IGF CultureWatch

Reprinted with permission from the "Encyclopedia of Homosexuality" (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1990), copyright Wayne R. Dynes, 1990.

This word is found only in some manuscripts of the New Testament Gospel of Matthew at 5:22, where the King James Version reads:

"But I say unto you that ... whosoever shall say to his brother, Racha, shall be in danger of the counsel...."

The text of the gospel includes no explanatory gloss, as is usual with foreign words that would otherwise have been unintelligible to the Greek reader, and the majority of modern commentators understand the word as Semitic: raka = Hebrew reqa, "empty, emptyheaded, brainless."

Yet there is an alternative meaning proposed in 1922 by Friedrich Schulthess, an expert in Syriac and Palestinian Christian Aramaic: he equated the word with Hebrew rakh, "soft," which would thus be equivalent to Greek malakos/malthakos, which denote the passive-effeminate homosexual.

Further, in 1934 a papyrus was published from Hellenistic Egypt of the year 257 before the Christian era that contains the word rachas in an unspecified derogatory sense, but a parallel text suggests that it had the meaning kinaidos ("faggot"). It would thus have been a loanword from Hebrew in the vulgar speech of the Greek settlers in Egypt.

A modern counterpart is the word rach, "tender, soft, effeminate, timid, cowardly" in the Gaunersprache, the argot of German beggars and criminals, which has absorbed many terms from Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic because of social conditions that created a linguistic interface between the Jewish "fence" and the gentile thief.

The import of the Gospel passage is that whereas the old Law forbade only murder, the new morality of the church forbids aggression even in purely symbolic, verbal forms, and the ascending scale of offenses and penalties is tantamount to a prohibition of what is called in Classical Arabic mufaharah, the ritualized verbal duel that is often the prelude to combat and actual bloodshed.

So Jesus is represented as forbidding his followers to utter insults directed at the other party's masculinity - a practice that has scarcely gone out of fashion in the ensuing nineteen centuries, as the contemporary vogue of "faggot" well attests.

So it cannot be maintained that Jesus "never mentioned homosexuality," as some gay Christian apologists claim.

In the sphere of sexual morality Jesus demanded an even higher standard than did contemporary Palestinian and Hellenistic Judaism, which uncompromisingly reflected and condemned the homosexual expression that was commonplace and tolerated in the Gentile world. Thus Christianity inherited not merely the Jewish taboo on homosexual behavior, but an ascetic emphasis foreign to Judaism itself which has always had a procreation-oriented moral code.

What the text in Matthew demonstrates is that he forbade acts of violence, physical and verbal, against those to whom homosexuality was imputed, in line with the general emphasis on self-restraint and meekness in his teaching. The entire passage is not just a legalistic pastiche of Jewish casuistry, but also a polished gem of double entendre and irony.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Warren Johansson, "Whosoever Shall Say to His Brother, Racha (Matthew 5:22)," Cabirion, 10 (1984), 2-4.

First appeared in the Chicago Free Press.

THE PEW RESEARCH CENTER recently released a group of polls assessing public attitudes on a variety of issues, trying to categorize voters according to their opinions, attitudes and demographic characteristics.

According to the center, its most significant finding was that voters now are more moderate and less extreme and angry than they were five years ago.

"Centrism, so characteristic of post-war American politics, is back. More moderation is not only apparent among Independents, but also evident on the right and the left," the center announced. What mainstream press coverage of the polls failed to notice was the finding of a slow but ongoing shift in public sentiment toward accepting gays.

As they say on public radio's "Marketplace," "Let's look at the numbers!"

The most general question on gays asked how much people agreed or disagreed with the statement, "Homosexuality is a way of life that should be accepted by society."

In eight Pew Research Center surveys from 1994 to 1997, between 44 percent and 47 percent agreed with the statement, while the number disagreeing hovered slightly higher, between 48 percent and 50 percent.

By the summer of 1999, however, the relative strengths had decisively reversed, with 49 percent agreeing that homosexuality should be accepted and 44 percent saying it should not be.

Although the change is small, it should be encouraging because it shows that gays are continuing to make progress.

This particular change, though, may be even more significant. Political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann suggests in her remarkable book "The Spiral of Silence" that people have a fairly keen sense for what most other people are thinking on issues and tend to shift in that direction themselves.

If that is true, then at long last we are over some sort of hump and instead of fighting against a public mood, we now have the public mood "on our side," as it were, gently luring people that way.

Not surprisingly, 54 percent of Democrats agree that homosexuality should be accepted, and only 35 percent of Republicans. But even among Republicans 35 percent is not bad for a question about "acceptance" - not merely "toleration."

Interestingly, self-identified Independents are even more pro-gay than Democrats: 55 percent think gays should be accepted.

Other gay-related questions suggest the same trend. For instance, back in 1987 51 percent thought school boards ought to be able to fire teachers who were "known homosexuals." The percentage agreeing dropped to 32 percent by this fall, while 62 percent disagreed - nearly a 2-1 pro-gay proportion.

The particularly interesting thing about this question is that it immediately follows questions about the existence of God, the importance of prayer, Judgment Day and miracles, all of which condition people to give a religiously based or moralistic answer to the gay school teacher question rather than a secular civic one - and gays still come out far ahead.

More remarkable still, this pro-gay change took place during a decade of increasing religious sentiment. Not only did more people describe themselves as "religious," but the already large majority of religious people became somewhat more certain about their beliefs.

That suggests either more religious people are accepting gays or more people are distinguishing between homosexuality and their religious/moral views, perhaps seeing homosexuality as some sort of personal matter.

Neither explanation offers much comfort for the religious right or politicians who try to play to their sensibilities.

A third survey question asked whether the respondent considered himself or herself "a supporter of the gay rights movement."

In 1987, 66 percent said they definitely were not gay movement supporters. By 1994 that number fell to 56 percent. And by this summer only 50 percent insisted they were not gay movement supporters.

During the same time period, the number saying they were gay movement supporters shifted upward from a minuscule 9 percent to 17 percent.

This means gays have picked up a sizable number of heterosexual supporters. But it also means, of course, that there are a lot of people somewhere in the middle: 31 percent of the population is skeptical, or uncertain, or selective, or just plain not interested in gays as a movement.

In any case, it is useful to notice that this drop in anti-gay sentiment occurred even though the number of liberals did not change, the number of conservatives increased and support for the "pro-life movement" (the questionnaire's wording) increased.

What did correlate with the rise in gay movement support was the sizable increase of people who said they supported "the women's movement." That number rose from 29 percent in 1987 to 41 percent this summer.

Finally the survey asked, "Do you have a friend, colleague or family member who is gay?" To that, 60 percent said "no," and 39 percent said "yes." This is appallingly low considering the number of friends, colleagues and family members each gay person has.

What is significant though is when the Pew Center broke voters down into categories, the groups that were most pro-gay also had the highest percentage of people who said they had a gay friend or family member.

For instance, 60 percent of the group Pew labeled "Liberal Democrats" said they had gay friends and 88 percent said homosexuality should be accepted by society. That was the highest percentage in each category.

Similarly, 52 percent of the Republican leaning "New Prosperity Independents" said they had gay friends and they were the most "socially tolerant" group on that side of the spectrum. So we continue to find a correlation between knowing gays and supporting gay acceptance. Keep that in mind.

IT CAN SCARCELY BE DOUBTED that the primary, and perhaps only sources of our culture's anti-gay hostility are the Christian denominations.

When most anti-gay zealots are pushed very hard, they do not come up with sociological or philosophical reasons for their hatred. Instead, they usually retreat to citing Leviticus, or the Epistle to the Romans, or the ancient Palestinian myth of Sodom.

As the bumper sticker says, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

One can only imagine how it might have been written otherwise.

The two male angels who sojourned to Sodom might have been welcomed as honored guests, lavishly fed and entertained by the townspeople who assumed they were a gay couple. When they departed the next morning with abundant provisions for their journey, the angels blessed the generous town for its hospitality and Sodom prospered for seven generations.

But no. The Hebrews of ancient legend were a nomadic people who could not even imagine such a thing as a "good city." They were deeply anti-urban, anti-technical, and anti-political. The Genesis legends of Cain and Nimrod, Babel and Sodom uniformly attribute impiety, pride, idolatry, luxury, crime and moral depravity to all cities and their founders, Sodom included.

And the Apostle Paul, the possible author of Romans, was never a better Roman citizen than when he grafted Stoic notions about "nature" and what is "natural" to the messianic Jewish sect he adopted as his own, producing a doctrine that reluctantly accepted sex only as a painful accommodation to human frailty and rejected homosexuality as wholly without value.

Had he been less a Roman, or, one might say, a better "Christian," he might have rejected such extraneous philosophy and written otherwise:

"The holy and loving are drawn to God who is their likeness in heaven, and God loves them because they are His image on earth, like cleaving to like. Just so among us those who are drawn to others like unto themselves should especially be valued and honored, for their love is an image for us of God's love for His creation and His people, their love holding no other purpose or consequence than mutual contemplation, emulation, and enjoyment."

But it was not to be.

Had it been so, where then could homophobia have arisen or how could it have become pervasive in a culture that took the Bible as its moral guide. No other primary cultural source preaches homophobia as a primary value.

Several years ago novelist Bette Greene, who writes young adult fiction, interviewed more than 400 gay bashers as part of her research for The Drowning of Stephan Jones, visiting jails in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Washington state.

I tried to find out where the hate comes from," she told Boston's Bay Windows in 1992, "and one of the places that it came from was the pulpits of America."

Greene said that when she asked teenagers why they attacked gays, "they got sort of exasperated with me and they talked about what their preacher said, what the televangelists have said. They felt they were doing what society wanted them to do."

"Again and again, I got the connection with the church," she explained.

When Greene told this to some of the teenagers' ministers, they insisted that they preached love: "love the sinner, hate the sin." But Greene shook her head. "Nobody I know has been able to make that separation."

In the same way, independent filmmaker Arthur Dong interviewed several men convicted of murdering gays for his recent film, Licensed to Kill.

"They were all influenced by their environment, whether that be the social environment, political environment, religious environment." he told ABC's Nightline.

Discussing one man he questioned about why he murdered a homosexual, Dong quoted the man as saying that he had no opinion about homosexuals except that "they ought to be all 'taken care of'"�i.e., killed.

Dong went on to report that the murderer remembered reading about homosexuality "and hearing about it in church and he, in the film, he actually says, 'Well if the Bible says it's right, that's what it is.'"

God said it. I believe it. That settles it.

Psychologist Karen Franklin, who studied anti-gay crimes committed by young college students, found the same thing.

Although Franklin discreetly avoided any specific reference to religion, she acknowledged that "many of the assailants view themselves as social norms enforcers who are punishing moral transgressions."

The point here is: No one is born hating gay people. They learn that hatred somewhere�from the culture and from its predominant moral influences. And the primary institutions teaching right and wrong are? The religious denominations.

Bette Greene is blunt: "If there's one problem we can end in a hurry, it's [anti-] gay violence. We just have to start preaching that it's wrong."

Not preach "hate the sin, not the sinner." That is a factitious distinction. You cannot denounce one without denouncing the other. You cannot punish one without punishing the other. You cannot beat up one, without beating up the other.

So we need to encourage ministers and priests and rabbis and bishops to speak out from the pulpit against anti-gay violence and gay bashing. We need them to speak out against hostility.

But we need to go further than that. We need to assert to everyone that our sexuality is not sinful at all. There is nothing wrong with homosexuality, nothing immoral.

Our sexual behavior is just as moral as anyone else's, with the same capacity for love, closeness, relatedness and harmless pleasure.

Nor should we let "moderate" religious people get away with condescendingly saying, "Well, the church welcomes gays because, oh, well, aren't we are all sinners, after all."

That is just another way of saying that homosexuality is sinful, but they are too squeamish, too "moderate," to say so explicitly. We need to smile and say, "Speak for yourself: The sin is not homosexuality, but homophobia."

Religions must stop preaching hostility to homosexuals or homosexuality.

They must begin condemning attitudes that lead to gay-bashing.

They must accept same-sex love for what it is�love�and, as such, deserving of all the encouragement and honor they traditionally offer to that emotion.

Churches and religious people are not accustomed to being held accountable by people claiming the moral high ground. They are going to have to get used to it because that is where our position legitimately is. It is up to you to make that clear to them.

EARLY IN MAY, Judge Jonathan Heher of the Johannesburg High Court struck down South Africa's sodomy law on the grounds that it violated the nation's new constitution barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Just a few months earlier Ecuador's Supreme Court ruled that nation's sodomy law unconstitutional. And Romania's new prime minister recently promised to repeal his nation's sodomy law so it could join the European Union.

In the civilized nations of the world there are few sodomy laws remaining. Mostly they linger in ignorant and savage nations of the third world, where religious faith inhibits rationality, provincialism is praised as patriotism, and fanaticism is proof of piety.

As South Africa's judge Heher noted with unusual eloquence in his ruling, to penalize a gay or lesbian person "for the expression of his or her sexuality can only be defended from a standpoint which depends on the baneful influences of religious intolerance, ignorance, superstition, bigotry, fear of what is different from or alien to everyday experience and the millstone of history."

Among the developed nations of the world only the United States of America still retains sodomy laws-in 20 of its 50 states.

Half of those states are in the heavily Baptist, former slave-owning Confederate South. If the Old South is no longer a "solid south" for racist Democrats, it is, at least, still largely solid in its legislated homophobia.

The other states are the western strip of Arizona, heavily Mormon Utah and Idaho; the traditionally Catholic states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland; Lutheran dominated Minnesota; and the conservative midwestern cluster of Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma.

These sodomy laws are seldom enforced. They do not appear to impinge on the lives of most gays and do not seem worrisome to most gay-friendly legislators. That would help explain the remarkable anomaly that three states with gay non-discrimination laws still have sodomy statutes: Minnesota, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. And the only states to have reelected openly gay congressmen by large margins are both states with sodomy laws: Massachusetts and Arizona.

However, anti-gay politicians who, like pro-gay politicians, seem content with non-enforcement of sodomy laws nonetheless fight vigorously to retain them.

This is extremely odd because no one claims that the laws actually reduce the incidence of sodomy. In fact, in arguing before the Montana Supreme Court, the the state's attorney general tried to make it an argument for retaining the sodomy law that no one had been arrested under it for decades.

But why then retain them?

When George W. Bush was running for governor of Texas he was asked whether he favored retention of Texas' sodomy law (currently in legal limbo). He said, yes, he thought the state should keep the law, chiefly for its symbolic value.

A symbol of what? A symbol, I think, of social disapproval. A symbol that society regards gay sexuality as defective, inferior and distasteful, tolerates it only contingently, and reserves the theoretical right to prohibit gay sexual expression because it is something we have no natural right to do.

It is a symbol that not only our pleasures, but our deepest relational commitments are shallower and less deserving of respect than those of heterosexuals, and, in short, that we are simply inferior human beings, not to be accorded the full autonomy, dignity or esteem granted to other citizens.

It follows from this that sodomy laws not only express social disapproval and lesser regard for gays, but they also serve the conservative function of reinforcing existing social disapproval and giving it a stamp of legitimacy.

One has to wonder why some bright young reporter did not speak up to ask the young Bush, "Do you mean to suggest, sir, that in your view the superiority of heterosexuality is not sufficiently evident to the public without the support of such legal symbols?

"And, sir, a follow-up question if I may? If the social superiority of heterosexuality is not readily evident to people, then wherein does its non-evident superiority lie?"

But heterosexual reporters probably did not think to ask the question, and gay reporters likely were too far in the closet to feel comfortable asking it.

Bush's statement, however, suggests he believes it is legitimate to devalue some people in order to bolster some other group of people. This is an odd claim to make in a country dedicated to either liberty or equality, though it may have a certain intelligibility in the Confederate South.

But apart from the devaluing function of sodomy laws, there are also substantive "collateral harms" that sodomy laws create.

They are used to label gays and lesbians as known law-violators and thus create evidence of unfit character for responsible positions such as custodial parent, foster parents, teachers and the like.

Sodomy laws create opportunities for police abuse. They can invite corruption (bribery, extortion), entrapment of gays, and selective law enforcement. It is important to remember, too, that the police absorb their attitudes toward gays from the way the law categorizes them. If the law states that gays are felons, the police will tend to treat known gays with less civility.

Rhode Island prosecutors acknowledged that the state's sodomy law was useful because it enabled juries to convict on the lesser sodomy charge in cases of alleged sexual assault involving sodomy where consent was uncertain. But that seems to be an argument against sodomy laws. If oral or anal sex is not wrong, then why should people engaging in anal or (chiefly) oral sex where consent is uncertain be convicted of something while those engaging in vaginal sex with uncertain consent not be?

By devaluing gay lives, sodomy laws also subtly encourage and legitimize young male vigilantes who assault, rob or even kill gays. On this ground, one could argue that legislators who support sodomy law are accessories before the fact in gay-bashing incidents.

Despite their offensiveness, sodomy laws remain on the law books in many states because local gay activists have not made repealing them a priority. But for all these reasons, repeal should be a higher priority.

One of the best arguments for the marches on the 50 state capitols in 1999 is that they will provide an occasion to demand the right to sexual privacy and the repeal of state sodomy laws.

Sodomy laws anywhere in this nation are a offensive reminder to all of us that legislators think that our lives are defective and less worthy of respect.

FOR THE LAST SIX YEARS, sociologists Charles Moskos of Northwestern University and Laura Miller of UCLA have conducted periodic small surveys of Army personnel's attitudes about letting gays and lesbians serve in the military.

In June 1992, before gays in the military became a contentious national issue, 67 percent of the Army men "strongly disagreed" with letting gays serve openly in the military.

By August 1998 however, the survey found that only 36 percent "strongly disagreed" with letting gays serve openly. That represents a nearly 50-percent decline in strong hostility to gays

Here are the results for those who "strongly disagreed":

• June 1992: 67 percent
• June 1993: 61 percent
• July 1994: 57 percent
• Oct. 1994: 49 percent
• June 1996: 44 percent
• Aug. 1998: 36 percent

Total anti-gay sentiment (combining "disagree" and "strongly disagree") actually peaked in mid-1993, near the conclusion of the vigorous campaigns by the Pentagon and U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) against letting gays serve. In the June 1993 survey, 78 percent of the Army men opposed or "strongly" opposed letting gays serve; only 11 percent of the men (and 27 percent of the women) favored including gays.

Since then, however, there has been a steady decrease in overall hostility and a steady increase in support for gays. As of August 1998, only 52 percent of the men opposed letting gays serve (16 percent opposed and 36 percent "strongly" opposed); and 26 percent favored allowing gays, an all-time high.

Interestingly, more than one-fifth (23 percent) said they were "not sure," the highest that number has climbed. That may mean those men have not thought much about the issue, or do not care, and are simply less judgmental about such things. Equally likely, they are simply waiting for the Pentagon to tell them what to think.

It is important not to place too much stock in these figures. The surveys are small, ranging from 200 to 400 men and even fewer women, and they are "convenience samples" not random samples. But the data do show a reasonably consistent trend.

The data also gain credibility because the findings for men and woman run a parallel course.

Women have long been more gay-accepting than men, in the military as well as civilian society. Even at their least supportive point, during the Pentagon's 1993 anti-gay crusade, 27 percent of Army women favored letting gays serve in the military; only 42 percent opposed the idea.

Since then, anti-gay passions have declined and pro-gay views have steadily increased. In August 1998, 52 percent of Army women favored letting gays serve and only 25 percent disagreed. And as with the men, more than one-fifth (22 percent) of the women said they were "not sure" about gays serving.

How can we account for these changes and what do they mean for us?

The simplest explanation is that attitudes in the military are influenced, at least somewhat, by attitude changes in civilian society.

Over the years gays have become a more familiar part of the social landscape, more people have come to know gays as friends and co-workers, seen gays on television, heard gay issues discussed. Particularly for young people, gays are part of the world they have always known, so gays do not seem new or bizarre or threatening. Thus, we have seen anti-gay attitudes among college freshmen drop rapidly in the last decade.

Young people presumably bring those same attitudes with them when they join the military. With the gradual turnover of military personnel between 1992 and 1998 newer recruits brought the more recent set of attitudes in from civilian society.

This effect may be being supplemented by a second: that under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy some military personnel are quietly becoming more open about being gay, only without making the formal declaration. If that is true, then more military men are discovering that those men and women do not cause the tensions or problems the Pentagon predicted and are, in fact, pretty good coworkers.

It is hard to imagine how to test that possibility, but with "don't ask, don't tell" the military is certainly acknowledging that gays are now serving and that very fact may be helping personnel get used to the idea of gays.

That growth in acceptance of gays suggests that even if we cannot have a direct effect on military policy, we can have an indirect effect by continuing to work in civilian society for public acceptance of gays.

As our work influences public attitudes, new enlisted men will continue to bring those more accepting civilian values into the military with them and they will find the military's ban on open gays to be unaccountable, unfair, and bizarre. And we should continue to denounce the gay ban at every opportunity as unjustified, hypocritical and superstitious.

The question then remains whether there is a point at which military opposition to gays sinks so low that the military hierarchy can no longer plausibly use the excuse that its personnel will not accept gays and that gays threaten "unit cohesion" and "mission readiness."

Many of us think that is not a very robust argument to begin with, but at some point the decline of intolerance will render it laughable even to those who find the reasoning persuasive.

That point may already have been reached for women. Since only 25 percent of Army women oppose letting gays and lesbians serve (and only 16 percent object "strongly"), the rationale exists for urging that we should now at least let lesbians serve openly in the military.

Such a policy would largely eliminate the egregious lesbian-baiting that now occurs in the military and the disproportionately high discharges of lesbians over gay men. It would also further chip away at the remaining homophobia.

The Pentagon will inevitably be slow to acknowledge the fact that its new recruits and enlisted men are increasingly comfortable with gays. The upper echelon military has less contact with civilian society and little recent contact with its evolving values. Most military men probably hold roughly the values of civilian society at the time they joined the military, which may be decades ago. In addition, the officer class is disproportionately from smaller towns and suburbs, less tolerant places to begin with.

They may see growing civilian acceptance of gays as signs of decadence and social collapse, and may dig in to oppose such trends all the more strongly.

At this point, changing military policy looks both more reasonable but, for political reasons, less likely than it did six years ago.

IN MAY 1998 a group of social scientists announced in Science magazine that they had found much higher rates of stigmatized sexual behavior and drug use among high school age young men than anyone had previously reported.

The article "Adolescent Sexual Behavior, Drug Use, and Violence: Increased Reporting with Computer Survey Technology," reported a survey in which 1,672 youths, 15-19 years old, were divided into two groups. One group answered questions using a common written questionnaire. The other group heard and saw the questions asked by a computer and answered using the computer keyboard.

To the surprise of the researchers, the computer users admitted far more homosexuality and drug use than the questionnaire users.

In particular: Only 1.5 percent of those using the written questionnaire admitted any homosexual behavior, but 5.5 percent of those using a computer did so.

Some of the details were interesting.

In the more candid (less dishonest) computer wing of the survey, the most common homosexual behavior the youths admitted was being masturbated by another male (3.5 percent), followed by being fellated by another male (3.1 percent). Then followed masturbating another male (2.6 percent), fellating a man (2.3 percent), insertive anal sex with a man (1.9 percent) and finally receptive anal sex with a man (0.8 percent).

In each case, the written survey produced far lower estimates.

Not surprisingly, the more stigmatized the behavior the greater the difference between the two sets of answers. For instance, five times as many computer users admitted fellating someone, and eight times as many computer users admitted receptive anal sex. (Hardly anyone using the written survey admitted receptive anal sex.)

The researchers were amazed!

For years, social scientists tried to convince us that people give fairly honest answers on written questionnaires because that format assuages their concern about keeping their behavior secret. And they have doggedly, arrogantly, defended questionnaires against frequent criticism that they were showing absurdly low estimates for many activities, especially homosexuality.

So now all those earlier findings are shown to be palpable nonsense -- and by a factor of three or four.

"We had the analysis done and redone, but this is real," senior author Charles Turner confessed frankly to The New York Times. "It means everything you thought about the risks adolescents face is an underestimate, if you're deriving your perceptions from past surveys."

But trusting those previous surveys is exactly what Charles Turner told us to do in the past, with as much confidence in the old method as he now places in the new method.

The researchers wondered why the computer elicited greater honesty. They might better have wondered why written questionnaires do so poorly and wonder if the computer method is much better.

Pioneer sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey scorned written questionnaires, calling them "an invitation to lie."

As Kinsey wrote: "People, even when guaranteed anonymity, will not commit themselves on socially taboo and legally punishable activities like? homosexual activity, when they have to put it down in black and white. Practically all previous questionnaire experience indicates that they come out with figures very much lower?"

But the computer survey results are subject to many of the same objections as a written survey.

Kinsey and his colleagues were able to get greater candor from people because they asked a large number of questions very rapidly, minimizing the opportunity to lie, and used numerous cross checks on accuracy.

In addition, Kinsey's small group learned to use whatever language people were most comfortable with, depending on their educational level (e.g., sometimes using "fuck" instead of "have insertive anal sex"). They also were able to explain the question if someone seemed confused.

Finally the Kinsey group could change the order of the questions, dropping a line of inquiry if a person seemed uncomfortable, coming back to the topic later when the person was more relaxed.

Standardized questionnaires, whether on paper or on computer, are able to do none of these things. In fact, modern researchers, including Turner, strangely continue to assert the superiority of the standardized wording and question order for everyone, despite evidence to the contrary, and examples of inconsistency, lying and misunderstanding in this study.

The researchers would have understood this if they had read Kinsey, but modern researchers seem determined to forget everything Kinsey ever taught, and then congratulate themselves on rediscovering any small piece of it. Much social science progress occurs this way.

Consider some of the methodological problems and difficulties in the newest survey.

Most obviously, many people refused to participate at all, many perhaps having something to hide. These people are conveniently ignored.

The researchers asked ambiguous questions. For instance, they asked about sex with a prostitute, but not whether the sex was for money. They did not ask the gender of the prostitute, though I know of youths who have paid for sex with men.

The researchers seem naive. Nearly 4 percent of the youths said they themselves had been paid for sex, and most (3.5 percent) said they had been paid by women (twice the number who had sex with a prostitute). However, that is not the way the world works. Women rarely pay for sex. (Kinsey found that about 0.l percent of his female subjects had done so.) If the researchers had any knowledge of the world they would know they were being lied to, yet they report this without comment as a "finding."

Third, can the researchers really believe that more than twice as many young men are being anally insertive with males as are being anally receptive?

Fourth, Kinsey pointed out that stigma and hypocrisy about homosexuality, like homosexuality itself, are more common among the less educated. Here too, none of the youths who were below normal grade level in school admitted any homosexual behavior on the written questionnaire. But a higher than average number of them using the computer admitted homosexual behavior (6.2 percent). Turner reports this as if no one knew it before.

Given such clear evidence of homophobia, some youths are no doubt still lying. So the question is: Given this and other evidence of lying, why should anyone think the new computer technique has eliminated cover-up and finally gotten accurate answers?

Ayn Rand's work enjoys surprising popularity among gay youth. The author explores why.

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A WELL-INFORMED FRIEND asked me recently why Ayn Rand is so popular among young gays and lesbians.

"Is she?" I asked.

He assured me that he keeps running into young gay Rand fans in social circumstances and on the Internet. Just recently a gay man visiting his home page told him he should read Ayn Rand.

I had not thought much about it before, but it seems reasonable that a writer who stresses individuality, trusting your own perceptions and confidence in your ability to achieve against the odds would be popular among young gays who might feel particularly assaulted by social pressures contrary to their own deepest feelings.

Some background here. Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a novelist and philosopher best known for three remarkable, long novels: We the Living, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She also wrote plays, short stories, and five or six books of popular essays on ethics, economics, education, aesthetics and the importance of philosophy.

Born Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Rand saw the Communist revolution at close range. Disgusted with both collectivist theory and the reality of its practice, she realized she could not live in a society that instead of bringing a human liberation, sacrificed the individual, demanded conformity, stifled individual creativity and opposed personal excellence.

Much of her life's work would be devoted to developing a consistent philosophy that would defend the autonomy of the individual against government, religion, society and everything that would use him or her for purposes other than his or her own.

Determined to be a writer, Rand left the Soviet Union for America in 1926. She made her way to Los Angeles, where she worked in the film industry, first as an extra, then reading and eventually writing screenplays.

Her first major novel, We the Living (1936), was a popular failure. But her subsequent novels The Fountainhead (1943) and her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged (1957) were best sellers, each articulating in fictional form her ideas about the value of the individual, thinking for oneself, enlightened self-interest, personal integrity, the importance of creative and satisfying work, and the multitude of obstacles to all of these.

Today we seem to be in the midst of a Rand boomlet.

A documentary about Rand's life, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, described as "marvelously engrossing" by the Los Angeles gay publication Frontiers, was just nominated for an Academy Award.

A made-for-television movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand, based on episodes from a biography of Rand by Barbara Branden, is scheduled for broadcast on Showtime this fall [1998?ed.].

And the first full-length scholarly analysis of Rand's intellectual background and philosophical procedure, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical was published just three years ago by Chris Sciabarra, a gay visiting scholar at New York University.

Rand's writings continue to be popular as well. According to a March 9 article in U. S. News & World Report, her books still sell upwards of 300,000 copies a year. An English professor at the University of California at Berkeley who regularly survey's his students reading habits found to his dismay that The Fountainhead was the single most popular book.

So I asked several friends who admire Rand, both gay and heterosexual, what they thought her particular appeal might be for gays. Some of the answers:

• "Most lesbians and gays want the world to judge them for the content of their own character?not as a stereotype defined by somebody else."
• "Anybody who growing up has some special �marginality' problem with respect to society might well respond with enthusiasm to a philosophy and vision that upholds going one's own way as a very basic value, especially one as artistically powerful as Rand's. Gays of course are clubbed over the head with the fact of their marginality fairly early on, in the very important area of sexuality. So they may be a little more susceptible to Rand because of their special situation."
• "[It] seems to me that those who feel disenfranchised in a culture would find Rand's individualist stance psychologically, at least, very appealing. A kind of �in your face,' �I'll be whoever I want to be, so long as I respect others' rights to do the same' approach. This would be appealing to gays, especially, given that in all respects they could well be unassailable in character, etc., while being or having been assailed to no end for being gay."
• And novelist Robert Rodi (author of Closet Case, Drag Queen and other comedies of manners) replied, "The simplest and greatest appeal of Rand to me, as a gay youth, was that her world was a meritocracy. People there were judged my the quality of their minds and works, and by nothing else, which certainly appealed to me at that particular time, beleaguered as I was by religious and societal disapproval (and worse)."

There is another way of coming at this. The benefits Rand offers are not limited in their appeal. But considered separately, it is easy to see their particular relevance for young gays.

• An immunization against a great deal of popular, even pervasive, nonsense in religion, morality, psychology and political thinking that is helpful to anyone who is trying to make sense of the world and beginning to question and test whatever views they have been brought up to believe.
• A distancing from the general culture, even a kind of healthy alienation from it, based on substantive values?as distinguished from any sort of nihilistic alienation.
• Skepticism about government and institutional do-gooders and "helping professions" (coercers, politicians, planners, organizers, experts, moralists), about their claims regarding duties, obligations, traditions, moral imperatives, collective goods, and so forth.
• An appreciation for individual creativity, enterprise and achievement as the source of personal meaning and fulfillment, the connection between those and human freedom, and the falsity of any distinctions between "personal" freedom, "artistic" freedom and "economic" freedom.
• A profound and largely accurate analysis of the character and motivations of the "bad guys": their deceptions, their motives, their self-deceptions, their cynicism, their envy, their willingness to distort language and use sophistic arguments to tear down what they oppose.

In short, Rand shows people a way to understand themselves and their differentness, to see the problem as "out there" in society, not inside themselves. In doing so, Rand shows that you can be a good (gay) person in a bad (homophobic) society. That is no inconsiderable achievement.

ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE aspects of George Chauncey's social history Gay New York 1890-1940 is the abundant evidence it provides that governments were consistently the enemy of gay people, but business entrepreneurs were often much friendlier.

This should not be surprising. Governments tend to impose the opinions and prejudices of the majority. By contrast, the free market is where people have an incentive to suspend their prejudices and simply try to make money from every available source. Thus free markets are the great solvent of prejudice.

And while government necessarily makes one law for everyone, the market is always open to a variety of minority tastes that can find themselves served as a "niche market." Government is unitary; markets are pluralistic.

Chauncey's book offers several examples of entrepreneurs ignoring pubic prejudice or evading the law in order to make money by catering to gays even when it was risky to do so.

Early in this century some heterosexual Turkish bathhouses began quietly tolerating gay men. According to one hostile account Chauncey quotes, "not a few of the places which cater to the public demand for steam baths are glad to enjoy the patronage of pansies [gay men]." The writer added that managers of the baths often received "fat tips" from their "degenerate patrons."

Strictly gay bathhouses were open as early as 1902, and as such were among the first gay commercial spaces in the city. Chauncey notes that there was considerable financial incentive for a bathhouse to develop a reputation as gay since that lent it a competitive edge in a period of declining public use of bathhouses.

Police generally ignored the baths, presumably because they were bribed to do so. The few raids were usually prompted by reformist and social purity groups who sent in their own investigators and then tried to force the police to shut them down.

A remarkable example of gay-tolerant entrepreneurship is provided by the history of the "Raines Law hotels" early in this century. When a law was passed forcing saloons to close on Sunday unless they were part of a hotel, many bars created several small cubicles with beds to qualify as hotels, which they then rented out to couples for sexual activity. Bars found to be fostering prostitution in this way were closed and allowed to reopen only if they did not admit women. Some bars then proceeded to garner income by renting out the cubicles to gay male couples.

The rooming houses where many of New York's single men lived also often accommodated gay men as tenants, respecting their privacy and permitting them to bring home male visitors. One major reason was simply the competition for lodgers among the city's many rooming houses. A few even became largely gay.

Chauncey comments: "Some landladies doubtless tolerated known homosexual lodgers for the same economic reasons they tolerated lodgers who engaged in heterosexual affairs, and others simply did not care about their tenants' homosexual affairs."

In the same way, many of the cafeterias and restaurants where most of those lodgers took their meals ignored the "disreputable character" of even their conspicuously gay patrons, "primarily because they were patrons."

By the 1920s, some restaurants and automats were heavily populated with gay men, especially late at night, and a few places openly catered to them. Chauncey points out that the gay men provided regular patronage at places that welcomed them, and sometimes the men's campy behavior attracted other patrons who found them entertaining.

Social purity groups and other "reformers" strongly disapproved of such open gay socializing, but often the police (or the politicians who controlled them) were simply bribed to not bother the restaurants. And some of the large restaurant chains had enough political clout to protect themselves from police interference.

By the early 1920s and into the 1930s gays and lesbians began to engage in more entrepreneurship themselves, opening their own speakeasies and restaurants and holding dances. Chauncey mentions one major gay entrepreneur first opened a small lunch counter, then opened a restaurant (promoted with the image of a sexually ambiguous couple), and later organized a "dinner dance and rumba review" at yet another restaurant.

Pay off the police, or "hire" them.

In some cases gay and gay friendly establishments paid off the police, in other cases they hired the police, ostensibly to provide security from public harassment, but also to provide protection from the police themselves. Chauncey reports that one entrepreneur who ran a gay cabaret protected his business by making his facilities freely available to a social club that included many policemen, allowing them to drink and socialize with female prostitutes.

Gays had always attended masquerade balls sponsored as fundraisers by local clubs, drawn by the opportunity to "dress up" or dance with a male partner in female costume. An investigator for a social purity group reported in 1918 that "a prominent feature of these dances is the number of male perverts who attend them." Organizers welcomed the gays who drew crowds of curiosity seekers.

But the police kept a watchful eye on the dances, uneasy about the gays and same-sex dancing ("disorderly conduct"). One dance organizer who stopped two men from dancing together later apologized to them, saying the police had forced him to stop them. Eventually the threat of police raids forced organizers to cancel the balls.

One of the oddest examples of entrepreneurship benefiting gays occurred when Prohibition ended. When the State Liquor Authority began to crack down on the gay presence in bars with mixed (gay and straight) clientele, gays tended to cluster at bars that were willing to risk serving them. But many bar owners found the cost and risk too great because police kept closing them for illegally serving gays (a gay presence was defined as "disorderly").

"As a result," says Chauncey, "organized criminal syndicates, the only entities powerful enough to offer bars systematic protection, took over the gay bar business." The syndicates, which developed during Prohibition, had enough money, political clout and inside police contacts to provide protection for the bars and their patrons; and the syndicates cared little about public opinion. The famed Stonewall Bar itself was a syndicate-owned bar.

One obvious subsidiary theme in all this is that laws often have surprising unintended consequences, but that is another column.

THE REFORM PARTY has come in for a good deal of ribbing from the nation's press. It has been dismissed as flaky, a circus and "a ship of fools."

It is easy to understand why. The party seems to have attracted an odd assortment of egocentric candidates with little political experience and almost no political principles in common.

Editorial cartoonists have had a field day with Ross Perot's ears, Jesse Ventura's bald head and feather boa, Donald Trump's hair and Pat Buchanan's pinched face. Truly an odd lot.

But not all the criticism is merited. A good deal of it stems from a desire to dismiss some of the ideas being offered without having to argue against them. It is a familiar ploy of the national press and one of the reasons why so many people say they do not trust the media.

Take a second look, if you will, at Jesse Ventura. The Reform Party may not interest you very much, but Ventura should. In a recent Playboy interview the Minnesota governor showed himself a solid, decent man not much given to tolerating prejudice and not afraid to say what he thinks.

If you are looking for a prominent politician in any party who supports gay equality, you cannot do better than Ventura. He makes Bill Clinton and Al Gore look like cold fish.

What does Ventura, a former Navy SEAL, think about gays in the military?

"Who am I to tell someone they can or cannot serve their country? I couldn't care less if the person next to me is gay as long as he gets the job done."

This is almost exactly what Sen. Barry Goldwater, a general in the Air Force Reserve, said when he supported letting gays serve in the military: "A good soldier will respect those who get the job done. . . . You don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight."

When Playboy asked about gay marriage, Ventura said he opposed the use of the word, but favored some policy like that: "I don't oppose gay people forming some type of legal bonding, but you can't use the word 'marriage.'"

Fair enough. Give gays the equal status and the language will eventually follow. In Norway, many people already use the word "marriage" for the legal partnerships of gays and lesbians even though technically those are not marriages.

Ventura explained his reasons for supporting gay partnerships during an October 1998 election debate with his Republican and Democratic opponents:

"I have two friends who have been together 41 years," he said, "and if one of them becomes sick, the other one is not even allowed to be at the bedside (in a hospital). I don't believe government should be so hostile, so mean-spirited. Love is bigger than government."

I suggest if you want a motto for the gay movement that will fit on a bumper sticker, you could not do much better than that: "Love is bigger than government."

It is useful to make another point explicit here. Ventura is saying not only that gay relationships should be acknowledged because we need to be more tolerant, accepting, etc., but also because we need to prevent the government from intruding into all our lives with a moralistic agenda that makes invidious distinctions among love-relationships, approving of some and disapproving of others.

Ventura, in fact, said his objection to the religious right is that religion "tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. The religious right wants to tell people how to live." And, of course, have the government impose that way of living on everyone.

Again, this is reminiscent of Goldwater, who said "every good Christian ought to kick [the Rev. Jerry} Falwell right in the ass," and told the Advocate in a 1993 interview, "I don't have any respect for the religious right. They are a detriment to the country, and the sooner they get their asses out of politics, the better."

On other issues generally, Ventura describes himself as "fiscally conservative but socially liberal," a thoroughly consistent combination which can produce some surprising results.

When Playboy asked how he felt about protesters who burn the American flag, Ventura shot back, "If you buy the flag it's yours to burn."

This is a good example of how someone can come to a supposedly liberal position but based on a supposedly conservative support for property rights. Ventura does not bother with any appeal to First Amendment protections for symbolic speech. He simply points out that the flag you buy is your property to do with as you like, a point that would never occur to liberals.

The same general libertarian approach leads Ventura to oppose both gun control and the death penalty. The connection seemed to escape a writer for the New York Times Magazine who found those positions inconsistent. But the connection is clear: Government has no business taking away people's ability to defend themselves (from the government itself, Ventura makes clear), nor should the government have the power to take away people's lives.

Ventura's support for lifestyle libertarianism extends further than most politicians would advocate in public, whatever their private behavior. He opposes prosecuting people for prostitution or using drugs. He acknowledges paying for sex and smoking marijuana. "I have smoked a joint, and there is nothing wrong with that," he said. "I have done far stupider things on alcohol."

Playboy is not good at asking follow-up questions to find out why Ventura holds these positions, but we can guess he would say that your body is your property and the government should not control what you do with it. When asked why he opposes mandatory helmet laws, Ventura gave a one-word answer: "Freedom."

First appeared in the Windy City Times.

AFTER EQUALITY, what?

That is to say, at some point in the indefinite future when gays and lesbians achieve equality, when we are fully accepted as equal, what will gay life be like? What will the gay community be like? Will there even be a gay community?

o one knows. But it is not an idle question. Equality is, after all, the end-state toward which most of our political effort, our time, our energy, our money, is aimed. So asking the question amounts to asking "What are we working toward?"

To begin with, it is far from clear that gays will ever achieve complete (social, legal, moral) equality. Have other historically stigmatized groups been fully accepted as equal? We do not have a lot of evidence that that happens.

Just as likely, we will asymptotically achieve acceptance -- that is, gradually approaching equality but never quite reaching it. Eventually it just may not be possible to make any further progress against a hard core of resistance. In some places or among some social/cultural groups gays may continue to be thought of as inferior, defective, immoral, evil or threatening.

For one thing there may always be sources of hostility that will disseminate a message hostile to us. Just as there are still backwoods racists, anti-semitic groups, even anti-Catholic zealots in this country, so there may always be homophobes promoting their message to people seeking some definable group to blame for their own alienation, discontent or lack of success. And there will always be doctrinal groups that define themselves by rejecting something else (fundamentalist Islam comes to mind).

Then too, what if humans have hard-wired into their psychology a root notion that reproduction and success with the other sex has intrinsic merit? If that is inborn, then there will be a point beyond which our quest for equality cannot go. We do not currently know whether it is inborn or culturally induced. We may find out.

Even if we achieved complete acceptance it seems unlikely that we will ever be regarded as "the same." We are, after all, only a small percentage of the population. If two men walk down the street holding hands they may draw notice in a way that a man and a woman doing so might not, not because people will be disapproving but because it is uncommon, like a man in a top hat. So we will, at least on occasion, never be completely invisible to others.

For the same reason, we will never eliminate the so-called "heterosexual presumption," the assumption that you are heterosexual unless otherwise stated. The T-shirts and buttons that say "How dare you presume that I'm heterosexual" make an arresting consciousness-raising statement, but no statistical sense at all.

If 95 percent of the population is heterosexual, people are going to assume, reasonably enough, that any given person is heterosexual. It need not be hostile; it is simply a safe bet. (In most parts of the U.S. Jews encounter the "Christian presumption" and in most gay enclaves Republicans encounter the "Democratic presumption.")

The point is that we are not likely to cease being aware of ourselves as members of a minority, even if we become fully accepted. Those who long for a feeling of identicality, unobtrusiveness or unself-consciousness that they may (at best) now feel only in a totally gay environment are likely to be disappointed.

Will there be a gay community, even gay bars, when equality happens? Partly, of course, gays coalesce socially and politically in response to hostile external pressure. If there is no hostility, there will be no pressure forcing gays together. But gays may still converge because of a kind of natural attraction rooted in a desire to be among people like themselves, people whose erotic and emotional vectors are intuitively comprehensible.

So many gays will still gather together in enclaves, social groups or friendship clusters as an "affinity group" like any other. Other gays may feel it less imperative than they do now to escape suburbs or small towns. That is beginning to happen some places even now.

There is also an obvious statistical reason to join a gay group or go to a gay bar: The chances are far better that some man there will find me interesting and erotically appealing than in the typical neighborhood bar. So for the single, the young or the randy (and these categories may overlap), gay institutions usefully increase their erotic opportunities and chances of finding a compatible life-partner.

However, there may be less contact between lesbians and gay men than now, since those groups have little in common except similarly stigmatized status. Rhetoric aside, our sexual orientations are, in fact, opposite rather than similar.

Apart from romantic aspirations, are our lives, our lifestyles, our psyches really much different from heterosexuals? I don't know and frankly no one else does either.

That means that equality for gays will be not only a minor social experiment (how does the presence of lots of open gays affect society?), but also will tell us a lot about gays too. That is, how much of our difference, or our sense of difference, is inherent and natural, and how much is induced by growing up and living in a society that has in a variety of ways communicated disapproval of us.

We may find out if some of the psychological qualities (irony, creativity, aestheticism) believed common among (some? many?) gay men are created by growing up under a condition of stigma (and our fumbling youthful efforts to resist or compensate for it), or are in some mysterious way actually a function of same-sex attraction, or whether the whole notion of gay difference is just an illusion, a self-serving, compensatory myth.

Will gays, individuals and couples, want to live their lives pretty much like heterosexuals, sinking into bourgeois normality, living within the same range of options and in roughly the same proportions (ostensible monogamy, suburbs, family ties, etc.)? Not entirely, I suspect, partly because of men's well-attested inherent sexual and social adventurousness, but it may take forms we cannot anticipate.

But equality will not entail that every conduct or lifestyle will be equally acceptable any more than every conduct by heterosexuals is now equally acceptable. Majorities seem to provide acceptance only on their terms, so people will apply the same standards to us that they apply to everyone else. Those who find those standards limiting will continue to feel some disapproval, but based on how they act rather than who they are.