IGF CultureWatch

Like that proverbial bad penny, the administration-backed Marriage Protection Amendment to exclude gay and lesbian couples from the protections of marriage is back with us.

I write prior to the scheduled debate during the week of June 5th, but there seems general agreement that the vote for cloture will receive not more than 52 or 53 votes, well short of the 60 votes required and far short of the 67 votes required for passage of the amendment itself.

There is also general agreement that GOP leaders who are pushing the amendment know their effort will fail and are going through this charade prior to the 2006 congressional elections to placate restive social conservatives who believe the Administration is not paying enough attention to their concerns-as if any administration could.

Not that those voters would vote for a Democrat, but they might stay at home and not vote, giving Democrats a comparative advantage. So the amendment functions as an Incumbent Protection Amendment for conservative Republicans.

I for one would like to see the amendment come to a vote since its defeat would be a convincing political victory for gays. Equally, it would be good to get senators on record about the amendment itself instead of the surrogate issue of cloture so we know who our friends are and who is just mouthing support when convenient.

But Democrats are dead set against allowing a vote on the amendment. They want the issue to go away. Above all, they want to avoid having to vote against constitutionally barring gays from marriage because that would expose vulnerable Democrats to Republican charges of coddling homosexuals. So the vote against cloture is a Democratic Incumbent Protection ploy.

For the same reason, only one senate Democrat, Sen. Ted Kennedy, spoke in favor of gay marriage in 2004. Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold is reportedly willing to support gay marriage this time around, and that is excellent news, but the rest of the Democrats are trotting out any reason they can think of to oppose the amendment other than the notion that gays should actually be able to marry.

They say: We do not want to alter a sacred national document; marriage should be left to the states; Congress has more pressing issues to worry about; this is a harmfully divisive issue; or this is just a GOP sop to the religious right-anything but supporting gay marriage itself. That's sad.

But the shameful thing is that our supposed gay advocacy group Human Rights Campaign does no better. HRC president Joe Salmonese said, "The president should stop threatening to put discrimination in our Constitution and use valuable airtime as an opportunity to lay out an agenda to address the challenges facing our country. President Bush is pandering to far-right extremists and making divisive, discriminatory politics his priority."

True enough, but do you see anything actually pro-gay in this? Instead of using this unprecedented media opportunity to advance good arguments for gay marriage to skeptical but open-minded Americans, instead of explaining why gay marriage is-as writer Jonathan Rauch argues-"good for gays, good for straights, and good for America," Solmonese merely parrots Democratic excuses.

Nothing could make clearer that the HRC is more interested in providing cover for Democrats than in promoting gay equality. Salmonese cannot even bring himself to call the amendment a Marriage Exclusion Amendment or a Marriage Prohibition Amendment, although either might be a useful rhetorical counter thrust.

Are we going to go through this every two years? It seems so, at least for a while. Conservative Republicans say that even if the amendment fails to pass this time, efforts to promote it now can build momentum for eventual passage. But they are surely whistling past the graveyard of soon-to-be-defunct political initiatives.

Polls over the last two decades show a continuing rise in tolerance for and acceptance of gays. Polls also show a slow decline in support for a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage. If present trends continue, Americans will eventually come to see gay marriage as acceptable. So If Republicans cannot pass the amendment now, their chances in the future seem increasingly bleak.

The American people have come far in the last half-century-from criminalized homosexual activity in every state to supporting openly gay people in the military and seriously arguing about gay marriage. Our job is to make sure that progress continues by explaining the case for marriage whenever we have the opportunity to parents, relatives, friends, and when possible in the public square, steadily, calmly and without rancor.

Thirteen years ago as the gays in the military fiasco that led to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was roiling the country then-President Bill Clinton urged gays and lesbians to "Tell your stories" in an effort to sway popular sentiment in their direction.

The advice came far too late to be of any practical use on the military issue, but it was important advice for the long term and we fail to act on it at our peril.

Each year as the Gay Pride parade comes around, gays take to the streets in our big cities carrying signs and chanting slogans about "Gay Pride," "Gay and Proud," etc. I suppose those are good polemical slogans to direct to closeted gays and lesbians to let them know that it is possible to be a proud, self-confident gay person. There are still a lot of gays in the closet.

But I suspect the notion of "gay and proud" has about zero effect on most heterosexuals, a substantial portion of whom are either reflexively antagonistic to gays or undecided about them. There is no logical connection between the fact that a person is proud and the idea that he or she deserves respect or equal freedom. No husband surfing TV channels and happening upon a film clip of a Gay Pride parade is going to turn to his wife and say, "Oh look, Martha, gays are proud now. We should let them have equal rights."

"National Coming Out Day" represented a different approach: A specific occasion on which gays might come out to friends, relatives, whoever. No doubt that is useful. It lets people know that they know gay people and opinion surveys do shows that knowing two or more gay people does correlate with a more positive attitude toward gays.

But I suspect this is true primarily if the respondent already knows, likes and respects the person coming out. If the person coming out is unlikeable or viewed with distaste, coming out might have little impact. It might even increase anti-gay feelings. We have all run into gays and lesbians we want nothing to do with and hope they have the decency to stay in the closet.

Then too, it is not actually clear that coming out changes other people's attitudes about gays. The surveys show a correlation, not causality. It seems equally possible, and perhaps more likely, that gays choose to come out to people whom they think will be receptive--who have already indicated in some way that they are generally open and tolerant.

So we are left with telling our stories. By "tell your stories," Clinton no doubt meant--and it is not his advice alone--explain to people how we gradually realized our homosexuality, the discomforts and hesitations we felt, the pain we felt from people's antagonism, our struggles for self-acceptance, how we conduct our lives now, and so forth.

The point of telling our stories is that it is the most effective possible counter to the idea--and it is not found solely on the religious right--that being gay is some sort of choice or willful indulgence. Logically it makes no sense to say that anyone chooses his sexual and emotional feelings; rather he discovers them, sometimes he is gripped by them, often to his own surprise. But if people thought logically about homosexuality, gays would have achieved equality long ago.

By telling our stories we can help people develop the kind of emotional connection that can lead to a degree of understanding about what we experienced. And by showing the fundamental humanness of our experience, we can reduce some of the mysterious otherness of homosexuality.

But it is not easy for most of us who have been out of the closet for a while to think back to an earlier period when we may have felt uncomfortable about ourselves, tried to suppress our feelings, worried about their implications for our future, and lied to others about our desires. It is often a painful period most of us would rather not recall. It is more comfortable to wear a button that says "Gay and Proud"--as if it were just that easy.

I suspect that recounting that period is particularly difficult for men. In our culture women are permitted, even encouraged, to talk about their feelings and emotions. Men are not. For men, to recount unhappiness, uncertainty and anxiety suggests weakness--a lack of self-confidence and self-control, in short a failure of male competence.

But it is a task that needs to be undertaken nonetheless, selectively, at the right time and under the right conditions. Fortunately, most people are happy to hear a salvation story, a triumph over adversity, a victory for integrity and a happy outcome. Told in that way, our stories can reflect well on us and help others relate to our struggles at the same time.

California state senator Sheila Kuehl introduced a bill to mandate that social studies courses in the state's schools should include the role and contribution to history and contemporary society of gays and lesbians along with several other groups already mandatorily included--women, blacks, Latinos, etc.

This seems like a fine idea and we can hope that similar bills are introduced in other state legislatures. I cannot imagine why the bill specifies only the social sciences and does not include literature and the arts, but you have to start somewhere.

Predictably enough, the homophobes are up in arms over the possibility that their innocent children--who have apparently never heard of Elton John, Rosie O'Donnell or Melissa Etheridge and have never, ever seen "South Park"--might actually learn that gays and lesbians exist and might even have contributed something to society.

The San Jose Mercury News quoted Karen England, executive director of the far right Capitol Resource Institute, as warning, "This is more than just accepting it, it's forcing our kids to embrace it, almost celebrate it." She says her institute prefers that parents teach their children about sexual orientation.

There are so many things wrong with her comment it is hard to know where to begin. First of all, most parents will probably not teach their children anything about "sexual orientation," by which England seems to mean people with orientations other than her own. Most parents don't have much information about gays in history because they themselves never learned about it in school either.

Second, teaching the facts about something does not mean "embracing" or "celebrating" them. I managed to learn a bit about heterosexuals in history without celebrating or embracing it. I learned about the solar system, osmosis, Christianity, and the Soviet Union without celebrating them. They are simply facts that have an impact on our world. The whole point of education is to learn such facts in order to make the world more fully comprehensible, no matter what we think about those facts.

England went on to say that she doesn't really care about people's sexual orientation because a person's contribution to history doesn't hinge on sexual orientation.

"I don't care if, or who, whatever historical figure they want to say is gay," she said. "If we're discussing history, who someone had sex with is inappropriate. I don't think most Californians want history and social sciences taught through the lens of who in history slept with whom."

England honey, we're not talking about sex acts. We're talking about people. But this is so typical. Every time we talk about gays and lesbians, the far right tries to reduce our lives to our sex lives--and then has the nerve to deny that sexuality has any impact on the rest of our lives. Of course it does.

Surely England does not mean to suggest that a heterosexual's sexual orientation has no impact on his or her life. Two examples. Example 1: If Engand's Henry VIII had not been heterosexual, he would not have kept marrying and disposing of his wives and finally establishing the Anglican church to justify his actions. Example 2: No one can doubt that publicity about President Bill Clinton's heterosexual activity certainly created political problems for him during his second term.

There are analogous examples for gay people, although it is easier to find examples in literature and the arts than in political history since research on gays is still an underdeveloped field.

If England's Edward II had not been gay, he might not have been deposed and murdered since his homosexuality so offended English nobles. Had Michelangelo not been gay, he surely would never have painted those voluptuous male nudes in the Sistine Chapel. Had Walt Whitman not been gay he would not have written so passionately about "adhesiveness" and "the love of comrades." Had Californian Harry Hay not been gay, he would not have founded the Mattachine Society. That gay composers Samuel Barber and Gian-Carlo Menotti were partners significantly influenced the subjects they wrote about and the musical styles they used. Etcetera, etcetera.

But someone might say we really should not have laws specifically mandating the teaching about the sexual orientation of important people. Instead, history and the arts should just be taught fully and honestly. Of course. But the problem is that it has not been and is not being taught fully and honesty and it won't be until legislation is passed to make that happen.

Teachers are not going to teach who is and is not gay if they don't know which people are gay. And where would they have learned that? Textbook manufacturers will not include the information unless they are legally mandated to do so. Teachers will not teach it unless it is in the textbook lest they get into trouble with conservative parents and school boards since even a small minority of parents can make enough noise to intimidate school administrators. And some teachers with attitudes like Karen England's will not teach it even if it is in the textbook unless the law says they must.

Each Memorial Day weekend, Chicago's gay community welcomes thousands of leathermen and women from around the world for the International Mr. Leather contest and its related activities-bar events, leather exhibits, parties, and dissolute behavior at the host hotel. The visitors amble around downtown sightseeing and entertaining the natives, enliven our gay neighborhoods, and fill our bars with good-looking gay men on the prowl.

Although Sunday's IML contest is the main excuse for this temporary mass migration to Chicago, the weekend functions mainly as a "gathering of the tribe"-a chance to visit old friends from around the country, live in leather for a long weekend and have a quick vacation in a major entertainment destination.

Much of Chicago's gay community gets into the spirit of IML: Bars that are not normally leather bars have special events, some of the stores along North Halsted Street emphasize any leather-related merchandise they sell, and one Halsted Street art gallery is even holding a "Leather and Metal Night" featuring metal jewelry on bare-chested models.

No doubt the most popular feature of IML is the Leather Market, which serves as the social and commercial center of the weekend. The Market hosts more than 100 leather-related businesses competing with one another to tempt leathermen with their latest products-clothing, accessories, dungeon equipment, toys, films, etc. As a friend remarked, the Leather Market is "where leathermen engage in capitalist acts with consenting adults."

Until I started interviewing people for articles in the IML Program Guide, I had not fully appreciated how competitive the leather business is. I asked several vendors what they were offering that was new this year and was surprised at how many had new products, new styles they planned to feature.

Most vendors were delighted to talk about their products and the style trends they observed, but a couple, acutely aware of the competition, were wary of divulging much information in advance. "You're not going to publish this before IML are you?" one asked. "Just a couple of weeks," I promised him, "and think of the free publicity."

If some bright young economics student wanted to do a dissertation on gay entrepreneurship-and there still is no serious research on the subject-he or she would do well to study leather businesses as a microcosm of gay business. Any study would explore some of the following:

Each of the businesses tries to think of new products, styles, materials, colors that might catch the eye of leatherfolk. New styles? There are now at least 30 variations on leather harnesses, with multiple straps, chains, buckles, snaps and O-rings. New products? My favorite example is one company's easy-access "Grope Me Overalls." New materials? More clothing is made of various kinds of rubber and now something called "Corbura" (ask the vendor).

And color is everywhere this year. It used to be that you chose leather the way you chose a model T Ford: You could have any color you wanted so long as it was black. But now there are stripes and accents of red, green, blue, yellow, maroon. Old-time leathermen would be aghast. Or envious.

Once one company is seen as having a success with any of these, others quickly produce their own slightly different version. So each business feels a constant pressure to come up with something new each year. And the consumer benefits by having more choices, more styles to choose among and, usually, different prices.

Where do new ideas come from? Almost anywhere. There is no general rule for creativity but recognizing a good idea when you see it is the key to successful entrepreneurship. A business owner may suddenly think, Why has no one ever tried this? Or he may get an idea from some European style (motocross racing) or non-Western culture (a leather kimono). Or he may recall something from history (a leather three-cornered pirate hat). Maybe a patron asks for something to be customized for him, his friends like it, and the vendor decides to try it as a product line. Or he will adapt an idea from the mainstream fashion industry.

How do new leather businesses get started in the first place? Lots of different ways, it seems, which is why we need a serious study. But many are the result of "budding": Someone works for a leather business for a while then leaves to start his own business. Or someone from a parallel business such as mainstream fashion or design decides to apply his knowledge and skills to leather products. Or the owner of a totally unrelated business decides to start a sideline of leather products "just for fun" and it takes off.

Developing better information about these things could increase our understanding of niche markets in the wider economic system.

The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, a boutique anti-gay marriage operation headed by conservative polemicist Maggie Gallagher, recently released a report which purported to estimate the number of gays and lesbians who would marry if same-sex marriage were legal.

To do this, the authors looked at the number of same-sex couples who had married where same-sex marriage was legal-specifically the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and the state of Massachusetts. They then calculated the percentage of gays that number represented depending on estimates of the size of the gay population from 1.1 to 5 percent.

They concluded that 1.9 to 4.7 percent of Belgium's gay population had married, 5.9 to 16.7 percent of Massachusetts' gay population and 2.6 to 6.3 percent of Dutch gays had married. Canadian data vary widely from province to province because marriage was legalized at different times.

But as usual with any right-wing "study" about homosexuals, there are problems with both the data and the analyses.

First of all, any report that seriously offers the possibility that only 1 or 2 percent of the population is gay or lesbian is intellectually frivolous.

Second, gay marriage has been legal for only a short time--barely five years in the Netherlands, barely three in Belgium, exactly two years in Massachusetts, and one to thre years in different parts of Canada. That is hardly enough time to give a sense of how many gays would marry once they find the man or woman they want to formally bind their lives with.

Some gays may not have even looked very hard for such a person because the possibility of legally solidifying a relationship was not available. With the availability of gay marriage the whole mental set about dating and developing a relationship changes but it takes time for that change to be absorbed and acted on.

Some couples who have been together for a long time may decide that they do not want to change things, that they are comfortable with how they have arranged their lives up to now and do not feel the need to "make as statement" as they would put it.

Better evidence of the desire for marriage among gays will be the behavior over the next 15-20 years of the generation of gays and lesbians just now coming into adulthood with the possibility of marriage available to them from the beginning.

Third, in both Europe and America, marriage for gays and lesbians offers much less than it does for heterosexuals. For instance, in the U.S. some of the main inducements of marriage are the vast array of federal legal and economic benefits--inheritable Social Security, veterans benefits, partner immigration rights, joint income tax filing, etc.

Those are not available for gay couples in Massachusetts, so pretending that gay and heterosexual marriage offer similar incentives is dishonest.

In European countries that allow gay marriage, most have not allowed gay couples to adopt children or have done so only recently. Yet the joint creation or adoption of children constitutes one of the strongest incentives for marriage. The raising of children as a joint project seems to solidify a relationship as nothing else does and increases the desirability of marriage. Yet that opportunity or incentive has been denied to European gays.

As evidence, there are data from Scandinavia suggesting that among heterosexuals a majority of first children are born to unmarried couples, but that many of those couples did eventually go on to marry after their children were born.

Fourth, although it seems almost too obvious to mention, one of the reasons for heterosexual marriage is the pressure from parents and relatives to "make it legal," or "tie the knot." Unmarried heterosexual couples hear a good deal of that urging. But how many parents or relatives of gays push them to marry their same-sex partner in the same way? Many religious and socially conservative parents and relatives can barely tolerate homosexuality, so they are hardly going to encourage their son or daughter to enter a same-sex marriage. Many gays would be marrying despite their families wishes, not because of them.

Fifth, most heterosexuals are openly heterosexual. But many gays and lesbians are not "out of the closet" in any general sense. Far fewer than half, perhaps barely a quarter are openly gay to all and sundry, so the majority of gays are not in a position to do anything as public as have a state certified marriage.

Finally, keep in mind that some gays are not allowed to marry at all. Gays and lesbians in the U.S. military are not allowed to marry. In most Protestant denominations gay and lesbian clergy may not marry and keep their jobs. Yet heterosexuals in those same positions marry in high numbers.

Are the gay marriage/heterosexual marriage comparisons valid? Of course not.

****

Author's note: This version refines language and corrects a few small errors in the print version.

Former neuroscientist Simon LeVay made a brief splash 15 years ago with research purporting to show that a part of gay men's brains he claimed was associated with sexual attraction in animals was slightly more like the brains of women than were the brains of ostensibly heterosexual men.

The study had a number of problems. The gay men all died of AIDS but the effect of the disease and antiviral drugs on the brain was left unexplored. The orientation of the supposedly non-gay men was actually unknown. The role of the studied brain segment in humans is uncertain. And some gay men's brain segments were more "male" than some of the heterosexual men's. The study has not been replicated and LeVay soon retired from neuroscience research.

Now LeVay is back with a long, meandering and confusing think piece once again arguing that there is something female about gay men. But then he seems to back off his claim as if aware that this outdated stereotype just won't sell any more. It is an odd performance.

Writing in the British magazine New Scientist, LeVay starts with the claim that gay men have difficulty falling in love and forming lasting relationships. Heterosexual partners, he says, are drawn to each other primarily because of their differences as male and female. But same-sex partners, "may sometimes be too similar to each other for their relationships to be stable."

They lack the complementarity that can solidify a relationship, he says, so "it may be difficult for a person to see their partner as sufficiently 'other' or 'exotic' for romantic passion to persist." In other words, gays do not fit LeVay's procrustean, heterosexual model of sexual bonding.

One successful gay relationship, LeVay says, "was portrayed by Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in the 1996 movie 'The Birdcage.' Although grossly stereotyped for humorous effect, it may have been more culturally authentic than the relationship between two similar, conventionally masculine men that was the focus of last year's Brokeback Mountain."

Well, hardly! In one sense LeVay is only stating the familiar point that differences can be attractive because they are mysterious. But he gets the rest all wrong. There are certainly differences between same-sex partners. As psychologist C. A. Tripp pointed out in "The Homosexual Matrix," the basis of erotic attraction is that each partner wishes to experience or take "symbolic possession" of some desirable quality present in the other partner.

But as Tripp makes clear, "Homosexuality in all its variations always means that same-sex attributes ... have taken on erotic significance." So it is the most simple-minded stereotype to think of partner differences as significantly related to the expression of gender polarity.

For one thing, as LeVay belatedly acknowledges in his final three paragraphs, there can be many differences between same-sex partners not related to gender polarity. The best known are age-differentiated relationships as in ancient Greece where--contrary to LeVay--it was the masculinity and prowess not the femininity of the younger partner that was valued.

Other familiar differences between partners can and do include things such as ethnicity, social level, race, body type, temperament, experiential background or personality type.

It is also important to realize that there is a variety of different ways of expressing or embodying masculinity that have nothing to do with femininity--although people who believe the stereotype usually try to represent them that way. Men who embody different modes of masculinity can readily be attracted to each other because none of us can embody them all fully--an emphasis on some involves a de-emphasis of others.

Tripp points out that the differences between partners are often small, almost invisible to outsiders, but exist nevertheless. LeVay, for instance misses the differences between the two "conventionally masculine" men in "Brokeback Mountain" because his procrustean gender dichotomy model of sexual attraction prevents him from seeing them.

As Virginia blogger Tim Hulsey writes, "The film's central point in depicting the relationship of Jack and Ennis is that their various masculine traits are different and complementary. To oversimplify, Jack Twist has the social skills, self-assertiveness and personal ambition that Ennis Del Mar lacks. Ennis has the internal moral fiber, survival instinct, and sense of personal responsibility to others that Jack lacks. Jack knows how to act like a man; Ennis knows how to be a man. Each needs the other to complete his masculinity."

Finally, even men who seem similarly masculine can be attracted to each other because, however masculine each partner may be, since he has eroticized same-sex attributes--the definition of being gay--each may be seeking yet more of an attribute he already has in abundance. We have all seen well-built men and bodybuilders attracted to each other as partners.

LeVay should read more about the psychology of sexual atraction before he writes about it again.

Over the past decade most of us have argued for gay marriage without bothering to weigh the competing merits of the concept of "civil unions." For the most part, our arguments have focused on why, as the subtitle of Jonathan Rauch's definitive book Gay Marriage put it, it is "Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America." And we should keep making those arguments.

But it is crystal clear that in all but a handful of coastal states gay marriage is not going to happen in the near future. The idea is too new for many people to be comfortable with. Gay advocates have too few resources to mount an effective campaign to counter religious right scare tactics. Legislators with an eye cocked toward the next election are not interested. Most conservatives are adamantly hostile and view it as a major issue. And most liberals, even if they favor gay marriage, are only quietly supportive and, unlike conservatives, do not view it as a major issue.

Only an obtuse person fails to learn from experience. So it is time to adjust our strategy and focus our efforts on trying to obtain the decidedly less scary civil unions. Less scary? Apparently so. With no public outcry the Connecticut legislature approved gay civil unions substantially equal to marriage. And President Bush, even while playing to the religious right, said during the 2004 campaign that if states wanted to establish civil unions that was fine.

There are at least three interesting arguments against civil unions, however:

1. By providing gays with the substance of marriage but not the name, states would be declaring gays and lesbians second-class citizens, as if their relationships are not worthy of the name "marriage." In short, civil unions relegate gays to "the back of the bus."

But that expression itself shows where the comparison with African-Americans breaks down. Currently gays have nothing. Are civil unions better than nothing? Emphatically, yes. During state segregation black southerners were at least able to get on the bus and ride to their destination. But not gays. Currently the bus doesn't even stop for gay couples-it just drives right on by. Our task is to get on the bus. Then we can argue about seating arrangements.

2. Civil unions do not provide the 1,100-plus federal benefits and entitlements that go with marriage, from social security survivor benefits, automatic inheritance, right of a married partner to immigrate to the U.S., and so forth. But those deprivations are not unique to civil unions. Legally married gay couples in Massachusetts cannot obtain those benefits, either. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act limited federal benefits to opposite sex couples.

Still, the argument goes, at least being married would give gay couples legal standing to sue in federal court to have the Defense of Marriage Act declared unconstitutional. So it would. And that right exists for married couples in Massachusetts right now. But would you really want that case to work its way up the federal court system and be decided by the Supreme Court, given its current membership? And if, contrary to all reasonable expectations, the Supreme Court did strike it down, consider the massive impetus that would give to the Marriage Protection Amendment being promoted by religious right groups.

3. Civil unions in other states, unlike those in Connecticut and Vermont, would probably include a smaller number of benefits and entitlements than marriage, making them far from equal. But however hard this is to swallow, here again the point is to get a process started. Even if lessor variations on civil unions offer minimal benefits (e.g., hospital visitation), it is almost inevitable that as legislators and the public become comfortable with gay couples in formalized relationships, they will feel more comfortable adding additional benefits over time.

That model has worked well in California where gay couples have obtained more and more benefits with each legislative session. It has also worked in several European countries that have gradually added benefits, in some cases resulting in marriage itself. Most U.S. surveys show majority support for providing some benefits for gay couples. So let us work on obtaining those and then go on to others as the public comfort grows. If you cannot get all the justice you want, take what justice you can get and then work for more.

Once you are in a civil union, you can refer to yourself as "married" if you like. A friend in Vermont who is in a civil union says he and his partner refer to themselves as married. So does everyone else. A friend in Norway reports the same thing: "Oh, you two are married." It seems clear that once people are comfortable with thinking and speaking of same-sex couples as "married," their willingness to accept gay marriage itself is sure to follow.

First published in the Chicago Free Press on February 22, 2006.

In a recent column I wrote that members of the religious right want gays to be invisible if their sexual behavior cannot be entirely suppressed. That prompted a friendly correspondent to write the following:

Many conservatives also have these two contradictory beliefs:

1. Homosexuality leads to misery and unhappiness, and homosexual sex is totally repulsive. (But)
   
   
2. Nonetheless, it's so appealing that if people find out about it, many will want to try it. ... (O)nce they get "hooked" they can't or won't stop.

This is absolutely on target. Two decades ago the late polymath scholar Joseph Wallfield, who wrote under the name Warren Johansson, formulated what he called "The Sodomy Delusion," published in an obscure monograph called Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality by historian Wayne R. Dynes (who also edited the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality).

Johansson characterized the Sodomy Delusion as a set of paranoid beliefs inculcated by the Christian Church in the Middle Ages. It includes the following components:

• Homosexual acts, particularly by men, undermine people's moral character and assure their eternal damnation.
  
  
• Communities that tolerate homosexual acts are inevitably visited with catastrophes such as earthquakes, droughts, plagues, floods, and infestations.
  
  
• So society should punish people who engage in homosexuality as severely as possible and make every effort to blot out any awareness or record that anyone ever engaged in homosexuality. (The Catholic Church typically destroyed church trial records of people accused of sodomy.)

Most of these beliefs can still be found among many fundamentalist Christians. Reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony called for the execution of people who engage in homosexual acts. Anita Bryant, Pat Robertson and others blamed droughts and other disasters on the tolerance of homosexuality. Even now many fundamentalists are eagerly awaiting the inevitable earthquake to damage San Francisco, so they can say "I told you so."

Johansson then set out a series of contradictory beliefs held by people in the grip of the Sodomy Delusion. We could call them "Johansson's Antinomies." They include the following:

• Everyone is by nature heterosexual BUT everyone is susceptible of the demonic temptation to commit sodomy, and potentially guilty of the crime.
  
  
• Everyone regards the practice with loathing and disgust BUT whoever has experienced it retains a lifelong craving for it.
  
  
• Everyone hates and condemns the crime of sodomy BUT the practice is ubiquitously threatening and infinitely contagious.
  
  
• Sodomy is a crime committed by the merest handful of depraved individuals BUT if not checked by the harshest penalties it would lead to the suicide of the human race.

We have all heard these contradictory claims made at various times by anti-gay polemicists from the average Catholic bishop to the average fundamentalist Protestant minister. Even today some polemicists view it as the conclusive anti-gay argument to ask rhetorically "But what if everyone became homosexual?"

To Johansson's list we might add some more recent refinements. For instance:

• The current version of Johansson's first antinomy is that everyone is by nature heterosexual BUT people-especially young people-can be easily lured to try homosexuality if they see films or plays or television programs that include homosexuals or see people who they know are homosexual or even learn that homosexuals exist.
  
  
• The current version of the fourth antinomy is the religious right claim that homosexuals are only a tiny fraction of the population-just 1 or 2 percent, BUT homosexuality is growing like wildfire.

Of course, anti-gay polemicists have been saying this for many years so we may wonder how homosexuality could have been growing like wildfire for years yet still be only 1 or 2 percent of the population.) Then, too:

• Homosexuality is viewed as a form of moral depravity that undermines a person's whole moral character BUT people keep being shocked to learn that someone believed to be of unimpeachable moral character such as a conservative religious leader is revealed to be "involved in" homosexuality.

Notice that when they are found out, such men usually blame alcohol or "stress" although alcohol or stress never seem to make homosexuals become "involved in" heterosexuality.

A special Catholic antinomy holds that the celibacy of the priesthood is a special calling and a gift of the Holy Spirit BUT men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" are expected to be celibate throughout their entire lives despite the manifest absence of such a special calling and/or gift of the Holy Spirit.

Where facts and reasoning are insufficient to condemn homosexuality, total fabrication will serve. Elsewhere in Homolexis Prof. Dynes traces the diffusion of a medieval legend that on the night Jesus was to be born, all the sodomites in the world died because the Savior refused to be incarnated as a human unless the world were free of homosexuality.

That could lead us to a final antinomy:

• Jesus (supposedly) hated sodomy most of all the sins BUT (unaccountably) never thought to mention any disapproval of it at any time during his public ministry.

First published in the Chicago Free Press on February 15, 2006.

During the 2004 election campaign, the Bush administration hoped that its promotion of a Constitutional ban on gay marriage could help peel off 4 to 5 percent of the most theologically and socially conservative African Americans from the Democrats. But are African Americans as a whole more hostile to gay marriage than are whites?

Few if any recent polls on the issue offered a breakdown of data by black and white respondents. However, a recent report on black college freshmen provides some clues. The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, which annually surveys freshmen, issued a report based just on data from freshmen at 440 colleges and universities in fall 2004 who designate themselves "African American/Black."

The survey did seem to find evidence that black freshmen were somewhat more likely than white freshmen to oppose gay marriage:

• 47 percent of black freshmen thought that "same sex couples should have the right to legal marital status" (rounding to the nearest whole percent).

The separately issued comprehensive report on all freshmen, however, found that:

• 57 percent of all freshmen (90 percent of whom were white) thought gay couples should have "legal marital status"-a 10 point greater support.

On the related question of whether "It is important to have laws prohibiting homosexual relationships"-presumably interpreted as prohibitions on gay marriage:

• 36 percent of black freshmen agreed but only 30 percent of all freshmen agreed-a difference of 6 points.

So in the aggregate, black freshmen do seem more likely than whites to oppose gay marriage and to favor (although by a lesser amount) prohibitions on gay marriage. But when examined carefully, the data on black freshmen reveal some interesting subgroup differences.

It turns out that:

• Half (50 percent) of black freshmen at "predominantly white institutions" favor gay civil marriage.
  
  
• But only 42 percent of the black freshmen at "historically black colleges and universities" favor gay marriage, bringing down the average for black freshmen as a whole.

Similarly:

• Only 33 percent of black freshmen at mostly white institutions favor bans on gay marriage, a figure that is only 3 percentage points higher than the average for all freshmen.
  
  
• By contrast, 42 percent of the black freshmen at black colleges favor bans on gay marriage, a figure that is fully 12 points higher than the average for all freshmen.

It seems useful to try to determine reasons for these differences among black freshmen by college type. There are at least two obvious possibilities: location and religion.

First, the vast majority of black colleges are in the South, the most socially conservative section of the U.S. The main reason black colleges were founded in the first place was that state segregation laws in the Confederate south barred black students from attending white institutions. There are few black colleges in other parts of the country.

Second, freshmen at black colleges are more likely to state their religion as "Baptist"--for many the conservative, black National Baptist Convention-than are black freshmen at mostly white schools:

• Only 39 percent of black freshmen at mostly white schools call themselves Baptist while 53 percent of black freshmen at mostly black schools say they are Baptist-a 14 point difference.

The other obvious subgroup difference is between males and females-a difference that parallels white freshman opinion:

• 40 percent of black freshman males support "legal marital status" for gays, but a significantly larger 51 percent of the black freshman women support gay marriage.

On the question about bans on "homosexual relationships:

• 46 percent of the black males support such bans, but only 29 percent of the black women-a 17 point difference.

And on both questions, among black freshmen at mostly white colleges both men and women are more pro-gay than freshman men and women at mostly black colleges.

What all this means for gay advocacy efforts-where gay groups should target their efforts, who can most persuasively represent gay concerns, what kind of arguments will be most persuasive-is a matter for the most tactically adept rather than the most politically doctrinaire members of our movement to determine. But three things seem obvious:

1. They must speak to people in language and with arguments that they will listen to and can relate to. Repeating the same stock phrases about gay civil rights and gay equality, however valid, has limited effect.
   
   
2. They will need to realize that not all African Americans can be reached equally well by the same arguments any more than all white people can.
   
   
3. And they need even more to be aware that compared with a similar survey in 1971, black freshmen have become much less "liberal" or "far left" (down from 50 percent to 36 percent), much more "middle of the road" (up from 38 percent to 47 percent) and more conservative even (up from 12 percent to 17 percent).

First published in the Chicago Free Press on Feb 8, 2006.

It has long been obvious that religious and social conservatives have been conducting a crusade against "homosexuality." But since you cannot suppress homosexuality without suppressing gays and lesbians, that means a crusade against gays and lesbians as people.

For example: The President's past support for sodomy laws; Republican opposition to gays in the military; the administration's support for an unprecedented constitutional ban on same-sex marriage; longtime Republican opposition to counting the number of hate crimes against gays and lesbians; opposition to gay parental custody, adoption, and foster care; and uncritical indulgence of homophobic statements by GOP leaders from Dick Armey to Jesse Helms to Rick Santorum.

Notice how many of these involve big government-i.e., coercion-whether it a government proscription of sexual activity, the institutionalization of anti-gay prejudice in a government agency, or the extension of federal control over a matter traditionally left to the states.

Republicans, who once claimed to be the party of small government and personal liberty, have moved far from that position. Economic conservatives usually advocated minimal government intrusion. Social conservatives advocate the exact opposite.

But there is another, larger, aspect to these issues. While social conservatives probably realize that despite their efforts they cannot entirely stamp out homosexuality (that is to say, homosexuals), they can at least make every effort to render them-us-socially and culturally invisible. Hence they oppose same-sex marriage because it would give gay relationships visibility by being registered with the government. If sodomy laws cannot entirely prevent homosexual activity, at least they help to keep it underground and discourage gays and lesbians from being open about their sexuality. The "Don't ask, Don't tell" ban on open gays in the military is simply an extreme version of this same thing: Saying one is gay or lesbian is designated as "homosexual conduct."

In the same way, although past opposition to counting anti-gay hate crimes was no doubt prompted in part by a view that they should not be taken very seriously because, after all, gays just bring attacks on themselves. But even more it stemmed from a wish to avoid giving gays visibility by collecting and publishing statistics about crimes against them. After all, a gay man being assaulted by a homophobe counts as just another kind of "homosexual conduct."

The U.S. census bureau's disinclination to ask even as a voluntary question if people are gay or lesbian is another example of preserving gay invisibility. And of course, the CDC cannot report risk behavior for AIDS by gay and bisexual men, only by "men who have sex with men." If a man is having recurrent "sex with men" that's what gay or bisexual means, but the CDC cannot acknowledge that gays exist as persons, only that people are engaging in certain types of sexual behavior.

Once you start looking around, examples of the effort to suppress gay visibility leap out at you.

Once you start looking around, examples of the effort to suppress gay visibility leap out at you. "Ex-gay" groups fit in perfectly. Most of them no longer claim that they can significantly change a person's sexual desires. Their main goal is to dissuade people from thinking of themselves as "gay," "lesbian" or "homosexual." As therapy, this is preposterous, but it successfully reduces the number of people identifying themselves to others as homosexual.

Social conservative opposition to television programs with gay or lesbian characters, to performance of plays such as "Angels in America," to Gay/Straight Alliances in "public" (government) schools, to the inclusion of homosexuality in any aspect in sex education courses has exactly the same root: We don't want to see gays represented or made visible in any way.

And especially, they will say, they don't want their children to see gays represented anywhere, although they never quite say why. Sometimes they seem to imply that learning that homosexuals exist will somehow, as if by magic, produce homosexual desire in young people. But it is hard to believe that anyone really thinks that.

I suspect the real social conservative fear is one of two things. Either they fear that if their children, or anyone-even they themselves-learn about gays and lesbians, that will gradually incline them to feel greater tolerance for gays. And that could lead them to question the other "bible values" they have been brought up to believe.

The other possibility is that they fear that a knowledge of gays and lesbians that could lead to greater tolerance would make the lives of gays and lesbians less unpleasant. And that is what they do not want. Not sufficiently trusting their god to punish people they regard as sinners, they are eager to take on that task themselves.

Gay author Wayne Besen once wrote about a friendly conversation with a woman he met on an airplane in the course of which he mentioned that he was gay. The woman stiffened and announced that she did not want to hear that. "Do you want me to lie?" Besen asked. "Yes," said the woman.