IGF CultureWatch

First published on April 28, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Two questions often asked about the gay community are: How many gays are there, and Where are they? The answer to the first question remains as controverted as ever, but for the first time we are beginning to obtain some approximation of the answer to the second.

In a fascinating new book, The Gay & Lesbian Atlas, Gary Gates and Jason Ost of Washington, D.C.'s Urban Institute used 2000 census data from the 600,000 same-sex couples who designated themselves "unmarried partners" to plot the location patterns of those gay couples across the U.S.

The handsomely produced, 230-page Atlas contains about 60 pages of methodology, analysis and description. But the heart of the book is the colored maps of each state and 25 major cities showing where gay and lesbian couples live, displayed by county as well as census tract (an area with 2000 people in it). The maps also show the relative concentration of gay couples - low (forest green), moderate (yellow), high (tan) and very high (burnt umber).

The best place to start is the national map on p.61 showing gay couple densities displayed by county. The map shows that gay and lesbian couples have higher concentrations in New England and downstate New York, along the California coast and in southern Florida. There is also a scattering through the southwest and southeast U.S.

Not surprisingly California, our most populous state, has the largest number of gay and lesbian couples, followed by New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. But it turns out that Vermont has the highest concentration (as a percentage of total households) of gay couples - and considerably more lesbian than gay male couples.

Also, interestingly, all the counties that have the greatest concentration of gay men contain major cities, while more than half of the counties with the highest concentration levels of lesbian couples contain smaller cities and towns, particularly college towns, and rural areas.

But counties hardly tell the whole story. For instance, Cook County, Ill. (Chicago) shows up as "high" concentration on the national map. But the map of Chicago itself (p.178), broken down by individual census tracts, shows that same-sex couples are clustered mainly on the north side toward lakefront.

More precisely, the separate Chicago maps for gays and lesbians show that gay male couples are more concentrated in the densely populated lakefront tracts while lesbian couples are a little more likely to live away from the lake and are more widely dispersed throughout the city - and the suburbs.

The same pattern holds for most other large cities: Gay men are densely clustered in a few areas, often near the center of the city, while lesbians are somewhat clustered and a little more widely dispersed. In a few cities the gay and lesbian clustering areas are markedly divergent.

The Atlas also tell us for each state and the 25 cities what percentage of same-sex households have children, what percentage are in various age brackets, and what percentage have a black, white, or Hispanic householder (the person who completed the census form).

Two questions arise. How can data about only a portion of gays tell us much about where all gays live? And what is that information good for anyway?

Even if only a small portion of same-sex couples identified themselves (and I think the Gates and Ost significantly overestimate the percentage who did), their location and density patterns fit roughly with our observations about where gays live for areas we know well.

As additional support, a Florida epidemiologist who compared the gay male couples data with location patterns of gay and bisexual men with HIV/AIDS, which would include single men as well as men in couples, found a high correlation between the two.

Even without specific numbers, gay residential patterns are useful for people who want to reach the gay community with public service information - e.g., AIDS or breast cancer education - or who want to provide social services to gays. Firms marketing products to gays can concentrate their efforts on areas where gays and/or lesbians actually live.

Gay concentration data should be particularly interesting to gays themselves when they are thinking about where they want to move to look for a job or retire and where in a particular city they want to live in order to find gay friends and social acceptance.

And finally, concentration data and even minimum numbers can let unwary politicians know they have gays and lesbians in their districts. Told that (at least) 55 gay couples lived in his town, one state senator blurted out, "Surely you jest. Wow, I have never met any of these people." (Whose fault is it if he has never met any gay couples who are constituents? I'm just asking, that's all.)

But most of all, the Atlas is just plain fun. Most of us like to read about ourselves and the Atlas offers a lot of interesting information in a visually appealing form.

First published on April 14, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Universities used to be storehouses of knowledge. That may still be true. But lately they seem to have become storehouses of facile ideologies and ponderous rhetoric. Take this announcement about a recent university conference, "The Media Queered":

"Since the 1960s, queer people have become increasingly visible in the media. Queer identities in community life and politics may rely in the 21st century on the prevailing media landscape. The paradoxes of visibility are many: spurring tolerance through harmful stereotyping, diminishing isolation at the cost of activism, trading assimilation for equality, converting radicalism into a market niche. A day-long symposium will explore visibility and its discontents."

None of this seems very coherent. To the extent it is coherent it seems simply wrong.

To be sure, gays and lesbians have become ever more visible in the media - television, newspapers, films - the last 35 years. This is a good thing. It has helped promote familiarity and comfort with gays. But it is bizarre to think "our community life and politics" will be limited to (or by) what is presented in the media.

It can hardly limit our community life because we see real live gays and lesbians around us every day with a wide variety of identities and ways of living. And after all, the very limited range of gay identities the media presented early on - a simpering Liberace, a bitter, sarcastic Paul Lynde - did not limit the wide range of personalities or identities actual gays and lesbians developed.

In fact, it was growing awareness of the wide range of real gays and lesbians that forced (or permitted) the media to expand beyond the limited identities (or stereotypes) they initially presented. We can expect that expansion to continue - as the media offer an ever-wider range of gay people.

And media visibility can hardly limit our politics because as more and more gays come out, other people's perception of gays will increasingly be based on their familiarity with and observations of actual gays they come in contact with and not be limited to the gay identities presented in the media.

All this should be obvious. But, typically, the academic deconstructionists or so-called "critical theorists" make two errors here. They get cause and effect exactly reversed, and they assume that representations of the world ("the text") are more important, more influential, than the world itself.

To use their own language, they "mistake the ontological priority" and they wrongly "prioritize the text" - perhaps because academics exist to some extent apart from the world and "texts" (representations) are what they know how to study. Or often not even texts but theories about texts.

Paradoxes - about anything - are big in "critical theory." They supposedly demonstrate that there are paradoxes or contradictions somehow inherent in the structure of the real world. But contradictions don't exist in the structure of reality. The world just is.

The supposed paradoxes or contradictions are the result of confusions or inadequacies in people's theories or concepts about the world. Quantum mechanics has not been reconciled with general relativity, but physicists don't say the universe contains contradictions. They know the problem is with their theories.

You would think this increasing media visibility and public acceptance of gays would be welcomed. In fact, it could hardly be puzzling or exhibit "contradictions" except to people who assumed that American society was bad and feared the acceptance of gays and lesbians because that might reduce their sense of alienation from society. Consider:

• "Spurring tolerance through harmful stereotyping." This is not paradoxical, it is simply wrong. The old presentations of Liberace or the gay character who committed suicide or died of AIDS - or complete lesbian invisibility - those were the harmful stereotypes. But the implication of The L Word that lesbians might actually be attractive? How awful! How oppressive! Or the fascist stereotype on Queer Eye that gay men might have style or a sense of humor? Oh, the horror, the horror.
• "Diminishing isolation at the cost of activism." So we should preserve isolation in order to preserve activism? But what has all our activism been for if not to diminish the legal, social, psychological, and spiritual isolation gays and lesbians once faced. Nor need acceptance inhibit activism. This supposed "paradox" is based on a complete misunderstanding of human psychology.
• "Trading assimilation for equality." Deconstructionist writing is generally turgid, but this is uncommonly opaque. In any case, the tacit assumption here is false. There is no trade-off between acceptance and equality. The full social and legal inclusion of gays in society what equality means. Nor are gays likely to lose any inherent gay qualities in the process - if they are genuinely inherent and not merely artifacts of forced inequality.
• "Converting radicalism into a market niche." Again activism and commerce are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive. The two realms are synergistic. In fact much of recent gay progress has been in the corporate and economic realm. Only someone with an uninformed, knee-jerk hostility to capitalism and business could resent this progress.

First published on April 7, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Few artists before the present era have left so clear a record of their homosexuality as Michelangelo.

The great 16th century Italian sculptor, painter and poet - styled "Il Divino" by his contemporaries - is best known to us now for a famous Pieta, his 15-foot statue of David, and frescoes in Rome's Sistine Chapel depicting scenes from Genesis and "The Last Judgment."

We could even describe the statue of the naked David with its curiously large hands, and the chapel's "Creation of Adam" with its languorous Adam reaching out toward God, as "Michelangelo's Greatest Hits."

The best place to start, though, is an early (1503-4) painting of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus. While the holy family are at the center, in the background are five young men, four of them naked, obviously more interested in one another than in the holy family. One seems to be trying to pull the cloak off the youth still wearing one. They serve no obvious purpose in the painting and seem to be there because Michelangelo wanted them there.

Mary gazes up soulfully at Jesus' face but reaches out toward his genitals. It was common in Renaissance paintings to emphasize the infant Jesus' genitals by pointing to them or placing them at the center of a painting in order to assert Jesus' full humanity - and maleness - but here Mary seems about to grasp them. It was not Michelangelo's last depiction of female attention to male genitalia.

The enormous frescoes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-12) depict scenes from the Old Testament. But between the paintings at junctures in the ceiling are some 20 well-muscled naked young men, each carefully individuated. They play no role in the biblical scenes and seem off in their own worlds - bored, scowling, joking or gesturing playfully - although one man noticing the Creation of Adam seems surprised and one glancing back at the Flood behind him looks alarmed.

The Temptation scene is particularly interesting not only for its hunky, mature Adam and decidedly female serpent, but because Eve is placed sitting in front of a standing, naked Adam, her face inches away from his crotch, just turning away momentarily to take the fruit from the serpent as if she had been interrupted while doing something else.

Two decades later, Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint "The Last Judgment" above the altar. There are an enormous number of characters surrounding a quite healthy and heavily muscled Jesus. The saved, the condemned and various demons all have physiques that would do credit to the best of today's steroid-enhanced bodybuilders.

Here the risen St. Sebastian is no willowy, agonized martyr but an extremely handsome, well-muscled youth holding in his hand the arrows that killed him. Here too St. Catherine looks over her shoulder toward the crotch of an originally naked St. Blasius, one of several elements that contemporaries found obscene and "fit for a bordello." Two male figures hugging each other toward the upper right remain unidentified.

Michelangelo never married and was never linked romantically with any woman. To the contrary, his poems and letters contain expressions of fervent affection for young men such as Cecchino de Bracci, Febo di Poggio and especially the young nobleman Tommaso Cavalieri.

The one woman Michelangelo befriended - after he was 60 - was the widow Vittoria Colona, something of a spiritual friend, and no one will be surprised to read that she had a "severe, masculine face." In one of his poems, Michelangelo described her as "a man in a woman."

Without doubt, the great love of his life was the vibrantly handsome Tommaso Cavalieri, whom he met in 1532 when he was 57 and Tommaso 23. Michelangelo wrote love letters and ardent love poems to him and in 1533 sent him a series of erotic drawings, the most famous of which depicts Zeus disguised as an eagle abducting a young Ganymede. In Michelangelo's drawing, the eagle presses its body tightly against the back of the smiling, pliant Ganymede.

Michelangelo's poems to Cavalieri were extravagant. "Your name nourishes my heart and soul filing each with such sweetness ... If my eyes had their share of you, only think how happy I would be." In another he wishes his hairy skin to be made into a breastplate for Tommaso and "Were I two slippers he could own and use as base to his majestic weight, I would enjoy two snowy feet at least."

Michelangelo was born out of his time. He would have been far happier in fifth century Athens. But he must have felt that if the Greeks could portray their gods and heroes as handsome musclemen, Christianity could too. He did not completely persuade his contemporaries, nor ours, but it is a tribute to his art that he came so close.

First published March 5, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

I cannot say for sure that the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, which now has President George W. Bush's approval and support, will not pass.

People with more political expertise than I think that with the opposition of liberal Democrats and pro-federalism Republicans it will not obtain the two-thirds vote needed to pass Congress. Others think legislatures in at least 15 or 16 states will be unwilling to yield yet another state power to the federal government - and only 13 are needed.

But because the outcome is uncertain this is the ideal opportunity for us to make our arguments for same-sex marriage as clearly and as often as we can. Never before have we had the public and the media paying so much attention to our arguments and our personal stories demonstrating the desire and need for gay marriage.

Nevertheless, while fighting a constitutional ban is vitally important now, it is encouraging to realize that in the long run anti-gay zealots are fighting a losing war and whether or not the amendment passes, same-sex marriage will eventually be legal. That assessment is based on consideration of the slow but relentless economic and social pressures that underlie politics and public opinion. They include:

• Young people's support. Since 1997 the annual survey of college freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA has shown an increasing majority of 18 year olds favoring "legal marital status" for gays and lesbians. Other surveys show the same thing. Where young people are today, society as a whole will be in 10 or 20 years, because they will be society. Given this trend Bush will probably be the last anti-gay U.S. president, just as George Wallace the last overtly segregationist governor.
• Women in business and politics. Women are already a majority of students in college and law school and an increasing percentage in business schools. Every survey shows far more support among women for same-sex marriage, so as these women become more influential in business, law and politics, they bring their gay-friendly attitudes, countering the aggressive prissiness about gays common in older heterosexual men for whom hostility to gays is a key component of their male identity and male self-presentation.
• More religious ceremonies. FMA or no, more and more individual churches will find ways to offer same-sex blessing ceremonies, union ceremonies and even wedding ceremonies. Responding to heartfelt pleas from gay couples, more ministers, rabbis and priests will offer blessings and marriage ceremonies as a pastoral obligation and an ecclesiastical statement of conscience, even in religious sects that do not authorize such ceremonies.
• Employee partner benefit. More and more corporations, large and small, will feel the pressure to grant same-sex partner benefits and then add more extensive benefits over time in order to compete for and retain skilled gay employees. That too will help legitimize gay partnerships and pave the way for gay marriage. In the United States, where business leads, politicians will follow eventually - reluctantly, perhaps, but inevitably.
• Gay couples' visibility. The 2000 census data reporting that at least 600,000 gay and lesbian couples consider themselves partners gave a boost to the pressure for gay marriage. The number is a vast undercount by a factor of five or more, of course, but it was more than most heterosexuals would have expected and gave at least minimal quantitative evidence for existing gay coupledom. In the next census that figure will double and in 2020 double again.
• The wedding industry. In a Feb. 29 New York Times column Frank Rich made the interesting point that several businesses have an interest in supporting gay marriage. As more heterosexual couples have low key civil ceremonies or simply live together, the sizable travel and wedding industries - wedding planners, florists, photographers, musicians - and perhaps others will support gay marriage as a valuable source of replacement income.
• Federalism. A little noted advantage of federalism is that it forces states to compete with one another in areas such as taxation, business climate and quality of life considerations. States that establish gay partnerships or civil unions will have an advantage both in luring gays who are deciding where to take their job skills and in promoting a state's social openness to businesses deciding where to establish a new plant or office. Then as people become accustomed to gay unions, pressure will build to turn those civil unions into what they really are - marriages.
• Foreign influence. A few nations and two provinces of Canada have legalized gay marriage or its close equivalent. Several others grant significant legal and economic rights to same-sex couples, arrangements that will be added to over time and eventually be turned into marriage. The experience of other countries can show skeptics that gay marriage is nothing to fear, undermining dire warnings that gay marriage will harm society.

Gay marriage will happen. The Federal Marriage Amendment is simply a delaying tactic by religious zealots who never heard the story of King Canute.

First published on February 25, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

When some opponents of gay marriage try to argue for their view, after they ritually condemn homosexuality they will claim that gay marriage "damages society" and "undermines marriage" in some unspecified way and end by postulating deplorable consequences of gay marriage: "If we allow gay marriage, then people will want to practice polygamy and marry their pets."

Well, when our opponents are reduced to arguing that gay marriage is bad because it might lead to something else, we have won the argument. When they have to change the subject, it means they do not have any good arguments against gay marriage itself.

You would think if the religious right were really so worried about polygamy - and whatever they privately think they do argue that way - they would use their energy to a) explain clearly how gay marriage could plausibly lead to polygamy and b) explain clearly why polygamy is bad. Yet they make little effort to do either.

Perhaps that is because nothing in the principles supporting gay marriage provides any support for the legalization of any other type of relationship, much less polygamy And the legalization of polygamy seems very unlikely anyway in modern societies like the U.S.

Over the centuries, heterosexual marriage shifted from being a merger contract between families or an economic and sexual arrangement to assure creation of legal heirs and caretakers for one's old age, and came to be understood primarily as a companionate relationship of mutual caring between two people who love each other.

But once the affectional bond became the central element of marriage, the rationale for limiting it to pairs who would procreate lost its force. Gays want nothing more than to participate in "traditional marriage" thus understood - marriage for the benefit of the marrying partners: meshing a person's life with someone they love.

Gays are not arguing that people should be able to have whatever marital arrangement they want. They argue only that everyone should have access to marriage as it is now commonly understood. Nor are gays arguing for any legal rights other people do not have. They argue that they are uniquely denied a right everyone else already has - the right to marry someone they love.

By contrast, an advocate of legal polygamy cannot argue that he (or she) is seeking anything akin to traditional marriage - unless the Old Testament is considered "traditional." Nor can he argue he is being denied a right that everyone else has. He would have to argue that he desires and deserves a new right that no one currently has. Perhaps that argument could be made but it has not been so far.

Now, if gay marriage opponents wish to argue that it could lead to polygamy, they also have to explain why polygamy is undesirable. After all, polygamy survived for centuries in many parts of the world and lingers in most Muslim countries today. In fact, the religious right has the causal relationship backward. Gay marriage does not lead to polygamy. Polygamy, however indirectly, led to gay marriage.

In any case, while there are some interesting arguments against legal polygamy, none of which would be weakened by gay marriage, it is more relevant to point out that polygamy was a response to certain pre-modern social conditions but that modern egalitarian, capitalist and individualist societies create little need for and considerable pressure against polygamy.

Polygamy flourished in primitive, male-dominated societies where women had little freedom of movement, education or employment skills and were dependent on men, where inequalities of wealth allowed some men to acquire several wives while others had none, and/or where male deaths in frequent military campaigns sharply reduced the number of potential husbands.

But in modern societies, women have equal access to advanced education and economic independence, social value apart from the status or wealth of a husband, and an equal male-female ratio. It is hard to imagine many women in the contemporary U.S. cheerfully welcoming competing wives or voluntarily becoming a second, third, or fourth wife.

In addition, women in third world nations - and southern Utah - who have left polygamous households describe them as rife with favoritism, rivalries, domestic abuse, and the like. It is hard to imagine a modern, educated woman entering or staying in such a family environment.

Nor would polygamy seem desirable for most males. Assuming an equal male-female population, a man who married two or more women would deprive one or more heterosexual men of the pleasures of a romantic, sexual and domestic life with a wife.

In fact, we may say that just as same-sex marriage is good because it allows more people to enjoy the pleasures and benefits of marriage, polygamy is undesirable because it deprives some people of the pleasures and benefits of marriage.

In short: None of the principles supporting gay marriage offers support for polygamy. Rather the opposite. And polygamy is not likely to be widely advocated because - unlike same-sex marriage - it answers no needs and removes no inequities in modern societies.

First published on February 11, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Back in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, you could scarcely go out to bars on weekend nights without paying a door charge "for AIDS" or being asked by some fresh-face young man to contribute to AIDS education. Bars held raffles, sales, fundraisers garnering anywhere from a few hundred to several hundred dollars.

Then the head of some AIDS group would step forward, accept the money and thank the crowd for "helping support the fight against this dread disease," telling us how wonderful we all were. And we would smile and applaud because we knew we were helping the fight against AIDS and we were wonderful.

For years, I cheerfully contributed a few dollars each time I was asked. After all, it was a worthy cause, I knew people with AIDS, some dying, and I was glad to help as much as I could.

Then sometime in the late 1980s I read that the head of the largest local gay health organization doing AIDS work was paid a salary of something like four or five times my admittedly rather unimpressive annual income at the time.

That made me stop and think. And I stopped contributing. The amounts this woman was gushing over and thanking people for contributing would barely pay her salary for a day or two, much less go to help anyone with AIDS. If she were so concerned about AIDS, I wondered, how much of her own salary she was contributing?

And this was while I was doing a considerable amount of volunteer AIDS-advocacy work of my own within the all-volunteer state gay advocacy organization.

So I resolved to make no more contributions to AIDS groups unless there were full disclosure. That is, unless I knew how much the executives made, how much money actually went to useful projects, and what specific things the money went for. And that information was seldom if ever available.

I thought back to all this when I recently read an article in the Washington Blade detailing the salaries of executive directors of more than a dozen gay advocacy groups.

Joan Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, headed the list with salary and benefits of about $210,000. Next was Elizabeth Birch, until recently head of the Human Rights Campaign, paid a total of $200,000. Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's Kevin Cathcart was third at not quite $200,000. Kevin Jennings, founder and head of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network earns about $165,000. And so forth.

These salaries are higher than most of us earn, at least more than I earn. I suppose they are not out of line with salaries in other social advocacy groups. If they seem high, maybe we are too used to thinking of gay advocacy as something you do as some sort of personal sacrifice.

And, after all, executive directors do have responsibility for the survival and growth of their organizations: setting policy, hiring staff, being a spokesperson, keeping the money flowing in, and doing what we hope is effective advocacy.

Still, since that moment of revelation years ago, my standards for contributing have risen. Fundraising letters waving the bloody shirt of religious right have no impact on me. Don't tell me about the menace, tell me what you are going to do about it. I want specifics. I figure if they are soliciting our money, we have the right, the obligation, to know what they are going to do with it. And how do we do that? Do they issue annual reports of what they achieved with the money we gave last year? Don't even ask.

In my book Kevin Jennings gets a free pass. He founded GLSEN, working courageously in the minefield of homosexuality and young people. He has written books, given innumerable speeches to educators and sparked those high school Gay/Straight Alliances. If anyone deserves his salary Jennings does. And Cathcart's Lambda Legal files high profile suits against unjust laws and policies and often wins. Perhaps no other gay organizations achieve such obvious results with so comparatively little money.

But the others? Especially GLAAD, best known for holding glittery fundraisers and award ceremonies "honoring" pop culture personalities, piggybacking on other people's achievements. And when we learn that Garry's $210,000 salary is a stunning 5 percent of her organization's total annual revenue of $4 million, something seems awry. Do they need my $25? I'm sure Garry can afford groceries without it.

I don't in principle begrudge executives making more money than I do, even a lot more. Maybe they deserve it. Some certainly do. But if they still want me to contribute, they had better give me a really good reason to contribute to them rather than any one of several other groups.

Just for starters, keep in mind that most statewide gay organizations are desperately poor - yet the state level is where most gay political issues are being decided - gay adoption and foster care, hate crime and civil rights laws, gay marriage and partnership issues, and state ratification or rejection of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment.

First published February 4, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

One of the biblical trump cards for fundamentalist Christians and Jews in their opposition to homosexuality and gay equality is the passage in the Old Testament book of Leviticus 20:13 which reads:

"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them." (Revised Standard Version)

But there are problems here. First, notice that this passage says absolutely nothing about a woman lying with a woman. In fact, nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is there any injunction against women engaging in lesbian sex. Ruth and Naomi may not have had a lesbian relationship, but they could have had they wanted to. So fundamentalists cannot cite this passage as a prohibition against anything regarding lesbian equality.

Second, although the passage clearly calls for (non-celibate) gay men to be executed, few fundamentalists except "Reconstructionist" Christian followers of the late theologian R.J. Rushdoony advocate execution for homosexual acts. But if most fundamentalists do not accept the Bible teaching about execution why do they accept the biblical condemnation itself? Both are in their Bible.

Third, as with other topics, the Old Testament is not without contradiction on the issue of homosexuality. Leviticus itself just two chapters earlier provides an alternative view, seldom cited by fundamentalists. Leviticus 18:22 and 29 reads:

"You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. ... For whoever shall do any of these abominations, the persons that do them shall be cut off from among their people."

The point to notice here is that while gay male sex is again described as an "abomination" - that is, a violation of cultic purity - this passage mandates no punishment. It is simply an injunction to Hebrew men on how to please Yahweh and achieve prosperity. Men who engage in gay sex are only to be ejected from the religious community. This plainly contradicts Lev. 20:13, yet fundamentalists explain neither the contradiction nor why they generally cite the later passage.

That said, it is worth pulling back from fundamentalist literalism and looking at these passages in their historical context. Both passages are part of a larger unit including Leviticus chs. 17-26 that Bible scholars call the Holiness Code.

The Holiness Code in the form it comes down to us consists of a repetitious and disorderly collection of several smaller law codes containing overlapping regulations written at different times and under different circumstances. Biblical scholar Otto Eissfeldt in his The Old Testament: An Introduction, puts it this way: "Whoever united them wished to alter their content as little as possible and had to let the duplicates stand."

Thus, for instance, Lev. 20:10-26 is more or less a parallel to 18:6-30, except that the second version has penalties attached where the first version does not. The likeliest explanation is that, as the New English Bible observes, "The two chapters were once independent, self-contained units."

It is not definitely known when the Holiness Code was patched together, but it was well after the Hebrews became numerous in Israel because Lev. 25-29 refers to the Canaanites having already been expelled. Clearly the compiler forgot that he was supposed to be impersonating a scribe at the time of Moses. According to Eissfeldt, the Code probably dates from sometime after the Hebrews returned from exile but in any case no earlier than 550 B.C., although it contains some older material.

It is tempting to imagine that the prohibition of male homosexuality without penalties was written when the Hebrews lacked political power to mandate penalties and the prohibition with penalties was written when they did have that power.

However that may be, nowadays we might wonder why the Hebrews condemned homosexuality. The Old Testament explanation is that Yahweh condemned the male prostitution that was a religious practice of the rival Canaanites. But this answer has difficulties.

For one thing, it is hard to see why disapproval of sacred male prostitution by a rival religious cult should lead to disapproval of non-religious, non-prostitutional sex between males. For another, the Levitical language actually seems to come into the Hebrew codes as a late borrowing from the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism which the Hebrews came into contact with during the exile and which condemned "the man who lies with mankind as man lies with womankind."

Third, despite the Old Testament claim, there is little evidence that Canaanite religious practice actually included sacred male prostitution. The accusation seems merely to have been part of the backdated fifth-century polemic against the Canaanites.

After a comprehensive examination of the available historical evidence for sacred prostitution, Kenyon College religion professor Robert Oden wrote in his book The Bible without Theology, the accusation of sacred prostitution "played an important role in defining Israel and Israelite religion as something distinctive. ... However, that it existed in ancient Syria-Palestine or Mesopotamia is not demonstrated in any of the evidence to which appeal is so frequently made."

{Author's note: Since the first publication of this piece, my attention has been drawn to sociologist Stephen O. Murray's recent comprehensive study Homosexualities (University of Chicago Press, 2000) in which, drawing on different sources and different evidence, he also concludes that Canaanite sacred prostitution did not exist. Referring to the supposed cult prostitutes or "qdeshim" mentioned in the Old Testament, Murray says, "There is no evidence that their sexual services were sold to men or that having sex with them had any religious significance" (p. 295).}

First published January 30, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Each September during freshman orientation, the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA conducts a survey of more than 275,000 first-year college students, asking questions about their backgrounds, education and career plans, and views on controversial social issues.

Among the questions is one which asks whether "it is important to have laws prohibiting homosexual relationships" and one added in 1997 that asks whether "same sex couples should have the right to legal marital status" - essentially civil unions or civil marriage.

It was reasonable to wonder if this year's freshmen would show diminished support for gay equality. The Supreme Court decision last June decriminalizing sodomy was immediately denounced by conservative and evangelical leaders not only for its substance but even more for opening the door to gay marriage, a possibility characterized as a threat to "family values."

At least as of September the freshmen did not seem to have been impressed by that alarmist message. Support for "laws prohibiting homosexual relationships," probably interpreted as Defense of Marriage laws, rose just 1.3 points over last year's freshmen to a not very impressive 26.1 percent. So barely one-fourth of the freshman think it is necessary to prohibit formalized gay partnerships.

And freshman support for "legal marital status" for gay couples remained essentially unchanged at 59.4 percent. That figure is actually a minute increase over last year's 59.3 percent, but the change is statistically negligible. In any case, it means that six out of ten college freshmen support gay civil marriage.

It is encouraging to notice that that level of support continues even as the proportion of freshmen describing themselves as liberal or "far left" fell slightly to 27 percent and the proportion describing themselves as conservative or "far right" rose 1.4 points to 22.7 percent. Almost exactly half (50.3 percent) describe themselves as "middle of the road."

This means two-thirds of the "middle of the road" freshmen continue to favor "legal marital status" for gays. So support for gay civil unions or gay civil marriage is - for college freshmen - the "middle of the road" position.

As in every other survey, women are more gay-friendly than men. More than two-thirds of freshman women - 66.9 percent - support "legal marital status" for gays, an increase of 0.6 over last year. That increase was canceled out by an identical decrease of 0.6 points from last year among freshman men, down to 50.2 percent - still more than half.

Also as in all previous years, bright freshmen are more gay-supportive than less bright freshmen. Both men and women at public and private universities requiring high SAT scores are 8 percentage points more likely to support "legal marital status" for gays than freshmen at universities with lower SAT requirements.

It is worth stepping back to ask what these figures could tell us. For one thing, the steady progress of gay-support paused. Here are the percentages of freshmen favoring civil marriage for gays:

• 1997 - 50.9 percent.
• 1998 - 52.4 percent.
• 1999 - 53.9 percent.
• 2000 - 56 percent.
• 2001 - 57.9 percent.
• 2002 - 59.3 percent.
• 2003 - 59.4 percent.

The survey was taken two months after the Supreme Court's sodomy law decision so the conservative reaction may have had some influence. Since then, anti-gay pressure has mounted in reactions to gay Episcopal bishop and the Massachusetts decision on gay marriage, so a survey now might show slightly lower support.

Many thoughtful people think a majority of Americans have not had time to become comfortable with gay progress. Young people who grow up knowing gays and seeing them on television don't have to adapt: this is the world they know. But for adults, becoming comfortable with social change is a slow process and some never adjust.

Alan Ebenstein, biographer of social philosopher Friedrich Hayek e-mailed me, "In many respects, the societies of today practice more toleration, acceptance, and celebration of homosexuals and homosexuality than almost any in history. ... (But) the social changes of the past 40 years or so have been too great in too short a period of time from a system that was in many, if not all, respects working tolerably for there not to be some sort of a social reaction."

Certainly the hesitation we are seeing is to be expected and we may see a brief downturn in support. But I think if we continue to expand our gay visibility, share our lives calmly and openly, and work to create empathy for our desire for an equal chance for happiness and a meaningful life, we can make sufficient progress among the young who keep coming along to counter-balance and overcome the anxiety reaction among older Americans.

I think we currently have sufficient support to block a constitutional gay marriage ban. But in any case an open debate can only gain us additional support. And in the long run, with the turnover of the generations eventually the majority of Americans will be comfortable enough with us to see that we richly deserve the same legal opportunities they have.

First published on January 7, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press. This version has been slightly revised.

Have you noticed how seldom the defenders of marriage as an exclusive heterosexual privilege talk about love as a reason for marrying?

They give a number of reasons why only heterosexuals should be allowed to marry: the procreation of children, the preservation of social stability, the purported "fit" of the male and female genitalia. But they never seem to mention that men and women might love each other and want to spend their lives together.

This is odd if you think about it. Of all the motivations heterosexuals might have for marrying, love would seem to be first and foremost. Is it really likely that a man might say to a women, "I notice that our genitals would fit together well. Would you marry me?" or "Our nation needs to generate more children. Please be my wife."

But the defenders of exclusionary heterosexual marriage dare not mention love because they know that if they admit for one moment that one primary reason people marry is love, then gays and lesbians - who have as much capacity for love as heterosexuals - would have just as much claim to marriage as heterosexuals. And they know most Americans would realize that.

Not that they came to this point willingly. During much of the 1990s, religious right groups such as the Traditional Values Coalition tried to deny the existence of same-sex love. They characterized committed gay and lesbian couples as "sex partners" or "just friends who have sex."

Apparently that was not broadly persuasive. Perhaps the slowly growing visibility of gay couples was a factor, or awareness of the 600,000 same-sex couples acknowledged in the 2000 census. In any case, that tactic was largely abandoned.

So gay marriage opponents have been forced to retreat to curiously strained or insubstantial reasons based on human physiology ("natural fit") or so-called "social policy" (e.g., the need for babies, two parents families, etc.).

Consider the argument that we need heterosexual-only marriage in order to be sure the nation and/or the human race will survive. In fact, heterosexuals are creating babies at a high rate. In 1950, the U.S. population was 150 million. By 2000, the U.S. population was 280 million.

So the problem is not one of inducing heterosexuals to marry so there will be more children. They are having plenty of children. The problem is that heterosexuals are having children without marriage. In 1990, 26.6 percent of babies were born to unmarried women. By 2000, 33.2 percent were born to unmarried women. So the task is inducing heterosexuals who have children to marry.

Religious right advocates say allowing gay marriage would separate the concepts of marriage and child-rearing. You can be sure that if gay couples had been able to marry during the 1990s, religious right polemicists would have blamed the rising birthrates among single women on gay marriage. But it is clear that many heterosexuals already separate marriage and child-rearing.

So the religious right argument amounts to this: Because heterosexuals are producing children without marrying, therefore homosexuals should not be permitted to marry. Another way to put that is: Because many heterosexuals who produce children do not love each other enough to marry, therefore we should not permit same-sex couples who love each other to marry.

The core question then is: What does prohibiting loving gay couples from marrying do to increase the likelihood that unmarried heterosexual procreators will feel enough love for each other so they will want to marry? How exactly might that work?

But if gay marriage opponents fall back on illogical arguments against gay marriage, they also conspicuously avoid mention of ways in which gay married couples can be a social good and help solve the very problems they claim to be concerned about.

Single parents, usually women, face real challenges. Researchers have found substantial social problems associated with single parenting: Higher crime rates, drug abuse, lower educational attainments, chronic poverty. Many single mothers are unwilling or unable to care for their children, so the children are put up for adoption or foster care.

But if the problem is heterosexual procreators who do not marry, one obvious solution is adoption by married gay and lesbian couples. In most states gays can already adopt and provide foster care for children. By marrying, gay couples would be able to provide evidence of their love for each other, their commitment to the concept of family, and greater assurance of a stable and loving home life for children than unmarried parents can.

Because the arguments against gay marriage are so poor but advanced so fervently, we might wonder if gay marriage opponents are arguing in good faith. That is, are they using arguments they find convincing, or ones they may not themselves believe but hope will convince others. If the latter, then they must be reluctant to submit their actual reasons for opposing gay marriage to public scrutiny.

First published on December 24, 2003, in the Chicago Free Press. This version has been slightly revised.

In most ways, 2003 seemed to be a year of accomplishments: The Supreme Court struck down 13 state sodomy laws; the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court struck down the state's prohibition on same-sex marriage; Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer, added sexual orientation to its non-discrimination clause; and "Queer Eye" became an instant, widely discussed hit.

But 2004 looks far more like a mixed bag. On the positive side, same-sex couples seem poised to be able to marry in Massachusetts some time in 2004. New Jersey seems certain to adopt some sort of civil union legislation. MTV - without Showtime - will finally launch a long-delayed gay-oriented cable channel. More large and mid-sized companies will add domestic partner benefits and more Gay/Straight Alliances will be formed in high schools.

Also on the positive side, industrial productivity started what appears to be a sustained growth. The Dow broke the 10,000 barrier again and seems likely to go further. Inflation is likely to continue at a gratifyingly low level. Saddam Hussein's capture secures the end of his Stalinesque dictatorship, weakens the opposition to a democratic Iraq and hastens the reduction of American forces there. These are things to be grateful for and President Bush deserves some credit for them.

But those good things about the economy and foreign affairs also mean that President Bush, the least gay-supportive candidate, seems likely to win reelection in November. Bush continues to support "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" despite its obvious failure and injustice. He opposes gay marriage and probably supports a constitutional amendment prohibiting it. He seems more concerned about AIDS in the rest of the world than in the United States. While he urges "tolerance" for gays, he seems unable to say a single word in our favor.

Not only is Bush likely to be re-elected, but Republicans seem likely to increase their majority in the Senate by 2-3 seats and in the House by 6-8 seats, making non-discrimination legislation and repeal of the military gay ban non-starters.

To be sure, the most plausible Democratic presidential contenders win no prizes, but at least they are better on gay issues. All say they support some sort of same-sex civil unions. And the leading contender, Howard Dean, is likely to be the most open in support of civil unions since he has a record to justify. All except the evasive General Clark explicitly favor an end to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," although they do not bother to explain how they could push repeal legislation through a Republican Congress.

On the other hand, none of the plausible Democratic contenders favors gay marriage any more than President Bush does, although all say they oppose a constitutional amendment prohibiting it and Dean advocates federal entitlements for couples with civil unions. The key question then is, do they support the Defense of Marriage Act with its discrimination against any legally married gay couples? Only Dean and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry oppose DOMA.

But even if the others support DOMA's stipulation that the Constitution's "Full Faith and Credit" clause should not force recalcitrant states to recognize out-of-state gay marriages, what argument can they offer in favor of the federal government itself discriminating against gay couples? If they support federal non-discrimination laws, which they say they do, on what principle do they think the government itself should discriminate? Probably the principle of "I want to win."

I said Bush "probably" supports a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. Who knows? In his December 16 interview with the ill-prepared Diane Sawyer, Bush said "If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment," "We may need a Constitutional amendment" and "It (the Defense of Marriage Act) may be undermined at this point."

The words to notice are: "if necessary," "we may need" and "may be undermined." Everything is in a tentative mode. Bush certainly sounded as if he would have no trouble supporting an anti-gay marriage amendment, but he avoided making a specific endorsement or saying what would trigger an endorsement. It is a complicated game of signals Bush is playing, trying to suggest something to everyone while avoiding anything specific.

Most likely, Bush is waiting to see (a) where public opinion jells, and (b) if the election looks so close that he needs to generate religious conservative zeal on his behalf. Ironically, that could well mean that the more likely Bush seems to win, the less pressure he will feel to endorse the amendment. Nobody said politics was simple.

Whatever happens in national politics, we can look forward to gains at the state and local level as more jurisdictions approve non-discrimination laws or domestic partners registries. More important in the long run, we can expect more visibility in the field of popular entertainment and more support in the private business sector as more companies adopt favorable employment practices and/or initiate marketing outreach to gays. So our progress toward equality will continue despite the ups and downs of national politics.