IGF CultureWatch

First appeared on October 13, 1999 in the Chicago Free Press.

SINCE OCTOBER IS GAY HISTORY MONTH, it seems an apt time to correct one of the persistent errors about gay history - the notion that support for gays came only from the political left. In truth, there was a certain amount of support for gays from libertarians and libertarian-leaning conservatives throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps the best place to start is 1960-1961 when two libertarian academics published books that helped set the agenda for future discussion.

In 1960, Friedrich Hayek, an economist and social philosopher at the University of Chicago, and later a winner of the Nobel prize, published "The Constitution of Liberty." Hayek's chief aim was to set out arguments for personal liberty and explain why government coercion was harmful both to the individual and to society.

One of Hayek's key points was that just because a majority does not like something, it does not have the right to forbid it. "The most conspicuous instance of this in our society," Hayek wrote, "is that of the treatment of homosexuality." After noting that men once believed that tolerating gays would expose them to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, Hayek added, "Where such factual beliefs do not prevail, private practice among adults, however abhorrent it may be to the majority, is not a proper subject for coercive action for a state."

Just two years later one of Hayek's students wrote a long article, "Sin and the Criminal Law," for the libertarian quarterly "New Individualist Review." Using Hayek's framework, the article attacked all so-called "morals" legislation - e.g., laws against gambling, drug use, suicide, prostitution, voluntary euthanasia, obscenity and homosexuality.

The article dismissed all these as "imaginary offenses" and developed Hayek's argument that such laws should be repealed because the personal freedom of individuals is what creates the conditions for social progress.

Hayek's influence was pervasive among libertarians. To take just one example, in 1976, one of Hayek's students wrote a 12-page pamphlet, "Gay Rights: A Libertarian Approach," for the fledgling Libertarian Party and its presidential candidate Roger Lea McBride.

The pamphlet, one of the major outreach tools of the campaign, outlined the libertarian approach of repealing bad laws instead of passing new ones. It urged the repeal of all laws that prohibited gay sex, gay marriage, gay participation in the military, gay adoption and child custody, cross-dressing and laws that permitted police entrapment. Many of these have become more pressing issues 25 years later.

The other early libertarian book was Thomas Szasz' 1961 "The Myth of Mental Illness," in which Szasz, a professor of psychiatry at Syracuse University, argued that psychiatry was simply a system of social control, that "mental illness" was just a label for socially disapproved behavior and the goal of all therapy should be individual autonomy and self-understanding for the person seeking therapy.

Just as Hayek provided a powerful theoretical structure for opposing sodomy laws and other government controls, so Szasz provided a powerful general argument against the notions that gays are sick and could or should be "cured."

Szasz' argument was quickly adopted by early gay activists and other advocates for gays. In a pioneering essay in Hendrik Ruitenbeek's 1963 anthology, "The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society," the independent-minded conservative psychoanalyst Ernest van den Haag reinforced Szasz' approach by arguing vigorously against every possible reason that could be offered for describing homosexuality as sick or immoral or unnatural.

"I do not believe that homosexuality as such can or need be treated," van den Haag wrote, and added that when one psychiatrist said all his gay patents were sick, van den Haag replied that so were all his heterosexual patients.

Van den Haag also mischievously turned traditional neo-Freudian theories about homosexuality upside down by arguing that powerful American mothers and passive fathers probably caused most fear and hostility to homosexuality. Because of this family structure, van den Haag explained, boys have a more precarious identification with their fathers. Their resulting fear of feminine identification leads to an exaggerated insistence on masculinity manifested in part by hostility to homosexuality.

Szasz himself applied his general argument to gays in "Legal and Moral Aspects of Homosexuality" in a 1965 anthology "Sexual Inversion," edited by psychiatrist Judd Marmor.

Szasz repeated his arguments that psychiatric diagnoses were merely labels used for social control. Accordingly, attempts to change homosexuals to heterosexual were simply attempts to change their values. Szasz added that there was no basis for saying that homosexuality was unnatural unless one's standard was universal procreation - hardly a modern necessity.

And Szasz pointed out that homophobia arises because homosexual acts seem to devalue the privileged status of heterosexual acts for heterosexuals. If anyone doubts the cogency of that argument, they need only remember that the most common argument the religious right offers against gay marriage is that it will cheapen or undermine heterosexual marriage.

Szasz returned to the mistreatment of gays in 1970 in "The Manufacture of Madness," where he argued with numerous historical examples that modern psychiatry is best understood as a continuation of the Catholic Inquisition but using pseudo-scientific language.

He described the legend of Sodom and Gomorrah as the first recorded instance of police entrapment of gays, noted that the Catholic church opposed homosexuality primarily because it gave pleasure and urged that the proper goal of psychiatry should be to help people value their own selfhood more than society's judgment about them.

There are other pro-gay libertarians and conservatives, but Hayek and Szasz are particularly important for their broad theoretical frameworks.

First appeared on September 8, 1999, in the Chicago Free Press.

AFTER I FINISHED a recent commentary about the slight shift toward gay inclusiveness by some GOP presidential candidates, it occurred to me that the language they use to describe their positions is as interesting as the moves themselves.

The language candidates Elizabeth Dole, George W. Bush, Steve Forbes, John McCain use to try to appear more tolerant, accepting or inclusive is intentionally evasive or ambiguous. It is designed to suggest as much as possible to voters on all sides of the issue while actually saying as little as possible.

Keep in mind, though, that obvious efforts at evasion are sometimes significant when there are strong pressures, say from the religious right, not to be evasive about issues such as homosexuality.

Perhaps the chief way Republican candidates try to show they are not anti-gay is their willingness to appoint a gay person to their administration. For instance, Bush said earlier this year that he would hire a homosexual "if someone can do a job and a job that he's qualified for."

This sounds positive enough, and we know that Bush has openly gay advisors. But notice the ambiguity. Bush leaves himself an out by saying that a person has to be qualified for the job. When it comes to political appointments, though, qualifications have a strong subjective component. That is, qualifications are partly a function of the person's acceptability to the constituency he will be working with or speaking for.

Is a Baptist "qualified" to be U.S. ambassador to the Vatican? How about an atheist? Not very likely. Is a union-busting corporate attorney "qualified" to be Secretary of Labor? Probably not. Is a gay man "qualified" to be Secretary of Defense, where he would have to deal with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military's anti-gay policy? What about a gay man as a senior official in the Department of Education, where he might influence policy for teaching our impressionable, vulnerable school children? What about ambassador to Luxembourg, where he would represent the U.S. government? Many Republican senators apparently think not. What about ambassador to Saudi Arabia, where gay sex is illegal?

In other words if there is sufficient objection to an appointment, that in itself means the person is not "qualified." So Bush's willingness to hire "qualified" gays seems considerably weaker and more flexible than it first appears. Maybe he would hire gays only when no one objected. Maybe the only "qualified" homosexuals are those no one knows about. Is this what Bush means? His answer tells us nothing, as it was designed to do.

Forbes' spokesman Bill Dal Col said his candidate too would be willing to appoint a homosexual "if the person is qualified for the job," but quickly added, "as long as it is not a statement on a lifestyle or promoting a lifestyle." That second part is even more evasive, and it is expressed in the language of the religious right with its overtones about choice and recruitment.

But we need to ask what Dal Col means. When is an appointment a statement about a lifestyle or promoting a lifestyle? Whenever a gay person is the first gay appointee to anything? If so, then no gay person can be appointed to anything higher than current gay appointment levels. In fact, almost any appointment of an openly gay person can be considered a statement about his or her lifestyle -- if only the minimal statement that such a "lifestyle" is neutral or irrelevant. In the current social climate, that is itself a statement about homosexuality to the extent that it rejects condemnation.

So the question remains: Would Forbes hire an openly gay person for anything, or is the concept of an appointment that "is not a statement about a lifestyle" an empty category, a concept with no possible examples? Dal Col's answer was meant to leave that question entirely open so as to commit Forbes to absolutely nothing.

Bush and Forbes also oppose "special rights." According to the New York Times Forbes frequently says he wants "equal rights for all, special rights for none." Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes told the Times that Bush "doesn't believe in granting legal rights based on sexual orientation." Presumably both are thinking of gay non-discrimination laws or hate crimes laws.

But of course Bush does believe in granting legal rights based on sexual orientation. In Texas, heterosexuals have a legal right to marry the person they love; gays do not. Texas' sodomy law, specifically endorsed by Bush as a statement of "our social values," lets heterosexuals have sex legally, while gays may not. Forbes too opposes the equality of gay marriage and both oppose the right of gays to serve openly in the military, although they approve of open heterosexuals serving.

Which rights then are called "special rights" and which are not? It seems that when heterosexuals have a right that gays lack, and the candidate approves, it is not a "special right." So the "special rights" language does not refer to a real political category; it is merely a rhetorical term, designed to include whatever the candidate wants it to. Whether something is described as a special right or not depends entirely on whether the candidate is for it or against it. If and when Bush or Forbes or anyone else decides to endorse something for gays, he will cease to refer to it as a special right.

So what do these candidates really believe? They believe they would like to be president.

They believe they do not want to alienate voters on either side of a contentious and divisive issue such as homosexuality. They believe any specific position will lose them votes. And they believe they can formulate language that will appeal equally to both sides, allowing each to think the candidate is on their side.

First appeared in the June 17, 1999, Windy City Times.

MODERN GAY LIBERATION is a creation not of Stonewall but of the 1960s.

In a previous column I sketched some notable examples of gay activism during the 1960s. The examples showed that the pace of gay activism accelerated rapidly in the second half of the decade, virtually assuring a thriving gay movement in the 1970s whether Stonewall happened or not.

However, the 1960s gay movement did not work in isolation. It was aided by large-scale changes in America's public culture, changes that not only helped the gay movement, but encouraged even gays who had no contact with the movement to be more self-accepting and step forward to claim civic equality.

When someone shakes a soft drink can before opening it, then pulls the tab, the contents spurt out. The Sixties were the shaking; Stonewall simply pulled the tab.

As gay historian Jim Levin pointed out in his valuable 1983 study Reflections on the American Homosexual Rights Movement, if there was a single theme underlying the various social trends of the 1960s it is the growing willingness to question received opinion, to "Question Authority" as one button urged, and to assert individual moral autonomy against the agents of social control -- governments, law, religions, psychiatry, even "propriety."

For instance, the 1960s black civil rights movement demonstrated how unjust some laws were and how irrational were the social prejudices behind those laws. It was easy for gays to see parallels to anti-gay laws and realize how the social opprobrium they endured was like prejudice against blacks.

Frank Kameny coined the slogan "Gay is Good" in 1968 in clear imitation of "Black is Beautiful." Whatever else "Black is Beautiful" meant, it meant that equality should not depend on becoming identical to the dominant majority.

The other main model of social protest was the anti-Viet Nam war movement. Increasingly militant demonstrations suggested to gays that it was legitimate to protest government policy and to consider resisting laws which directly threatened them.

Then too, the fact that some heterosexual anti-war protesters claimed to be gay in order to protest the war or avoid the draft suggested to many young gays that it might not be so scary to acknowledge being gay after all.

Perhaps the best example of the 1960s social ethos was the embrace by some young people of the idea of a "counterculture," a lifestyle emphasizing relaxation of rules, hierarchies and traditional moral strictures.

The theme of the counter-culture was the libertarian one of self-exploration and personal authenticity, in contrast to conformity or conventional respectability. A zealous non-judgmental attitude prevailed, a rule of "Do your own thing." The advocacy of personal authenticity was not lost on gays. The politicized New Left held "teach ins," but the counter-culture held "be-ins".

The counter-culture encouraged the use of psychoactive drugs to explore "alternative consciousness." It encouraged the exploration of Asian religions -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, a plethora of gurus. Despite meager results and more quest than insight, the effect of both was to disestablish moralistic Christianity as the sole model of religion.

The counter-culture fostered sexual expression as a means of helping people find personal liberation and permitted occasional bisexual behavior by heterosexuals for the same reason. Its non-assertive attitudes encouraged a kind of mild androgyny among males that challenged aggressive masculinity and the stereotype that gays were unique in lacking masculinity. When a shocked young women once told one such man that he was wearing "girl's tennis shoes," he looked puzzled, shrugged, and said simply, "I don't care."

The imperatives of personal authenticity and self-discovery were reinforced by the newly reborn women's movement, which urged women to reject traditional social role limitations. Women were encouraged to "raise their consciousness" and rethink their self-concepts and preconceptions about women's capacities and autonomy. The message for women was given powerful impetus by the availability of the birth control pill after 1960, allowing women to assert greater control over their sexuality.

The feminist call to reject socially fostered self-concepts and assert sexual self-ownership had clear relevance for gays, even when not directly aimed at them.

One of the most conspicuous changes during the 1960s was the greater openness about sex. Social historians now argue whether there was actually more sex (yes, some), but there was certainly more talk about it in newspapers, magazines, on television talk shows, in living rooms. There was more sex in novels, in plays, in movies. One small magazine mischievously titled itself Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.

Partly this was pushed along by the ongoing sexual revolution and the increasing separation of sex from reproduction. But in greater measure it resulted from U.S. Supreme Court decisions steadily restricting the definition of obscenity, allowing an ever-widening range of sexual material to be published.

Inevitably, greater public discussion of homosexuality followed, especially in the latter half of the 1960s, if only because gays were exotic and controversial. The number of newspaper and magazine article multiplied year by year. At one point New York television talk show host David Susskind seemed to have gays on his program so frequently that a contemporary cartoon parodied him by drawing a homosexual interviewing a group of David Susskinds.

Early gay activists solicited and welcomed this publicity, even though it was seldom uniformly favorable, because they saw it as a way of letting closeted gays know they were not alone and sending the message of gay legitimacy to gays they could not reach otherwise. As we know from the results, the strategy worked.

It deserves mention too that during the 1960s there were growing numbers of intellectual challenges to the chief sources of anti-gay oppression: to orthodox Christianity by liberal religion, process theology, and existential theology; to traditional ethical principles by "situation ethics;" and to state enforcement of morals by the concepts of victimless crimes and the over-reach of the criminal law.

Finally, a growing number of researchers and theorists challenged the notion that gays were mentally ill or, like Thomas Szasz, said frankly that the whole concept of mental illness was simply a device for the social control of disapproved behavior.

Despite its excesses and occasional nuttiness, the '60s has a lot to teach us still.

First appeared June 10, 1999, in the Windy City Times.

THIS YEAR IS BEING billed as the 30th anniversary of "Stonewall Riots" of June, 1969 in New York's Greenwich Village.

Hallowed in story and song, "Stonewall," as it is now called, was a weekend-long series of skirmishes between gays and the police that followed a bar raid, often taken to mark the beginning of the modern gay movement.

To be sure, a great deal of gay self-disclosure, activism and institutional development followed rapidly after "Stonewall."

But focusing on "Stonewall" as some sort of beginning or defining moment for the gay movement is deeply misleading. It blocks recognition of the important fact that there was a rapidly growing gay community consciousness in the 1960s, and that there was already a gay movement that not only grew rapidly but accelerated as the 1960s progressed.

Stonewall, we could say, was as much an effect as a cause.

As New York gay historian Jim Levin pointed out in a 1983 monograph on the gay movement, "Stonewall was the trigger for the gun, but the gun was so well loaded that any number of other events might well have fired it."

And veteran activist Frank Kameny comments to me, "I've always believed that our public demonstrations in 1965 and the subsequent ones in 1966, and at Independence Hall thereafter, created the mindset which made the 1969 public demonstration at Stonewall possible, and without which such a public demonstration would have been so unthinkable that it would not have occurred."

Although speculating about alternative history is risky, it also seems safe to say that even if no such catalyzing event as "Stonewall" had happened at all, gay progress would have continued from the 1960s on into the 1970s at an ever-increasing pace. It would simply have happened differently.

Let me give a generous dozen examples of pre-Stonewall gay activism and growth. Notice how the pace accelerates as the decade progresses.

• San Francisco entertainer Jose Sarria, the first openly gay man to run for public office, received 6,000 votes in the 1961 race for city supervisor, the same office Harvey Milk won 16 years later.
• Illinois in 1961 was the first state to decriminalize sodomy. Connecticut followed suit at the end of the decade.
• The first gay business association, the Tavern Guild, was formed in 1962 by gay bars in San Francisco. Within five years, gay bars in other cities formed similar groups.
• A gay magazine distributed in San Francisco's gay bars had a circulation of 7,000 by 1962.
• Frank Kameny organized the first ever picket demonstration for gay rights in America in April 1965 at the White House. Six more pickets followed that year in Washington or Philadelphia, including a second White House picket in October that drew 65 people.
• A national gay association, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, began holding meetings and coordinating local activist efforts in 1966.
• Gays in San Francisco opened a community center in 1966. It was supported, of course, by a thrift shop.
• A Los Angeles rally to protest gay bar raids in which patrons were injured drew several hundred gays early in 1967.
• Craig Rodwell opened the first gay bookstore, Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, in New York in 1967.
• The first campus gay organization, the Student Homophile League, was founded at Columbia University by Robert Martin in 1967. It was quickly followed by gay groups at Cornell and two or three other schools.
• Dick Michaels and Bill Rand founded the biweekly national gay newspaper The Advocate in 1968.
• The Rev. Troy Perry founded the Metropolitan Community Church in 1968.
• There were 15 gay organizations in the United States in 1966. By the spring of 1969, just before Stonewall, there were nearly 50.

I offer this dozen or so examples to make clear that during the 1960s there was a small but rapidly growing gay movement that helped ensure the continued growth of activism in the 1970s even had Stonewall not happened.

But to a certain extent people live by symbols, find meaning and structure for their lives in symbols, and Stonewall has become our symbol. Think of a symbol as a kind of mental shorthand -- a conceptual device we use to coalesce a large number of facts, beliefs and feelings into a single manageable package which comes to have some sort of meaning for us, apart from and greater than its constitutive elements.

Stonewall (the event) was an odd combination of guerrilla warfare, camp street theater, and New Age "happening." Noting the growth of avant-garde and experimental theater in New York during the 1960s, historian Wayne Dynes described Stonewall as "simply the most spectacular manifestation of the new funky theater, produced in improvisational style with unpaid actors, and the police playing themselves."

"Stonewall" (the symbol), however, now has come to stand for -- "to mean" -- the aggressive expression of gay moral legitimacy, gay self-determination, and gay assertiveness in the face of institutional (especially governmental) hostility. As a symbol it includes all the earlier activist claims and adds a kind of intransigent and militant posture, "Not with my life, you don't."

After the hostile response to the bar raid, in which a gay crowd kept police trapped inside the bar until reinforcements arrived, the slogans chalked graffiti-like on the sides of buildings included "Gay Power." No matter how imitative of "Black Power" that phrase may have been, for most gays it was a new and startling thought even as braggadocio.

Walking through the Greenwich Village neighborhood after the second night of the disruptions, gay poet and counter-culture icon Allen Ginsberg commented to a reporter, "You know, the guys there were so beautiful. They've lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago."

But "Stonewall" was not automatically a symbol. People chose to make it one because they wanted a symbol. Clearly many people were close enough to being ready to agitate openly for gay equality that it took only the small added impetus of Stonewall to make them take that further step.

It seems almost as if the gay movement was building up so it could take advantage of some event that could sell the gay liberation message of gay equality, gay openness, gay assertiveness to larger numbers of people in an imaginative way.

The Stonewall Inn was an unlicensed bar. It was seedy. The glasses were dirty. The drinks were weak. It charged exorbitant prices.

Seldom has such a sow's ear been made into such a silk purse.

First appeared June 3, 1999, in the Windy City Times.

Along about this time o' year,
My po'r ol' heart fills up with fear.
Examinations 'r comin' roun'-
Like to drive a fella right to the groun'.
- From "The Talking Examination Blues" (circa 1955)

ALONG ABOUT THIS TIME OF YEAR my own poor old heart fills up with fear mainly because editors start making aggressive noises about Stonewall Anniversaries and Gay Pride columns.

Gay Pride is coming up again," they chirp. "You know what that means."

It means I have to think of something new to say about gay pride. This year is even worse.

"And it's the 30th anniversary of Stonewall," they inform me, as if I could escape this fact. "Isn't that exciting?" they burble. But that's ancient history, for goodness sake. In 1969 most young gays weren't even born. Especially most gays under thirty. We might as well celebrate the Battle of Tours, whenever that was.

What is there to say about gay pride? Worse yet, what is there new to say about gay pride? Not much. Nevertheless, yielding to editorial persuasion, and the fact that I would like to keep my job, I have come up with the definitive schema on gay pride. Feel free to take notes.

Thesis one: Being gay is wonderful and we all should feel proud that we are gay.

Put this way the idea of gay pride seems pretty silly. You can really only feel proud about the things you accomplish. But being gay is not something you accomplish; it is something you discover about yourself. You do not choose to be gay any more than you choose your race or height or your eye color.

This is a definitive argument against the whole notion of gay pride. There is no possible rebuttal. Which accounts for the fact that no one bothers to rebut it. But oddly, it makes almost no impression on anyone at all.

People go right ahead talking about gay pride, saying they feel gay pride, claiming they are glad to be gay, and all the rest. So we must try to make sense of what seems on the surface to be nonsensical. This leads to:

Thesis two: True, you don't choose to be gay, but you can choose to come out and you can take pride in coming out, in having the courage to overcome social stigma and affirm your own character.

This thesis at least has the advantage of being defensible. But coming out is getting easier and easier, at least in most places, so coming out is not such a big deal any more. Fifteen year old tots are coming out these days, so doing it in your 20s or 30s does not seem like much of an achievement, much less a source of pride.

Then too, I have known people who are out of the closet but who conduct their lives badly. They may be rude and insensitive. They may act foolishly and even destructively. They can cause pain to others and themselves. Maybe they thought that after they came out, they had no further obligations--as if that were all. Are they examples of gay pride? Not that I would want to introduce to anyone. Sometimes I wish they would just go back into the closet. (I have a list.) These plain facts lead us to:

Thesis three: "Being gay" is, in an important sense, more than just being openly homosexual. It seems to require that you develop the strength of character, the emotional stability, and social equipoise to live openly and function well in a primarily heterosexual society that still offers many opportunities for missteps and miscalculations.

Flourishing in this milieu necessarily involves rolling with some punches, evading others, blocking some karate chops, and occasionally using jujitsu to throw an adversary off-balance. (These are metaphors, please note.) It can also include firm resistance and a calm assertion of one's own dignity. The trick is to understand these techniques and to know which is appropriate under what circumstances. Some gays, alas, do not manage their lives well under these intermittently adverse circumstances. if you can, that is something to take pride in.

Still, the Gay Pride parades and events as we see them today do not seem so individualistic as all this. They do not seem to be involve a collection of people expressing pride about achieving social adeptness. So what is going on? This leads us to:

Thesis four: A gay person might say he was proud of our community and the institutions that we have created over the last thirty or forty years. We created social service, health care institutions and advocacy groups. We created clubs, sports leagues and business groups. We increased our political presence in both parties and in large corporations. Of all these accomplishments we can be proud.

But there is a problem here. The "we" that did the work to create "our" community is some of us "we" but not others of us "we." Some of us "we" (and you know who you are) did absolutely nothing to help. In order to be justifiable, pride in anything should probably be proportional to the contribution a person made to it. Just being around while other people did some work does not seem like much of an achievement.

A person could reply, maybe somewhat testily, "Well, those things show what gays can achieve." So they do. And that is excellent. And people who created those things deserve the credit and deserve to feel a sense of pride. But what about the others? It seems a little odd to say you are proud of someone else's hard work. That sort of collective thinking ultimately seems parasitic; it seems strange to be proud of being a parasite. So we wind up at our final rationale for gay pride:

Thesis five: "gay pride" may lack a firm basis in careful thinking, but it is an entirely understandable and reasonable reaction to past persecution and stigmatization. It represents a kind of over-compensation. Proclaiming "Gay Pride" is something like an archer who aims above the target in order to hit the target. We tell people to be proud in order to overcome the negative messages the culture sends.

Well and good, but since our goal is a society in which gay is viewed as no different from heterosexual, "gay pride" is at best a temporary response in our current transitional era. As acceptance of gays grows over time, it will become less significant, and will finally be irrelevant.

If this is true, then "Gay Pride" is mainly a form of PR propaganda aimed both at the large number of gays who have yet to fully accept themselves, and at those heterosexuals who still find themselves able to feel a smug, disdainful superiority to gays.

This rationale for "Gay Pride" has the most merit, chiefly because it is the most honest.

See you at the parade.

First appeared in The Windy City Times August 27, 1998.

A study published in Pediatrics suggested that self-identified gay high school students are more likely to engage in "risk behavior" than are other students. Religious right groups claim this shows gays are "self-destructive" while the study's own author suggests that such behavior is a response to rejection by the majority culture. There are problems with both interpretations.

---

A SEEMINGLY HARMLESS AND INOFFENSIVE little article about teen-age gays recently became a focus of controversy between gay-supportive researchers and the religious right.

Back in May, Dr. Robert Garofalo and colleagues published a study in Pediatrics suggesting that self-identified gay high school students are more likely to engage in a variety of "risk behaviors" than other students are.

In a survey of 4,159 Massachusetts high school students, the researchers found 104 students who said they were gay, lesbian or bisexual. The gay youths were 2-3 or even more times more likely than other students to smoke dope, use alcohol, use cocaine, inject drugs, be threatened with a weapon, miss school out of fear, attempt suicide, and so forth.

Then on July 14, a group of religious right and "ex-gay" organizations placed an advertisement in the Washington Post citing the article as evidence that gays are trapped in a self-destructive lifestyle.

"Studies also show a high degree of destructive behavior among homosexuals, including alcohol, drug abuse, and emotional or physical violence," said the ad, "it's not lack of acceptance... it's... the visible response to a broken heart."

After a distressing three-week time lag, Garofalo stated publicly that he was "horrified and angry" at how the religious right had interpreted his study.

In an Aug. 4 interview with the Boston Globe Garofalo fumed, "It's a complete misrepresentation of what the research actually says. It comes to the completely opposite conclusion of what the paper concluded."

Garofalo told the Globe that the youths' behavior was actually a result of the alienation that gay teenagers face "in a culture that is often unaccepting."

Robert Knight, point man on gay issues for the Family Research Council, fired back, saying there is no merit to the theory that alienation can produce self-destructive behavior. Rather, said Knight, "homosexual behavior is the symptom of deeper, unmet emotional needs. Everyone in their heart know the behavior is wrong. People who are caught up in it are covering their emotional distress by abusing substances."

Frankly, there are problems with both interpretations.

Go back to Garofalo's article. Although Garofalo could establish a statistical link between being self-identified as gay and a greater tendency to experience these "psychosocial and medical risk factors," the survey could not show was what was a cause and what was an effect.

Garofalo acknowledges this in the article: "There are several limitations to this study... We can only examine the association between sexual orientation and health risk behaviors and not draw conclusions about causality." If he now thinks the "risk behaviors" are a response to a hostile culture, that could be true, but nowhere in his article does he say that.

Let us start with the fact that 104 seems a surprisingly low number of gay students. Sure enough, 62 additional youths said they were "not sure" about their sexual orientation and surprisingly 387 (9.3 percent) refused to answer the question at all. No doubt too some of those who marked "heterosexual" simply lied.

So many young gays can be found in the "non-gay" group that had lower rates of all those risk behaviors.

Even among the 104 who said they were gay, fewer than half said they had engaged in most of 40 the "risk behaviors" listed. That suggests that many of the self-identified gays were handling themselves quite well even by the stringent standards of the survey.

All this scarcely supports the religious right theory that "homosexuals" engage in self-destructive behavior because of "emotional distress" over behavior they know to be wrong. But it also weakens Garofalo's broad claim about gay alienation, at least for many students.

But what about those who do engage in sex, alcohol, drug use, and so forth? The study also found high rates of missing school because of fear, having personal property damaged, being physically attacked, being threatened with a weapon, and so forth. For Robert Knight to ignore the impact of verbal and physical hostility on young gays' attitudes and sense of self seems plainly dishonest.

Is Garofalo's interpretation about "alienation" the better one? It is certainly appealing to many of us who remember an uneasy youth. But "alienation" is too vague to do much work; it obscures more than it illuminates. No doubt there is hostility toward young gays, but does the hostility produce alienation which then induces risk behaviors? Does risk behavior cause alienation? Or does behavior somehow prompt the hostile reaction? What exactly is going on?

For one thing some of the categories seem odd. it seems strange to treat smoking cigarettes as a risk behavior like cocaine use. And why is having three or more sexual partners in your life a risk behavior? Drug use might be a response to stress, but can also just be fun. And why would social hostility cause high rates of steroid use? The whole thing is a conceptual tangle.

Now think of some possible ways to link being gay, engaging in risk behaviors, experiencing hostility and alienation.

• Gay youths might feel more alienated from a hostile society and less restrained by traditional social norms and more willing to smoke, drink, do drugs, have lots of sex and antagonize their peers.
• Gay youths who are insecure might have a desire to "act out" and behave in a exaggeratedly cross-gendered fashion, take drugs and deliberately flout social convention. This may cause them to be harassed at school.
• Gay youths who are harassed at school may drink and use drugs as an escape and seek more sexual partners as a source of self-affirmation and needed pleasure.
• Gay youths who find that gay sex was not the terrible, dangerous thing they had been told might have less reason to believe societal warnings about drugs.
• Youths who realize they were gay at a young age might act cross-gendered, thinking that is how to be gay. That could induce other youths to harass them, and then they might use drugs for escape, compensatory pleasure and so forth.

There are other possible combinations. And different causal links may be true for different students. Questionnaires cannot tell us these things.

Ultimately, researchers will just have to go and talk with young gays and ask them how they feel about their lives, the reactions they get, the pressures they face, how they cope with stress, and what expectations and hopes they have for the future.

That would not be a bad idea for Robert Knight either.

First appeared in the Windy City Times July 30, 1998.

DURING THE MIDDLE OF JULY, a coalition of conservative religious and political organizations mounted an assault against gays by placing ads in national newspapers claiming that gays can change and be "healed."

The three ads featured a "former lesbian" prominently displaying a wedding ring, a crowd shot of "ex-gays" who have "changed," and a football player who says his free speech rights were violated when people criticized things he said about gays.

The ads claimed gays can change their sexual desires, can become heterosexual, and that they should do so because being gay is sinful, unhealthy and destructive.

So it seems. But do the ads actually say homosexuals can become heterosexuals?

No, they do not. Nowhere do the ads say gays can become heterosexual or develop heterosexual feelings. In fact, the words "heterosexual" and "heterosexuality" do not appear anywhere in any of the three ads.

On closer examination the ads seem very cagily written, as if they were drafted by a lawyer who was acutely aware of what he could and could not get away with.

Instead, the ads say gays can "leave homosexuality," leave "this lifestyle" and "leave their homosexual identities." They can "overcome homosexuality" and become "ex-gays."

What do gays leave homosexuality for? For "sexual celibacy and even marriage," say the ads. This claim is so central that it is repeated in two of the ads. Yet celibacy is the cessation of activity, not of feelings. And although the ads suggest "even" the possibility of marriage, they do not claim that ex-gays stop having gay feelings or are heterosexual.

Clearly what becoming "ex-gay" means is ceasing homosexual behavior (referred to as the "lifestyle") and ceasing to think of oneself as homosexual (the "homosexual identity"). By doing these things, gays can "overcome" their homosexuality and be, not heterosexual, but "ex-gay."

The key to reading this language is that the religious right uses "homosexuality" not to mean homosexual feelings, but to mean engaging in homosexual activity. Otherwise the religious right could not say gays can "walk out of homosexuality . . . into sexual celibacy." For them, if you are not doing it, you are not being it.

In a similar vein, psychologist C. A. Tripp reports in his book The Homosexual Matrix that one interview subject told sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey he had once been homosexual but he had been cured by therapy. The man explained, "I have now cut out all of that and I don't even think of men -- except when I masturbate."

The same emphasis on behavior enables the evangelicals to refer to "nurture, not nature," as "the real cause of homosexual behavior." This is true enough since any particular act is chosen rather than genetically determined.

But the ads also offer a theory of how homosexual feelings arise that suggests they are "non-genetic" and therefore pathological (ignoring the possibility that they are neither genetic nor pathological). The ads assert that gays are gay because they have a defective "gender-identity," that is, a defective sense of their own gender-their own maleness or femaleness.

Anne Paulk, the "former lesbian" in the first ad, recounts how she was molested as a child and as a result felt unlovable, "rejected my own femininity" and "became drawn to other women who had what I felt was missing in me."

In other words, gays are gay because they felt rejection in childhood, failed to bond with a same-sex parent or experienced sexual violence and psychological abuse in childhood. Any of these can give children a deficient sense of their own gender identity, which leads them to try to remedy that deficiency by seeking sexual partners of the same sex. And that's how gays are made.

There are a host of inadequacies in this wacky little theory, starting with the fact that many of us had a reasonably happy childhood, good parental relationships and were not abused; some heterosexuals had far less happy childhoods than many of us did. The ex-gays ignore these contradictions.

A more basic problem is that viewing same-sex attraction as trying to make up for a deficiency in one's maleness or femaleness misses the whole point. As psychologist Tripp pointed out, most gay men are sure of their maleness, "sometimes super-sure of it." Homosexual desire, he says, is fueled not by the height of a person's self-assessment, but by the distance he feels between that assessment and his aspiration above it.

(Interestingly, the ex-gay theory also fails to account for heterosexual desire, unless heterosexuals are trying to make up for a deficiency of opposite sex qualities. Don't try to think about this.)

In the venerable religious tradition of frightening sinners by describing the wages of sin, the ads also warn of the dangers of homosexuality. But they do so somewhat dishonestly.

The ads warn that homosexual behavior accounts for a disproportionate amount of sexually transmitted disease (STD) and that gays exhibit high levels of self-destructive behavior.

There is no question STDs are common among a certain subset of sexually active gay men in urban areas, but they are not the majority of gays, however conspicuous they may be. STDs are not a problem for homosexuality per se, but for sexually very active gay men. The ads dishonestly imply that the threat is to all gay men.

No doubt too some urban gay men engage in excessive alcohol and drug use and other potentially harmful activities, but the article cited in a footnote (Pediatrics, May 1998) refers only to a subset of self-identified gay youth, not to all gay men. And the article states: "It is important to realize that the majority of [gay] youth cope with a variety of stressors to become healthy and productive adults." The ads ignore that "important" statement.

Similarly deceptive is the ads' claim that a great deal of "emotional and physical violence" is found "among homosexuals." The Pediatrics article cited for this states: "gay youth face violence and victimization" including "being threatened/injured with a weapon" by others, presumably people who do not like gays. So the physical violence is actually found "among" heterosexuals rather than gays.

In the end, the religious right has finally taken off the gloves, asserting that the cure -- the only cure -- for homosexuality is Christianity, and even it will not stop homosexual feelings, nor do evangelicals care much about that. They took their best shots, only to reveal the weakness of their claims and their arguments.

It turned out that all they had were pop-guns.

First published in the Windy City Times May 28, 1998.

THE MAJOR PROBLEM IN RESEARCHING gay history is the virtual absence of reliable source material. The public record usually expunged references to gays, gays themselves were largely silent or silenced, and literary sources and histories, written by our opponents, are defamatory.

In that light, fifteenth century Florence is uniquely valuable. During the Renaissance, Florence developed a reputation for being pervaded with homosexuality - "sodomy" in the language of the time. Smarting from this reputation, reeling from population loss suffered during the Black Death, and pressured by homophobic clerics, in 1432 the city government set up a judicial panel called "The Office of the Night" exclusively to solicit and investigate charges of sodomy.

Remarkably, most of the records of that body survived in the city archives and provide the basis for Michael Rocke's historical reconstruction of Florentine homosexuality, "Forbidden Friendships."

Rocke's book received excellent scholarly reviews, but little popular attention, when it was first published two years ago. Now issued in softcover (at half the hardbound price), it deserves a wider readership by gays who may find the lives of men half a millennium ago and across the seas a distant mirror of our own lives, full of fascinating similarities and disconcerting differences.

By Rocke's reckoning homosexuality really was pervasive in Florence. In the small city of just 40,000 people, he estimates that 17,000 men were incriminated on charges of "sodomy" during the 70 year existence of the Office of the Night. That amounts, he points out, to nearly half the male population of the city during two generations. Whether Rocke's population estimates are accurate or not, such a prevalence for allegations of sodomy is remarkable and would appear to implicate a substantial minority of the male population over two generations. And that estimate no doubt misses others who did not come to judicial notice.

To explain the high number of sodomy reports, Rocke points to the city's unusually late average age of marriage for men, roughly 30 to 31, and the large number of men who remained lifelong bachelors-approximately 12 percent of the male population.

These facts produced a large population of young, unrooted, sexually vigorous males in a city where many women were sheltered by their families or otherwise inaccessible. This led many men to engage in sex with other males. Unsurprisingly, most of those accused of sodomy, or who voluntarily confessed, were younger than 35 or unmarried older men.

Generally, the older partner in the sexual relationship was expected to penetrate the younger one, very much in the classical fashion; no doubt there was an expression of power or dominance in the arrangement. However, there were also reports of older men who sought to be penetrated, and some who sought reciprocal relationships.

Even more, although historians routinely claim that fellatio was widely viewed with distaste in the Mediterranean area, it was a far from a rare activity. It was specifically mentioned in 12 percent of the case reports and was likely unreported in others.

Properly wary of imposing anachronistic models on the past, Rocke repeated stresses that these men were not "homosexual" much less "gay," and that they were not involved in anything like a modern gay subculture. No doubt, as Rocke says, many men whom we would not call homosexual engaged in sodomy since it was such a pervasive part of the drinking, gambling and open sexuality of the single male culture. But despite his protests, clearly some men had a lifelong preference for homosexuality.

Some men pursued young males throughout their lives, sometimes falling in love with their partners and developing relationships lasting two, three or even four years. If they were single, that was likely their primary sexual outlet. If they were married, some still preferred their young men to their wives. One man confessed to a friend (the friend was Machiavelli) that had his father "known my natural inclinations and ways, [he] would never have tied me to a wife." That sounds like a very modern recognition of a homosexual orientation.

Some men apparently undertook homosexual "marriages" in which the men swore fidelity to each other holding hands over the bible on a church altar. Even the "Office of the Night" appeared to regard such men as married to each other.

Similarly, if there was not a discrete "subculture," there were interlinked networks of sodomites who tended to gather for drinking and gambling at certain taverns or brothels (one tavern was suggestively named "Buco"--"the hole," slang for anus), who loaned their homes to friends for assignations with other men, who worked in certain shops or clustered about them, and who tended to congregate in certain parts of town, particularly along the "Street of the Furriers."

"In addition," Rocke acknowledges, "to the copious evidence on their shared sexual experiences, glimpses of their sociable activities appear frequently in the judiciary records: dinners together in inns or homes; gatherings in workshops, homes, or taverns to drink and gamble; trips together to country houses on feast days, and so forth" (p. 189).

Many of these "sodomitical" relationships were apparently tolerated and even encouraged by parents and relatives who saw that they could gain protection and political advancement from a son's well-placed lover. In addition, since older lovers customarily gave their partners gifts or money from time to time, families often welcomed the financial gain.

Florence seems to have been fairly tolerant of youthful sodomy or contacts that did not become too open and notorious. Despite the large number of accusations, fewer than 3,000 men were convicted (less than 20 percent of those charged), many others never paid their fines, and some were let off even when they were clearly guilty. When pushed too hard to punish people severely, the "Night Office" itself engaged in kind of passive resistance, once refusing to convict anyone for 14 months.

One of the most interesting elements is the way in which "sodomites" occasionally resisted the pressures on them. In the small nearby town of Prato, the box where sodomy accusations were to be deposited was repeatedly ripped down.

During the reign of the fanatic and homophobic friar Savonarola in the 1490's, young patrician males, no doubt involved in sodomy, staged a "wild riot" inside the Cathedral during the friar's Ascension Day sermon to protest his puritan crackdown.

Just a few years later on August 31, 1512, a group of 30 young aristocrats staged history's first gay rights demonstration by charging into City Hall, forcing a senior justice official to resign and demanding that the council revoke the sentences of all those who had been exiled or deprived of office for sodomy. (Remarkably, after a palace coup by the Medici family two weeks later, those demands were actually acceded to.)

The recovery of this and much other material makes Rocke's book fascinating and occasionally startling reading, as well as a confirmation of our own continuity with the past.

A final note: The general reader may find the numbers crunching in the first chapters slow going. He may want take the numbers on faith and start reading with Chapter 4 or 5 on friendships and social relations, then go back to pick up the foundations of Rocke's analysis after seeing what interesting results they support.

First published in the Windy City Times on April 23, 1998.

MORALITY, especially the morality of sexual behavior, has become a topic of late in the gay press and in some recently published books.

Although a few of the discussions have addressed variant sexual practices such as S/M or the propriety of where one engages in sex, most discussions I have seen focused primarily on people who have sex with lots of different people.

The concerns seem to be, variously, that such behavior facilitates transmission of HIV, or inhibits a more fulfilling life within a relationship, or constitutes as an impediment to the social acceptance of gays, or is intrinsically wrong in some unspecified way.

This discussion is all to the good: It is important to keep before us the notion that there are, after all, better and worse ways of conducting ourselves, better and worse ways of living our lives.

One of the most irritating things people sometimes say is "Now, don't be judgmental." I always want to snap back, "Of course you should be judgmental, you jerk. That's what you have a brain for."

We are not machines made to run on a preset program. We have to size things up, weigh them, consider, assess and choose as we go along. Judgments are what enable us to live our lives more satisfyingly, to determine what we want, or what is best for us and to pursue it.

At the same time, however, it is not always clear which are the better or worse ways to act. Not only do we disagree about the best ways to live, but we disagree about what principles apply to our behavior and how to resolve conflicts among them. Then too, people's basic psychological constitutions seem to vary considerably, so moral principles might not apply in the same way to all people.

And there is the basic problem of what justifies moral positions. What is their ultimate aim or purpose or justification? In short, what are morals for? Is it personal human happiness or simple self-preservation? Or is it the well-being of society as a whole, or maybe some Platonic intuitions of The Good? Or is it even the arbitrary edicts of some gods or prophets? You see the problem.

As an apt epigraph to his seldom-read essay "On the Basis of Morality" (1841) the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer used a quotation from one of his own earlier works: "To preach morality is easy, to give it a foundation is difficult."

The issue is particularly difficult for gays for at least two different sorts of reasons.

One is, of course, that gays have long been criticized as immoral for acting on sexual and emotional desires that seemed entirely normal and authentic for them. That led many gays to dismiss all talk of sexual morality as just so much hot air: we know that much such talk is nonsense -- homophobia on stilts, so to speak -- so we assume all of it probably is.

Second, much traditional talk about sexual morality was developed and articulated with specific reference to heterosexuals, for whom sexual morality was more obviously self-enforcing and violations carried their own consequences. But it is not clear how relevant heterosexual morality is to our own lives.

It is useful in this connection to recall the pointed limerick that British novelist Norman Douglas included in his ribald collection "Some Limericks:"

There was a young lady named Wilde
Who kept herself quite undefiled
By thinking of Jesus,
Contagious diseases,
And the bother of having a child.

Although Jesus probably had little impact on the exemplary Ms. Wilde (and no doubt that was Douglas's point), promiscuous or careless heterosexual behavior could have the woeful consequence of unwanted children, possibly a burden to the parents, possibly an unwelcome burden to the taxpayers, which no one desired. Not so for gays.

Similarly, much traditional sexual restraint stemmed from women's physical vulnerability and social inequality. Women, unable to support themselves, guarded themselves from larger predatory males, and limited sexual access to the man who would promise lifelong support. But again that does not apply to gays.

"Contagious diseases" does have continuing relevance for us. Although during the 1970s many of us assumed that sexually transmitted diseases were, at worst, mild inconveniences and of little moral significance, AIDS has reminded us of what everyone knew before antibiotics: Sexually transmitted diseases can be crippling, lifelong and fatal for gays as well as heterosexuals, hence their renewed moral significance for both the HIV-infected and in the uninfected.

The example of disease, however, only serves to remind us how much of traditional sexual morality seems rooted in simple prudence, that is, a rational concern for self-preservation, self-protection, self-regard.

It seems, at first glance, oddly ignoble to have something as important as ethics and morals reduced to mere prudence. But to say "reduced" and "mere" is hardly fair. After all, Aristotle places prudence -- the right exercise of judgment in particular contexts -- high on his list of virtues or excellences. Nor, he makes clear, is it an easy virtue to develop. Certain other-worldly religions and philosophies disparage "prudence" along with its exercise and careful development, but they have little to put in its place.

People who have a firm sense of what they want to do with their life, the kind of person they want to be, and who have a sense of what is likely to bring them happiness and a sense of fulfillment will have a better notion of why prudence is a major virtue and what role it plays in their lives.

What seems to be usually lacking, though, in the current discussions is any very clear acknowledgment that a person might have reason to want to develop one sort of character rather than another, or how some sorts of happiness might be more satisfying or fulfilling than others.

It seems likely that only after that claim is made explicit that we can begin to talk in a coherent way about what role -- if any -- a wide variety or large quantity of sexual experience, sexual knowledge, and sexual pleasure can or should play in contributing to or inhibiting someone's overall goal. Without that issue being addressed, how could there be any grounds for judgment at all?

And it should go without saying that knowledge and experience is going to have a different effect or impact on people depending on the way they incorporate it into their overall lives. If the same experience is going to have different effects, then its moral significance will differ from person to person.

Now we can begin to talk about morality.

Originally published in the Windy City Times on March 12, 1998.

IT IS LIKE WAITING FOR THE OTHER SHOE to drop. At some point in the near future, either the Hawaii Supreme Court or some other court is almost surely going to rule that the state must recognize same-sex marriages.

The effect is going to be remarkable.

For one thing, conservative religious and political groups are going to go absolutely berserk. You cannot imagine how much you are going to hear about how the United States has turned into Sodom, how Satan has seized control of the country, how that makes the second coming of Christ imminent, and how all this proves that the world is going to end at the turn of the Millennium.

Evangelical Protestants, the Catholic hierarchy, and their conservative political allies are going to put almost irresistible pressure on state legislatures to bar recognition of gay marriages performed in other states. Roughly half the states (26) have already enacted such prohibitions, but pressure will now mount in the other states since the issue will no longer be merely theoretical. Few of our state advocacy groups have the resources to resist this pressure, so we will probably lose in more than half those states.

But put aside the legal and political issues. How is gay marriage going to affect us? The two most important results will be how it affects heterosexuals' view of us and how it affects our view of ourselves.

For one thing, it is going to feel very strange. For the first time in your life you are going to actually be able to consider marrying someone you love, with all the attendant duties, obligations, and considerable cultural freight that the institution of marriage brings with it. We have had no practice in thinking about that even as a possibility.

Gays and lesbians who are already coupled will have to think through whether their commitment to each other extends as far as the more complicated and difficult-to-disentangle structure of marriage.

Some couples will hasten to marry immediately, eager to take advantage of the new opportunity and sure that their commitment to each other can optimally be expressed within the legal and cultural structure of marriage. Very likely you know at least one gay couple who is making plans to fly to Hawaii to marry within a month of the decision. Even if they live in a state that bars gay marriage they will do it to "make it legal" as much as possible.

Other couples may choose to marry hoping that legal structure will solidify an unstable or uncertain relationship. But many of those will find, as heterosexual couples have found for centuries, that marriage is not a panacea, that it does not improve the other person (in fact, often the opposite), and that you get out of marriage just about what you put into it.

Yet other couples may feel that their relationship is fine the way it is and decide not to marry. But that in itself will look like a statement about the relationship since they are not taking the newly available further step. That is, relationships that previously looked and felt fully "committed" now if not legalized may seem "not fully committed," even "keeping our options open" without any inherent change in the relationship. Family and friends will wonder if the couple really is committed -- even if the couple really is. That may be disconcerting for some couples.

Those who are single will likely begin to notice mild, subtle encouragement by friends, relatives and other gay couples to "settle down," "tie the knot" and so forth, when marriage becomes available, just as single heterosexuals feel those pressures. On the whole they are harmless and well-meaning. Every culture or society, after all, tends to develop favored forms of behavior, certain ways they expect most people to behave, forms that are believed to conduce to the social benefit.

No doubt, partnerships stabilize gay people's lives somewhat and gay marriage probably will solidify gay partnerships somewhat more, even for those that are not monogamous-perhaps especially those that are not monogamous. The legal bond may help them over rough spots in the relationship and guarantee a kind of rootedness no matter their occasional deviations. So there is a kind of tacit rationale for the social pressures, although it is prudent to remember that such pressures usually aim at social stability and predictability rather than individual happiness.

It will certainly be easy enough to resist that mild pressure. But even so, for single gays, the fact that you will be able to marry will now linger in the back of your mind when you go home with someone for sex, when you go on a date, when you start "seeing" someone. The fact that you could actually marry this person means you will be asking yourself if you really would want to, and that may subtly encourage many of us to take our casual relationships with other gays a little more seriously. That realization will take a while to develop, though, as gays learn to think and talk about marriage and the role they want it to play in their lives.

In any case, however, I suspect that our new ability to marry, even if in just a few states, will inevitably encourage most heterosexual people to take us, our lives, and our partnerships more seriously. If the law stipulates that our partnerships are the legal equivalent of theirs, that will be considerable encouragement for them to begin thinking of us and our lives as equal to them and their lives. Far more than non-discrimination laws, that is pretty much exactly what our long-sought goal of social equality consists of.

But there is more to it than that. Many heterosexuals have in the back of their minds, and some are still brought up to believe, the notion that a marriage certificate basically says, "Sex is OK now." So when gay men start getting marriage certificates, people are going to see the law as asserting not only the equality of our relationships, but an equal status and dignity for our sexual behavior. And that, for many people will be a remarkable and startling thought.

Religious conservatives, of course, will loathe it, because they have known all along that the bottom line of their hostility to gays is our sexual behavior. They feel that if you cannot maintain that homosexual acts are wrong, then you cannot claim that anything at all is wrong, "everything is permitted," and moral chaos will reign. That is why gay marriage upsets them so, why they will fight it with every resource they have.

They are wrong, of course, but we must win to show them that.