IGF CultureWatch

EARLY IN THIS CENTURY, most people, if they thought about homosexuals at all, tended to believe that there were more lesbians than gay men.

Women, after all, had always been more openly affectionate in public. And pioneer German sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld had estimated that there were perhaps twice as many lesbians as gay men. Perhaps, too, popular views in the post-World War II era were influenced by the pulp paperback novels, written primarily for a male audience, in which lesbian themes played a highly visible role.

American sex researcher Alfred Kinsey himself took notice of the prevailing view: "There is a widespread opinion which is held both by clinicians and the public at large that homosexual responses and completed contacts occur among more females than males."

But then Kinsey proceeded to turn this conventional wisdom upside down: "This opinion is not borne out by our data and it is not supported by previous studies which have been based on specific data." In fact, just the opposite seemed to be true.

In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) the Kinsey team reported, as is now familiar, that 37 percent of their men had at least one gay experience to orgasm since puberty, that 4 percent of their men were exclusively homosexual, and that 13 percent of men had more homosexual than heterosexual experience for at least some three-year period between ages 16 and 55.

Five years later in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), the Kinsey team reported that 13 percent of their women had at least one gay experience to orgasm (vs. 37 percent for men); even including homosexual "experience" that did not lead to orgasm raised the figure for women only to 20 percent. In addition, somewhere between 1 percent and 2 percent of their woman were exclusively homosexual (vs. 4 percent of the men).

Kinsey noted in summary that "the incidences and frequencies of homosexual responses and contacts . . . were much lower among the females in our sample than they were among the males . . . . There were only about a half to a third as many of the females who were, in any age period, primarily or exclusively homosexual."

Originally a zoologist, Kinsey was careful to point out in a footnote the human similarity to other mammals in this regard: "In the class Mammalia taken as a whole, homosexual behavior among males is more frequent than homosexual behavior among females."

Even the famous "10 percent" figure for gays repeatedly proffered by gay activists (a claim Kinsey never made) turns out on examination to be an average composed of the 13 percent of men who have had more gay than straight sex for some three-year period, and a 7-percent estimate for the same category for women.

Surveys conducted since Kinsey, using various research techniques, have varied widely -- from Kinsey and from one another -- in their estimates of the incidence of homosexuality. But despite their differences, for the most part they have tended to reproduce his finding on the proportion of gay men to lesbians.

A study published in Nature by a British team in 1990 reported that 9 percent of the men and 4 percent of the women contacted said they had "some" homosexual experience.

In 1993, psychologist Sam Janus published survey results showing that 22 percent of the men and 17 percent of the women had had at least one homosexual experience. Perhaps more importantly, 9 percent of the men and 5 percent of the women said their homosexual experience could be described as "frequent" or "ongoing." (Slightly less than half of those called themselves homosexual.)

In 1993, a team at the Harvard School of Public Health reported that 6.2 percent of men and 3.6 percent of women reported a same-sex partner in the pervious five years. (Interestingly 8.7 percent of the men and 11.1 percent of the women reported feeling some same-sex attraction but not engaging in homosexual behavior.)

Sociologist Stephen Murray counted the unmarried males and females in San Francisco who checked the "unmarried partnership" category in the 1990 census. He reported in his recent book American Gay that he found 5,437 male couples and 1,379 female couples. While both these figures are absurdly low for several obvious reasons, Murray observes that they do approximate "what I think is the true ratio of three or four self-identified gay men for every self-identified lesbian."

Murray also cites an unpublished study by sociologist Diane Binson, who conducted a random sample of households in multi-ethnic neighborhoods in San Francisco and found 3.4 times as many exclusively homosexual men as exclusively homosexual women.

And finally, a ponderous National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study published in 1994 as "The Social Organization of Sexuality" found that 9 percent of the men and 4 percent of the women reported engaging in at least some homosexual behavior since puberty.

In addition, the NORC study found that 6.2 percent of the men report being attracted to a man while only 4.4 percent of women report any sexual attraction to women. Finally, 2.8 percent of the men and 1.4 percent of the women acknowledge a homosexual or bisexual identity.

There are, however, two anomalous studies. A 1993 survey by the Louis Harris organization had results that were all over the map. They found that 3.8 percent of the men and 2.8 percent of the women had a same-sex sexual partner in the last year; and 4. 4 percent of the men and 3.6 percent of the women had a same-sex partner in the last five years; but 1.8 percent of the men and 2.1 percent of the women reported a same-sex partner in the previous month.

Also anomalously, marketing consultant Grant Lukenbill reports in his book Untold Millions that a 1993 survey of consumer behavior by Yankelovich Partners found that 5 percent of the men contacted identified themselves as gay men, and 6.4 of the women identified themselves as lesbians.

The point of gathering these results together is not to estimate the number of gays and lesbians, but to try to see what basis there is for the current belief by both gays and heterosexuals that gay men are not only more visible but more numerous than lesbians.

The studies have varying degrees of reliability. And they clearly measured very different things-behavior, attraction, identity, openness. But they seem to converge on a finding that there about twice as many gay men as lesbians, no matter what measures are used.

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.

LET'S SEE NOW. As a gay man, I am single with no dependent children. Most gay men, in fact, are (legally) single males with no dependent children. In the same way, most lesbians are single females and fewer have dependent children than do heterosexuals.

That being the case, where is my gain, my tax cut, our tax cut, in the recent, much heralded, balanced budget and tax cut agreement? There wasn't one.

Keep in mind some of the major provisions of the new law:

• A $500 dollar income tax credit for each child. People who earn up to $25,000 but who do not owe income taxes can deduct the amount from their social security tax.
• A $1,500 tax credit for each of the first two years of a child's college, and eventually a $2,000 credit for each of the next two years.
• Higher taxes on cigarettes to pay for medical care for?cigarette smokers? No?children again, specifically, children whose parents do not provide health insurance for them.

As the Chicago Tribune tersely headlined its front page analysis of the agreement, "Got kids? You'll cash in."

But if you are single person with no dependent children, that is, if you are a typical gay person? Then there is nothing much here for you.

Now no one need begrudge anyone else's paying lower taxes. After all, it is their own money to begin with, not the government's money. They worked for it, they earned it, they should be able to keep it. The objection here is that other people got a tax reduction and most gays did not. That is, the "tax cut" effectively raised the proportion of the total tax burden that we will be paying, including even the social security tax. Our taxes, in short, just rose compared to everyone else's.

No doubt the conservative wing of the Republican Party was happy to provide such conspicuous support for its "pro-family" agenda and produce benefits for "pro-family" voters. That is called "servicing your core constituency."

But what about President Bill Clinton? In 1992 (and promising a "middle class tax cut"), Clinton received two-thirds of the gay vote. In 1996, by all accounts he was estimated to have received at least 60 percent. According to The New York Times (Nov. 10, 1996), Clinton received 57 percent of the singles' vote, about twice Bob Dole's 31 percent.

Was Clinton aware that this law would benefit everyone but gays and others without children? Despite our national leaders' claims, echoed by Democratic fund-raisers, that we are a Clinton "core constituency," we seem to have been ignored. No one seems to have mentioned this during policy discussions. No one seems to have made an issue of it. But it is at least worth pointing out that this looks like another example of a double standard policy between (most) gays and (most) heterosexuals?something like "don't ask, don't tell" surfacing in the economic realm. And it looks like a policy that is of a piece with the Defense of Marriage Act and the Communications Decency Act.

It would have been possible for our national gay and lesbian organizations to raise the issue with the administration, or with our supporters in Congress, while the agreement was still in the discussion stage. But they almost surely did not?and did not, I suspect, for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, they do not think of gay interests in economic terms. They do not see most gays as having an economic life at all, much less an economic life that is differentiable from that of most heterosexuals. Nevertheless, earning a living is how most of us spend about half our waking hours, and spending (and enjoying) our income is how we spend a good deal of the other half, so any economic benefit that accrues to us represents an increase in our quality of life.

There is a sense, of course, in which the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is about our economic life. Specifically ENDA is about increasing the number of jobs open to gays and lesbians. In practice that means it would enable gays to choose from among more jobs, choosing a higher paying (rather than lower paying) one. But, of course, reducing the taxes we pay would have the same effect as opening up access to a higher paying job, and it would involve less coercion of others, and therefore less resentment and less opposition.

Then, too, people who have more money are less likely to be discriminated against, and it certainly enables them to cope with discrimination when it occurs, so lower taxes would benefit us all now without having to wait for a change in employment law.

A second reason could be that our national organizations have little or no experience in working for lower taxes or reduced government expenditures. When they are concerned with money issues, it is usually in trying to obtain more government expenditures, as for subsidies for AIDS drugs, or money for AIDS research or AIDS education.

But they have little idea of how to work for lower taxes, and perhaps not much commitment to it. They lack the vocabulary, the arsenal of arguments, and ultimately the congressional contacts among the mostly Republican (and conservative Democrat) zealous budget cutters to make the case that gays, if only as people without children, should be included in the tax reduction package in some way.

For instance, let everyone equally spend a college tuition credit on further education or job training or any other personal improvement program, including travel or book purchases. Or let each of us add the same amount, $7,000, to a personal IRA. Or use the cigarette tax-derived money to cover the deductible in everyone's health insurance program. None of these is an ideal example, but they are a start.

But a far better solution would be to let individuals make their own decisions about what will most benefit them in any given year by simply reducing everyone's taxes by $500, or $1,000 or whatever. Period. Or reduce the income (or social security) tax rate by some amount across the board for everyone. After all, it is our money too. We worked for it. We earned it. We should be able to keep it, just like people who have children.

Lesbians often make the claim, and it is a very plausible one, that they more often feel discriminated against as women than they do as homosexuals. So they join women's advocacy groups, such as the National Organization for Women.

In the same way, I suspect, gay men often experience, deprecation and even dismissive responses as "singles" or "childless" more than they do as homosexuals. But there are no effective organizations to lobby for us and represent our interests in those capacities.

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.

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.

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.

THE STORY GOES that shortly after the 17th century English poet John Milton published his great epic Paradise Lost, he ran into a Quaker friend who told him, "John, Thee has written well of paradise lost, but Thee must also write of paradise gained."

Suitably admonished, Milton went on four years later to compose Paradise Regained.

In a similar way, it is not enough for us to condemn religions for being anti-gay; we need to help gay people make their religions more gay-affirming.

This is work that must be done. Religions are not likely to wither away. So while some people may choose to oppose all religion, it is also important to work to improve what exists.

Can the churches change? Of course they can. Even the most hierarchical or fundamentalist religions are not immune to moral suasion, new information, reinterpretation of texts and dogmas, claims of supervening love, social pressure, the need for self-preservation and even cash flow.

Some churches have changed their doctrines; many more have changed their attitudes and let doctrines fall into desuetude. How many Catholics still condemn usury, once a mortal sin, or Presbyterians still believe in predestination, once a basic doctrine?

Changing religious attitudes is work that can best be done by people within those denominations.

The most basic contribution to change anyone can make is to be openly gay in their own religion. This may not be easy, of course, but it is both urgent and solidly traditional. For Christians, at least, personal witness to the truth is the one great commandment, and hypocrisy one of the great moral evils.

If you feel that you absolutely cannot be honest about being gay in your church, ask yourself seriously whether you are supporting the right church, whether your church contributes to your spiritual development as a whole person, whether your church welcomes or turns its face from the truth and its responsibilities.

By being open you affirm as you can in no other way your own dignity and worth and the firmness of your own moral convictions. You enable other church members to know gay people and learn that gays are decent citizens, contrary to what they may have heard. You provide inestimable encouragement to young people in your church who may fear they are gay, even if they never talk to you about it.

And you serve as a learning experience for a pastor and a living counter-example to any pastor who thinks about denouncing homosexuality as sinful.

Participate in the life of your church. Volunteer. Getting involved in church lay leadership is vital.

"The congregation needs to see gay people as contributing members to the life and health of the church," one friend wrote to me. He reported that even at his predominantly straight congregations, openly gay people are involved as board members, vestry members, greeters, Sunday school teachers, choir members and coffee hour hosts.

When the Wake Forest Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., decided recently to permit same-sex union ceremonies, the Raleigh News and Observer reported, "Members said it was the presence of gays in their midst that convinced them they were ready to recognize their lifelong commitments."

"They've been extraordinary, good, faithful members," church deacon Richard Barnett told the newspaper. "They're hard-working and deserve as complete a level of participation as any member should have, including the blessing of their relationships."

If you have a partner, try to obtain some sort of commitment ceremony as a recognition of your relationship. It will help fellow church members get used to the idea of gay partnerships. With or without a ceremony, treat yourself and your partner as married and people will begin thinking of you as married. Eventually they will start wondering why their church is refusing something so reasonable as gay marriage.

Urge upon your minister, priest, rabbi or bishop that as a moral leader of the community he or she should sermonize and speak out publicly against hate crimes, especially against anti-gay violence. You can also point out that relentlessly denouncing any person as a sinner generates hostility that some people inevitably act out.

Try to help other members with their problems. Remember that being gay can give you insight into how internal conflict, self-doubt, self-esteem and psychological needs work in a way that many people don't ever think about. Be willing to share that understanding with others so they can gain something useful from you.

With the help of your pastor, or on your own if necessary, start a study group on gay issues, or sexuality issues or the history of religious treatment of minorities. The more people see current topics in a historical perspective, the more open they will be to reconsidering their own views.

Organize a candlelight or prayer vigil for some gay-related issue. Invite the congregation to participate. Hold candles. Pray. Nothing impresses religious people and shatters our opponents' self-confidence more than the notion that people on our side are confident God is with us.

Be careful where you put your money. Try to support projects that will help gays, or gays in your church, rather than any anti-gay hierarchy. If necessary, make directed donations instead of a general contribution.

Many gay Episcopalians who supported foreign missions learned that lesson last August when recently converted Africans bishops voted to oppose gay sex, gay clergy and gay marriage at the Lambeth conference. Spend your money foolishly and you deserve the consequences!

Suggest a designated offering for some gay-related purpose. Use the occasion to provide information about the issue and how the money will help people in need. For instance, agencies trying to help homeless gay youth are in chronic need of funding. Point out the parental hatefulness, the church's responsibility.

Finally, it is important to support the gay-affirming people in your religious community. I have been surprised and impressed by the number of courageous men and women in several denominations who have stepped forward to speak on behalf of gay equality and gay marriage.

Theologians and clergy members have put their reputations and careers on the line on our behalf, witnessing their faith in a way most of us will never be called upon to do, opening themselves to church persecution like nothing we have seen since the 17th century.

We need to honor and help these people financially and organizationally, to show them how much we appreciate their support.

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but I have been spending the last couple of weeks getting ready for Gay History Month, which we celebrate in October each year.

• I've taken out all my CDs and old records of music by Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber and (a personal favorite) the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski and put them next to the CD player for easy access. And I went through the program guide for the local classical music stations and marked the pieces by other gay composers.
• I dug out that dauntingly long, definitive biography of Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann that I have been meaning to read for years and put it beside my big leather easy chair.
• I pulled my copy of Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy from the bookshelf and put it on my nightstand so each evening before going to sleep I can re-read a few of Cavafy's surprisingly frank and level-headed descriptions of street cruising, man-watching, love and loss in early 20th century Alexandria, Egypt.
• I made a short list of the buildings designed by architect Louis Sullivan that I want to make a point of going to see. And I want to make a special effort to spend some time just sitting and looking around in Ralph Adams Cram's neo-Gothic Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue, trying to figure out what makes it so remarkable.
• I went to the post office and bought a bunch of the new stamps honoring composer Samuel Barber that the U.S. Postal Service issued Sept. 13, just in the nick of time for Gay History Month.
• Luckily for me Henry Gerber, founder of the first American gay advocacy organization in the United States (the Society for Human Rights founded in 1924), lived here in Chicago at 1710 N. Crilly Court, a street just one block long just west of Wells St. in the Old Town area. I've never actually gone to look at that site, so I shall put on a coat and tie and make a small pilgrimage to honor our venerable ancestor.

As one of the small band who were early proponents of the idea of a Gay History Month way back in 1994, I admit that my celebration may be a little more thoroughgoing than other people's, maybe even obsessive. But the point is, anyone could easily do one or two of these things, or something similar. I myself may punk out on a few of these (Ellmann's book does look pretty long), but the opportunities exist.

Though the idea of a Gay History Month is less than four years old, the idea of gay history itself has been around quite some time.

Perhaps the earliest form of gay history was the list of famous homosexuals.

"The list," as we could call it, appears even in classical times. It was used by gay writers or characters seeking to offer a justification or precedent for their sexuality. One notable example is in the 2nd century Greek writer Athenaeus: anecdotes about the gay sexuality of several gods, heroes and ancient figures are offered by guests at a dinner party (in Book XIII).

The list's first appearance in modern times may have been in Marlowe's play Edward II (written in 1596), and it became a staple of 19th and early 20th century apologetic writings and early gay fiction. The list eventually became so long and inclusive that it became an object of parody by Chicago playwright Rick Paul and by novelist Larry Kramer in his labored, unfunny satire Faggots.

As modern candor about sexuality increased through the 1960s, researchers began to ask more interesting questions about the lives of famous gays?about the social environments they lived in and the friendship networks they formed, and about how their sexuality, and the social response to it, influenced their lives and entered into and shaped their creative works.

An extreme case, for instance, would be Henry James' almost excruciating attention to the nuances of people's behavior and the details of cultural coding.

Another example would be Walt Whitman's backing away from his early celebration of male physical bonding and "adhesiveness" and degenerating into windy vagueness about "democracy" and invented stories about illegitimate children as he was at first attacked and then grew better-known as a poet.

A still more recent third phase of gay history now takes as its task the attempt to find out how ordinary gay men and women actually led their lives: how they discovered one another, the informal institutions they developed, the coding they used, how they coped with persecution and prejudice, how they thought of themselves, and how their self-understanding may have influenced their lives.

George Chauncey's Gay New York, though not a zippy read, is a prominent example of this sort of history. Allan Berube's 30-page history of gay bathhouses (contained in the anthology Policing Public Sex) is another.

And the fascinating thing is that even for the much earlier periods new material keeps coming to light: A European archive divulges a group of letters, an ancient library is discovered in a Near East archeological dig, a Greek vase depicting sodomy is found hidden in the basement of a museum, a mummy is found wrapped in papyrus that preserves a same-sex love-spell, etc.

If history, as Oscar Wilde?who should know?said, is "merely gossip," then of what use is gay history, besides being merely a charming antiquarian hobby?

I think the answer is that George Orwell was absolutely right when he said in his anti-Christian (as well as anti-Communist) novel 1984 that "Whoever controls the past, controls the future." The Catholic church knew this full well when it burned Sappho's poems and destroyed other ancient literature, when it sought to have records of gay court cases and interrogations burned with those found guilty, when it sought to make sodomy a literally unspeakable "thought crime."

History is a way of finding out that one has a past, that there have always been gays and lesbians who struggled and survived, who failed nobly or prospered, who provide models to emulate or transcend. History can increase our self-understanding by showing us the richness of our past.

At the same time history can be a way escaping the present, of getting a bit outside oneself and one's limited viewpoint, of seeing that the world was once different from the way it is now, and realizing that it could be?surely will be?different in the future.

And one almost inevitably wonders what gays and lesbians 100 years hence will think as they look back on us as a part of their own history. It is an odd feeling, really.