IGF CultureWatch

Originally appeared Sept. 11, 1997, in the Windy City Times.

FROM SEVERAL QUARTERS within the gay community, gay men have lately been hearing the message that they should settle down and form relationships.

The rationales for this generously offered free advice range across the moral spectrum: It will result in a more emotionally satisfying life; it will promote personal maturity; it will offer a more fulfilling sex life; it will provide someone to take care of you when you are old or sick; it will keep you from getting AIDS; it will lower the rate of HIV transmission below epidemic levels; it will reduce promiscuity, which is sinful; it will promote social stability; and so forth.

Each of these deserves a thoughtful response on its own, but we can also offer some more general cautionary notes.

Contrary to their claims, these writers are hardly courageous Jeremiahs crying out an unwelcome doctrine to rootless and anomic individuals. In fact, our whole modern culture is pervaded by the assumption of coupledom and strongly biased toward rewarding it - joint tax returns, family memberships in clubs, benefits for unmarried domestic partners, media images of couples, even "double occupancy" travel packages.

In fact, the notion that one "ought" to be in a relationship scarcely needs to be promoted to gays. If anything, gays tend to form relationships too easily, too unsuspectingly. Some people seem to end one relationship and within weeks announce that they are in a new one.

The belief that one can find happiness only in a relationship is responsible for the undue haste with which people unwarily enter unsuitable relationships, and the cause of a great deal of later unhappiness. If anything, gays need to start exercising more caution, more restraint. Instead of trying to provide supports for mismatched gay couples, perhaps we ought to provide support and teach coping skills to people to live on their own.

Now no one need doubt that relationships can be a good thing and that many people find fulfillment in them. But we should also make it clear that not everyone is a good candidate for a relationship. History and literature, to say nothing of the lives of our friends, provide abundant examples of people psychologically stuck in empty, drab, stultifying, demeaning, damaging and emotionally draining, miserable relationships.

Some people are unpleasant or mean-spirited, emotionally immature or psychologically unstable, insensitive or dull, or even complete jerks. Urging a relationships on such people would be a disservice to them or their potential partner.

Other people may be pleasant and interesting enough to be decent partners, but are focused on concerns other than a relationship: a career, a personal goal, a life-project or an exploration of their own individual potential.

Relationships take a good deal of time and work to foster and to maintain, as well as a good deal of compromising. Many people may not find the rewards commensurate with the time and effort required. One may simply be a bachelor.

And then too, for all of us, it is a matter of luck, chance or grace that someone falls in love with us at the same time that we fall in love with them. The wonder is not that falling in love does not happen more, but that it happens as often as it does.

The plain truth is that people are different from one another. They grow up developing different needs for personal space, varying desires to compromise, different needs for companionship and support, different abilities to cope with solitude.

Some people may have insecurities or self-esteem needs that can be met only with or by a partner. Some people, it seems, do not even know how to conduct a life on their own. They take their bearings from interaction with other people: They want the mental or emotional "structure" that others provide. Barbra Streisand's preposterous and neurotic song "People" is their anthem.

Other people develop a greater capacity for autonomy, for acting alone, for being able to amuse themselves, to make new friends easily, for developing projects that are personally satisfying. Absent a need to be in a relationship, they choose not to enter one.

Even heterosexuals are showing greater skepticism about relationships and marriage. Until the 1950s and 1960s, even apart from love heterosexual marriage was a virtual necessity: Women married to guarantee a means of support, particularly while they reared children, while men married to have a home and access to sex.

But those necessities have been obviated by the large number of women now employed and self-supporting, the large number of labor-saving devices that enable a single male to manage his own household satisfactorily, and the availability of birth control which provided sexual opportunities without the inevitability of children.

Gays face those same social realities: employment by virtually all participants; ease of single-household management; ready access to sex without the risk of children; and the similarly reduced inducements to long-term relationships. In addition, gays as two equal employed people without the strong shared bond of children and the problems of raising them, with which heterosexuals are deeply concerned, can easily find themselves growing apart and their interests diverging.

A different sort of obstacle to male-male relationships is the tendency of males "by nature" to be promiscuous. This is one of the best attested findings cross-culturally and among virtually all species of animals. The male tendency to seek a multiplicity of sexual partners is simply built into their genes, since those men whose behavioral tendencies were most reproduced were those who most widely propagated their genes; in turn, our own genes' "desire" to reproduce themselves is best served by inducing similar behavior on our part.

This is not to argue that we should always give in to "nature" nor to justify whatever "nature" suggests. Biology need not always win out, but it is always waiting for an opportunity to assert itself. So a social prescription that ignores "nature" or thinks it can be countered with a little exhortation is likely to have only limited success. And at the individual level it will create an unrealistic expectation of what is likely - or possible - for long-term male relationships.

Given all this, gay relationships need to be advocated or discussed with a good deal less simple-mindedness, a good deal more awareness of the obstacles and difficulties, and in a full awareness of the variety of human beings and our individual needs and capacities.

First appeared August 29, 1996, in the Windy City Times.

IN THE SEPTEMBER 1996 issue of the slick, self-consciously "hip," youth magazine Details, gay comic writer John Weir published a humorous piece disapproving of gay marriage, explaining that the whole point of being gay is to be critical of such bourgeois convention. Oh.

Now it is always risky to disagree with humor, since the author can always say he was just joking and you failed to get the joke or catch the irony.

But the notions Weir advances have some currency within the self-avowed "queer" community -- which constitutes about 2 percent of the gay population and gets about 70 percent of the media attention. And Weir is writing for a primarily heterosexual audience who, knowing little better, may take him at his word. Those facts make it worthwhile disagreeing with Weir whether he means what he says or not. Weir starts from the fact that Congress is considering a "Defense of Marriage Act," which would limit the federal definition of marriage to "one man and one woman as husband and wife."

"In other words," Weir explains, "husband and husband, or wife and wife, are out, which is fine with me. These words sound too much like master and slave." And Weir hastily segues to a description of a gay leather wedding he says he once attended.

But the segue does not work as an argument. Most gay marriages are not and would not be leather or master/slave marriages. And why should "husband and husband" sound like "master and slave"? After all, who would be master and who would be slave -- the husband or the husband? (Would they flip a coin? Choose alternate weeks? Arm wrestle for bottom?) In fact, just the opposite is true. Husband and husband sounds exactly like a joining of two parties who are equals so far as legal entitlements and gender role expectations are concerned.

(It is worth while pointing out that master/slave relationships in the context of modern sexual practice usually involve a contract voluntarily entered into: If the stated mutual obligations are not honored, the contract is void. This hardly sounds like "slavery" as we traditionally think of it. Weir probably knows this, but he would not have much of an article if he acknowledged it.)

Weir's claim is really an illogical application of the lesbian-feminist line that heterosexual marriage is a "patriarchal" institution and that gays and lesbians should eschew it to avoid supporting the "patriarchy."

That argument claimed that women were once treated as chattel slaves and were regarded as the property of their husbands. Even in modern times, the argument continued, the disproportionate legal advantages and economic power of men combine with the strong traditional gender role expectations to make women the subsidiary partner in any male/female marriage.

Alas, the argument is not historically well grounded (contrast, for example, Chaucer's Wife of Bath); and in an era of nearly equal legal rights and growing economic power for women it looks particularly unpersuasive. But even if the argument had merit, one would expect that gay or lesbian marriages, since they are between equal partners, would be free of precisely those feminist objections to marriage.

Weir's disapproval of marriage turns out not to be based on reason, but to be simply a part of his hostile view toward everything bourgeois.

"I thought the whole point of being homosexual was to poke fun at heterosexual convention," Weir says. "When you commit yourself to being gay you're supposed to take a lifelong vow of otherness. You're supposed to live on the outside, to glory in being different."

"Why be gay if . . . -- -- but stop right there. Weir writes as if being gay, or not being gay were, after all, a choice, an option, merely a "commitment." Now it may be that avowing oneself "queer" involves playing at being different and sneering at others. But being gay is simply coming to the realization that you are erotically attracted primarily to men.

There is no "whole point" of being gay any more than there is a "whole point" of being heterosexual, unless it is the effort to live a full, rich, rewarding life as far as one's talents and capacities allow. If "poking fun at heterosexual convention" and "glory[ing] in being different" is sufficient to make life full, rich, and rewarding for someone, well and good. But most of us are going to find that pretty thin gruel to live on.

Notice, however, that poking fun at heterosexuals is not what Weir is doing. Just the opposite. Weir spends most of his space making fun of gays -- the leather wedding, apolitical gays planning a party, gays who think Jeffrey Dahmer is "cute," and the like. Now Weir is welcome to make fun of and sneer at his fellow gays for the amusement and edification of the mostly heterosexual readership of Details, but let us not call that courageous, or cutting edge, or "living on the outside." Let us call it what it is.

Being different from others is hardly much of an effort or an achievement to "glory in." Most of us already have varying perceptions, tastes and values. This writer, for instance, values and enjoys Shostakovich and Carl Nielsen, Rembrandt, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Yvor Winters, Ludwig von Mises, and Leo Strauss. Few of these are widely shared tastes; they certainly provide little material for the customary cocktail party or bar chat. But far from "glorying in" these uncommon tastes, I wish more people shared them. Frankly, the world would be a better place if they did.

Weir's piece by contrast contains numerous references to what apparently are familiar elements in popular mass culture: movie stars and the like. Weir clearly expects his readers to recognize and enjoy these references. So Weir's mind turns out to be not very different from the minds of the mass-circulation readership he is writing for. Perhaps the only people who think it is nifty to "glory in being different" are the people who are really, at the most fundamental level, not very different at all.

It would be entirely possible, of course, for someone to start with the fact of a gay sexual orientation and generate an interesting sort of social criticism of any society that is unable to accommodate it. But Weir does not do that. The "queer" posture he assumes can only make fun of convention and propose an unmotivated and unspecified "otherness." It produces no insights, generates no understanding. Like the rest of popularized "queer theory," it is epistemologically barren and ontologically vacuous.

Originally appeared June 27, 1996, in the Windy City Times.

Living in the 1990s, we tend to take the gay community for granted, much as we tend to take ourselves as gay people for granted.

And yet historically and cross-culturally gay communities such as ours do not exist. And most people with gay erotic valences do not seem to have arranged their lives as we do now.

So the questions persist: How come us? How come now? What is it that we have created? And what is the right way to think of our community and ourselves?

It takes a certain trick of mind to separate oneself from living one's life in order to figure out what the influences are that lead us to live as we do: it is something like staring at one of those 3-D posters, trying not to look at the surface but through and beyond the surface, in order to see the impressive 3-D effect.

We ask these questions when we want to see our lives in 3-D.

Enter gay sociologist Stephen O. Murray, who has just published a fascinating book on gays and the gay community called American Gay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). There are not many good books in sociology (trust me!), much less ones that could be called "fascinating," so this one immediately joins that small shelf of "Essential Gay Reading."

According to Murray, our modern understanding of ourselves has four salient features which taken together are new in the world.

1. An awareness of our distinctiveness as a group (and a willingness to assert the legitimacy of our distinctiveness).

2. De-assimilation from the general, mainstream culture and the development of separate institutions to serve the community.

3. The primacy of egalitarian same-sex relationships rather than ones that involve marked age differences (as in ancient Greece) or ones that imitate male/female roles (as in many third world cultures).

4. People engaging more or less exclusively in same-sex relationships rather than in bisexuality (as in most cultures where homosexual behavior is "tolerated" or "institutionalized").

Where did this combination come from and how did it get put together? If it is culturally shaped, what shaped it; if it is in some sense natural, what forces or factors allowed it finally to express itself now for the first time?

First then, how did gay communities come to be?

Murray points first to economic changes: "I would suggest that the long term trend from farming and manufacturing to service occupations provided slots for men and women who were relatively detached or seeking to be autonomous from their families."

In support of his hypothesis, Murray notes that the growth of San Francisco gay culture occurred simultaneously with the rapid growth of the city's downtown office space and the virtual end of manufacturing and handling of ocean freight there.

The greater geographical mobility and "car culture" that followed World War II permitted single men and women, who had previously typically lived with their families until they married, to move away from home to take advantage of those new jobs and to express their sexuality.

In addition, the rapid growth of the welfare state created a sort of social and economic "safety net" that previously only families had been able to provide, allowing would-be gays more autonomy from the monitoring eyes of their families and neighbors.

Murray is skeptical of ideological sources of change. "While ideas matter," he cautions, "they don't matter all that much." Still, he does allow a role for the groundwork for gay liberation provided by the greater openness about sex fostered by the Kinsey reports, the "do your own thing" mood and anti-orthodoxy political climate on 1960s college campuses, the remarkable popularity of "situation ethics," and the rapid loss of credibility of psychoanalysis which had been a main support for the idea that gays were mentally ill.

Once gays began a clustering effect in large cities, and once they were provided with an awareness not only of their own numbers and moral legitimacy but a publicly defensible set of arguments for that legitimacy, the gay community began to "recruit" just by existing - to grow, attracting more like minded people, coalescing and crystallizing out of its surroundings, and beginning the process of (selective) de-assimilation from the mainstream that we see continuing to this day.

Of what, then, does the gay community consist? Rather than using some sort of vague, metaphysical notion, Murray opts for the concrete criterion of "institutional completeness." By that he means a variety of institutions which allow members to obtain their basic services from within the community, ones such as gathering spaces, periodicals, religious groups, health and social services, and the like.

It is relatively easy to show that most large cities now contain an elaborate set of gay-specific institutions and that smaller cities are developing more of them, experiencing "institutional elaboration" even in the 1990s. This is in marked contrast to the situation of almost every other social or ethnic group.

In the beginning, of course, were the gathering spaces, the bars (though preceded by friendship networks and private parties). Murray cautions against regarding this as just "sociology discovering the obvious" and points to the specific social impact of the bars. Elsewhere too, gay bars were the first institution to develop in cultures where gays have only recently begun to challenge the equation of homosexuality with female gender behavior (Latin America, Polynesia). And in cultures where homosexuality is age-divergent (a younger with an older partner) gay bars and gay identity have never developed at all (Arab and Persian societies).

The reasons seems connected to the fact that drinking together seems to represent a kind of solidarity which creates a sense of social equality among the participants, undermining socially constructed roles. Drinking, in other words, is used to join something as an equal, not merely consuming alcohol for a respite from one's anxieties or from a hostile world.

The process of "de-assimilation" is an interesting puzzle in itself. One important factors was the challenge made by gay men to the (repressive) cultural stereotype of gay men as effeminate. In earlier periods many gay men apparently tended to avoid having affairs with fellow homosexuals ("sisters") with whom they may have socialized and instead sought sexual liaisons with putatively heterosexual "trade," to whom they imputed masculinity.

But with the first flush of gay liberation in the 1970s, gay men themselves conspicuously cultivated an aura of masculinity as a concomitant of gay pride. Gay gyms became a new community institution and men began working out in order to try to become the sort of man they knew they were attracted to - assuming that he, in turn, would be attracted to them. Even the "clone" look contained a stylized assertion of masculinity. A straight friend whom I took to some gay bars many years ago commented on how well-built the men were; then added, "Do you realize that every man in this bar has a mustache?"

With the continued development of the gay community, this self-presentation has been somewhat moderated by younger gays now coming out. Perhaps 25 years later the negative stereotypes are less pressing so they do not feel the need to resist them so assertively.

This change from gay "exogamy" (sexual involvement with those outside the community) to "endogamy" (sexual involvement with those within the community) seems to have been a key component of the ability to exist in some degree separately from mainstream culture and largely in the company of other gays. Once gays associated with other gays full-time and experience fewer pressures from the surrounding culture, whatever were to be the natural ways of being gay could develop and flourish.

Many young gays, taught about homosexuality in the bosom of their nuclear family (especially at the lower social levels where gender polarities are strong), are still brought up to believe gay cross-gender stereotypes, so for them joining the gay community at first involves not so much learning how to be homosexual but unlearning the false notions of how to be homosexual ("the homosexual social role") they had absorbed.

So the gay community does have an educational function: it teaches young gays how to be; it also teaches them how they do not have to be; it helps them develop an authentic sense of self; it teaches (often tacitly) "cruising etiquette"; it teaches self-esteem; it teaches safe sexual play; it can foster a kind of rough egalitarianism. In this sense, then, the gay community can be seen as a process as well as an entity.

We tend to think of the gay community as a male phenomenon, probably correctly. There is little reason to think there are as many lesbians as gay men. Using several different sources, Murray concludes that there are probably three or four self-identified gay men for every self-identified lesbian. It is worth noting that this is consistent with many gay men's experience in co-sexual gay organizations as well as with the reports of sexual behavior in the Kinsey volumes.

In his discussion of gay relationships, Murray notes that gay relationships tend toward the egalitarian far more than heterosexual relationships (at least until the recent influence of feminism on straight marriage). But he casts doubt on the frequent claim that gay relationships are "more democratic" or cross social or other boundaries to any significant extent.

There may be a slightly greater tendency to be intrigued by and to trick with people from different classes or ethnicities just to see what they are like, he admits, but there remains a tendency to settle down with people pretty much of one's own kind, ones own class, race, educational level, etc. For the same reason, most gay male couples tend toward the "butch/butch" form rather than the earlier model of "butch/femme."

What data there are suggest that partners stand a better chance of staying together if they have relatively equal success in the world. It may be the failure on this count that tends to undermine lesbian couples, whose relationships, as reported in one mammoth study of couples, were more unstable than gay male or heterosexual relationships.

Gay men and women also differ in their approach to sex outside the relationship. Gay men were relatively casual about sex outside the relationship - provided "it didn't mean anything." By contrast, lesbians tended to view sex outside the relationships as indicating a lack of commitment to the relationship or even "betrayal." The greater stability of gay male relationships may be due in part to this ability to handle outside sex, while lesbians may break up over such behavior. Although Murray does not speculate, the lesbian view of sex outside the relationship may be traced to the way all young women are brought up, a residuum of heterosexual indoctrination.

For what it is worth, he notes a finding that for both gays and lesbians (as well as straight men), the more the couples engaged in oral sex, the happier they said they were in their relationship, although the causal direction is unclear. And perhaps contrary to expectations, in the case of anal sex between gay men, it is not who penetrates whom, but getting what one wants (whichever that is) that is the most important element in satisfaction.

Despite widespread belief to the contrary, Murray says he is doubtful that AIDS has caused there to be more gay couples now than previously, at least not more durable gay couples. Even before AIDS some gay men were already losing enthusiasm for a fast-lane lifestyle, and by the early 1980s members of the first wave of gay liberation had grown older and were ready to slow down somewhat anyway.

Murray has surprising things to say about AIDS and the attempt to use it to attack gay male "promiscuity." There was never any evidence presented that going to bathhouses was a risk-factor for contracting AIDS, and some evidence to the contrary, he notes (it remains unpublished!). Most of the sexual acts at bathhouses were without significant risk.

Nor has "professional" safe-sex education had significant impact: most gay community gay men had already changed their behavior long before that professionalization, and the "professional" AIDS education has turned out to have little impact even now on preventing new cohorts of gay men from becoming infected, particularly those from minorities.

Murray says that there will be something in his book for everyone to disagree with. That may be true for academics, since Murray zestfully sets about showing what is wrong with many of the zany theories about gays and gay lives propounded by academics ("queer" theorists, social constructionists, etc.).

But the end result is remarkably close to the lived intuitions of enculturated gay men in gay enclaves. This is not to say that they will not learn something from the book. On the contrary, they may learn the most, because they will have the fewest mental obstacles to learning it. But they will have their intuitions given shape, improved, extended, given firmer foundations, and they will see unexpected implications of them drawn out.

Reading Murray is like talking with a bright, thoughtful, and extremely well read friend who is happy to pass on to us what he has figured out about how we live and why we live as we do.

First published in the Windy City Times April 4, 1996.

• The Japanese car manufacturer Subaru recently began a national advertising campaign to reach the gay and lesbian market, placing full page ads in national and local gay publications. The ads depicted two men or two women with copy that read, "It loves camping, the beach, and long-term commitment. Too bad it's only a car."
• Just a few months ago, Aetna insurance company decided to offer automobile and homeowners insurance coverage to "domestic partners," candidly defined as "two adults of the same or opposite sex engaged in a spouse-like relationship..."
• A nationwide bedding distributor called "Dial-a-Mattress" last year specifically targeted the gay market with advertisements showing a nude, sleeping man with copy that read, "Who you sleep with is your business. How you sleep is ours."
• Last year as well the furniture company IKEA ran a television advertising campaign in selected markets depicting a male couple picking out IKEA furniture for their home.

For many years gay publications have promoted the gay and lesbian community as an ideal economic market, one with favorable demographics in such areas of education, urban concentration, and disposable income.

It appears that major national corporations are beginning to suspect that those claims may be correct and are willing to promote products and services specifically to the gay market.

That we are a substantial "niche market" now seems a fairly well attested fact.

In a useful recent book, Untold Millions, marketing consultant Grant Lukenbill pointed out that a recent random survey of consumers by Yankelovich Partners found that six percent of its 2500 member panel were willing to identify themselves as "gay," lesbian," or "homosexual."

That amounts to 15 million consumers nationwide, a number we may reasonably expect to grow somewhat as more people feel comfortable identifying themselves as gay.

In addition, gays were more numerous or more willing to identify themselves in large cities: Yankelovich found that eight percent of its respondents in metropolitan areas of more than 3,000,000 described themselves as gay.

While those percentages may not seem overwhelming, they mean that in a multi- brand field, a solid gay constituency could constitute 15, 20, even 25 percent of the total purchases of any one brand of product.

Each company that promotes to the gay market reduces the psychological obstacles other companies face in doing the same. And each company that promotes to us to increase its market share pressures places pressure on its competition to do the same, if only to maintain theirs. Lukenbill calls this snowball effect the "gay and lesbian consumer revolution."

Granted the likelihood that this "revolution" is likely to continue, it seems useful to try to determine what it can do for us.

First of all, it is important to point out that there is little or nothing in this change that is motivated by benevolence or a concern for gay rights; it is founded on the desire for profits. This is good, not bad.

There is a famous quotation by Adam Smith to the effect that "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest."

When Aetna Insurance announced its willingness to offer insurance to gay couples, their spokesman said the same thing in modern "corporate-speak": "We need to recognized changing demographic situations and pursue those segments that we feel offer the best profit opportunities."

What the economic bottom-line argument does is insulate Aetna against any flamboyant rhetoric from the Religious Right that Aetna is "pandering to the homosexual community." By pleading economic necessity, the company tacitly rules out of court all arguments based on morality or claims that they are supporting deviance.

And the argument serves to solidify stockholder support for the new package by reminding them what is at stake.

At the same time, however, the very flatness of the language tacitly sends the message, "We do not regard gay couples as any different from anyone else."

Even more so, in a climate of lingering social disapproval, the assertively laissez-faire language of the "Dial-a-Mattress advertisement ("Who you sleep with is your business") constitutes positive support.

Like the Aetna initiative, the Subaru promotion was based on simple economics. According to Advertising Age, market research found that lesbians were four times as likely as members of the general public to buy a Subaru, so the campaign seems designed to solidify brand loyalty and build on that existing market advantage.

The campaign does at least two useful things besides getting gays together with a decent product. Most obviously, by advertising in the gay press, Subaru provides gay publishers with income to grow in size and hire more writers to research and produce more interesting news and feature articles.

But by their inclusion of two men and two women, the ads also provide implicit visibility for gays and gay couples, a visibility that has been absent when gays peered into the mirror offered by the general culture to see their existence acknowledged.

The Ikea ad using the male couple did the same, but had an additional impact because not just gays but the general public saw the image of a wholesome male couple establishing a cozy domesticity. The ad must have prompted a shock of recognition among young and closeted gay who may have never considered such a thing possible.

It must have come as a considerable surprise to members of the general public as well, for whom it served as a virtual Public Service Announcement to undermining notions that gays are socially harmful or a threat to the family.

In an interview with author Lukenbill, the vice president of Young and Rubicam's direct marketing division frankly acknowledged, "I was shocked at the IKEA ad. They spent money [targeting] the community and it got out in the world-at-large in a way that had a political effect that all my years of political activism never had."

In that light, it may be that the next significant jump in gay influence will take place through the economic sphere rather than in the currently stalled political arena. It is hard to disagree with Lukenbill's assessment that "[the] fight for human rights is now becoming an economic process as much as it has been a political process-a new cultural dynamism of identity."

Originally published Feb. 15, 1996, in the Windy City Times.

ONE MIGHT REASONABLY CONCLUDE that the State has always been the great enemy of gays and lesbians.

Governments once executed gays for simply having sex lives. In some places they still imprison people for homosexual behavior. Governments empowered psychiatrists to confine gays in institutions to be drugged and electroshocked as "therapy." The United States government refuses gays the right to jobs in its largest industry - the military.

Governments refuse to recognize the marriage contracts of gays and lesbians. Governments in most places refuse to promise not to discriminate against gays. And it is governments that by all these policies set the moral tone for a society that, as a result, devalues gays and gay lives.

Yet gay activists spend much of their efforts on trying to get governments to use their power on our behalf.

Clearly, we need to make some distinctions between liberty from government, equal treatment by the government, and government-enforced behavior.

Start with sodomy laws. For eons governments have tried their best to enforce laws that prohibit our sexual activities. Even when such laws are not often enforced, they remain - as religious conservatives want them to remain - as an assertion of state-approved moral values: a statement that our lives are of secondary importance and our sexuality is viewed with distaste and disapproval.

Governments are loath to give up the power to make this statement, as witness legislatures (e.g., Massachusetts and Minnesota) that have passed gay civil rights laws but retain criminal penalties for sodomy.

But it is consistent with the most vigorous assertion of our privacy, personal autonomy and liberty against government for us to say, "This is none of your business. Your job is to protect our zone of privacy, not invade it."

As libertarian political philosopher Friedrich Hayek pointed out in "Law, Legislation and Liberty," "What a person does when within his four walls, or even the voluntary collaboration of several persons, in a manner which clearly cannot affect or harm others, [should] never become the subject of rules of conduct that will concern a judge" (Vol. 1, p. 101).

The argument changes somewhat when we turn to gay marriage. With marriage, governments currently legitimize and grant favors to the relationships of one class of people (heterosexuals) but not to others (homosexuals).

There are two solutions. The one more commonly proposed is for the government to recognize the marriage contracts of gays just as it does of heterosexuals.

The other solution, as proposed earlier this year [1996] by Hawaii's governor Ben Cayetano, is that the government should not be involved in marriages at all; rather, it should simply adopt laws to specify the reciprocal rights and duties of domestic partners, both gay and heterosexuals.

A consistent concern for liberty and autonomy from government gives clear preference to Cayetano's proposal, but the root argument for both is the same: Gays equally with heterosexuals are tax-paying citizens the government exists to benefit, so it should provide equal access to services including the registering of contracts.

The same argument is at the core of our claim to serve in the military. We are citizens who pay taxes for the upkeep of the military. You personally may not wish to join the military, as I do not, but other gays and lesbians might. By excluding us, the military deprives gays of access to the career training and steady employment the military offers to heterosexuals.

In addition, being able to join the military has always served as recognition of civic legitimacy. Denying that opportunity to a class of people demeans their value both as people and as citizens. Even when African-Americans served in segregated units, they were still treated as citizens equally capable of serving responsibly in the military.

It is similar with gay marriage, of course. The significance of our relationships is demeaned by being ignored by the agency that grants legitimacy to "real" marriages.

When we turn to non-discrimination laws, we have to distinguish between two types and the radically different arguments for them.

Let us call Type A laws that prevent government itself from discriminating against gays and lesbians in employment, provision of services, etc. Such a law requires the government itself to treat gays the same as heterosexuals. Several cities have this kind of law.

The argument for such a law is the same as for gay marriage and gay access to the military: We are equally citizens and should receive the same access to opportunities the government provides to others.

The other type of non-discrimination law, call it Type B, requires not only that governments treat us equally but that the government force all private businesses, landlords, and "public accommodations" to treat us the same as heterosexuals.

It is not clear what the argument could be for this sort of law. We are not citizens of private establishments and we are not forced to support them by paying taxes. So what could be the origin of this right? And since there are usually a variety of potential employers and places to live, the basis of a right to any particular job or housing unit seems unclear.

The availability of other options becomes evident from realizing that by the time there is enough public support for a non-discrimination bill to be passed, there is already considerable social tolerance for gays and lesbians. In other words, by the time general (type B) non-discrimination laws are politically feasible, they are less "necessary" - on their proponents' own grounds.

It is also worth pointing out that the same laws also coercively prevent gays and lesbians who are business owners and landlords from showing any preference to us as gays over heterosexuals. Nor is it clear where the right of heterosexuals to work for a gay employer or rent from a gay landlord could come from.

Someone might say that we should want this kind of law to enforce morally virtuous behavior by people who are doing things we do not approve of. But this is exactly the same argument that anti-gay forces used against us in the past. So all we are really saying is that although they had power before, now we are gaining power and are going to use it against them.

It seems odd that gays and lesbians, with their harrowing historical experience of harm from government power, would turn right around and try to use that power to control others, and even be willing to increase government power over ourselves.

One might reasonably think that using governments to enforce morally virtuous behavior has all along been the problem, not its solution. The solution might well seem to be reducing the scope and power of governments by getting them out of the business of enforcing "virtuous" behavior altogether.

Originally appeared Feb. 1, 1996, in the Windy City Times.

We do not currently have an adequate theory of why gay progress is happening Our spokespeople are obscure, our organizations are small, and the opportunities for making our arguments are few.

Yet we know from a variety of surveys that homophobia is declining among high school graduates, college students and the general public. We do not know why. It is happening at different rates in each group. But we do not know why that is, either.

It is almost as if progress gets made without any effort on our part. But some theory would be valuable, if only to satisfy our natural human desire to make sense of the world.

I offer the following experimental explanation, oversimplified, no doubt, for the purposes of clarity.

I used to think that gays needed to persuade people of our value and moral legitimacy. Now, I have come to suspect that our task might better be to help foster conditions where people do not care about homosexuality one way or the other because they come to hold a hierarchy of values in which sexual orientation is of little or no significance.

The rate of pro-gay change among each of these populations-high school and college students and adult-is best understood as a function of the hierarchy of values each tacitly holds about what it means to be successful as a person, as that implicit value system presses against traditional social/religious homophobia.

1. For instance, high school students are strongly impressed by biology, by their intense realization of gender polarities. To a high degree, success as a person tends to be defined as success in embodying one of those polarities This is particularly true among males, for whom, as Camille Paglia usefully points out, masculinity is not a given but a hard-won achievement.

That achievement is fostered, certified, by athletic prowess and success with the opposite sex. Such a value system has little place for gays who are, at best viewed as non-participants, much less participants on the wrong side.

These values ought to reinforce social homophobia, but they are apparently countered to some degree, by the extraordinary attention young people pay to popular culture: film, MTV, television, popular, rock and "alternative" music.

Popular culture seems to be the chief way many young people learn about the world out there and-the conservatives are correct-they absorb its images and values. That homophobia is declining among teenagers is almost surely due to the growing presence of amiable, talented gays and gay characters: from "Roseanne" and "Friends" to "To Wong Fu," the Pet Shop Boys and Melissa Etheridge.

2. Among college students surveys show that homophobia drops as much as 50 percent between the freshman and senior years. The explanation may be that students who go to college are exposed to a new way of understanding what constitutes success as a person.

In college, if anywhere in our culture, success as a person is defined by intellectual capacity-learning new facts, learning to think about old facts in new ways. In such an evaluational scheme, gays and lesbians have an even, perhaps better than even, chance at doing well and being thought of well.

In addition, college students tend to absorb a new way of thinking about themselves. The constant emphasis on learning new things tacitly teaches the virtue of openness to new ideas and the concept of living as a process, a perpetually unfinished personal project. That too undermines prejudice.

Further, education leads to a kind of individualism. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out in "The Road to Serfdom," "The more intelligent people are, the more they are likely to have an individual scale of values." And we could add, have grown accustomed to the idea that other people have different values, desires and plans.

3. Opinion surveys of the general public show a gradual shift in a pro-gay direction despite the contrary efforts of religious fundamentalists and cultural conservatives.

The main new pressure against homophobia is the way in which the culture once again redefines for people the notion of what it means to excel as a person. To a large degree, this is understood as excellence in a skill or craft or function for which there is a market. The more exclusively this criterion is used to evaluate people, the less room there is for homophobia to play a significant role.

It is odd that the political left ever thought capitalism was anti-gay. To the contrary, it would seem to be the free market, with its ceaseless flux and stress on creative efforts to remain competitive, that generates the environment in which people assess one another more or their knowledge and skills than on other "personal" qualities.

In a way, that market dynamic reproduces the college-environment learning dynamic in that it stresses alertness to new information, skill in finding that information, and creativity in using it. Only now the information has a direct practical purpose rather than that of just passing an examination.

To all this sexual orientation is irrelevant. That David Geffen is a multi-millionaire entrepreneur is significant; that he is gay is merely interesting.

4. Such reflections as these, if they are correct, are not without practical vale. They can suggest what to encourage in society that will foster open, flexible attitudes.

Since the more educated and affluent people are the most pro-gay, we might want to support adult education programs and public awareness of scientific and technological change. We might want to support attitudes and institutions that promote the idea of life as an unfinished project, such as modern psychology with its emphasis on personal growth.

We might want to encourage interest in and education about music, art and literature, where gays are clearly plentiful, where excellence is judged by aesthetic standards.

In social dynamics, we might want to foster competition and the reduction of government decision-making. The more we can remove decision-making from the collective (or political) arena, the more we can tacitly teach people that they should have greater respect for other people's autonomy and that their own views should have no coercive role in deciding how others pursue personal fulfillment.

And we might be wise to focus our organizational attention on promoting gay presence in the mass media and popular culture, the most effective means of countering or preventing homophobia.

First appeared in The Windy City Times July 20, 1995.

IN THE WAKE OF THE APRIL 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing, it was sometimes pointed out that a very similar ammonium nitrite bomb is used to destroy the FBI Washington headquarters in an obscure novel called The Turner Diaries by William Pierce.

By July 5, New York Times correspondent John Kifner had tracked down people who said chief suspect Timothy McVeigh was a fan of the book.

"He carried the book all the time," one gun collector told Kifner. "He sold it at [gun] shows. He'd have a few copies in the pockets of his cammies... They were supposed to be $10, but he'd sell them for $5. It was like he was looking for converts."

The Turner Diaries(1978) is an authoritarian, white supremacist, anti-Semitic novel in which Earl Turner, through a series of diary entries, records his work in helping the "Organization" --essentially a Nazi underground group. By bombing government buildings, and sabotaging businesses and utilities, the Organization foments civil disorder, seizes a stronghold in California and eventually takes over the country, exterminates minorities, and provides "wise and benevolent rule."

Almost lost among the denunciations of blacks and Jews are references to "gay bars, massage parlors, porn stalls, liquor stores, and similar capitalist ventures." In the same vein, Turner notes a rise in "sexual debauchery:" "the queers, the fetishists, the mixed-race couples, the sadists... are parading their perversions in public and the public is joining them."

It has generally gone unremarked that The Turner Diaries is Pierce's first novel. There is a second: Hunter, published in 1989. Hunter is a kind of preliminary or "prequel" to the first book showing how actions here and now could plausibly lead to the creation of the "Organization" and its revolution.

In Hunter, Oscar Yeager ("Yeager" is German for "hunter" or "rifleman"), a former combat pilot in Vietnam with a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado (Pierce himself has a Ph.D. from Colorado) finds himself revolted by the decay of modern society as exemplified by drug use, race mixing, and open homosexuality, and decides to become a vigilante, shooting interracial couples.

Eventually Yeager meets members of a group called the "National League" (Pierce's organization, which publishes his books, is called National Alliance) who educate him about the key role of Jews in the decay of civilization and destruction of the white race. At the end, the League goes underground and Yeager recommends destroying the economic infrastructure to foment civil disorder.

In a way, Hunter constitutes a kind of Old Testament to the Turner Diaries' New Testament. The OT is a history of the ancient Jews; Hunter is the history of a man being taught how Jews destroy civilization. The NT is about the founding of a new religion replacing Judaism; Turner Diaries is about the founding of a new regime with a literally religious attitude toward racial purity that overcomes both Judaism and Christianity.

The notion is not entirely fanciful. The OT has 39 books: Hunter has 39 chapters. The NT has 27 books. The Turner Diaries has 28 chapters, thus going one step beyond, or overcoming, Christianity.

However that may be, Hunter, published 11 years after The Turner Diaries, contains Pierce's updated thoughts and his response to recent social change. It is far more anti-gay than The Turner Diaries. Along with denunciations of Jews, blacks, "race traitors," and man-hating feminists, there are more than 20 hostile references to homosexuals, queers, fairies, fags, faggots, and sodomites.

Yeager is disgusted by "the open displays of homosexual behavior by an increasing number" of young people. "Queers" are said to have a "general antipathy toward the heterosexual world." Yeager's girlfriend shows a "natural revulsion" when "two obviously 'gay' men had swished into a restaurant where they were eating... and held hands as the perused the menus."

Yeager asks, "don't these fags realize all the hatred they're causing... Do they really think they can keep rubbing the average guy's nose in their filth indefinitely and there'll never be any payback?" Comes the reply from his mentor, "Gays are really not rational. They're a lot like Jews in some ways. They don't know when to stop pushing."

In one episode Yeager cheerfully agrees to kill Sen. Howard Carter, a powerful New England Republican who is a closet "homosexual and pederast."

Gaining entrance to the office, Yeager first kills the senator's Jewish legislative aide: "The knife slipped easily into Sheldon Schwartz' belly and Oscar ripped savagely upward with it, spilling the man's entrails on the carpet. The eviscerated Schwartz could utter no more than a long wheezing gasp as his knees buckled and he fell forward."

Coming to investigate, Carter sees Yeager with the knife, freezes with horror and exclaims, "Oh Shit!"

"'Yes, and that's all she wrote, faggot,' was Oscar's reply as he plunged the ten-inch blade into the center of Carter's chest."

In a later incident gay activists picket the publishers of a book called The Growing Threat of AIDS in America that urges universal HIV testing and quarantining of those infected. One day two demonstrators slosh allegedly infected blood on a female employee.

The next day the woman's husband drives up, shoots and kills some of the demonstrators while 30 New York policemen assigned to keep order do nothing to stop him. The police even order the demonstrators not to run away while the man stops to reload his gun.

Originally appeared June 15, 1995, in the Windy City Times.

We need constantly to remind ourselves that the chief opposition to gay equality is religious. In the here and now, that means primarily fundamentalist Protestantism and the Catholic hierarchy.

We may conduct much of our liberation efforts in the political sphere or even the "cultural" sphere, but always undergirding those and slowing our progress is the moral/religious sphere. If we could hasten the pace of change there, our overall progress would accelerate, in fact, would be assured.

In that light, it is fascinating to catch the Catholic church in mid-transition on an important moral issue that has some historical and doctrinal parallels to our own: anti-semitism.

No one can doubt that the New Testament contains anti-semitic passages and explicit condemnations of "the Jews." There are far more, and more specific, anti-Jewish references in the New Testament than there are anti-gay texts in the Old and New Testaments combined.

Perhaps the best known and most bizarre is in the gospel named for Matthew which says that when a crowd of Jews shouted to Pilate that he should crucify Jesus, they added gratuitously, "His blood be on us and on our children." Historically this is preposterous, but there it is "holy writ."

The gospel named for John is even more insistently and vehemently anti-semitic. A few examples: "And this was why the Jews persecuted Jesus." "This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him." "I know that you (Jews) are of your father the devil." "The Jews took up stones again to stone him." "The Jews assured him (Pilate), 'We have a law and by the law he ought to die.'" "They (Jews) cried out 'away with him, away with him, crucify him.'"

Other writings of the early church fathers are littered with condemnations of Jews, Jewish customs, Jewish beliefs. And the Christian hierarchy and its flock acted on that hostility for centuries through inquisitions, expropriations, displacements, slaughters, and pogroms, all coming to an appalling height in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

Hitler himself allegedly told a delegation of church leaders that he was merely putting into practice what the Christian churches had preached for nearly two thousand years.

Malcolm Hay's pioneering book, "The Foot of Pride: Europe and the Jews" is still a useful place to start in learning the full story.

But the moral revulsion against the Holocaust was so strong that many decent people felt a need to rethink the texts that appeared to lead to such a result. Watching them do so can help provide a model for how similar changes will come about on gay issues.

Last March 23 [1995], the Catholic archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, delivered a remarkable lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem called "Antisemism: the Historical Legacy and the Continuing Challenge for Christians."

The speech is a fascinating attempt to cope with and evade the fact of Christian anti-semitism and its roots in ancient Christian writings. Bernardin draws on historical research, modern Catholic teaching, and current Biblical interpretation, emphasizing the original contexts of the texts, all to de-emphasize their significance.

To begin with, Bernardin drives a wedge between the texts and their plain, literal meaning by asserting that "There are texts that remain open to anti-Judaic interpretation." He refers to "what many consider to be problematic New Testament texts," and he notes that "John" is "the most problematic of all New Testament books in its outlook toward the Jews and Judaism."

Later he goes further, saying that "it is not certain that any of these texts themselves can be legitimately termed antisemitic or even anti-Judaic...." Note the words that produce wriggle room: certain, themselves, legitimately.

Second, carefully citing church documents, he usually refers to "forms of racism, including anti-semitism" and calls anti-semitism "the most tragic form that racist ideology has assumed in our century."

But those documents are an attempt to exonerate the church for its religious persecution by pretending that the motivation was something other than the unwillingness of Jews to accept the central Christian doctrine-that Jesus was the messiah. Bernardin does go a bit further, acknowledging a theological element, but he cautiously downplays what he is doing. And he avoids writing of "Christian anti-semitism," preferring to speak of "antisemitism in a Christian context."

Third, Bernardin frankly says, "Retranslation ... and reinterpretation certainly are to be included among the goals we pursue in the effort at eradicating antisemitism."

We could call this the "Where there's a will, there's a way" school of Biblical interpretation. Nowhere else does Bernardin quite so openly acknowledge the moral impetus behind the effort to find other, more innocuous meanings for these texts.

Among the techniques of reinterpretation he suggests are emphasizing the limited original context and denying the general application of the texts. Another is attributing their form to "polemical" aims, that is, deliberate exaggeration or distortion. Elsewhere he flatly if tacitly denies that Jesus ever said that the Jews are "children of the devil." He does this by approvingly quoting a scholar who says the words are "an affirmation which is placed on the lips of Jesus." That is, "placed" illegitimately, by someone else.

Bernardin also argues that anti-semitism does not begin with Christianity. Since there were pre-existing anti-semitic influences, then anti-semitism was no necessary part of church doctrine, he asserts. So if anti-semitism became part of Christianity, then Christianity was also a victim rather than a perpetrator.

Bernardin comes close to saying just this when he quotes the Pope speaking of Catholic "acquiescence ... to intolerance and the weakness of so many of [the church's] sons and daughters who sullied her face." In other words, Catholicism was not guilty, only Catholics.

Two years ago, writing in "Theological Studies," John Noonan traced earlier Catholic doctrinal changes on marriage, slavery, religious freedom, and lending money at interest. Clearly the Catholic church is now changing on anti-semitism even as we watch.

So we know the Catholic church will find a way to change its position on homosexuality when it finally feels morally compelled to do so. Our task is to seize the moral high ground and press our moral case with gentle but relentless pressure.

Originally appeared June 2, 1994, in the Windy City Times.

There was a note in my office mailbox from The Editor saying he wanted to see me. I walked down the long corridor past the offices of all the Assistant Editors until I got to The Editor's door. I knocked with what I hoped was the right mixture of assertiveness and respect.

"Enter," came the familiar stern voice. I entered.

The Editor was seated at his desk behind a tall stack of half-edited manuscripts, wearing a "Just Be You" T-shirt with a little yellow button that said, "Have a Nice Whenever." Pushed up on his forehead was his ever-present green eyeshade. Vivaldi was playing on the portable CD player.

"Good morning, Sir. You wanted to see me?"

"Where is your Pride Issue column, Varnell?

"Pride column?" I asked, all innocence and wonderment.

"Pride column," he repeated. "The Pride Issue is at hand. I sent a memo to all staff about this more than a month ago. We need an appropriate column."

I smiled a thin, cool smile, reached into my back pocket, and. ...

"Ta-dah!" I said as I handed him my column with a flourish.

He stared at it as if I were offering him a live snake.

"What does it say?" he asked suspiciously.

"It's about how proud we should all be to be gay," I replied. "How it makes us the truly wonderful, self-actualizing people we are. How it sensitizes us to the joy and beauty in the universe, gives meaning to our lives, and elevates our existence far beyond that of ordinary mortals."

"Oh, cut it out, Varnell," he said with a grimace. "You don't believe any of that. You've always made fun of gay pride. You always said being gay was a neutral quality, like having blue eyes and that it was only how people handled it, what they did with it, how they lived their lives, that could be a source of pride. Do I not recall correctly?"

"Well, I'm selling out," I said grandly. "I've decided to tell people what they want to hear. They want to hear that life can be simple and uncomplicated; that life presents few demand and that it is enough just to 'be.' They want to hear that the universe is benevolent, that they can be wonderful without effort, and that living involves no pains, no trade-offs, no compromises, no agonizing dilemmas.

"I am telling people it is enough to be proud and everything else will just fall into place. I reassure them that being gay involves no moral or intellectual obligations, that they can keep on being however they are, that wherever they are is the final stage of personal development."

"Oh, for pity's sake, Varnell," he burst out. "Can't you do anything right? When you sell out you're supposed to do it for money or for power or something. But here you are selling out - as you call it - but you aren't getting anything for it at all."

"Oh, I am, I am," I insisted. "I'm gaining popularity, regard, affection. People want to read things they already agree with, that reassure them about themselves, however they are. People love this sort of thing and they love the people who tell it to them - ministers, politicians, therapists, even writers.

"And people will love me. They will write me fan letters, speak of me in reverential tones, buy me drinks at bars. I will be famous and esteemed."

"No doubt!" he said. "But this is all irrelevant. This year's Pride topic has nothing to do with Pride."

"It doesn't?" I gasped, taken aback. "How is that possible?"

"If you'd paid attention to my memo" - he pulled a piece of paper out from the middle of a pile and waved it at me - you'd have known that this year's theme is 'Stonewall 25.' I don't know why I even bother to write these things if no one reads them. ..."

His voice trailed off. Then he looked at me sternly.

"Your deadline is 4 o'clock. Dismissed!"

I made an "about-face" I learned in Boy Scouts and marched out, wondering what I could say about diversity that was not already cliche'd, hackneyed, tired.

On the way out, I stopped by the office of Aspasia, one of our young Assistant Editors.

"You'll never guess...," I began glumly.

"I know!" she said. "You need a new column." She grinned guiltily. "The intercom was on - just a teensy bit."

"Well, what are you writing about?" I asked.

"I'm writing about the most important events since Stonewall," she said. "You know, Bowers v Hardwick, Anita Bryant, the psychiatrists voting that we're mentally healthy - that kind of stuff. I'm learning a lot," she added.

"What do you think was the most important event of all? I asked.

"Most important event?" She looked off into space for a moment. "You know. I really think the most important event was when I came out."

I must have looked startled.

"Oh, I don't mean that my coming out was the most important event for everyone else, just for me. What I mean is that for each of us the most important event since Stonewall is that we ourselves came out.

"Think about it," she went on. "That means that each of us at some point summoned up the courage to be honest with ourselves about ourselves. And we managed to do that even knowing there would be some risks and losses if we did it. But we valued truth and integrity enough to face those risks. It's kind of an achievement."

She smiled brightly.

"I don't mean it's a stopping point," she added. "And that doesn't mean it's easy from then on. But it does mean that each of us was willing to throw ourselves into that existential void and take on the burden of beginning to work out life's same old problems from a new and uncertain starting point. It's an achievement that gets us up to square one, but somehow it gives us some momentum as we pass through that point on into the rest of our lives. And I suppose it gives us the experience of knowing that honesty and courage and self-knowledge have some cash value in our mental economy."

"But that's just my opinion. I suppose other people would think differently."

A glimmer of an idea stole into my mind.

"Are you writing about this?" I asked as casually as I could.

"Oh, no," she said. "It's not my topic. Besides, people would just laugh at me if I tried to explain it."

"Well, it's been good talking with you," I said. "But I've gotta go work."

And I rushed off to my word processor.

Originally appeared in the Windy City Times on March 24, 1994.

Rather than concentrating single-mindedly on politics, activists would be wise to turn some of their energies to educational initiatives such as Gay and Lesbian History Month, "a painless, non-threatening way of disseminating information - and therefore familiarity, and therefore comfort, and therefore tolerance - among a larger number of people than we have thus far been able to reach."

---

AS YOU PROBABLY ARE AWARE, America has just recently (in February) observed Black History month. The designation is an occasion for the major media and many of our public institutions to do some special features on the topic. Some newspapers even do daily short columns or articles on events in black history or the lives of prominent African-Americans.

Radio and television talk shows - especially those ubiquitous local radio call-in programs - often do something on the topic. Many schools regularly do units on black history. And the classical music stations to which I am usually tuned play more music by black composers or performed by black artists.

Libraries shows special displays of books on black history or by black authors. Book publishers make sure they release new books on the African-American experience to be promoted during February. In cities with large black populations, public officials often attend events to kick off Black History Month or end it with some special celebrations.

Most Americans, like myself, probably make little effort to seek out material on black history. But just as I do, they probably absorb a certain amount of new information just in the normal course of things.

So why, I ask, is there no Gay and Lesbian History Month?

More often than not, our existence is publicized when we are the villains or the victims of some crime; or when we as a group are seen as an aggrieved minority or a social threat (as in the recent antigay ballot initiatives) or when there is news about AIDS, in which we are simultaneously villain and victim.

Seldom except during rare major events such as last year's March on Washington is there much coverage of us as a people, a community growing into self- consciousness, developing our own institutions and making a contribution to the common culture.

Discussion of gay and lesbian history, which is safely in the past, could be an excellent way of talking about gay lives in a context free from controversy and rancor, without having to argue or be partisan. And it is a way of talking about gays without directly talking about sexual behavior, which still makes many people uncomfortable.

Gay and Lesbian History Month could provide a painless, non-threatening way of disseminating information-and therefore familiarity, and therefore comfort, and therefore tolerance-among a larger number of people than we have thus far been able to reach.

Perhaps most Americans are not even aware that there is any gay history. Most Americans do not know much history at all, but particularly they do not know that gays have a history. They must think homosexuality was invented some time in the last couple of decades in a big city far away. They may still think being gay consists primarily of the mindless repetition of sexual acts, and be totally unaware of our social history, literary history, even economic history.

Gay history could help explain much about our lives from a community-development standpoint: where we have been, what we have overcome, and what we - individually and cooperatively - have achieved, often against daunting odds and with frequent examples of great individual courage.

What would it take to get Gay and Lesbian History Month off the ground? To start with, merely an "official" designation by some "official" body that some month is now "officially" Gay and Lesbian History Month. It should not be difficult to persuade the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign Fund, along with the gay caucuses of the American Historical Association and the American Library Association, to make such a pronouncement.

And it should be easy to set up. Two people working in a small office could get it started. They could draw up several thematic topics and choose several significant individuals, then make a short list of available books, articles and films on the topic. They could even provide article outlines, biographical sketches and photographs of the people involved. (The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality is a useful tool here.)

Gay and Lesbian History Month staff would then package this material attractively and send it to city editors, features editors and gay-friendly reporters at local newspapers, to the assignment editors at radio and television stations, to local and network talk-show producers, to library directors, to magazine editors. They could send the same material to special events people in city governments and the human resources departments of large corporations.

They could follow up with telephone inquiries ("Did you receive our kits?" "How can we help?") and regular faxed updates and supplements to keep nudging people along.

They could identify experts, local and national, who could give lectures or be available for interviews and talk show appearances. Gay and lesbian historians such as Martin Duberman, John D'Emilio, Lillian Faderman, Warren Johansson, John Boswell, Elizabeth Kennedy, William Percy and Eugene Rice could become media stars.

And those classical music radio stations I listen to might even be persuaded - if only for one month - to actually identify as gay those innumerable gay composers they already play without identifying them as such.

I spell all this out not to show how complicated it is, but to show how many opportunities are going untapped. In fact, it is not complicated at all; it is very simple and straightforward - very much like a standard public relations campaign.

In fact, that is exactly what it is - that is what the whole gay movement is about. Some people (some activists) mistakenly believe that PR campaigns such as this might be at best a useful tool in helping to obtain gay rights laws. The truth is the exact reverse: Gay rights laws are a useful tool in the broader gay PR campaign.

Our goal, remember, is a society in which there is no hostility or discrimination against gays. A positive and affirmative public attitude can bring that about - with or without laws. In fact, a positive and affirming public attitude is exactly our end point.

Accordingly, we must devote far more tactical thinking to non-political (non-electoral) ways to advance our goals. (National Coming Out Day is one such.) The obsession with politics by some activists amounts to a kind of tunnel vision bordering on pathology.

The current fixation with state antigay ballot initiatives may be understandable, but the point should be to have prevented their occurrence in the first place. That should have been our goal five or ten years ago, and preventing ones in the future should be our goal now.