construct of the last hundred years. That is, of course, true of homosexuality as a 'scientific' or psychiatric category. But it is a mistake to presume that earlier ages thought merely of sexual acts and not of persons."

We can go further. There is good evidence not only that people knew they had predominant or exclusive homosexual desires and that fact was important to them, but that there were homosexual sub-cultures in earlier times - in the 18th century London, in Renaissance Italian cities such as Florence, and perhaps even in 12th century London. As for someone's having a homosexual identity, the 16th century gay Italian artist Gianantonio Bazzi adopted the nickname "Sodoma." That sounds like a fairly assertive homosexual identity to me.

Academic fads generally last 15-20 years and social construction is arguably on the decline. It was based on a limited knowledge of history and a wildly exaggerated notion of the power of language to control and limit people's understanding.

It inhibited gay historical research because it assumed a priori that evidence for meaningful historical continuity was not there to be found, so no one needed to look for it. As Crompton's own recent book shows, they are beginning to look again.

***

Author's Note: In response to post-publication queries, the two John Boswell articles the column refers to are:

• "Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, et al. (New York: New American Library, 1989), pp. 17-36. This article is mostly a reprint of an earlier article in the journal _Salmagundi_ 58-59 (1982-83), pp. 89-114, but adds short postscript (pp. 34-36) from which the column quotes.
• "Concepts, Experience and Sexuality," in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, Edward Stein, ed. (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 133-173.

First published April 27, 2005, in a slightly different form, in the Chicago Free Press.

On April 21, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon's general counsel had proposed that the military decriminalize consensual sodomy by redefining "sodomy" as sodomy "committed by force" or with a person under age 16. Currently "sodomy" is defined as any "unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex."

Prompted by the premature disclosure and no doubt fearful of initial congressional reaction, the Pentagon went into protective reaction mode. The very next day a Pentagon spokesman assured a waiting world that consensual sodomy would continue to be a crime, saying it violated "good order and discipline."

But the Pentagon's rationale for existing policy seems more unsustainable than ever. The Supreme Court's Lawrence decision striking down state sodomy laws drew on the Constitution's guarantees of liberty and equality. And the military cannot expect traditional "judicial deference" to insulate it forever from the Constitution. The Pentagon memo alluded to this when it said the proposed revision would "conform more closely to other federal laws and regulations."

What needs to be emphasized even more is that the idea that oral and anal sex are "unnatural" is not a scientific concept, but a religious - specifically Catholic - concept dependent on the doctrine that sex must always have reproductive potential and therefore must always involve only a penis and vagina. To say nothing of other religions, even for Protestants nothing in the bible prohibits heterosexual sodomy. So the ban on sodomy violates religious liberty.

And in fact many heterosexual couples, married and unmarried, engage in sodomy. In a large 1988 survey by the National Opinion Research Center, more than three quarters of American men said they had at some time received oral sex, and nearly 30 percent of white men and about 20 percent of African-American men said they received oral sex during their most recent sexual encounter. So a lot more oral sex ("unnatural carnal copulation") is committed by heterosexuals than homosexuals.

Yet although the military criminalizes consensual heterosexual sodomy as well as homosexual sodomy, the military never discharges heterosexuals for engaging in it. Nor is there any evidence that the military actually believes consensual heterosexual sodomy violates "good order and discipline." How could it do that? So the military does not take its own rationale seriously.

Removing the ban on consensual sodomy would not in itself allow gay men and women to serve openly in the military. In passing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in 1993, Congress also stipulated that homosexuals may not serve. But removing the ban on consensual sodomy would remove any rationale for excluding gays and lesbians except "animus" which the Supreme Court's Romer decision said lacked legal merit.

Turning then from reasons why the ban is bad to reasons why including gays and lesbians would be good for gays and good for the military:

The option of military service would be good for gays and lesbians because joining the military has long been a way for young people to escape an unpleasant home life or repressive small town environment. Few have more potential need for that option than young gays beginning to be aware of their sexuality.

In addition, military service offers an additional career path for all young gays as well as an opportunity to learn skills useful later in the civilian job market. And to a civilian employer military service implies an ability to understand and follow instructions, an ability to work with others, and a degree of stability and personal responsibility, all valuable traits in any young job-applicant.

Finally, military service certifies gays and lesbians as morally equal citizens, willing to contribute to their country and supportive of its fundamental values. Nothing could more effectively undermine religious right propaganda that gays and gay equality would harm America - which is why they oppose gays serving openly in the military: It would show that they are mistaken - or lying.

Gays in the military would be good for the military because it would enable the military to carry out its mission better. Allowing gays and lesbians to serve would enlarge the pool of potential recruits at the very time the military is complaining about its inability to obtain sufficient new personnel.

In addition, allowing open gays would enable the military to retain personnel with valuable skills who are discovered to be gay. The recent discharge of a several gay men who were learning Arabic at a linguistics school is only the most obvious example.

The ban is so irrational that military recruiters do not even pay attention to it. One young gay man told me that when he told the military recruiter he was gay, the recruiter replied, "I didn't hear anything you just said," and promptly signed him up. So ending the ban would end an increasingly obvious example of military hypocrisy.

Finally, while there are necessarily differences between civilian and military life, it is never desirably for a military to become too far detached from the values of the society it defends. A prominent rationale once offered for the draft was that it helped prevent just that separation. Allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would help reduce a distance that has grown since the abolition of the draft in the early 1970s.

First published April 6, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Catholics around the world are mourning the death of Pope John Paul II, the man who headed their church for more than a quarter of a century. But if we were reviewing John Paul's long reign as a performance on the world stage, we would have to give him "mixed" reviews.

The surprise election of a Polish pope and the quiet support the church hierarchy in Poland gave anti-communist dissidents helped overthrow the communist government there and then in the rest of Eastern Europe. And those eventually led to the evaporation of the Soviet Union itself. Although the pope's contribution was not paramount, his moral support was important at a time when the outcome was far from certain.

But those of us who are gay or lesbian can hardly join in mourning John Paul's death. Through his doctrinal statements, his public exhortations, his ecclesiastical appointments and his intrusion into political controversies John Paul did his utmost to retard and reverse the movement for gay and lesbian equality.

In a technical sense, John Paul was a reactionary pope, seeking to reassert with renewed vigor traditional Catholic doctrines and their social policy effluvia against all efforts to rethink or reformulate core church teachings.

His outlook was decisively shaped by having spent much of his adult, clerical life in Poland under the domination of communism, a system which he - like the communists themselves - seemed to view as the fullest expression of post-Renaissance, modern philosophy. His response was to set himself firmly against virtually every expression of the Enlightenment and push back against it at every moment.

He was less interested in bringing political and economic freedom to Eastern Europe than in restoring Catholic dominance. He rejected the autonomy of civil society and promoted the legal imposition of Catholic social doctrine. He did not believe free speech and press were basic human rights, but conditional "privileges" that must not be "abused" by attacking his church.

He rejected the separation of church and state: When governments threatened to reduce subsidies and privileges long granted to the church, he said the church was being persecuted. He rejected artificial birth control even to prevent HIV transmission: Better a woman and her baby become infected than block conception. While he managed to say - 400 years after the fact - that the persecution of Galileo was a mistake, he refused to say evolution was a fact, admitting only that it was "more than a theory."

He dismissed without argument the idea of female priests, apparently believing his God would transubstantiate only for male celebrants. He promoted a prominence for Mary unknown since the Middle Ages and came close to promulgating the novel doctrine that she was "co-redemptress of the human race." He was dissuaded at the last moment.

But it was in opposing legal and social equality for gays that the pope and the bishops he commanded showed the most zeal. Around the world the Catholic hierarchy regularly opposed the repeal of sodomy laws, opposed gay non-discrimination laws and opposed government recognition of gay civil marriage and civil unions.

In European and Latin American nations where civil unions have been proposed, Catholic prelates vigorously opposed them as a threat to the family and the social structure. When governments proposed non-discrimination laws or hate crimes laws, Catholic officials claimed their religious freedom was being threatened. When Spain's social democratic government proposed a gay marriage law, the Vatican summoned the Spanish ambassador to make clear the church's adamantine opposition.

In 1986 the pope authorized a formal Vatican statement declaring that homosexuality was not a "neutral" condition, but "a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." Even more remarkably, the document went out of its way to observe that it was "understandable" if the advocacy of gay rights generated an increase in violence directed against gays.

When the international gay celebration World Pride 2000 was planned for Rome, the Vatican maneuvered furiously to prevent it, saying it was offensive to a city held sacred by the world's Christians. When the event was held anyway, the pope deplored its presence and repeated that homosexuality is "an objective disorder" and harmful to the family, the basis of society.

Although the Pope apologized, after a fashion, for the Catholic Church's millennia of persecution of Jews, and apologized to Africans for the role the church had in slavery, such as having owned some, the pope never apologized for or even acknowledged the persecution, torture and judicial murder of gays during the Inquisition as well as during other social purity crusades fostered by the church. It was as if those never happened.

John Paul II was the last medieval pope. Until the next one.

First published March 30, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Back in 1999 a group called the Publishing Triangle issued a list of what they considered the best 100 books of gay and lesbian fiction. Some of the choices were eccentric, many were second rate and the list seemed too politically correct, but if it prompted people to read some gay fiction it had some value.

Then last June they issued an equally eccentric list of the 100 best gay non-fiction books. Always eager to be helpful, just as I offered a gratifyingly shorter list of the 10 best gay fiction back then, I belatedly offer my own list of the 10 best non-fiction books relevant to homosexuality.

Alfred C. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and its female sequel (1953) seem to be classics no one reads. But the long chapters in each book on homosexuality as well as the rest of the books are valuable reading for what Kinsey actually said as opposed to what people think he said. And Kinsey shows a deeply humane concern for the meaning of sex in people's lives and all varieties of sexual expression.

Stephen O. Murray's American Gay (1996) offers a comprehensive sociological analysis of the reasons for the development of group awareness by gays and the subsequent growth and diversification of the gay community as "a quasi-ethnic group." Murray also explores the issues of sexual promiscuity, the community response to AIDS, the formation of same-sex couples and ethnic gay communities.

Of the many books on gay history, Louis Crompton's magisterial Homosexuality and Civilization (2003) is clearly the best and most exhaustive. Beautifully written and illustrated, the book traces the oppression and resilience of gays and lesbians from the ancient Jews and Greeks, through the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, up to modern times, correcting the accounts of John Boswell and Michel Foucault among others.

C.A. Tripp's The Homosexual Matrix (1975, enlarged 1987) remains the most insightful book on the psychological origin and expression of homosexual orientation and desire. Like his mentor Kinsey, Tripp harshly dismisses Freud and clearly explains the futility of all change therapy - since there is no "illness" to "cure" and desire is resistant to change. He also discusses the psychology of gay relationships, sexual interaction and effeminacy, laying waste to a host of stereotypes in the process.

With a title taken from President Clinton, Bruce Bawer's A Place at the Table (1993) stakes out a gay-assertive middle ground between the religious right and the deconstructionist left, insisting on the full acceptance of gays in the American community. Bawer does not argue for an identity-sacrificing "assimilation" but for a welcoming social "inclusion" in which gay people can contribute their own perspectives.

Stephen Murray's Homosexualities (2000) is the anthropological counterpart to his sociological American Gay, a wide-ranging survey of just about everything currently known about same-sex relationships in scores of other cultures and societies. Murray develops a useful typology of the predominant gay relationships in different societies - in which partners are differentiated by age or by gender roles or are egalitarian.

Because homosexuality cannot be understood without understanding sexuality itself - and most heterosexuals don't, and too many don't want to, which is part of our problem - there are a few books on sexuality generally that must be included in the gay top 10.

Murray S. Davis's cheekily titled Smut (1983) is the most fascinating book on sex you'll ever read. Rejecting the idea of sexual desire as instinctive, Davis explores the conceptual and experiential sources of desire. He examines the effect of sex on people's perceptions of the self and partner as well as the different sexual ideologies of religious conservatives, "naturalists," and liberationists - explaining, among much else, conservative fears of contamination by other people's sexual behavior (e.g., homophobia). A great book, unaccountably obscure.

Richard Posner's Sex and Reason (1992) uses an economic, rational choice model to stress the volitional elements that influence sexual behavior and social policy on topics such as sexual regulations, homosexuality, marriage, pornography, reproduction and the sexual revolution. The approach produces surprising insights and gay-supportive conclusions.

Paul Robinson's The Modernization of Sex (1976) is an insightful reading of Havelock Ellis, Alfred C. Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson to bring to light their fundamental premises and contribution to modern ideas about sex. Robinson omits Freud, but best critique of Freud's obsolete, tangled myth-making is Ernest Gellner's patient demolition, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985, revised 1993).

That's nine books. For the 10th choose any one from eight runner-ups: Jonathan Rauch's Gay Marriage, Ronald Bayer's Homosexuality and American Psychiatry, Bruce Bagemihl's Biological Exuberance, Richard Mohr's Gays/Justice, John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On and Conduct Unbecoming, and Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal.

[Editor's note: You can help support IGF by ordering available books through our links to Amazon.com.]

First published March 23, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Every few years someone on the far reaches of the political and cultural left peeks out at the country and is dismayed to discover that most gays and lesbians are "embracing the values and routines of the American mainstream" and failing to carry out the supposed transformative mandate of the original "gay liberation."

Never mind that the idea of openly gay and lesbian people leading contented, ordinary lives amid their neighbors and co-workers would seem pretty transformed to most of the early leaders of gay liberation who lived in more repressive times.

This scandalizes the radical critics who then write books trying to explain for others on the far left what went wrong and whom to blame. The latest entry is Stanford University Prof. Paul Robinson's brief Queer Wars: The New Gay Right and Its Critics.

Robinson thinks "the emergence of gay conservatism as a political and intellectual force is arguably the most important new development in the gay world." Further, "the new conservatives have exercised an influence on the gay movement far in excess of the number of their actual converts." For Robinson this is something to be explained and, if possible, countered.

Queer Wars examines books by four writers Robinson alleges represent "the gay right" - blogger Andrew Sullivan, critic Bruce Bawer, broadcaster/columnist Michelangelo Signorile and former OutWeek publisher Gabriel Rotello - focusing on three issues and equating the failure to simultaneously embrace all three with "conservatism": the gay movement's supposed affiliation with the political left, the liberation of gender variance and liberated sexuality.

Then the book begins to fall apart.

Signorile and Rotello both turn out to be on the political left. Bawer, a New Deal Democrat when writing A Place at the Table, said virtually nothing about politics. Even Sullivan is described as a "classical liberal" à la John Stuart Mill - so not very conservative. For that matter, most gays you talk with are not on the far left but prefer fiscally prudent Democrats or socially liberal Republicans.

As for liberating gender variance, that seems to be a romantic fiction early gay leftists tried to sell. None of Robinson's writers endorse it, but then neither have most gay men, then or now. The gay clone style of the 1970s - and leather even more - was a clear rejection of the idea of gender deviance. Gay personal ads almost always insist on masculine partners. So if most gay men are "conservative" about gender, how are these writers discernibly different?

On the third issue of liberated sexuality, political leftists Signorile and Rotello turn out to be more conservative than the "conservative" Sullivan. For them, as for many other gays, the AIDS epidemic seems to have recommended a more cautious view. But likely even without AIDS, as gays and the gay movement matured, more gay men would have settled down anyway.

So Robinson offers supposed exemplars of "gay conservatism" who don't exemplify his definition, and supposedly defining issues that do not reliably differentiate "conservatives" from most gays. What Robinson really seems to object to are mainstream gay attitudes and writers who articulate those attitudes. But if Robinson thinks most gays are actually "conservative," then he must think anyone who is not a radical leftist is a conservative.

Just as Robinson's thesis falls apart, so does his mode of explication. He says he intends to "identify the tensions, even contradictions in their thinking." But contrary to Robinson, for instance, Sullivan's sexual liberalism hardly contradicts his mildly libertarian politics: they are parallel. Nor is it contradictory for Bawer to note that sexual orientation is all that gays have in common while opposing the idea that gay people are nothing but their sexuality.

Worse yet, while failing to find contradictions in his opponents, Robinson commits some whoppers of his own. First he says Sullivan and Bawer are less interested in enlightening right-wingers than in correcting leftists. Then he admits Bawer's book "is as much an attack on conservative homophobes as on gay radicals" and that Sullivan's book attempts to persuade conservatives to "amend their views of homosexuality."

Likewise, first he says Larry Kramer is an ancestor of the gay conservatives but later says he represents "the whole tradition of gay radicalism." First he says the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is "mainstream" but later admits it is part of "the institutional gay left." So was he not candid earlier?

Robinson clearly dislikes these writers. Writing a book about them was "a challenge to my tolerance." He finds some of their views "downright repugnant." He accuses them of being "grubby advocates for their own material interest." He asserts that they feel shame about homosexuality, feel "self-disgust and anxiety," are prudish, dislike sex or have low sex drives. And so forth.

The war over the word "queer" is over, Robinson says. "Queer" lost. So did the concept. All Robinson can do now is draw a mean-spirited caricature of the victors and make cheap personal attacks. Ultimately, this is a badly confused and dishonest polemic and no credit to the author - or the University of Chicago Press.

First published March 16, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

During a recent series of reports on widespread drug use at gay circuit parties, Chicago's WBBM-AM news interviewed a man at the party who told him the reason gay men use drugs:

"I think there's a lot of insecurities in the gay community. That's why there's a lot of drug use and stuff like that. I think they use that to feel more comfortable with who they are. You know, it's hard to be accepted as gay people in America as it is, so this is something to sort of cut the edge."

That view seems to be common. Berkeley psychologist Walter Odets similarly explained to the Chicago Tribune that gay men use crystal meth as "a terrific self-esteem enhancer" because "we have a widely depressed [gay] community living in the midst of a deadly epidemic and a society that's still, for the most part, unapproving."

That reasoning seems plausible. But think back. Where have we heard this explanation before?

Back in the 1970s, when sociologists (doing their research at gay bars) purported to find high rates of alcohol consumption among gays and lesbians, the rationale immediately offered was that we lived in a homophobic society and the pressures of societal hostility and the tensions of having to remain in the closet led gays and lesbians to seek relief in the anodyne, pain-deadening effects of alcohol.

Then during the 1980s, as AIDS irrupted into the gay male community, when some gay men continued to have sex with a large number of partners, the explanation was that gay men lived in a hostile society that devalued their lives, so it was not surprising that they sought personal validation by proving to themselves that they could attract lots of sexual partners.

Even today, when some gay men continue to engage in unprotected sex, you occasionally hear that, well, unprotected sex is more "intimate," and after all as an oppressed minority gay men are just trying to find ways to compensate for social opprobrium, feel better about themselves, etc., etc.

Oddly, no one seems willing to say out loud that frequent drug use, unprotected sex, or heavy drinking can be enjoyable and that is the main reason people engage in them. They hardly need social hostility or internal discomfort to find them fun, pleasurable, gratifying and ego-enhancing.

But no, there seems almost no enjoyable but risk-laden activity gays and lesbians might engage in that someone does not try to explain as the result of societal hostility or compensation for internal discomfort about being gay.

But if you think about it very long, that social-psychological explanation begins to seem pretty tired and threadbare and look less like a reason than an excuse, a rationalization, an alibi, for not just one but several reasons.

For one thing, it is no longer 1970 or 1980. It has been more than 35 years since Stonewall and more than 30 years since homosexuality was de-pathologized by the psychology and counseling establishments. Institutional and societal homophobia have abated significantly, so if they were the cause of imprudent behavior, that behavior should have decreased proportionally rather than continued, much less increased.

Then too, this supposedly homophobia-induced behavior is being noticed most prominently not in Alabama or Oklahoma, which really are homophobic, but in the gay enclaves of our most tolerant, urbane, blue state cities - New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. Some of the very people whose behavior is attributed to oppression even live and work in the gay enclave and hardly ever encounter societal hostility at all.

No doubt many of us felt, or at least were aware of, opprobrium toward gays when we were growing up - from our families, at school or from our churches. But people are not helpless victims of their childhood. We expect people to acquire a certain amount of self-knowledge and self-understanding as they mature, to come to terms with and get over the pains of childhood. That is part of what "growing up" means.

Furthermore, blaming homophobia fails to account for why most gays and lesbians, no less sensitive and subject to the same social pressures, now as well as during childhood, do not feel the need to engage to any great extent in these enjoyable but risk-laden activities. Somehow the majority of us manage to get along largely without them.

The social opprobrium model fails for all these reasons. But most of all it fails because it is too heavily influenced by an outdated behavioralist stimulus-response model of how humans function: Put in influence X, and generate behavior Y.

But people do not function that way; they are not machines. People have free will and personal agency. Talking as if they do not, as if they are in the grip of social influences they cannot resist is exactly the wrong message to send to them. We need to remind them of their ability to control their own lives. We effectuate their capacity for self-determination by reminding them that they have it, not by offering spurious reasons why they do not.