IGF CultureWatch

After I wrote recently about the impediments--or lack of inducements--society presents for gay men to become adults, a reader referred me to an article on "Gay Adults" by Los Angeles psychologist Don Kilhefner in the magazine "White Crane."

Although the article contains too much Radical Faery politics and spirituality for my taste, Kilhefner's main point about the need for recognition of "gay adult" as a stage in the gay life-cycle is important and he develops it thoughtfully.

Kilhefner writes that one time after a public discussion about gay men's lives during which he discussed gay adulthood, "a bright, 30-something, gay man ... shared that he had never heard of the concept of a 'gay adult' ... and he found it intriguing. He always heard people talking about "older gays" and "younger gays" but he had never heard of gay men having an adult stage of development."

Maybe things are a little worse in the Hollywood fantasyland of perpetual youth, but perceptions are probably not much different elsewhere.

Kilhefner critiques the rationales (or excuses) offered--that I too have offered--for why gay men so often seem not to mature into adulthood.

Consider the supposed delayed adolescence of men who come out in their 20s. He points out that adolescence normally lasts about eight years at most. So, he wonders, "why am I seeing large numbers of gay men in their late 30's, 40's and 50's still thinking and acting like 20-somethings?"

He acknowledges that AIDS took the lives of many of the gay 30-65 generation, but cites CDC estimates that only 8-12 percent of gay men have died because of AIDS. "Where are the remaining 90% of gay men who are not missing in action?" he asks pointedly.

His critique of the "absence of children" argument is the weakest, depending on his notion that gays as a group have some purpose and that purpose is "the spiritual survival of the species." That sort of unprovable metaphysical speculation won't convince many people. But I think better arguments could be offered: Gay men who marry or otherwise join their lives to a long term partner generally act more mature. And even single men who see their own immature behavior mirrored in younger gay men eventually find the sight distasteful and abandon it.

I think there are counter-arguments to each of these, but they may be only partially successful so the critique of gay immaturity has considerable force and deserves a serious hearing.

There are actually gay adults around in considerable numbers. They run gay businesses, the gay cultural institutions, the gay bars and clubs, the community health and social service organizations. But perhaps they are inconspicuous to young people focused on the bar, party and hook-up scene.

Still, there are millions of gay adult besides those. And indeed, where are they? Perhaps they withdraw from the gay community because they view being gay as largely about drinking, drugs, and fast-food sex. That is a sad misunderstanding. More than anything, gay is about Civic Life. The gay community is an affinity group. It is about interpersonal empathy, friendships, social and political progress and cultural creativity.

For those who do not know how to stay involved: We need gay adults to volunteer at gay organizations, to serve on committees that can use their skills, to hold a fund-raising house party, or even start a new organization or group when the need arises, as all the AIDS organizations once were.

From time to time, I get emails from readers saying, "I wish there were a group that ..." to which I usually reply: "Start one!" Gay adults are the ones with the knowledge and self-confidence to be entrepreneurial about such things. (For instance, a young artist I know is currently forming a gay artists and art photographers network.)

And we need gay adults to engage in an unobtrusive calming and mentoring of young people (and juvenile adults) in the arts of growing up. They can do this in large measure just by being themselves. They can exemplify simple maturity and self-possession, an example of someone with a source of internal authority and sense of what is appropriate in varying circumstances.

"We have been busy mothering (i.e., accepting) each other and our young," Kilhefner writes, "accepting behaviors that are clearly self-destructive to us individually and collectively--at a time when we need to be fathering (i.e., communicating expectations to) ourselves and our young--developing a community-wide ethos ... that expects young gay men to become adults."

And I add: Sometimes it may take more overt social pressure. We have all seen people behave stupidly and thought to ourselves, "Oh, grow up!" Maybe we should occasionally say that out loud.

Religious and social conservatives generally present themselves as vigorous opponents of homosexual sex, gay visibility, gay equality and "the gay identity."

They attack the political left for encouraging gays to become more visible and providing an incentive to adopt a "gay identity" by passing gay non-discrimination legislation, supporting gay marriage and creating "special protections" for gays that create a safer space for them to come out of the closet and promote their own equality.

Yet one of the ironies of politics is that the Law of Unintended Consequences means that people's efforts often have results directly contrary to their goals. In this instance, religious and social conservatives turn out to be among the primary generators and firmest support of gay visibility and "gay identity."

Here's why.

Christian churches for centuries have condemned, persecuted and promoted hatred of homosexuals. This meant that homosexuals had to disguise their fundamental erotic and emotional nature from church, state, neighbors, and blackmailers, evade detection and prejudice, yet contrive somehow to find partners who shared their desires. So instead of being just another moderately interesting minority attribute, a person's homosexuality became a very significant part of his or her life and self-concept.

In the same way current attacks on gays and gay equality by religious or political leaders are an affront to every gay person's sense of his own dignity and self-worth. And eventually they make most gays realize that their homosexuality is an important part of their lives, induce closeted gays to come out and make gays who were not politically involved become more assertive.

Social conservatives still haven't quite grasped after more than 40 years of gay liberation that gays are not going back into the closet, abandon their dignity and self-esteem, or succumb to political suppression or religious calumny. The more they attack gays, the more they increase our visible numbers.

Some empirical evidence for this is provided in a new study by researcher Gary Gates of the UCLA Law School's Williams Institute based on data from the Census Bureau's 2005 American Community Survey sample of 1.4 million Americans.

The survey found that 30 percent more gay and lesbian couples identified themselves to the Census Bureau in 2005 than in 2000: 594,000 in 2000, and an estimatd 777,000 in 2005, a remarkable increase. Gates allows the possibility that more gays are forming committed same-sex relationships, but says that even if so, it hardly explains such an increase.

Gates says a more likely explanation is a greater willingness of existing same-sex couples in 2005 to acknowledge their relationship-and thus their sexual orientation-to the Census Bureau.

Even more significant for our purpose is the fact that states which have or had in 2004 and 2006 battles over Constitutional amendments to prohibit gay marriage had greater than average percentage increases in gay couples. Arizona, Colorado, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri all had increases above the national average. Wisconsin showed a stunning 81 percent increase in the number of acknowledged same-sex couples.

People can get used to a certain level of discrimination, but the breaking point seems to be when someone tries to take away something people already have-as the state constitutional bans of gay marriage do. It is not true that they change nothing: They remove the possibility of electing sympathetic officials and lobbying the legislature for the right to marry. In other words, they make it much harder to achieve one of our ultimate goals-as they are intended to. That plus the indignity of having their relationships designated as not equal to heterosexual relationships made a lot of people angry enough to stand up and acknowledge themselves.

I am far from asserting that the more gays are attacked, the better it is. Obviously verbal and political attacks can fuel hostility and even promote hate crimes. In politics, however, any attack can produce a counter-reaction, and that reaction may turn out to be more significant in the long run.

If in virtue of being attacked and insulted more gays come out, then more people will get to know gays, more skeptics will gradually decide that we are decent people who should be treated equally, and little by little prejudice will be chipped away.

In the early 1980s when the Centers for Disease Control created the term "Men who have sex with men" (MSM) to refer to an AIDS risk group, many of us criticized the term as a euphemism for gay men. Now, however, a new survey of "MSM" in New York City shows some important differences between gay men and non-"gay" MSM. That suggests that we were wrong to reject the term entirely, but that the CDC was also wrong to lump us all together.

Our objection to "MSM" had a good deal of merit. It seemed like a social conservative attempt to deny that men could actually be constitutionally oriented toward love and sex with other men, instead treating our orientation as just a succession of sexual acts.

Even more, it rejected our self-affirming label "gay." After all, one of the first steps of the ex-gay process is to persuade gay men to stop thinking of themselves as "gay" or "homosexual"--i.e., to reject the identity.

Whatever the CDC's reasoning, it is certainly true that during the Reagan administration, when social conservatives began to wield a great deal of influence, any attempt by the CDC to talk about "gay men" or "gay and bisexual men" would have met vigorous criticism and objection.

However, over the years, "MSM" came to have a sort of plausibility. There are large numbers of men who have and may well prefer sex with other men, but who use a variety of rationalizations to evade acknowledgment of their homosexuality or bisexuality, and the CDC's MSM designation did manage to include them without seeming threatening.

How many? A 2003 telephone survey of more than 4,000 men conducted by the New York City public health department just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that MSM who deny being gay are more numerous than self-acknowledged gay or bisexual men.

According to Reuters, fully 10 percent of the men in the survey who identified themselves as "straight" said in the past year they had sex with one or more men but no woman. And that figure is undoubted low since telephone surveys traditionally encounter the greatest degree of cover-up of homosexual activity.

Since only 9 percent of the men acknowledged being gay or bisexual (or "unsure"), that means that more straight men are engaging in gay sex than gay and bisexual men are, although further questioning determined that they have fewer partners than the gay/bi men.

They use a variety of rationalizations to deny being gay. They may think "gay" designates a specific set of social behaviors or "lifestyle"--regularly going to clubs, taking drugs, attending parties, obsessing with fashion, etc. That most gays do few or none of these things is irrelevant if the "straight" men have accepted that stereotype.

Or they may think "gay" designates men who act publicly in a feminine (or effeminate) manner--a stereotype left over from the 1950s and still common enough among some males at lower educational levels. They may feel that if they act in a traditionally masculine fashion, they are not "gay."

They may believe that "gay" men are the ones who take the receptive or "insertee" role in sexual behavior. If they prefer the inserter role, then they don't think of themselves as gay. That many openly gay men also prefer the inserter role, and many others switch roles easily--thus being alternately gay and not gay--may not make sense to them. This view seems to be particularly common in third world countries.

Then too, some men make a radical distinction between their sexual and emotional desires and deny being gay if, while enjoying sex with men, their only emotional relationships are with women. Maybe they never allow their succession of sexual contacts to develop an emotional connection. But it would also apply to the significant number of men whose self-image and self-esteem largely depends on being loved and needed by a women.

Not surprisingly given these rationalizations, the "straight" men who had gay sex were more likely to belong to a racial or ethnic minority, to be born in a foreign country, and to have a lower educational level. They were also less likely to have used a condom during their most recent sexual activity with a man. But if they think that by denying that they are gay or bisexual they are protected from AIDS, they are denying reality. And denying reality invariably has a cost.

The CDC may not be doing anyone, including itself, a favor by using a single term for gay men and for "straight" men who have sex with men. They are different populations with different attitudes and behaviors. So whatever the CDC wishes to call those "straight" men, maybe after more than two decades it is time for the CDC to start calling gay men by our own name.

Not long ago I was cleaning out some old files and ran across one labeled "Homophobia--Internalized." Into it I had stuffed articles that purported to analyze why gay men engaged in such risky harmful activities as heavy drinking, crystal meth use, and unprotected receptive anal sex.

After a good deal of tut-tutting about the irrationality of putting oneself at risk for physical and mental deterioration and sometimes death, the articles often suggested that the explanation was "internalized homophobia" a supposed hatred of oneself as homosexual.

"Self-hating homosexual" was also used by gay leftists to describe gays who support conservative politicians and could equally have been used by moderate gays to refer to far-left gays whose main goal was to push gays into working for "the worldwide socialist revolution" (remember that?). Both, of course could have retorted that they supported gay equality but there were other political goals they valued more.

But "internalized homophobia" is a little too pat, too readily invoked, too all-encompassing. What disadvantageous or harmful behavior could it not purport to explain? I have to say, too, I don't think I have ever met a real instance of internalized homophobia. I think it is a label that doesn't refer to anything real--like "the ether" or "phlogiston."

I know of gay men who wished they were not gay. They say being heterosexual would make their life easier. They wish they could marry and sire children, or please their parents, or please their god. But none of them hate his whole self. Sadly, a few gay men do kill themselves, but they seldom if ever engage in typical "risk behaviors" as a way to do it gradually. They do it and get it over with.

It seems to me that people engage in so-called "risk-behaviors" for a simple reason: They are enjoyable; they feel good now. It is only in the long run that most risky behavior turns out to be harmful. And the further off the future, the more the consequences are discounted in our calculations about whether to do something enjoyable in the here and now.

Consider too that some heterosexual men also regularly engage in risk behavior. They use crystal meth and heroin, they drink heavily, they have sex with girl friends without a condom (risking unwanted paternity or the costs of an abortion). They parachute jump, race automobiles on city streets, get into fights. All these entail risk but the potential costs are uncertain or somewhere off in the future--and the pleasures are in the present, some of them very intense pleasures. No one diagnoses them with "internalized heterophobia" or calls them "self-hating heterosexuals." Instead, people look for other reasons for their behavior: they are fun, they are exciting, they provide an adrenaline rush, they are totally absorbing.

Show me an instance in which gay men engage in behavior with potentially harmful consequences but no benefit in terms of present pleasure or cessation of physical or emotional pain, an instance that cannot be found among heterosexual men, then I will reconsider "internalized homophobia."

At this point we could wonder whether explaining gay men's behavior with an easy and dismissive "internalized homophobia," without carefully examining the specific reasons or motivations of individual men involved is itself a kind of de facto homophobia. No doubt many of these people in the so-called "helping professions" would deny that emphatically. But failing to treat gay men the same way they would treat similarly situated heterosexual men amounts to heterosexism at least.

But instead of just condemning writers who fall back too easily on "internalized homophobia," it would be helpful to have a more satisfactory alternative explanatory model. "Time preference"--the relative weight anyone gives to present costs or benefits (pleasures) versus longer term costs or benefits--provides a clearer explanation. But time preference is part of the tool kit of economists while homophobia is in the tool kit of sociologists and psychologists and the disciplines seldom talk to each other.

The issue of "time preference" is particularly important in assessing gay men's behavior. Most heterosexual men marry and eventually produce dependent children. Because they now have other people who depend on them they have a greater incentive to think about the longer term. Not coincidentally, it is young single males who most engage in high risk behavior.

Since gays are denied marriage or civil unions, society fails to provide them with this incentive to develop a similar long-term perspective. In significant ways, most gay men remain single males all their lives. And because they do not have access to the ceremonies and other markers that bolster an internalized sense of socially certified adulthood (marriage, the birth of children), they remain in some sense young. This may have good effects as in preserving the free play of youthful creativity, but it also fails to promote that lengthening of a person's time preference which would discourage these much discussed risk-behaviors.

To the dismay of the religious right, in the last decade American corporations have moved rapidly in a gay-supportive direction, pledging not to discriminate, supporting gay employee groups, offering domestic partner benefits, advertising in gay media and contributing to gay non-profits. To the equal dismay of whatever remains of the anti-capitalist left, these quintessentially capitalist entities have done so at a pace that far outstrips most governments-local, state and national.

No one has done more to promote these changes in recent years than Washington, D.C.-based marketing and public relations consultants Robert Witeck and Wesley Combs of Witeck-Combs Communications. Witeck and Combs have now written "Business Inside Out: Capturing Millions of Brand Loyal Gay Consumers" (Chicago: Kaplan Publishing) to share what they learned about the gay community as an economic market, how they learned it, and how they used that information to help shift corporate attitudes and policies.

The main lesson Witeck and Combs teach is that corporations have to promote gay-friendly attitudes and policies internally before they can successfully market to a skeptical gay community. They explain, "This is the true basis of bringing business 'inside out' and establishing a lasting reputation in the market." So the relationship between gays and business is symbiotic. Gay consumers will support a company so long as the company supports gays. Both function on the most reliable economic principle there is: self-interest.

But the key to persuading corporate managers that making internal changes is in their best interest was showing managers and marketers that the gay market existed and was of a size and economic significance to make it worthwhile marketing to. So Witeck and Combs begin their book with a history of the growth of gays as an identifiable market and early efforts to measure the gay market by surveying gay newspaper readers or attendees at pride rallies.

Serious research really began in 2000 when Witeck and Combs formed a partnership with the highly respected survey research firm Harris Interactive. Harris had developed an enormous panel of online respondents it drew on for its research, then compared the results with an identical telephone poll to adjust for the fact that not every American is online.

Harris and Witeck-Combs separated out a sub-panel of people who self-identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual to use for gay research and comparison with a similar panel of heterosexuals. Since the gay panel was not selected from identifiable gay sources, it was more nearly representative of the community as a whole than earlier samples.

Online research consistently found that 6.5 to 7 percent of respondents identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual. (Bisexuals are included if their current or most recent partner is the same sex.) Based on Department of Commerce calculations that the total U.S. buying power (disposable income) is $9.1 trillion, that works out to $610 billion in buying power for the gay community-an enormous sum by any measure. And that is before you factor in the greater likelihood of two same-sex partners to be employed and the lower incidence of dependent children among gays.

Online survey research also found that most gays (78 percent) said they preferred doing business with companies that were committed to diversity and equal treatment of employees; 86 percent said they were "likely" to "extremely likely" to consider brands that treated gay employees equally; 63 percent were likely to extremely likely to consider brands from companies that marketed directly to them. And gays were attentive to these issues, saying that they would seek information from friends, acquaintances, gay newspapers and gay websites.

As many of us have long observed among our own friends, the research found that gays were important "early adopters" and "trend-setters" for many types of products and services. Just as they quickly took up the Internet and personal computers, so too they quickly adopted other consumer electronics, personal care products, beverages, and certain clothing styles. Absolut Vodka achieved its initial success among gays, for instance. So the gay market is important beyond its own bounds because it influences other consumers.

Finally, Witeck and Combs turn to those old corporate bugaboos, the fear of bad publicity, backlash and boycotts. They point out that most boycotts are paper tigers: They are short-lived, fewer people participate than say they will and most Americans pay no attention to them. Those who call for boycotts generally move on to other things after they have reaped the initial publicity. Witeck and Combs recommend that business simply stay on course and either ignore criticism or respond with solid business-based reasoning such as the economic importance of diversity and fairness to all employees and customers.

Although "Business Inside Out" chiefly addresses corporate managers and marketers, it will be of keen interest to many gays and lesbians as well because of the amount of solidly based information it contains about them, their lives and their attitudes. After all, who does not like to read about themselves and their importance?

About a month ago a group of self-described "LGBT and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers" issued a manifesto titled "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage" in which they demanded legal "recognition of diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships and families" with "access to a flexible set of economic benefits and options regardless of sexual orientation, race, gender/gender identity, class, or citizenship status."

The signers consisted mostly of "no-names"--people you've never heard of--along with a couple of handfuls of known gay and lesbian (mostly lesbian) academics, activists, former activists, and hangers-on. Some of the signers are heterosexual; most seem to be long-term advocates of the post-Marxian socialist and deconstructionist left.

As witness: The manifesto avoids gay/lesbian issues but is replete with venerable left-wing demands--e.g., an end of funding of "militarism, policing, and prison construction." And it emphasizes "women's issues" such as more money for "decent housing, childcare, healthcare and reproductive services," etc.

All this is not so much beyond same-sex marriage, it is in a different universe entirely. All gay marriage proponents want is a change in one law to allow them equal treatment. Manifesto signers want free goodies for everybody, subsidized by taxpayers. In other words, this is nothing but the economic and cultural left's attempt to link itself to the gay marriage movement.

This little exercise in socio-economic splenetics would have sunk without a trace except that social conservatives publicized it widely as proving their contention that gay marriage was the first step in a scheme to undermine and destroy marriage. Polygamy is just around the corner, they shouted. And, they added triumphantly, the gay marriage movement has finally come out of the closet and admitted what its real goal is.

Oh, blarney! None of this has been secret, none of it is new from the far left and it offers no support to gay marriage. In fact, vigorous opposition to marriage--a "bourgeois" institution denounced by Marx as legalized prostitution--has long been a mainstay of the Marxian and feminist left. They have routinely denounced marriage, any marriage, as an oppressive "patriarchal" institution, although no one bothers to explain exactly what is patriarchal about the marriage of two men or two women.

For instance, manifesto signer Paula Ettelbrick has written and debated in opposition to marriage--and specifically gay marriage--for more than two decades. For her to sign a manifesto that indicates even openness to gay marriage, if only as a tactical feint, seems disingenuous. I suspect the same is true for many other signers. If I didn't know better I would think the signers were trying to disrupt and discredit the gay marriage movement. Come to think of it, I don't know better.

Despite this well-known background, right wing polemicists eagerly welcomed the manifesto as proof that gay marriage advocates were finally being candid about their "real" intention to destroy marriage. It is, in fact, an indication of the utter poverty of the argument against same-sex marriage that instead of arguing against it directly, the right wing has to immediately change the subject and point to other familial configurations as social dangers--polygamy, legalized incest, whatever.

Bluntly put, there are no cogent arguments against gay marriage. One of the most prolific opponents of gay marriage, Princeton professor Robert George, after repeatedly trying to develop and present just such arguments, has more or less admitted that. In a co-authored article with one Gerard Bradley, George states that male-female marriage has an "intrinsic value" that "cannot, strictly speaking, be demonstrated" and that "if the intrinsic value of (opposite sex) marriage ... is to be affirmed it has to be grasped in noninferential acts of understanding."

That is about as close to acknowledging defeat as you can get without explicitly saying so. What if George Wallace had said that the superiority of the white race could not be demonstrated but could be "grasped in noninferential acts of understanding"? Certainly there was a sizable constituency for just such a view, but undemonstrable "noninferential acts of understanding" are a poor basis for creating public policy in a secular civil society.

Then too, Robert George and his colleagues have never explained very well what it is about their own requirement of a male-female polarity for marriage that excludes polygamy. It is hard not to suspect that George keeps harping on polygamy as an imagined consequence of same-sex marriage to distract attention from the far more obvious opening to polygamy his own principle entails. I'm sure many fine polygamous Muslims would agree.

The latest Pew Research Center poll of Americans' social attitudes found that 56 percent of adults oppose gay marriage while only 36 percent support it. However, 54 percent said they support same-sex civil unions and only 42 percent oppose them. The poll of more than 2,000 people also found that adults under 30 are more supportive of gay marriage than people over 30 and that Americans are less likely than a few years ago to think that someone's sexual orientation can be changed.

A few quick points:

1. Clearly many more people are concerned about preserving the word "marriage" for heterosexual unions than are worried about depriving gays of the legal entitlements.
   
2. Young people are comfortable about gays, having grown up knowing gays among their peers and seeing them in popular culture.
   
3. The "ex-gay" campaign is making no headway whatsoever. People who get to know gays fairly quickly realize that there is no defect to be "fixed" or "repaired."
   
4. Despite these seeming gains, political progress will be slow in coming.

Elaborations:

Point #1. To many people, especially but not exclusively religious people, marriage is not something that can be extended to homosexuals because the word "marriage" means heterosexual unions-a bride and groom, man and woman. To speak of "gay marriage" is self-contradictory as if we were to speak of a round square or cold fire. There isn't any argument for this, it is just the way the world is.

To them, it is as if someone claimed that gravity pulls "up." We all could answer: "No, that direction is called down. You just don't understand what the word 'up' means." Or if somone claimed that parallel lines meet, we could all reply, "No, calling them 'parallel' means that they do not meet. That is what 'parallel' means." So all our counter-examples about childless heterosexual unions or same-sex couples with children simply have no persuasive power. They are irrelevant. How to reach such people requires careful thought.

Point #2. The pro-gay trend will continue as more gays are open about their lives and as gays are visible in popular culture. You're thinking of Lance Bass. Yes, but think too of the syndicated comic trip "Zits." On July 25, teenager Jeremy pointed at fellow-student Billy's shoes and says "Billy, your shoes look so gay." Billy replies patiently, "I AM gay, Jeremy," to which Jeremy replies "I know. I didn't mean 'gay' as in 'homosexual,' I meant 'gay' as in 'lame.'" Then in a thought bubble the puzzled Jeremy adds, "Why do people always misinterpret what I say?"

The strip is not only a wry critique of the popularity of "gay" as a generic put-down among students, it is remarkable for the casual way it introduces a gay character and lets Jeremy treat that fact as insignificant. It is a notable addition to the number of comic strips that have included gay characters such as "Doonesbury," "For Better or Worse" and "Brenda Starr." Things are changing: Less than twenty years ago the Tribune Syndicate forced the cancellation of a story line in "Winnie Winkle" in which Winnie's son Billy was to come out.

Point #3. The fraudulent "ex-gay" movement is simply the tail end of the century-long notion that homosexuality can be altered. Gay poet Edward Field's recent autobiography "The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag" (the reference is to gay writer Alfred Chester, not Field himself) reminded me of the enormous damage that error caused to gays who felt pressured in the 1940s, '50s and '60s to enter therapy to be heterosexualized. Martin Duberman's autobiography documents the same thing.

Therapy never worked-except to make gays unhappy, guilt-ridden, and sexually repressed. And it inhibited their assertion of legal and social equality. That is the real agenda of today's "ex-gay" programs. The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus once caustically observed, "Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it claims to be the cure." That statement is equally, especially true of the ex-gay movement. Incidentally, in case anyone (such as the New York Times) doubted Susan Sontag's lesbianism, Field discusses it at length.

Point #4. Although the Pew Research Center poll suggests a welcome increase in gay-supportive attitudes, that does not automatically or rapidly translate into legal or political progress. Referendums usually result in 5-10 percent lower support for gays than opinions surveys indicate. People lie to opinion pollsters, giving answers they think pollsters will approve and most "undecided" people are evading stating a negative opinion.

A more important factor, however, is that our opponents feel more intensely about gay issues than our heterosexual supporters. With a few honorable exceptions, for most of our supporters, gay equality is not a major motivating issue. Our opponents, whether motivated by religious doctrine, stereotypes or visceral distaste, are more likely to vote in elections, vote in primaries, and canvass among their friends and neighbors when gay issues are at issue.

The 4-2 decision by the New York Court of Appeals that the state constitution cannot be read to require equal marriage rights for same-sex couples was keenly disappointing but not a shock. Three of the four lower courts that heard the cases involved ruled against same-sex marriage. The Republican governor and Democratic attorney general both opposed a supportive decision, although the attorney general says he personally favors gay marriage.

But the majority's reasoning was contemptibly poor and tracked hoary social conservative arguments so closely the decision could have been written by the Pope. The strained reasoning suggests that the court was determined to justify a conclusion it had arrived at on other grounds, such as fear of heightening passions about "judges legislating from the bench."

If so, it showed that social conservatives are getting the lapdog judiciary they want. To U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall's ringing declaration of judicial supremacy, "It is a Constitution we are construing," the New York court replied, "Not if it involves homosexuals."

In creatively imagining "rational" reasons for the legislature's failure to legalize same-sex marriage, the court said it might think that for the welfare of children it is more important to promote stability in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships and that since heterosexual relationships are "all too often casual or temporary" an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born.

Notice that this only offers a reason for approving heterosexual marriage but no reason at all for prohibiting same-sex marriage. Notice too that the argument is both under-inclusive and over-inclusive. It ignores same-sex couples who adopt children or retain custody of children born in a previous heterosexual marriage, both allowable under New York law. And it ignores the fact that some opposite sex couples through birth control or infertility do not have children.

Moreover, in this analysis the undoubted benefits of marriage to the two individuals themselves who constitute the same-sex couple is held to be of no significance: Gay couples and their welfare are contemptuously beneath judicial notice.

In a second argument the court said the legislature might believe it is better for children to grow up with both a mother and a father before his or her eyes every day as models of what men and women are like.

This reasoning suggests that the legislature must think a child never sees any males or females except its mother and father, whereas with brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, playmates, parents of friends, teachers, and people on television, the child can hardly escape observing what both men and women are like.

And it too is over- and under-inclusive. Many single heterosexual parents rear children after a divorce or a partner dies. And gay and lesbian couples can legally under New York law adopt children whose parents have died or cannot care for them. Yet, according to the court, the legislature may think it better for those children to have no parents at all or unmarried gay parents than to have two married parents of the same-sex. So those children's well-being is also beneath judicial notice.

In short, unlike the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the New York court refuses to recognize that social and legal judgments about gays and their ability to rear children have changed since the state passed its current marriage law nearly a century ago.

Finally, the court airily and dismissively observed, "Plaintiffs have not persuaded us that this long accepted restriction is ... based solely on ignorance and prejudice against homosexuals. Until a few decades ago, it was an accepted truth for almost everyone ... that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex."

But even the New York court might admit that it was bigotry and prejudice against homosexuals fostered by the psychiatric, legal and religious establishments that long supported sodomy laws and related discrimination against gays. And that that long-standing hostility and criminalization effectively prevented serious consideration of, much less advocacy for, marriage between same-sex partners. The court in effect blames gays for being oppressed and asserts that historical oppression is a sufficient rationale for its continuance.

Nor, contrary to the ignorant court, have gays only recently expressed the desire to marry. Scholarship on the history of same-sex partnerships, unions, and marriages is not well-developed, but we have occasional reports of clandestine attempts to marry. French writer Michel de Montaigne wrote that when he visited Rome in 1581 he heard a report of several Portuguese men who earlier had married there in a church "with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriages."

They were later burned at the stake. But that wasn't mere "ignorance and prejudice," I suppose.

By now you've probably heard about the New York Court of Appeals' deciding that their state constitution does not require equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. Problem is, much of what you've heard is misleading.

Yes, the Court declared that "The New York Constitution does not compel recognition of marriages between members of the same sex." But no, they did not declare such marriages unconstitutional, nor did they "vote to prohibit" such marriages. Rather, they decided that "Whether such marriages should be recognized is a question to be addressed by the Legislature." Indeed, they explicitly encouraged the legislature to take up the issue.

Courts are not supposed to decide whether policies are good; they're supposed to decide whether policies pass constitutional muster. What the Court did here was to ask whether the current policy of limiting marriage to heterosexuals violates the Due Process or Equal Protection clauses of the New York State Constitution.

To answer this question, the Court considered whether New York could have a "rational basis" for restricting marriage to heterosexuals. The Court concluded that it could, and it thus ruled that the restriction is constitutional--which again, is not the same as ruling that it's smart or sensible.

The rational-basis test is easily misunderstood. It does not ask whether a law is rational in the sense of being wise or compelling. It simply asks whether some non-arbitrary reason can be offered to justify it, which is a pretty easy hurdle to clear. And the Court suggests an interesting one on the Legislature's behalf:

[T]he Legislature could rationally decide that, for the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability, in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships. Heterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not. Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the Legislature could find that this will continue to be true. The Legislature could also find that such relationships are all too often casual or temporary. It could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement--in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits--to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other.

Generally speaking, heterosexuals but not homosexuals say "Whoops, we're pregnant." Essentially, the Court is saying that that fact is a potential justification for restricting marriage to heterosexual couples.

As I said, a justification doesn't have to be a good one to pass the rational-basis test. Nonetheless, as arguments against same-sex marriage go, this one is better than most. Indeed, if I were back on my high school debate team and forced to argue the "con" side in a same-sex marriage debate, I'm not sure I could do much better.

Which is sad, because the argument is pretty poor. It falsely presupposes that the primary function of marriage is to protect children accidentally produced by heterosexual sex. What an impoverished view of that great institution.

Moreover, the argument ignores the difference between having a reason to endorse heterosexual marriage and having a reason to prohibit gay marriage. One can support marriage for heterosexuals (I do) without thinking that it should be restricted to them. One might just as well argue that because there's a reason for giving a bus discount to the elderly, there must be a reason for denying one to minors, or vice-versa.

But it's important to keep in mind that the Court is not endorsing the argument quoted above. Notice its frequent use of the subjunctive ("the legislature could decide," "the legislature could find"). Not "did decide." Not "should decide." Essentially, the Court is throwing this hot potato back in the legislature's court.

And therein lies the silver lining. In an election year, when right-wingers eagerly point to "activist judges" trying to "redefine marriage" and then use that threat to rally voters to pass reactionary amendments, the New York Court has declined to become their next poster child. Whether this was the correct decision legally is a subject for another day. But politically, it makes a point: when judges in "liberal New York" refuse to mandate same-sex marriage, right-wingers in places like Virginia and South Dakota are deprived of a key scare tactic.

Meanwhile, New Yorkers who advocate marriage equality can urge their legislature to do the job the court has ceded to it. Note that when the California legislature tried to enact marriage equality, the governor vetoed it, stating that it was a matter for the courts. Here the governor can't do that (at least not with a straight face). While George Pataki, New York's outgoing Republican governor, has promised to veto any such legislation, Democratic candidate Eliot Spitzer supports marriage equality.

All of which is to say: in the spirit of summer, when the Court hands you lemons, make some lemonade.

On June 13, someone set fire to the gay/lesbian special collection at the John Merlo branch of the Chicago Public Library, destroying about 75-80 of the 800 books in the collection before the fire was extinguished.

Library administration spokeswoman Maggie Killackey downplayed the fire and a police spokeswoman said it was not a hate crime because there were no prior threats or anti-gay graffiti, as if that were sufficient to rule out anti-gay intent.

Most gays, however, noticing the timing just before the Gay Pride Parade and the Gay Games in Chicago, viewed the fire as an attempt to attack gays and mounted a sustained effort to draw media attention to the fire. Gratifyingly, television stations visited the library, interviewed gay spokesmen and covered a June 20 protest denouncing the police.

On June 21, police announced the arrest of a 21 year old pregnant, homeless woman with a long arrest record who said she wanted to protest the library's refusal to let her to sleep in the library. She said she did not know what books she burned but chose books in a secluded part of the library.

To gays familiar with Chicago police practices, the quick arrest of a suspect after major negative publicity, a homeless person at that, smacked of "round up the usual suspects." But the woman reportedly bragged to friends about setting the fire.

Police said, "What she did in her mind was little. She realized it got a lot bigger than she intended." If that means she bragged about the fire after noticing the media coverage or the man who reported her realized from the publicity that the fire was a major issue, or the woman meant that police intensified their efforts after all the publicity (as they did), all those suggest that the media attention and political pressure produced an arrest. Activism worked.

The fire raises concerns about the safety of the library and the gay collection. There seems to be no surveillance camera in the library entryway, so police could not determine who had come and gone near the time of the fire. Library security guards are there only part time. Patrons in the library at the time said smoke detectors did not go off. And the gay books might wisely be moved to a less secluded location.

But the pressing issue now is the Chicago Public Library's (CPL) offensive and dismissive policy of not accepting donated books. That policy must be revised.

With amazing speed to stanch bad publicity, within two weeks the CPL reordered books that could still be identified. But gay community members insisted that the collection not only be reconstituted but be expanded to better meet local needs and interests as well as send a warning to homophobes that attacks on gays will be countered with a greater positive response.

Yet when people brought books to branch libraries, they were told that the CPL does not accept donated books and their offers were rejected. (Do not blame branch libraries--they do not control policy.) This policy has created growing anger as people learn about it. Although people are still sympathetic with the Merlo branch which supports the unique gay collection people are increasingly angry at the elitist downtown administration.

At the June 20 demonstration, library spokeswoman Killackey complained to me with evident irritation, "People are bringing books to libraries all over Chicago." Stunned, I could only think to reply, "It's a shame libraries are getting more books."

Killackey's main rationale for the policy is that processing books "is not an efficient use of staff time." Yet it takes about 10 seconds for a subject area specialist to determine whether a book would be a useful addition and five minutes or less to process it if the Chicago system already has a copy anywhere else in the system. Clearly a bargain. If no Chicago library currently owns the book, it takes about a half hour to process it. But if the library can get a free $50-$60 university press book (a typical price for specialized books) for a half hour of processing time, that too seems like a bargain.

And the no-donations policy seems to be unique among libraries in the U.S. New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia told me they all accept and consider books donations. They leave it up to specialist librarians whether to add donated books to their collection based on the condition of the book, its value to the collection, and their current need. Reasonable enough.

Gays and lesbians in other cities who wish to help can donate funds for the Merlo gay book fund at the website of the Chicago Public library Foundation (www.chicagopubliclibraryfoundation.org). They would also be wise to learn from Chicago's sour experience. Consider donating library-appropriate gay and lesbian books in good condition to your local library. Talk with the librarian first to make sure they can be added to the collection, but please help expand the range of materials available for gays, students and other people who wish to learn about gay history and gay issues or wish to explore the gay/lesbian literary heritage.

For Chicagoans, the following are some possible responses: Write to Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey to urge revision of the policy. Write to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley since Dempsey is a close ally. Donate gay books to any branch library you like (they could all use more) and let them cope with the problem. Call or write 44th Ward Alderman Tom Tunney (the Merlo branch is in his ward) and ask his help. Consider an informational picket outside Harold Washington Library downtown: The CPL honchos richly deserve the negative publicity they would get.