IGF CultureWatch

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?

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."

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.

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.

ALL THIS REALLY HAPPENED. I could not have made it up. There would be no point in making it up; it is only interesting if it really occurred.

I can tell it now because more than 10 years have passed and the principals have moved on. Perhaps they have even forgotten about it. I have not. Although I only stumbled into it, it may have had more resonance for me than for them.

One Saturday afternoon in the late fall I was at home listening, as I sometimes do, to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast. The opera that week was Der Rosenkavalier -- the "Rose Cavalier" -- a romantic comedy by Richard Strauss. It is a beautiful opera, full of lush arias, sensuous waltzes, and an intriguing amount of transvestism.

I need you to understand part of the plot. Oversimplifying, a boorish old nobleman, Baron Ochs, decides to propose to a lovely young lady, Sophie. He engages a young man, Octavian, to take his proposal to Sophie and present her with a token of his esteem and desire?a silver rose. When Octavian and Sophie first meet each other as Octavian presents the rose, they instantly fall in love. Eventually they manage to scare off Baron Ochs and vow to live happily ever after. This is all accompanied by some of the best music anybody ever wrote for anything.

Part way through the first act, I got a call from the local gay bookstore, telling me a book I had ordered had come in and I could pick it up any time.

Oh, great! I wanted the book but did not want to miss the best parts of the music?and I did not have a Walkman.

I decided I would listen through the beginning of Act II, where Octavian presents the silver rose to Sophie, than I would run out for the book, and get back just in time for the series of waltzes in the third act. It would be close, but I could do it.

As he always does, Octavian duly presented the silver rose to Sophie -- the rose represented musically by high notes played on flutes and little silver bells -- and the two young people fell in love, as young people will. I threw on my coat and scarf and hurried out.

As I was walking up Broadway, one of the main arteries of Chicago's gay enclave, I ran into a young man I knew slightly. Robert was the teenage son of one of the couples I got to know when I served as the gay board member for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

Robert was standing outside a popular local restaurant looking around forlornly. He was holding something long and thin, wrapped in a sort of greenish translucent paper. When he saw me, he brightened up.

"Hi," I said. "How ya' doin'?"

"Can you do me a favor?" he said. "A really big favor?"

I hesitated. "I don't know. I'm in kind of a hurry. What is it?"

"You're Paul, right?" he asked. "I really need somebody to do this. See, there is this guy in there" -- he pointed into the restaurant -- "that I met in the gay youth group and I think I'm in love with him. I want you to give him this."

He thrust out the long thin object wrapped in translucent green paper.

"What is it?" I asked.

"A rose," said Robert. "I bought him a rose." He looked sheepish. "I wanted him to have it."

The world tilted slightly.

"Is this some sort of set up?" I asked warily.

"No," said Robert. "I bought this for him. Could you give it to him?"

"Listen," I said. "Do you know what is on the radio right now? Do you know what the Met is playing?"

"I don't know anything about that," insisted Robert. "I just want to give him this."

"Why can't you do it?" I asked, still suspicious.

"Oh, I couldn't do that. I don't want him to know who it's from. Could you give it to him? It'll just take a second."

I resisted. Something was fishy. This was too coincidental to be a coincidence. I shook my head. "I really can't," I said. "I'm in a hurry. Hope you find someone. Good luck."

I walked on. When I looked back he was still standing there holding the rose, looking around anxiously for somebody, anybody he knew.

I got to the bookstore, picked up my book, leafed through a few magazines then started back home.

When I got as far as the restaurant, Robert was still there.

"Could you do it now?" he said, coming up to me. "I can't find anyone to help me. Please?" He thrust the rose at me.

"He's still in there?"

"He's with a bunch of guys from the gay youth group. They have a snack after their meeting."

"What does he look like?"

"You'll do it?" His face brightened.

"What does he look like," I repeated, reaching out to take the rose. I listened. No silver bells.

"He's really good looking and he has bright red hair. His name is Brian."

Feeling very self-conscious and a little foolish, I walked into the restaurant carrying the rose, looked around and spied the table of young men, accompanied by one or two adult advisors. Among them was, unmistakably, an engaging young man with bright red hair. I drew myself up and walked over to the table.

"You are Brian?" I asked the young man.

"Yes," he said. "Why?"

"I am to give you this," I said, as I handed him the rose, still wrapped in its green florist's paper.

He unwound the paper and took out the single, long stemmed red rose. The entire table fell silent and stared at it. So did other diners.

"What is this for?" Brian asked. "Who is this from?"

"It is from? An Admirer," I said.

"Who are you?"

A harder question than he knew.

"I? am The Messenger." I said. Then I bowed slightly. "Have a good day." And I walked back out.

Robert rushed up to me. "Did you find him? Did you give it to him?"

"Yes, of course."

"That's great. Thank you. Thanks a lot. That's really great."

We shook hands and I walked on, feeling a little odd, a little detached from the world around me. When I got home, Octavian and Sophie were singing a final duet.

Love, I suppose, doesn't always win out; but it always has a chance. And, somehow, we always wish it well, don't we?

WHEN GAY NON-DISCRIMINATION LAWS are subject to a popular vote, gays generally lose. When gay non-discrimination laws, and, even more, gay marriage laws are put to a vote in a legislature, gays generally lose.

At the same time, several major business firms have recently made outreach to gays and lesbians, advertising to them and fashioning products and services for them. Large numbers of major corporations have adopted gay non-discrimination rules and some are providing health insurance for domestic partners.

The marked contrast between the political and the business realms suggests that the economic marketplace is friendlier to gays and lesbians than the political marketplace.

Put another way, actors in the economic marketplace, subject to profit and loss, have an incentive to be friendly to gays because their goal is to retain skilled employees and to lure dollars from every possible consumer. By contrast, actors in the political marketplace have a disincentive to be friendly to gays because they need to lure votes from all citizens; that is, they are subject to democracy or majority rule.

As author Grant Lukenbill remarked recently, "Gay employees of Apple Computer in Texas have more rights at work than they do in their own home."

Bluntly, the free market is better for gays than democracy.

It is worth looking more closely at some of the ways in which the economic market provides better protection for individuality and individual choice than the political market.

Votes that really register

In the economic marketplace, when you cast your "dollar vote" for the product you want, you get the product you want. That is, you win no matter what other people do with their dollar votes, and your approval registers economically with the firm whose product you bought.

In the political marketplace, you get what you want only if half of all the other voters already agree with you. If you voted for a losing side, you get nothing. And your candidate gets no reward for making outreach to you. In fact, he may be being penalized.

In short, the economic marketplace fosters a pluralism of values and a plurality of results�i.e., a variety of ways of living. In the political marketplace, the winner's values are imposed on the losers.

For the political marketplace to achieve the value pluralism of the economic marketplace, you would have to imagine a country (state, city) in which you could choose which politicians made the laws for you, and everyone else could do the same.

A second advantage of the economic marketplace is that you can use your dollar votes for the things you want most, and forgo (if necessary) the things you want less. In other words, priorities count. For people with limited incomes, this is a particularly important feature of the marketplace.

In the political marketplace, by contrast, you get to case only one ballot vote for each office, even if on particular race is very more important to you and some others are not important at all.

Say a gay candidate were running. If the political marketplace had the same respect for individual preferences that the economic marketplace does, you could abstain from voting in races you did not care about and then use all those votes in the race you felt strongly about.

Package deals

A third advantage of the economic marketplace: In the political marketplace each candidate has an "issues package," a set of positions on different issues, some of which you will agree with and some of which most likely you will not. But you are stuck with the package and if you vote for the candidate you get the positions you dislike just as much as the ones you like.

In the economic marketplace, by contrast, you can use your dollar votes for a wide variety of disparate items, buying the products, styles, and brands of each that you want, putting together a personal "products package" that is different from everyone else's. There are no package deals where you have to buy, say, Guess jeans, Arrow shirts, Adidas tennis shoes, and Pepsodent toothpaste in order to get any one of them.

A fourth advantage of the economic marketplace is that it encourages rational consideration in advance of acting.

Before you buy a major purchase, you tend to read up on the subject, ask friends, comparison shop, and so forth. You have a definite incentive to do this because the more time you invest in making a prudent "dollar vote" choice, the more you benefit directly by having and using a good product.

In the political marketplace, by contrast, there is little benefit to spending your time investigating the candidates' voting records, analyzing the issues, and so forth. An informed vote has no more influence on the outcome than an uninformed one, and practically no influence in any case, so there is no incentive to be an informed voter, no "payoff." Your vote can still be canceled out by someone who does not know or care about the issues and votes on whim.

Recourse for Defective Merchandise

A fifth advantage of the economic "dollar vote" is that if the product you bought turns out to be defective or fails to live up to your expectations, you can cut your losses immediately. You can throw the product away, return it to the store, get it repaired, sometimes even get your dollar votes back.

No so with the political marketplace. No politician ever came with a guarantee of "Full refund if not completely satisfied." One you have "bought" him (or her) with your vote, you are stuck with him no matter if he changes his positions, compromises his principles, or turns out to be totally ineffective in advancing the ideas that led you to vote for him. Perhaps a few names come to mind.

The political marketplace is open only once every two, or four, or sometimes only once every six years. In the economic marketplace, people are voting every day.

Pluralism: The Genuine Article

Perhaps the root difference between the economic marketplace and the political marketplace is that the economic marketplace is voluntary. It respects people's individual choices in what they buy or sell, including the choice not to participate, because it cannot do otherwise. It embodies as well as fosters values pluralism.

The political marketplace, by contrast, is coercive. It allows a majority to make one rule for all, usually to the advantage of the majority, and requires all who dissent to obey. It gives short or no shrift to differing desires, needs, or conditions. Which of these better benefits minorities like gays seems clear.

First appeared Nov. 17, 1999, in the Chicago Free Press.

ON NOV. 9, THE U.S. SUPREME COURT heard oral arguments on University of Wisconsin vs. Southworth, a case brought by a group of university students who object to the use of mandatory student fees to subsidize some campus organizations.

Specifically, the students are evangelical Christians who object to the use of their money to support 18 student groups, including Campus Women's Center, the University of Wisconsin Greens, the International Socialist Organization, the Militant Students Union and a Native American advocacy group.

The case is interesting to us because the students also object to their money going to the Madison AIDS Support Group, the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Campus Center, and the 10 Percent Society, a gay group.

The students say they are being deprived of their free speech rights. The university, they claim, compels them to "speak" against their own views by using their money to support advocacy groups whose opinions and goals they disagree with.

It is natural for gays and lesbians to want to support the targeted gay student groups. But you do not need to be, as I am not, either Christian, or conservative, or religious at all to think the students have a pretty good argument. Sometimes when unappealing people defend their own freedom they end up defending freedom for all of us.

No one, of course, seriously believes the protesting students are being deprived of free speech. No one, certainly not the university, has prevented the students from expressing their views.

But the university did use the students' money to support speech and advocacy efforts the students disagreed with. That seems wrong. To see why, consider a hypothetical fact situation.

Imagine you as a gay person go off to Old Sarsaparilla University where you discover to your dismay that part of your student fees support the Pro-Family League, Ex-Gay Student Union, Friends of the Nuclear Family, Student Promise Keepers, the Creationist Society and the Fundamentalist Journal.

These groups use your money to make posters they place around campus, to bring speakers to the school, to print anti-gay pamphlets they pass out at the student center, to distribute "free" magazines your money helped print and buy ads promoting their views in the student newspaper.

If you do nothing and say nothing, you are de facto helping the other side. This does look like "forced speech." If you decide to express your own view, you find you are arguing against speech your own money is paying for. Let them use their own damn money, you might think.

The University of Wisconsin did a good deal of huffing and puffing about how free speech and open debate are part of university life and how the mandatory subsidy system encourages the expression of unfamiliar or unpopular views. But this argument has several serious infirmities.

No one is trying to hamper or chill free debate. If subsidies to student groups are terminated, every student and teacher remains free to speak his mind and advocate whatever he wants.

Wisconsin assistant Attorney General Susan Ullman told the court the university wants to promote an open forum and further the First Amendment rights of all students by encouraging groups to express their views.

But first off, someone needs to remind Ullman that if exposing students to diverse viewpoints is the goal, that is the reason universities have professors and classes. Professors are supposed to know more about all those various ideas, their origin, history, development-and defects. In fact, most professors can provide better arguments for positions they do not believe than most student activists can for what they do believe. It is called being educated.

In any case, the "open forum" the university seeks to promote will happen of its own accord. It is worth remembering that the First Amendment is purely negative. It is predicated on the idea that people will spontaneously express their views if they are not blocked by government. The First Amendment subsidizes no one.

Nor would the absence of subsidies prevent students from forming clubs to advocate their views: Students do it now without subsidies. The majority (70 percent) of student groups at the University of receive no school subsidy. They manage to support themselves with dues and other sources of income.

The university claims that decisions about what groups to support are made "by the students themselves" - i.e., by a committee elected by students. But that means that some students decide what other students are going to hear and pay for.

And if a committee elected by a majority disburses money by a majority vote, that system seems likely to promote views that are fashionable or popular, rather than ones that are unfashionable or unpopular. But popular viewpoints hardly need subsidizing.

If the goal truly is to let students determine where their money goes, why does a committee have to make one decision for everybody? Why not let students decide individually on their own? Let them keep their money and contribute to any organization they want. Or join a club and pay its dues. Or do something entirely different with the money. A few might even buy a book.

Nor can the university defend its system on the basis of encouraging all viewpoints. Subsidies to partisan political groups are forbidden. Yet as Justice David Souter pointed out during oral argument, protecting overtly political speech is the "core value" of the First Amendment. So in the paradigm case, the university fails to achieve its ostensible goal. In fact, it explicitly rejects it.

So it appears that the protesting students have a fairly good case, and the University of Wisconsin offers a remarkably poor defense of its policy, riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions.

First appeared Nov. 10, 1999, in the Chicago Free Press.

THE LARAMIE, WYO., TRIAL of Aaron McKinney for the murder of Matthew Shepard came to a rapid conclusion when Wyoming District Judge Barton Voigt ruled that the defense could not introduce testimony to support a "gay panic" defense.

The "gay panic" defense, Voigt said, amounted to saying that because of an (alleged) sexual approach by Shepard, McKinney either became temporarily insane and unable to control his behavior, or that the approach at least caused McKinney to have a "diminished capacity" for controlling his behavior.

Neither of those defenses has standing in Wyoming law, the judge pointed out.

Having little or nothing else to offer, the defense quickly rested its case and McKinney was found guilty of felony murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery.

Voigt's decision to disallow a "gay panic" defense applies only in Wyoming, but it provides an important statement of what is wrong with that defense. We can hope that Voigt's reasoning will help kill off the defense elsewhere as well.

For eons heterosexual males have been able to get away with beating up, even killing gay men (and often robbing them) by offering the excuse that the gay man "came on to me," relying on courts to believe them (You know how predatory those homosexuals are!) and to think that violence is a plausible response.

But the gay panic defense is a conceptual tangle just beneath the surface. We can distinguish at least four different versions of what is better called the "homosexual advance defense."

The general idea is that when a gay man expresses sexual interest in a man who is not gay, the advance can be so offensive or threatening that the person lashes out at the gay man. The versions differ in their explanation for why the person lashes out rather than simply saying no, or why the person feels uncontrollable revulsion rather than a mere lack of interest.

In McKinney's case, the defense tried to argue that McKinney had been subject to sexual assault when he was 7 years old by being forced to fellate an older boy and that Shepard's alleged sexual approach brought back angry recollections of that incident.

The defense also claimed that at age 15 McKinney had a consensual homosexual contact that he found "confusing." But if McKinney's earlier forced homosexual experience was so offensive and traumatizing, why did he agree to a consensual gay experience eight years later? Why did he not become engaged and lash out at his partner then?

As for feeling "five minutes of rage" after Shepard's alleged advance, as McKinney's attorneys claimed, that seems unlikely. McKinney had the time and the self-control to drive his vehicle to a remote location and tie Shepard securely to a fence before continuing to beat him. That does not sound "out of control." It sounds like a plan of action.

Associated Press reporter Robert Black tried to explain the "gay panic" defense in a slightly different way as the theory that "a person with latent homosexual tendencies will have an uncontrollable, violent reaction when propositioned by a homosexual."

But the whole notion of "latent homosexuality" has pretty much been tossed on the slag heap as an invalid concept. As sex researcher C. A. Tripp pointed out in The Homosexual Matrix:

"The term (latent homosexual) is virtually undefinable unless one assumes that the individual has in some sense already eroticized at least a few attributes found in same-sex partners - and in that case, the person firmly meets either the homosexual or bisexual definition," whether they act on those desires or not.

Certainly in McKinney's case having "consensual" homosexual sex at 15 does not sound very latent by anyone's standard.

There is another version of the homosexual advance defense - but stripped of all its ponderous psychiatric baggage - which asserts that if a gay man expresses interest in another man, that means the gay man thinks the other man might also be gay.

This is alleged to be so upsetting and offensive to the straight man, such a threat to his self-image, honor and self-esteem that he may feel it is necessary to attack the gay man to avenge the insult and restore his honor.

It seems likely that some heterosexual men (and many closeted gay men) do in fact have this response, particularly in the South and in some rural areas where reputation is so vitally important and the so-called "culture of honor" prevails.

But, of course, McKinney could not appeal to this defense since he acknowledged a "consensual" homosexual experience and, more important, had allegedly already told Shepard that he and Henderson were also gay. So the alleged approach could have come as no surprise.

Still, other defendants do try to make this claim. All they need is one or two men on a jury to share their reaction. But however much it may reflect prevailing cultural mores, it is important not to honor this defense in the law.

Finally, there is a version of the homosexual advance defense in which defendants simply try to imply that any invitation to homosexual activity, any contact with homosexuals or homosexuality, is so offensive, so disgusting to any heterosexual man that he naturally feels offended and angry.

This defense too, is probably still hinted at in some areas of the United States, especially when no other defense seems available. But the notion is clearly false and will become more obviously false as the acceptance of gays continues to spread. Most heterosexual men, even now, are able to say, "No thanks, I'm not interested" and that can be all there is to it.

The reason for refusing to accept any of these defenses is the same: One important way to discourage men from beating up gays is to stop accepting the excuses they offer after they have done so.

First appeared October 27, 1999, in the Chicago Free Press.

A large number of current controversies hinge on whether public funds should be used to display or promote symbols or materials that offend some persons but which others support as promoting tolerance or virtue, or recognizing the contributions or heritage of their groups. One way of defusing this culture war might be to reduce the government's role in the support of advocacy, art, and public symbol-mongering generally.

LIKE MANY PEOPLE who regularly write on public issues, I have developed an interest in examining how people argue about these issues. Not just the arguments one way or the other about specific topics or the merits of specific positions, but the types of arguments people make, the general principles they appeal to, the background assumptions that never actually get stated or argued.

Take a couple of examples. In Plymouth, Mich., recently, high school teachers set up showcase displays about gay history for Gay History Month (October).

The local school superintendent ordered the displays taken down because they were not part of the curriculum and were offensive ("promoting a lifestyle" was his boilerplate language).

The Brooklyn Museum of Art recently mounted an exhibition of supposedly shocking "art" including a bland picture of a black woman with scattered brown blobs (alleged to be elephant dung), titled "The Holy Virgin Mary."

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called the exhibition offensive and threatened to cancel the city's subsidy of the museum, arguing that the city should only be supporting real art.

It is easy to get caught up in the heat of these controversies. Should a gay history display be considered offensive? Does it promote a lifestyle? Does it help promote tolerance and understanding? Is the controversial art any good? Is it sacrilegious? Is Giuliani just playing politics?

But it seems to me that people who argue on different sides of issues like these are tacitly appealing to different models of what the "public" (that is, the government - that is, people's tax money) should be supporting.

One model assumes without argument that since government ("public" entities) embraces all the various views and groups of people in society, it should be using tax money to support and promote the widest possible cultural diversity, points of view and expressive representations (e.g., art, group symbols, etc.).

The alternative model assumes, again without argument, that the government which-in a democracy, at least-represents the whole people, should subsidize and promote traditions and viewpoints that "the people" have in common, that are part of our common cultural heritage, provide undeniable public benefit and have strong popular support.

Thus, for example, the teachers in Michigan could argue that gays are one of American's diverse social groups, that they have made unique if previously unacknowledged contributions to the society, that schools should teach unbiased truth, that knowledge promotes understanding which helps promote social tolerance, that it promotes self-esteem among gay students, and that any objections are based on ignorance, fear, hate and prejudice.

Parents and school administrators can argue that gays are a small minority, that the displays offend most people in the area, that they just create divisiveness and disruption, that they are mere group advocacy, and scarce teaching time and resources should promote things all of us-including gay-have in common.

You can easily imagine the parallel arguments regarding the controversial art in New York. In fact, you can now probably generate new arguments yourself.

Once you begin looking around, examples spring into view: Should the National Endowment for the Arts subsidize controversial performance artists? Should Christmas displays be on "public" (government) land? Should the Confederate flag fly atop South Carolina's capitol building? What about the rainbow flag at the Ohio state capitol?

Should Kwanzaa be treated as a "real" holiday in public schools? Should government employees get Good Friday off from work? Should Robert Mapplethorpe photographs be exhibited at government-subsidized art galleries?

The two sides are fundamentally at odds over how they view society - as a people or as a collectivity of groups - so they diverge over their views of what the government should support and represent. There seems no way for them to compromise or reach an accommodation: The two positions and their partisans will remain in a fundamental strife for all eternity, one gaining a little here now, the other gaining a little over there later.

Considerations such as these might lead someone to a more libertarian approach, attempting to minimize the areas of social conflict as much as possible by reducing the amount of "public" (government) subsidizing, promotion and sponsorship, and leaving social, cultural, and ideological advocacy of any sort to individuals and civic groups.

We might leave the promotion of art, for instance, to the vast army of private collectors, art dealers, art critics, private museums and perhaps even the artists themselves.

In the area of viewpoint promotion, we could leave that to the wide array of think tanks, public policy institutes, philanthropists, advocacy groups, editorial writers and public polemicists.

Instead of having the government take people's money and spend it according to one or the other model of the "public interest," it might be preferable and more peaceful to let people keep their own money and spend it to support the ideas and buy the cultural products they actually want.

But this libertarian view antagonizes both the diversitarians and the majoritarians more than anything, more even than they antagonize each other. Both want to seize control of the public treasury and the government megaphone in order to promote the art, viewpoints, and ideologies they approve of. Both are afraid that if things are left up to individuals and civic associations, they will not get the results they want.

Both may be right.

First appeared Oct. 20, 1999 in the Chicago Free Press.

AS I WRITE, the Boy Scouts of America is considering a proposal to set up a panel to study the current ban on gay Scouts and adult leaders. They may as well do it: It commits them to nothing. When you want to stall, appoint a panel to study something.

Do the Boy Scouts have good reasons for their gay ban? Of course they do. They are concerned that parents will withdraw their boys from Scouting if the Scouts allow gays. They worry that conservative churches that sponsor Scout troops will stop participating (Two-thirds of Scout troops are sponsored by churches.) They are terrified that a horde of parents will sue them over charges of sexual behavior if the Scouts can be construed as enabling them by allowing gays.

But these are not the reasons they discuss in public. Instead, they fall back on more principled-sounding arguments. Are those arguments any good? Most are not.

The Scouts say they are a private, quasi-religious organization and not "a public accommodation." But they also say they are "open to all boys," which sounds very public. Further, the Boy Scouts are chartered by Congress, and numerous government agencies from police and fire departments to school districts sponsor Scout troops. They could not do that for a religious organization.

Further, the Scouts and some individual troops solicit and receive funding, equipment and meeting space from all levels of government. They clearly compromise their private status by taking benefits that are paid for with tax money extracted from all of us, gays included.

The Scouts claim that they have always banned gays, citing the Scout oath to be "morally straight." But it is easy to find in the huge Oxford English Dictionary that in the early years of this century when the Scout oath was written "straight" meant "honest, upright, candid." (It is still used that way sometimes.) One looks in vain for any recorded use of "straight" at that time to mean "heterosexual." That usage was not generally adopted until the 1960s and 1970s.

Should gays then want courts (the government) to force the Scouts to change their policy? I am inclined to think not.

The Scouts also claim freedom of association for their organization. However much we may not like this particular invocation of it, freedom of association is an important principle for gays, as for any minority, and one we should not want to see compromised, even for a short term gain. We relied heavily on arguments for freedom of association during the early years of the gay movement when we had to defend our right to form gay clubs, gay political groups and gay student groups. It is no less important a principle now that our right to form gay groups is no longer generally contested. It might be contested again sometime.

Freedom of association also plays a role in supporting everything from women's coffee houses and gay male bathhouses to gay-specific parades and perhaps even whom we live with.

It may be useful to think of associational freedom as an extension of our vitally important right to privacy. Freedom of association simply extends the boundaries of your privacy to include your ability to determine who you share your life with and interact with in pursuing shared goals. This includes everything from whom you invite into your home -- and whom you exclude -- to whom you want to include in your club, religious group or civic organization.

So I end up concluding that, however much I dislike it, the Scouts should be allowed to keep their ban on gays -- but only if they give up every single government charter and sponsorship, their free meeting space, funding, equipment and other benefits. No gay tax money for anti-gay discriminators.

Are we then stuck with tolerating an anti-gay Boy Scouts. Not for long I think. Businesses in the free market and broad changes in civil society will induce the Scouts to change their policy without government coercion. Here is why:

The social action/social policy arm of the United Methodist Church issued a statement on Oct. 10 calling on the Scouts to abandon their anti-gay policy. The statement read:

"While the General Board of Church and Society would like to enthusiastically affirm and encourage this continuing partnership of the church and scouting, we cannot due to the Boy Scouts of America's discrimination against gays. This discrimination conflicts with our Social Principles."

The statement is particularly important because the United Methodist Church, the nation's second largest Protestant denomination, is one of the largest sponsors of Boy Scout troops -- nearly 12,000 troops that include more than 420,000 boys. A policy statement by so important a supporter can have a powerful persuasive effect. And it will not be the last.

A bellwether of another major source of pressure came to light at a September awards ceremony for business supporters of the Boy Scouts in Providence, R.I.

After receiving an award for his company's support of Scouting, one corporate executive told the Scout group that he disagreed with the policy of banning gays. Another pointedly informed the Scouts that the gay ban violated his company's "commitment to diversity." Yet another executive who won an award two years ago said he did not attend this year's ceremony because the gay ban was contrary to his company's policy.

The extremely popular mayor of Providence said that the city would be forced to "reexamine" its financial support for the Scouts. And a representative of Southeastern New England United Way noted that the giant charity "disapproved" of the gay ban.

The Boy Scouts of America will change on its own when it can assure worried parents that it was encouraged to change by its own supporters.