IGF CultureWatch

I enjoy reading letters to the editor supporting equal treatment for gay people, especially those in small, regional, "heartland" newspapers. I find it encouraging that pro-gay voices are being raised in burgs where you wouldn't think the "movement" had penetrated. But that doesn't mean I always agree with the views expressed on what's in the "gay" interest. Take, for example, a letter that ran a few weeks ago in the Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune under the title "Vouchers prompt fear for gays."

The letter writer, Luann Conaty, prefaced her remarks by noting she is "the mother of a gay man and the stepmother of a lesbian." She notes that Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, has just signed a bill permitting tax dollars to be used to send students from failing public schools to the schools of their choice, including private and religious schools. Ms. Conaty worries about anti-gay discrimination that gay or lesbian students might face in religious schools, and remarks, "I could have been a prime candidate to send my son to a religious school under this system, not knowing that he was struggling with his sexual identity. I assure you he would have been at least brainwashed about the 'evils' of his sexual orientation and, at worst, humiliated, emotionally abused and perhaps physically attacked." After its publication, this letter was distributed via e-mail by a group called (take a breath) The Coalition for Safer Schools' Actual or Perceived GLBT Student Protection Project.

I marvel that Ms. Conaty and her activist allies express such concern about anti-gay harassment in private, religious schools at a time when attacks on gay students in the American public school system are rampant. A story on high school harassment last May in the Los Angeles Times noted that teachers and administrators ignored "pervasive anti-gay abuse" in the halls of a suburban high school in the Morgan Hill Unified School District, south of San Jose, where "the words 'faggot' and 'dyke' were uttered about as often as 'hello' and 'goodbye'." Slurs were hissed at one out lesbian student in class, and "scribbled on her locker and on pornographic death threats, including a picture of a bound and gagged women with a slit throat." I wonder if the GLBT anti-school-choice activists are glad that this student was kept trapped in the public school system.

Or consider the pervasive anti-gay abuse at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a killing rampage. The Denver Post reported that members of Columbine's now-notorious Trench Coat Mafia were "tormented" by jocks who called them "faggots" and bashed them into their lockers when they walked down the school halls. A story in the online magazine Salon noted, "it's clear that 'gay' is one of the worst epithets to use against a high school student in Littleton." Time magazine's post-Columbine story looked at patterns of violence, and found that anti-gay taunting was also a factor in provoking killing rampages in Pearl, Mississippi and West Paducah, Kentucky.

Of course, the issue isn't that some disturbed straight boys turn to murder in the wake of anti-gay taunting; the issue is the anti-gay harassment and physical abuse that kids who are gay (or perceived as gay) face in the public school system, and the persistent lack of concern shown by public school teachers and administrators.

Following Matthew Shepard's murder, a CBS poll found that nearly half of 11th graders said gay and lesbian students were abused verbally and otherwise at their schools. At the same time, a CNN story reported that public school officials used "community values" to defend their inaction. "You have to...not be so sensitive and so open that you are promoting something that certain portions of your parent population and students would be opposed to," said Paul Houston, a spokesman for the American Association of High School Administrators.

A few public high school students have won lawsuits charging that their schools failed to protect them from anti-gay attacks, but that hasn't stopped other school districts from imposing what they call "prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction" or forbidding gay and lesbian student groups from meeting. Maybe, just maybe, school vouchers could be part of the remedy instead of the threat that some activists fear.

A Pro-gay Case for School Choice

Advocates for school choice argue that under the status quo the government pays noncompetitive public schools a "head price" for each of their captive students. Alternatively, with school choice parents are free to send their children to the public school of their choosing or to receive a scholarship voucher to help pay for a private school. This "market competition" forces the public schools to compete for students, creating better, more responsive schools. And since the private school tuition support is always less than what the government pays the public schools per pupil, the system is more economical to boot.

Yes, school choice proposals includes parochial schools, but I know at least some Catholic school veterans who tell me that, unlike at many public schools, gay baiting and bashing simply would not have been tolerated at their alma mater, regardless of the Church's teachings about sexuality. Richard Sincere of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (GLIL), a libertarian gay group, says his all-male Catholic school was a far cry from the hate-and-fear-filled hallways of Columbine High. In fact, demonstrating respect for fellow students was ingrained and fostered by the faculty on a daily basis, with an affirmative attempt on the part of administrators to make sure different sorts of students mixed with each other, so jocks worked on the school play and musicians assisted the basketball coach.

It could be that one reason this example seems so far from the reality of most public schools is that the public system has become, like most government monopolies, insulated, corrupt and lazy, with little regard for serving its "customers" (the students and their parents). While students in public high schools report widespread harassment, with many going so far as to say in online discussion groups that they understand how Harris and Klebold felt, we're just not hearing that cry of pain from private school students.

But more than simply providing for safer schools, allowing for choice supports a real diversity of educational options for students -- including allowing them to attend public or private schools that have gay-supportive reputations or curriculums, or that allow students to organize gay-straight alliances. It could even mean that more public school districts would be willing to experiment with alternatives along the lines of New York City's Harvey Milk school, which takes openly gay, lesbian, and transgendered students who've dropped out -- or fled -- their local schools.

That's not a perfect solution, since some kids come from homophobic homes, or from homes where parents just don't care at all. But competition is the engine of innovation and improvement. In the long run, applying market competition to force government-funded and operated public schools to compete would provide an economic incentive to curb the worst aspects of high school hell faced by all students, gay and straight, trapped in schools that just don't give a damn.

The Politics of School Choice

So, why are some vocal lesbigay activists so opposed to school choice? The main opponents of choice reforms are the teachers' unions, and public employee unions are the bedrock of the Democratic Party. Moreover, school choice is seen as a "Republican" issue. The result: in the name of alliance politics, gays and lesbians are once again being asked to take the left side of an issue which has nothing to do with gay equality per se and everything to do with maintaining entrenched government bureaucracies.

It's ironic that so-called progressives want to keep economically disadvantaged kids imprisoned in rotting public schools. And it's unconscionable that some in the lesbigay movement, whose leaders insist we support a "broad social agenda" with a "multi-issue" focus, want us to add opposition to school choice to the mix.

Who Decides?

To sum up, the disagreement over school choice is one of basic principle -- whether parents should be able to choose how their money (taken by the government as school taxes) is used to fund their children's education, or whether the state should decide. The anti-choice side seems to be saying, as regards gay students, that once progressives take control of the state (or the school district) that policies will be implemented to teach tolerance and enforce anti-discrimination. I just don't buy it; too many of today's noncompetitive public schools can't even teach reading, writing and math, so why on earth should we expect they would be more successful with sensitivity training?

Furthermore, there will always be political resistance to attempts to mandate that public schools teach 'gay is ok' when some parents who must send their kids there believe (often based on their religious convictions) that being gay is, at the very least, not morally equivalent to being straight. That's the sort of social engineering that gives rise to an effective backlash, as happened in New York City over its proposed Rainbow ("Heather Has Two Mommies") Curriculum.

Yes, choice may give some tax money back to some parents who will choose to send their kids to conservative religious academies. That's what choice means -- parents decide, not Hillary Clinton. Still more pupils would be able to flee the worst public schools and attend far more tolerant private schools, or go to public schools that do a better job of ensuring that they don't get beat up in the hallways. When the bad schools and their union employees have to pay a financial price, there will be a real incentive to improve those institutions, or face going out of business.

Finally, you may hear that the pro-school-choice side wants to "destroy public education." Again, I don't believe that. It seems the only hope for our highly dysfunctional schools is not throwing even more money at them, but to engender competition and its universal byproducts -- efficiency and innovation. To be blunt, I am sorry that the teachers' unions are more interested in protecting their iron rice bowls than in seeing how necessary these reforms are.

By fostering a diversity of educational options, school choice could strike at the heart of the one-size-fits-all public system predicated on fears of offending some homophobes' "community values," and instead would allow both public and private schools to "market" a gay-inclusive alternative. At the very least, this would help besieged gay students to escape from the Columbine Highs of the world and seek out competitive institutions that foster human decency, rather than bigoted depravity.

In the end, wouldn't that be a better choice?

Last month [June 1999], Slate - Microsoft's Web-based magazine - featured a four-part debate between Urvashi Vaid, director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, and David Brooks, senior editor at the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. Vaid has for many years been a leading light of the lesbigay left, and is known for inveighing against gay and lesbian "mainstreaming." Brooks is a conservative Republican, but one who hasn't engaged in gay-baiting. Their exchange, although ostensibly about recent books on the lesbian and gay movement, illuminated the difficulty that the gay left and the straight right have in finding a common language to discuss gays and society. But aside from that, I'd argue that both sides managed to score points that non-dogmatic gays might benefit from keeping in mind.

To show what I mean, I'll do my best to briefly summarize and quote the views put forth by Vaid and Brooks on two primary subjects: sexual liberation and economic liberty. And I'll try to explain why I think the "progressive" Vaid is mostly right about the former, while the "conservative" Brooks has the better argument about the latter.

First, let's talk sex. Vaid argues there are "two competing visions of sex in America" over whether sexual pleasure is "inherently dangerous" or "inherently morally neutral (or even good)." She observes that "a redefinition of sexuality and its relationship to morality and spirituality is at the heart of the challenge that homosexuality poses -- and part of why it is so threatening." As if to prove Vaid's point, Brooks responds that "anybody -- straight or gay -- who has more than five sex partners in a year is probably doing something sleazy," and adds, "I think promiscuity is the key issue....People like me who believe that homosexuality can become a respectably part of the society we have inherited believe that it must uphold monogamy, without always living up to it, just as straight culture does."

To this, Vaid responds by asserting there isn't anything wrong with "responsible promiscuity" and that "ethical behavior in sex involves not doing harm to others or yourself, it involves behaving in a responsible manner. If my partner and I decide to open up our 11-year relationship and have other lovers, while continuing to live together, why should it render us any less decent than you? Private consensual adult sexual activity is the business of consenting adults."

Brooks shoots back, "Anyone who can come up with the phrase 'Responsible Promiscuity' should be living here in Washington occupying a senior post in the Clinton administration" (a pretty good retort). He adds, "I want to live in the same community as you," but "without shared norms -- about consensual adult sexual activity too -- community erodes.... Trust is gone and life is nasty, brutish, and short."

For my part, I think it's too simplistic for conservatives to charge that non-monogamy, in "open" relationships or otherwise, is too great a threat to society to be acquiesced to. Conservatives are going to have to accept a "live and let live" reality in order to co-exist with those, gay and straight, who have a radically different attitude from theirs on sexual pleasure. Accepting personally responsibility for ones actions IS important--a point that liberals too often fail to grasp--but responsiblity and monogamy are not synonymous.

But if my libertarian sympathies lead me to side with Vaid on sex, I found her totally disingenuous (and even dishonest) when the debate turned to economics. Vaid didn't raise the topic, but an offhand comment she made about the "pro-Nicaragua lesbian movement" leads Brooks to respond that, on Nicaragua, Vaid "took the side of a Communist kleptocracy that the people of Nicaragua booted out of office as soon as they got the chance (and elected a woman besides!)."

He explains that he was looking through the Web site of the Independent Gay Forum, which publishes writings by centrist, conservative, and libertarian gays and lesbians. At the site, he came upon an article about corporate America's efforts to reach out to the gay market, in which Vaid is quoted as saying that America has "taken off its ugly white hood to show its sexist, racist, anti-gay and capitalist face." He sums up by saying that "If gay and lesbian liberation means a New Left-style assault on mainstream American values and institutions, like the regulated market system we now enjoy, then I will be against the gay and lesbian liberation movement and so will many of the people who would otherwise be sympathetic to the cause."

A confession here. The article Brooks refers to is titled Corporate Liberation, and was written by none other than me (although Brooks doesn't name me).

Vaid responds testily that, although she did in fact make the statement attributed to her, it was lifted "completely out of context" because she wasn't referring to marketing per se, as Brooks seemed to suggest. She then accuses him of "McCarthyite red-baiting crap." Vaid asserts that although she is "proud to be a leftist," what she believes in is "socially responsible capitalism."

This, as I noted, is disingenuous, for Vaid has written in left-wing publications that she not only is a socialist, but a socialist on the radical left "syndicalist" fringe to boot. That's why her quote, lumping "capitalism" in with racism, sexism, and all the other social evils, was so revealing. Why doesn't she have the courage to defend her economic convictions when addressing a general audience?

rooks understands that a free economy is the basis for all other freedoms. Vaid believes that "society" should make economic decisions for its members (based, no doubt, on "consensus"), rather then letting individuals decide for themselves. On the other hand, Vaid believes that adults should be free to lead the sexual lives that give them pleasure, as long as their relationships are consensual and among adults. Brooks thinks that the "community" should enforce social norms and stigmatize those who aren't monogamous and relegate them beyond the pale.

Responsible folks might reasonably conclude that both sides of this debate uphold one form of freedom only to vilify another.

First published in late June 1999 in The Weekly News (Miami) and other gay newspapers.

Organizers of next April's Millennium March on Washington (MMOW), which aims to "promote equal rights for all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals," are celebrating their commitment to diversity, defined as "parity by gender and for people of color." According to the group's recent press release, "The movement has progressed so that the board of directors of this march are [sic] now made up of 60 percent people of color, African American, Native American, Latino/latina and Asian American, as well as 60 percent women."

This commitment to "parity," and even "parity plus," is now so common among lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgendered activist groups that it's barely alluded to, even though all non-white minorities together are considerably under half of the US population (which is still 73 percent non-Hispanic white). And while women are a bit more than 50 percent of the general population, surveys repeatedly suggest that gay males outnumber lesbians by close to 2 to 1. But I really don't want to get into the numbers game, because for those of us who believe personal merit, rather than identity group membership, should be the determining factor for selecting leadership, the whole issue of "proportional representation" based on race or gender is offensive.

I point this out not to be churlish, and at the risk of inviting the inevitable, and mindless, critique of "racist and sexist." But when a policy becomes as ingrained within our community as "parity" has become, it deserves to be given a second look. Consider, for example, that at the last March on Washington, in 1993, the smattering of gay white males allowed to be speakers at the all-day rally could be counted on one hand, literally. If anything less than representation reflecting actual demographics constitutes discrimination, then pale gay males were discriminated against by their own rights march! Aside from those deemed fit to speak, organizers had also mandated 50 percent minority quotas on state organizing committees.

The following year, for the Stonewall 25th anniversary march and rally in New York City, the event's executive committee required 50 percent gender parity and 25 percent representation by people of color. But since many of the regional delegations that filled the larger national steering committee failed to achieve their quotas, it was decided at a planning meeting (held that summer in Milwaukee) that women present could cast three votes apiece, and people of color, two. This meant giving more weight to the vote of a black lesbian than to that of a black man, and more weight to his vote than to that of a gay white male. (One delegate suggested that to improve gender and skin color "parity" at future planning meetings, some of those who were of the wrong gender and racial classification should stay home.)

The parity mantra isn't limited to national marches. A few years ago, a national planning meeting of representatives from chapters of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation operated under a convoluted quota requirement that went this way: Each chapter sent two delegates to the meeting, but unless one of the two delegates was a person of color and one was a woman, the chapter was penalized by getting only one vote instead of two. To avoid this, only when one delegate was a lesbian of color could the second be a gay white male (I said it was convoluted).

Over time, well-intended support for greater inclusiveness in the gay and lesbian movement has become twisted into something altogether different. Rather than fostering greater mutuality grounded in an appreciation of diversity, what has emerged is a politically correct tribalism that champions apportioning representation based on gender and race/ethnicity, creating superficial diversity that works against the equality vital for true community. At the heart of the parity paradox is the illiberal assumption that we can only be represented by someone of our own gender and skin color (with the caveat that the candidate be on the political left, or else she or he is likely to be dismissed as an "inauthentic" representative of his/her respective identity group).

"Diversity," in effect, has become a veil for positing the fundamental differentness of people based on their race or sex, rather than suggesting something altogether different (and desirable) -- the removal of barriers that separate. Just how insidious has this become? At a forum sponsored by the National Association of Gay and Lesbian Journalists that I attended in New York City, someone loudly protested that an African-American panelist wasn't dark-toned enough to provide adequate "diversity."

Another predictable outcome is tokenism, with some female and minority delegates selected solely on the basis of race and gender. This means that others, who truly are qualified, get tarred with the "token" stigma.

When good faith attempts to foster diversity on the basis of equality, such as affirmative outreach, are replaced by rigidly applied quotas to ensure parity, chasms are created that no amount of "diversity training" can overcome. And, despite all the self-righteous rhetoric, often the not-so-subtle subtext is that the participation of gay white guys is not desirable, and that the optimum "diversity" would be 100% "progressive" women of color. This message, in fact, may go a long way toward answering the question posed by a recent cover story in The Advocate magazine, which asked, "Where are the men" in today's gay rights movement?

Anyone who dares raise objections to "parity" can expect to receive a lecture about the primacy of diversity. I know this from personal experience, as I was once scolded as "someone who thinks white men are the main victims of discrimination" simply for raising the issue of gender and race quotas at an activist gathering. For that reason, many who sense that hostility toward gay white men, rather than desires for equality and community, is at play have learned not to express the opposition they feel toward these policies. Many others, often with badly needed technical expertise, steer clear of activist organizations altogether.

At one time, of course, characterizing individuals on the basis of their gender and race and treating all other characteristics as secondary would itself have been called sexist and racist, and rightly so. Apportioning votes on the basis of skin color or sex is not only profoundly anti-democratic and anti-liberal, but profoundly un-American.

Nobody should dispute that in the recent past women and people of color were formally excluded from power. But if policies based on remedying collective guilt (rather than fostering equal opportunity) rankle society at large, a growing number of gay white men also are expressing resentment toward the "oppression hierarchies" that classify them as privileged members of the patriarchy and belittle the bigotry they, too, face every day.

Unlike guarantees of equal opportunity for all comers, requiring an outcome of parity ultimately work against a united, diverse, and truly democratic (as in one person, one vote) lesbian and gay movement. It's time to reexamine received dogma and to once again join together to work for real equality by emphasizing our common humanity. In short, it's time to stop defining diversity as the application of parity requirements that not only disproportionately discriminate against gay white males, but serve to reduce all concerned to stand-ins for their race and gender.

First appeared in early May 1999 in Bay Windows (Boston) and other gay newspapers.

ANTI-GAY ACTIVISTS have had great success milking the claim that laws prohibiting discrimination against gay people serve to create "special rights." In fact, lately they've made the same charge about granting us the right to marry, to serve in the military, and to adopt children. They even go so far as to claim that repealing the so-called sodomy laws that turn gay lovers into criminals is tantamount to granting us those self-same "special rights."

It seems that, in the lexicon of the bigots, mere equality under the law for lesbians and gays becomes equivalent to granting us an unfair and undeserved privilege (i.e., who do those perverts think they are, expecting to be treated the same as you and me?). Or perhaps it's just that they know if they repeat the "special rights" charge ad nauseam, then like any big lie it will eventually come to be perceived as true.

In fairness, there is a distinction that ought to be recognized between ensuring the government's non-discrimination against gays and lesbians (that is, prohibiting the state from treating sexual orientation as a reason to diminish the legal rights of citizenship), and limiting discrimination in the private sector. Some impressive gay intellects, including writer Andrew Sullivan, believe that the gay/lesbian political movement has put far too much emphasis on passing laws that limit the discretion of private employers and landlords to choose whom they hire or rent to, and not enough on prohibiting discrimination by the state itself. Gay libertarians argue that allowing the government to intrude into private decisions for any reason only serves to diminish everyone's liberty and freedom to associate with whomever they choose, whereas discrimination by the state against a class of citizens is never acceptable, since the government represents all of us, and all of us are taxed to support it. That's a debate that probably should be given more attention, but it's not my focus here.

Instead, I think it's worth noting the specious logic of those conservatives who support the principle that it's okay to prohibit private-sector discrimination against some groups, including those defined by race, nationality, or religious belief, but that extending this protection on the basis of sexual orientation is to uniquely afford us, again, "special rights." The argument usually goes that the reason sexual orientation is different is because it's a "lifestyle choice." As the anti-gay Family Research Council put it in a recent policy statement, "Unlike race, homosexuality is not a manifest characteristic, but a behavior."

Hmmm. Leaving aside the body of evidence indicating, at the very least, some genetic predisposition for being gay, there's a clear logical flaw in this right-wing rhetoric. For while race and nationality are indeed a matter of birth, one's religion needn't be.

David Boaz, author of the book "Libertarianism: A Primer" and a contributor to the Independent Gay Forum, has highlighted the issue of consistency about different protected classes. "Conservatives say gays shouldn't be protected, but blacks should, because being gay is something you choose, unlike your race," he writes. "But their reasoning is doubly wrong in that case: Most of us believe you DON'T choose your sexual orientation; but you DO choose your religion, which category conservatives want to protect." In fact, religious rightists, especially those who are "born again," stress that their brand of faith is something freely chosen. And, of course, many choose to adopt a faith different from their upbringing, while others abandon faith entirely.

Some conservative African-Americans, most notably General Colin Powell, claim that gays don't deserve protections because you can hide your sexual orientation, but not your race. While that's true enough, you can also hide your religious beliefs, yet no "anti gay rights" conservative to date has been willing to abandon hypocrisy and say that civil rights protections also should not extend to religion.

In fact, a growing number of civil rights cases before the federal courts focus on claims of workplace discrimination against fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews. Many of these involve the plaintiffs' claim that requiring them to work on certain religious holidays amounts to discrimination, even though all employees are expected to work on those days (talk about demanding special rights!).

Leaving aside the die-hard "born agains," some who believe that religious belief should be a protected category, but that sexual orientation shouldn't, might argue that you don't really "choose" religious belief, it chooses you. That is, you either are drawn to the doctrines and ritual expressions of a particular sect, or you aren't. But then again, even if you believe that being gay is also a choice (as, in fact, some gay and lesbian radicals proclaim), then how much "choice" do we really have about what we choose? Like religious belief, it either strikes one as right on a deep, subjective level, or it doesn't.

The point of all this is to expose just how idiotic the argument that "gay rights" are somehow of a "special" nature, at least when juxtaposed to civil rights protections based on religion.

Looking back on it, I'm amazed that lesbian and gay activists have spent so much energy trying to convince people that sexual orientation is akin to race, when the religious belief analogy seems so much easier to justify. If the right wing is against "lifestyle choices" receiving anti-discrimination protection, then they should be forced to be consistent, and to surrender the "special rights" granted on the basis of religion.

After all, fair is fair.

First appeared in April 1999 in Miami's Weekly News and other publications.

SHOULD GAY MEN AND LESBIANS arm themselves for self-preservation? The question itself comes across as incendiary. Most gay folks, after all, abhor violence. Firearms are a part of the world of criminals, thugs, and bigoted rednecks. Guns are the weapons of patriarchy. We seek to live in peace and want to end, not instigate, human brutality.

But the world doesn't seem so simple anymore. Gay people constantly face the threat of violence. Every day we are attacked, beaten and, yes, even killed. The media seem only recently to have discovered this, with the high-powered coverage of the sensational murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, followed by the brutal killing of Billy Jack Gaither in Alabama. But scan any gay paper and it's hard to avoid stories of gay people badly beaten and bashed in what are termed "unprovoked attacks."

I've been thinking about the issue lately, after reading a column by Jonathan Rauch in the March 20, 1999 issue of National Journal, a Washington-based policy weekly. Rauch is also a contributor to the Independent Gay Forum -- a group of gay writers exploring new approaches to old problems. He begins his column, titled "And Don't Forget Your Gun," with an anecdote about Tom, who found himself "running, possibly for his life," one summer evening in San Jose, as he and a friend were walking through "a dicey neighborhood." They caught the eye of a group of urban youth, one of whom yelled, "Hey, you faggots!" The gang then rose "like a flock of gulls...shouting taunts and threats: When we're done with you, they'll find your bodies!"

As Rauch tells it, what happened next stopped the attackers in their tracks. "Tom suddenly stops, turns, and levels a semiautomatic handgun" that he pulled out of his backpack. The gang turns tail and runs.

The moral: protect thyself. Being in shape and knowing some jujitsu isn't enough. Buy a handgun and learn how to use it.

But, you say, putting more guns on the street is nothing but an invitation to urban mayhem. If everyone carried a concealed weapon, our cities would all become Dodge City. Arming the citizenry is no way to stop crime. Being pro-gun is a surrender to violence.

The pro-gun lobby points out that violent crimes, including street attacks, actually decrease in jurisdictions that have okayed carrying concealed weapons. But having just said this, I can hear the gasps among some readers. The fact that gay people could possibly be on the same side of an issue as the National Rifle Association -- the very personification of a "conservative" lobby -- is enough to provoke some activists to come "gunning" for me, if only metaphorically. We all know that Charlton Heston and his friends are the enemy, right?

Now I know this issue is complex. I suspect that I could never bring myself to own -- or especially use -- a gun. Apart from the danger of self-injury, I don't think I would ever risk taking someone else's life, even in an attack situation. I know many other gay men and women feel the same.

But I also believe we should at least think about guns more than we have. Gay people are a minority, and minorities make easy targets. Look at Kosovo. At the risk of reaching too far to make a point, it's worth noting that the Nazis strengthened gun control laws after taking power in 1933, and began house-to-house searches to discover firearms in the homes of suspected opponents. Soon after, Jews were barred from businesses involving firearms, and on November 11, 1938, Hitler issued a decree forbidding Jews from possessing firearms, knives, or truncheons under any circumstances and to surrender them immediately, thus ensuring that no effective defense could be waged against his genocide (which began in earnest in 1941).

Gays in America aren't in that situation, but we confront "little Hitlers" every day, and some of us don't survive. What if a gun defense were common enough that would-be attackers couldn't be sure of what they were in for if they decided on a fun night of fag bashing? It's not an unreasonable query. Almost half of all Americans live in the 31 states with so-called "shall issue" laws, which require the authorities to approve a permit for anyone over 21 who is mentally sound, has no criminal record, pays a fee, and takes a gun safety course. Should gay people be encouraged to take advantage of the right to bear arms?

There's another reason I've been thinking about how complicated and confused the whole "gun issue" is. I just saw Bernadette Peters in the Broadway revival of "Annie Get Your Gun." My fellow gays in the audience went wild over the show, which tells the story of sharp-shooter Annie Oakley (who discovers, to her chagrin, that "you can't get a man with a gun"). The real Annie Oakley was arguably the first great female professional athlete in America, and spent her life breaking down barriers against women. But she generally isn't lionized by contemporary feminists, according to a recent biography. Why? One reason is that she advocated that women learn how to use guns and arm themselves. During her life, she encouraged the formation of Annie Oakley gun clubs for women, which sprouted across the country. That legacy leaves many modern feminists and liberals uneasy.

I suspect most gay people will never agree to carrying lethal weapons. But rigorous debate on the pros and cons of arming ourselves for self-defense, rather than a simplistic rejection, just might lead some to consider the option, which could mean more lives saved, rather than lost, due to guns.

Appeared June 3, 1998, in the Miami Weekly News, and other gay newspapers.

IN NEW YORK CITY, Cardinal John O'Connor was furious over a proposed law extending certain legal rights to gay and unmarried couples. Said the Cardinal, recognizing domestic partnerships is tantamount to "legislating that marriage does not matter." He added, "it is imperative, in my judgment, that no law be passed contrary to natural moral law and Western tradition." Natural morality, that is, as interpreted by Cardinal O'Connor.

The New York bill, which was passed by the City Council despite the Cardinal's objections, requires city agencies (not private businesses) to treat unmarried couples who are registered with the city clerk the same way they treat married couples. A surviving partner is allowed to live on in a rent-stabilized apartment, for example. And registered partners of city employees are eligible for family health insurance. The bill was proposed by Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican backed by the Log Cabin Club, the gay GOPers. Giuliani defended the bill as "a human rights issue" aimed at preventing discrimination.

Governments like New York City's are merely following the lead of the private sector, where one out of ten organizations now offers some kind of domestic partner benefits, according to surveys. And the majority of DP policies are written to apply to both same-sex and opposite sex couples, as in the New York proposal. Personally, I don't believe it's wrong to limit benefits to same-sex only domestic partners (as the Walt Disney Company does). Straights, after all, have the option to wed. That's why I feel little sympathy for the Bell Atlantic employee who is suing the telephone giant for denying health benefits to his live-in girlfriend (and claiming he's being discriminated against for NOT being gay!).

Of course, the argument over whether DP benefits should be granted to all unmarried couples or only those of the same sex (who would get married if they could, but legally can't) is a debatable point within the lesbian and gay community. Gay moderates (often labeled as assimilationists) tend to favor same-sex only DP because it most narrowly solves the imbalance in marriage laws, serving as a substitute until true marriage equality can be achieved. Employers are thus making amends for an unfair government dictate by creating a somewhat more equal playing field. In fact, some argue, opening domestic partnerships to heterosexuals who choose not to marry does, in fact, undermine marriage.

This view is opposed by some lesbian and gay "progressives" who regard marriage as an oppressive, patriarchal institution. Therefore, they say, benefits should be offered to both gay and hetero couples who want equal benefits but don't want to be committed to the institution of matrimony.

Interestingly, an even more expansive view is being supported by some religious conservatives. In San Francisco, the city's Catholic Charities objected to an ordinance requiring city contractors to give benefits to their employees' gay, lesbian, and straight unmarried domestic partners. Archbishop William Bevada accused the city of trying to force the Roman Catholic Church to violate its moral teachings. An agreement was hammered out in which Catholic Charities now allows any employee to designate "a legally domiciled member of the employee's household" to receive benefits formerly provided only to a spouse. Similarly, San Francisco-based BankAmerica (now merging with NationsBank) permits an employee to sign up any adult household member, including relatives -- a more encompassing definition of domestic partners, to be sure, but one in which the very nature of partners as spousal equivalents, rather than mere housemates, is jettisoned.

The Catholic bishops in California are now objecting to a bill being debated the state Assembly because it does NOT include household members who are related by blood, specifically saying they would approve of the bill if it included household relatives (such as an adult child sharing a home with an elderly parent). An argument could be made that such a DP model, entirely separate from the religious trappings of marriage, mitigates much of the religious-based criticism DP benefits face (in California at least). By including non-romantic relationships, it gives religious conservatives the option of pretending the DP relationship needn't be a sexual one, and thus they can close their eyes to the gay relationships that will be included.

Of course, all these variations on a theme wouldn't be necessary if gays could simply marry their partners, like everyone else. Either that will happen, I predict, or get ready for DP benefits so broadly defined as to include acquaintances and pets.

Originally published April 22, 1996, in the New York Native.

WHY IS IT THAT SO MANY ACTIVISTS see the current renewed emphasis on "values" as simply a reactionary plot to oppress gays and lesbians, keep women subordinate, and preserve "white skin privilege"? True, calls for the assertion of "traditional family values" by the religious right often include a hefty dose of anti-gay venom, but the yearning for a new commitment to personal responsibility and rectitude goes far beyond the diatribes of the intolerant right. From Bill Clinton's State of the Union address to best-sellers such as Bill Bennett's The Book of Virtues and Ben Wattenberg's Values Matter Most, and from plans to "end welfare as we know it" to efforts to elevate personal merit over group-based entitlement, the call for a return to moral discipline is widespread.

While some dissident gay intellectuals - Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan, and Jonathan Rauch come to mind - have argued that traditional morality, including the commitment of marriage, can and must be expanded to encompass out-and-proud gay people, many movement activists who came of age in the post-Stonewall years reject such assimilationist pleading as a betrayal of "liberation" and a surrender to oppressive bourgeois morality. Feminists see a plot to restore "patriarchy."

Values advocates, alternatively, argue that crime, welfare dependency, and other social pathologies can be traced to the rejection since the 1960s of "shame" as a motivating concept. That's the thesis in books such as Saving Face: America and the Politics of Shame by Stuart Schneiderman, a former anti-Vietnam War activist who is now a psychoanalyst. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Ruth Benedict, he defines shame as the fear of looking bad before others, an internalized monitor that keeps bad behavior in check. "Shame cultures educate by persuasion," he says, "by showing the right things to do."

In America today, where shame has been banished as unhealthy, only the fear of punishment for major transgressions maintains what remains of civil order. Schneiderman writes that as a consequence, "Obnoxious and insulting behavior becomes acceptable" while "the idea of being a 'pillar' of the community sounds like a stale joke."

But there's a reason why we, as gays and lesbians, tend to resist the idea of a healthy sense of shame, and it's developed in another recently published book. In Coming Out of Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives, Lev Raphael argues that "most gay men and lesbians grow up learning that to be gay is to be sick, to be unnatural, to be a sinner. By adolescence such negative attitudes have produced and reinforced a single, powerful emotion: shame, the feeling that you're inferior and judged as 'bad' not for what you do, but for what you are: gay."

It's hard to argue with that perspective, as well. The trouble is that many who want to get rid of the bad shame (internalized homophobia) would throw the baby (civil behavior) out with the bath water. This is the camp that likes to argue that because some values proponents don't support gay equality, we must oppose all of the "personal responsibility" positions that it happens they do support. Moreover, this line of reasoning goes, we must make allies with all groups that continue to define themselves in revolt against bourgeois normality.

Yet welfare as a way of life is now too expensive for American taxpayers to maintain, even if the besieged middle class weren't demanding tax relief. And as the cry heats up to jettison liberal judges who think criminals are "oppressed" by police, our movement could find itself on the backward-marching side of history, even more so than today, when activists loudly defend maintaining preferences based on group membership rather than individual merit and oppose attempts to reform the very welfare system that breeds dependence and despondency.

But what about the anti-sex message in all this shame talk? One answer is to dare to make distinctions when it comes to sexual behavior. We can, for example, say forthrightly that gay men and lesbians should overcome and heal the scars produced by the negative self-images imposed on us owing to our sexuality. Like other adults, we must be free to lead healthy, hearty, but responsible and safe sex lives, whether or not we choose to form committed relationships. Moreover, gay and lesbian youth should have access to information and resources so they do not grow up mired in the self-negating belief that they are sick or "queer," so to speak.

On the other hand, teenagers unequipped emotionally to make the self-assertions and engage in the negotiations required for safe sex are better off remaining abstinent for awhile, and a heathy sense of shame regarding premature sexual behavior is not a bad thing. Despite liberal sex-ed programs and free condom distributions, rates of AIDS transmission are up among gay male teens, and teen pregnancy rates have skyrocketed (up 9 percent from 1985 to 1990). Children reared in welfare-dependent, fatherless homes have become an inner-city norm, and demograpahic experts say juvenile crime is soaring as a result. [Since '96, with welfare reform and a more 'conservative' mood in the country, some of the statistics cited above for social pathology have begun to reverse.]

For all our sakes, these teenage mothers, and the boys who notch their belts for every girl they get pregnant, could use more than a little dose of old-fashioned shame.

Still, many lesbigay activists can't see the forest for the trees. Arlene Zarembka, a lesbian-feminist writer, asserted last year that "welfare reform has become a phrase for re-asserting patriarchal control over women." It accomplished this, she claimed, by "arresting the independence" of women because they are lesbians or otherwise choose not to marry but still want children - and somebody to support them. Moreover, she even decried efforts to "penalize women for bearing an additional child" while on welfare by not increasing the welfare-recipient's taxpayer-funded benefits. Similar writings by self-styled "liberationists" celebrate teenage sexual expression and romanticize criminal behavior.

But as fears of "moral meltdown" escalate, the pendulum clearly is swinging back toward a renewed emphasis on personal shame and civility. Those who argue otherwise are woefully out of touch with the tenor of the times. Movement activists who oppose the trend toward tying individual accountability to a renewed sense of shame will only convince the bigots that they are right to see homosexuality as inherently destructive to the social order and restraint on which civil society rests.

Appeared December 1, 1995, in Philadelphia Gay News and other gay papers.

SURPRISINGLY, and blind-sightedly, leading lesbigay activists applauded the news that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was taking legal action against Hooters, the restaurant-lounge chain renowned for its sexy waitresses.

But letting the state dictate that straight men cannot enjoy an eroticized ambience at a private establishment isn't good news for gay folks, or at any rate those of us who don't subscribe to the unisex view that gender is nothing but an unfortunate social construction.

Let's take a look at the government's war against Hooters, often described as Playboy Clubs for working-class men. As James Bovard recounted in the Wall Street Journal, the anti-Hooters vendetta was not initiated in response to a complaint from disgruntled male job applicants but solely at the behest of the EEOC. Hooters tried to explain that only women were hired as "Hooters Girls" because their primary function is not serving food, but "providing vicarious sexual recreation." Their "uniforms are designed to tempt and titillate, consisting of short shorts, and either low-cut tank tops or half shirts, which are to be worn as form fitting as possible, and the Girls are expected to enhance the titillation by their interaction with customers. They are to flirt, cajole and tease the patrons."

In short, said the company, "The business of Hooters is predominantly the provision of entertainment, diversion, and amusement based on the sex appeal of the Hooters Girls."

Like Orwell's Big Brother enforcing an anti-sex campaign -- but this time doing so in the name of perfect gender equality - the EEOC dismissed these arguments and decreed that "no physical trait unique to women is required to serve food and drink to customers in a restaurant." In other words, the bureaucrats just don't get it.

The government is demanding that Hooters abandon its trademark concept of Hooters Girls and adopt a quota (what a surprise!) for male waiters. Bovard quotes a former EEOC official who observed, "The women attorneys [at the EEOC] are hot to do this case because they want to bust up a sexist restaurant chain. They want to get at this wicked institution."

So why should gay men - and lesbians - be concerned? For starters, many of our establishments and clubs also intentionally provide an eroticized ambience, the difference being that in this case staff and customer are the same sex. As for gay male bars and private clubs, including gyms, their all-male atmosphere is already under siege by those who consider "homo-sociality" more of an offense than homosexuality.

In one well-publicized case, a lounge in New Port Richey, Florida, which became a gay bar and announced it would no longer employ female bartenders, came under fire. Although the bar's manager insisted his patrons preferred being served by other gay men, a statewide lesbigay rights group took up the barmaids' cause, arguing the women were victims of sexual discrimination.

Although Hooters aims to provide soft-core erotic pleasures to straight men after a hard day's work, the case could create a precedent that allows the government to outlaw exclusively gay male or lesbian commercial establishments by insisting, say, that gay clubs hire a customer service staff that is divided equally between the genders.

While I don't treat the issue of employment discrimination lightly, I wonder what the politically correct response would have been if men (especially straight men) demanded the right to serve drinks at a lesbian bar. In fact, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that lesbian clubs - prized because they provide the safety of "women's space" - could also be required to hire male waiters in this brave new world, freedom of association and the rights of private business owners be damned. Carry the principle of government-determined gender-mixing to its natural conclusion and all eroticized commercial spaces - gay and straight - become verboten under the dictates of a politically correct puritanism.

In the pursuit of absolute gender equality and sameness, as scouted out by government lawyers, liberty for gay and straight alike becomes a casualty.

First published in Christopher Street magazine, October 1994.

The lesbian and gay left has declared war against the growing numbers of moderates, libertarians, and out-and-proud conservatives (along with other ideological deviants) within the gay movement. Gays committed to fighting for equality in all spheres of life but who aren't part of the gay-left and lesbian-feminist coteries that have heretofore dominated organized "lesbigay" politics increasingly find themselves targeted and scapegoated.

Spearheading this campaign (or at least its latest round) has been a chorus of recent articles by Tony Kushner, Richard Goldstein, Sara Miles, and Urvashi Vaid, all taking aim at gay "assimilationists" for (in Miles' words) aiding the "backlash against feminism, multiculturalism, and affirmative action."

Here's a look at these attacks and what I believe lies behind them.

The Left Strikes Back
In December 1993, Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner told the Advocate that, in his view, "the serious gains we've made are gains made by people I would identify as progressive - by the Left," but that he feared the gay movement might abandon its commitment to a broad, left-wing agenda. When Newsweek asked him to contribute a major article commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Kushner used the opportunity to attempt to further marginalize gays who are not on the political left, thus giving a skewed portrait of who gay people are.

With the zeal of a true believer, Kushner wrote that "To be a progressive person is to resist Balkanization, tribalism, separatism." Unfortunately, for the last decade "progressives" have been the ones advocating identity-group based "remedies" (i.e., quotas, set-asides and dual standards) that have exacerbated racial tensions and fermented resentments between the genders, while promoting the idea that individuals needn't take responsibility for their own lives ("victims" being entitled, its seems, to perpetual government largess).

Gay white men, of course, take their lumps for enjoying the privileges of the white male patriarchy. "Will the hatred of women, gay and straight, continue to find new and more violent forms of expression," Kushner wrote, "and will gay men and women of color remain doubly, or triply oppressed, while white gay men find greater measures of acceptance, simply because they are white men?"

What an old, tired refrain! The fact is in Los Angeles and other urban areas gay men are more likely to be victims of hate crimes than are African-Americans - or lesbians. According to a Klanwatch researcher quoted in the late William Henry III's much more balanced Stonewall retrospective in Time, "People now are less likely to condemn someone for being black or Hispanic," while anti-gay bigotry "has become more acceptable."

Kushner isn't alone, of course, in suggesting that sexism and racism motivate gays - particularly gay white men - who don't embrace the left's idea of a progressive agenda. A December 1993 New York Times op-ed by Donald Suggs of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and Mandy Carter of the Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF) held gay white men responsible for black homophobia. Suggs and Carter, both African-Americans, began by asserting that "leaders of the gay and lesbian movement have given highest priority to the interest of their most powerful constituents - white men," which apparently alienated gays of color from the gay rights movement, causing, in turn, black churches to support the religious right (got that?).

The piece ended with the charge that "Anyone who tries to widen the focus of gay activism is characterized in some gay publications as a white-male basher or is accused of caving in to political correctness."

This reference, I suspect, applies to me, since I criticized GLAAD in the November 1993 issue of Christopher Street, writing that "Support for greater inclusiveness in the gay and lesbian movement has been twisted into something altogether different - a rationale for bashing gay, white men."

One might, by the way, ask Suggs and Carter to explain just what they considered to be the exclusively "gay white male" issues that have dominated the gay movement: Sodomy law repeal? Domestic partnership? Employment and housing discrimination? Gays in the military? AIDS? None of which, of course, solely concern "gay white men."

What I imagine they're really criticizing is the gay community's failure to embrace what Kushner and others conceive of as a grand alliance of the radical left. Kushner's Newsweek piece lamented that the traditions of radical America are under siege, without showing the slightest understanding why Americans have grown fed up with megabuck government programs - paid for by middle-class taxpayers - that produce little and often make things worse for the supposed beneficiaries.

Time reported that according to its just-completed poll, those Americans who described homosexuality as morally wrong made up exactly the same proportion (53%) as in a poll taken in 1978 - "before a decade and a half of intense gay activism." Despite this striking failure to change popular opinion, Kushner would have gays renew their commitment to a sweeping left-wing alliance. Down that path lies ruin, for the more that the fight for gay equality is linked with the radical left, the less likely we'll be to win the hearts and minds of a nation founded on belief in individual liberty and personal responsibility.

But the politics Kushner only hinted at in Newsweek became explicit in "Homosexual Liberation: A Socialism of the Skin," the opus he penned for the July 4th issue of the Nation. Freed from the need for euphemisms, Kushner's Nation tract laid it on the line: "Homosexuals...like most everyone else, are and will continue to be oppressed by the depredations of capital until some better way of living together can be arrived at." He quoted Oscar Wilde's essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism," to the effect that "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at."

At least it can be said of Wilde that he lived before the monstrous dystopia of state socialism cast its shadow upon the planet, depriving countless millions of life and liberty. Kushner has no excuse.

To advance his call for ideological purity, Kushner took aim at both New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan and author Bruce (A Place at the Table) Bawer - the gay left's best-loved whipping boys. He disapprovingly quoted Sullivan's statement that "Every right and responsibility that heterosexuals enjoy by virtue of the state [should] be extended to those who grow up different. And that is all."

Sullivan's thought crime was to argued that gays must demand public equality but should not seek to legislate private tolerance. Bawer, for his part, was castigated for writing that the movement for gay equal rights should not be linked "with any left-wing cause to which any gay leader might happen to have a personal allegiance."

Kushner responded that "Like all assimilationists, Andrew and Bruce are unwilling to admit that structural or even particularly formidable barriers exist between themselves and their straight oppressors...nowhere do they express a concern that people of color or the working class or the poor are not being communed with."

He added, "Such a politics of homosexuality is dispiriting. Like conservative thought in general, if offers very little in the way of hope, and very little in the way of vision. I expect both hope and vision from my politics."

Well I do, too. And, I have no doubt, so do Sullivan and Bawer. But it is not the false dream of the gay left, promising "utopia" through a socially re-engineered humankind, with its reeducation camps (or sensitivity retreats) and distribution of perks and political position according to race and gender categories (class having all but been abandoned, after white working folks proved notoriously unreceptive to the left's appeals).

Spare us, Lord, from artists and academics who dream of utopia. I'll opt for equality before the law any day, and take responsibility for making my own garden grow.

Outrageous
Also spare us from leftist lesbigay journalists offering up revelatory articles on gay centrists/conservatives. A case in point was Sara Miles "Do the Right Thing" in the July/Aug. 1994 issue of Out magazine. Ms. Miles explains it all to you, entering enemy territory to interview Kushner's bete noires, Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan, along with original cold-warrior Marvin Liebman, Log Cabinboy Rich Tafel, and a host of others.

To be fair, Miles allowed these activists to speak for themselves at some length. On the other hand, she submerged their remarks into a text that is relentlessly patronizing. "These men's criticisms of existing gay politics and subculture are rooted in the same backlash against feminism, multiculturalism, and affirmative action that fuels the broader neoconservative movement," she huffed. Gee, I guess they've failed to see the light. What's more, she continues, "Adding a couple of token, respectable lesbians or a black face to the letterhead [of conservative gay groups] won't change the essential nature of an argument that pits 'good' gays against 'bad' queers, and that sneers about 'political correctness' when challenged for its elitism."

Actually, the "backlash" charge is an all-too-typical canard slung at anyone who dares point out that the multi-culti emperor has no clothes (or, at any rate, that the "diversity" gang seems more interested in dishing out perks based on gender and race than on promoting community based on equality).

Hunter (After the Ball) Madsen told Miles that ethnic separatism has been dressed up as multicultural diversity. Andrew Sullivan lamented the movement's embrace of racial gerrymandering. And Rich Tafel warned that gays lose when we appear to be the next liberal group looking for "special rights" from taxpayers. "By making an impression on traditionally conservative institutions," he said, "traditionally liberal institutions will follow or join in. The reverse is not true." But Miles was having none of it.

She claimed, in fact, that "Calling the national [gay] groups 'left' is inaccurate." Was this a stunning burst of myopia, or did she merely lack the courage of her own left-wing convictions? At any rate, she should ask NGLTF about its stand on NAFTA, the Gulf War, and welfare for illegal aliens. Moreover, as columnist Paul Varnell pointed out in the Windy City Times, the language of the movement's ubiquitous "Fight the Right" campaigns seldom seems to distinguish between religious-right extremists and the roughly half of the country that considers itself politically conservative.

Speaking of the left and gay groups, it's not surprising that the very PC and quota-obsessed organizers of the Stonewall 25th anniversary march in New York City, who employed "weighted voting" and other schemes to "empower" women and people of color at the expense of equality for all, wound up beset by mismanagement and internal turmoil. When the commemoration ended, the committee was over $300,000 in debt. Call it another victory for left-wing (dis)organizational strategy, with its "appointment-by-quota, only-leftists-need-apply," mentality, along with a fixation on "process" and consensus-based decision-making (a demand for uniformity that, in effect, stifles democratic debate).

Those who, like Miles, deny that the movement organizations are skewed to the left often point to "moderate," nonpartisan groups like the Human Rights Campaign Fund. But recently in the Washington Blade Bob Roehr looked behind some of the congressional defeats the movement has suffered. "None of HRCF's registered lobbyists are Republican, none a conservative Democrat," Roehr wrote, even though "few issues are decided along straight party lines." He added that, like other gay political groups, HRCF's staffing patterns "are dominated by a rather small, strongly left-of-center segment of the political spectrum. It is not the broad, diverse base necessary to attract and cultivate a majority of votes in Congress."

Although Miles had just argued it was "inaccurate" to label national gay groups as part of the left, she wound up doing the same thing herself. In fact, she ended her piece in Out asserting that "the decision to situate gay and lesbian rights within a progressive framework was a choice" made by the radicals who took to the streets "while Marvin Liebman was living in the closet and cheerleading for the Vietnam War."

But some of us see Stonewall as a beginning, not a permanent movement model. In today's politics, it's the hard left that repeatedly proves itself "reactionary" and resistant to evolution.

Voice Chimes In
Just when I thought the left had vented enough spleen against conservatives/libertarians (the left makes no distinction) to leave it satiated for awhile, the Village Voice appeared with a special Stonewall 25 section picking up the battle cry. Richard Goldstein's "The Coming Crisis of Gay Rights" was heartfelt but predicable. The gay political agenda is now in jeopardy, it seems, because not all gays are loyally adhering to the party line.

Goldstein took aim (surprise, surprise) at Sullivan, Bawer, Liebman, and (finally, recognition!) yours truly. We were labeled "gayocons" - and treated as if we advocated the same positions on all matters sexual and political, with no significant variances among us.

Goldstein claimed "the biggest blunder of gay conservatives" is ignoring "the vital bond between queers and feminists" and that "feminism is a movement that honors the individual." With what ideological blinders does he view the world? Contemporary feminism has become notorious for excommunicating from its ranks women who deviate from approved ideology - just look at the hatchet job the feminist leadership is carrying out against Christina Hoff Sommers, whose book Who Stole Feminism? dares suggest that radical feminism's anti-male bile is out of touch with ordinary women.

Goldstein added, for good measure, that the charge of "political correctness" made against the left is indicative of "jargon appropriated from male chauvinists" and that we "worship the sexual hierarchy that affirms male power." I'd say we're simply trying to be masculine-affirmative in the face of explicit feminist, lesbigay savaging of the very concept of manhood.

"Nearly all members of this fraternity are white. And male. And they act like it," Goldstein charged. In this, he echoed Miles, who also played the "sexism" card (you didn't think she'd let that one go by, did you?) when she called Bawer, Madsen and Liebman on the carpet for having "written books that purport to speak for the movement yet leave lesbians out entirely." But the reasons these authors didn't dwell on lesbian issues is they know (sometimes from painful experience) that any gay man who takes up lesbian-specific concerns or describes lesbian activists' views is pounded for presuming he can speak on behalf of women. So it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Goldstein at least recognized we're not quite as bad as our straight counterparts on the Right. Being gay ourselves, after all, presents certain "contradictions" in our thought. Goldstein even found himself complimenting me (I think): "New York Native columnist Stephen H. Miller monitors 'male bashing' by the women's movement, and regularly rails against the 'feminist-directed 'lesbigay' amalgamation' of gay life. He's every bit as bitchy as Howard Stern when it comes to identity politics, but every bit as fervent as Tony Kushner when it comes to gay rights - and every bit as out."

Ah, sweet recognition. If I write a book, I'll be sure to use it on the jacket.

Urvashi Vaid's Amerika
Last but by no means least, the gay left's escalating intolerance for ideological diversity got a boost from an old hand at this game, former NGLTF executive director Urvashi Vaid, who is writing a book from Anchor/Doubleday titled Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (hint: she's against it). As part of the build-up, a Vaid call to arms, "The Status Quo of the Status Queer," ran in the June issue of Gay Community News. The essence of her thesis: Gays and lesbians who seek to join the mainstream are sell-outs to the radical cause.

Vaid complained that recent developments on the cultural front - Newsweek's lesbian chic cover story, the Ikea ad featuring a gay male couple, Tom Hanks's praise for two gay teachers while accepting his Philadelphia Oscar - left her "feeling very uneasy." Lamented Vaid: "As more of us move into a space where we can be personally gay or lesbian...we risk being appeased."

Rather than aspiring to join the mainstream, Vaid wants lesbians and gays to radicalize American society by "building a powerful, grassroots, political movement rooted in notions of Liberation and not merely Rights."

Vaid never really said what she means by "Liberation," but judging from her speeches it's not hard to figure out. In a 1991 tour de force, she wailed that the world "has taken off its ugly white hood to show its sexist, racist, anti-gay and capitalist face" (emphasis added).

This, by the way, brings to mind a Newsday op-ed piece by Raan Medley, a lawyer and former member of ACT BLACK (the African-American caucus of ACT UP), who called the Ikea ad "the culmination of 25 years of...de facto segregation by one of the nation's best organized, most politically cohesive and, indeed, narcissistic minorities" - a sentiment shared by the religious right, no doubt.

Unreconstructed hard leftists like Vaid aren't looking to regenerate community through volunteerism; state-engineered restructuring of personal relationships is more in line with her thinking. Alas, she runs into that old leftist conundrum: the masses aren't interested in the kind of world she and her cohorts know is in their best interest.

Vaid clearly doesn't like the fact that consumers in a free market can chose to support what they like - she's upset that "Lifestyle magazines keep appearing (Out, 10 Percent) while movement driven political papers like OutLook and Gay Community News falter." She pined: "The gay and lesbian liberation movement has turned into a gay and lesbian marketing movement" and complains that "a political movement is not what is being sold."

And there's more. "Has anyone read Christopher Street lately?" she asked. "The anxiety and misogyny of the male writers read as it if is the 1970s." Now Christopher Street is about the only major gay publication that will publish serious work on men's issues - the rest of the gay magazine world having gone "lesbigay."

Maybe she had in mind pieces I've written for CS on topics ranging from the feminist/"queer" demonizing of gay masculinity and men's community to the misuse of race and gender quotas within gay organizations (gay white men, as noted above, being privileged members of the patriarchy from whom power must be wrested). Why is it that many radical lesbian feminists who hold "women's culture" sacred go ballistic at the thought "men's culture" might also be valuable and unique?

Vaid needn't agree with me, but that's not her point. Despite the gay left's dominance of lesbian and gay media (including many of the "lifestyle" magazines Vaid dismisses - like Out - and certainly the Advocate and most gay papers, as well as the Gay Cable Network), Vaid doesn't seem to think the community should abide any forum for views that aren't politically correct.

And speaking of PC, Vaid also doesn't like the term one whit, seeing it as part of the "backlash against race and gender equality - the same enemy behind the white hood." Vaid told Sara Miles in Out, "I'm so tired of hearing people throw around 'politically correct' as a term to shut everyone up. It's exactly like saying 'nigger-lover." Now, just who in the movement is trying to shut up whom by making incendiary comparisons?

To those of us who have knocked our heads against the PC inanity that riddles the movement - running afoul of the language police, enduring castigation for the collective guilt of white maledom, or being driven from leadership positions in gay organizations for questioning the wisdom of community building based on the rigid application of racial and gender quotas - Vaid's hyperbole rings exceedingly hollow.

At the conclusion of her GCN manifesto, Vaid called for "a full-scale frontal assault" against "the coming of a racist, sexist gay and lesbian Right." This is pure Stalinism - silencing anyone who opposes the hard left's dominance of the gay movement by labeling us racist and sexist. And it's typical Vaid.

I remember that when Vaid resigned from NGLTF a few years back, an article by gay journalist Rex Wockner, quoting both her fans and critics, appeared in Outweek and other gay papers. Vaid's supporters were outraged, writing letters to the editor that said the criticism of Vaid - a lesbian of color - was motivated by sexism and racism. Her defenders also pointed to a fawning assessment of Vaid's tenure published in another gay publication, holding it up as a model for how her departure should have been covered by everyone.

The problem is not that Vaid is a dogmatic lefty, but that her views now represent "mainstream" (sorry, Urvashi) lesbian and gay political thought. She is cheered when she arrives at lesbian/gay gatherings. And her lover, comedian Kate Clinton (who organized a fundraiser for Lorena Bobbitt - no joke) gives her added cache.

Bruce Bawer told me he views the recent flurry of attacks on gay centrists/conservatives as a sign that hard-left gay activists are running scared, fearing loss of their foot soldiers as lesbian and gay folks cease to defined themselves solely as marginalized outcasts.

But these remain delicate times for the gay community; the same advances into the mainstream that unnerve gay leftists have provoked fierce new attacks by the radical right. And to the homophobes, all gays and lesbians are part of an undifferentiated bloc intent on subverting the bourgeois norms that underlie social order - especially when we (horrors) demand the right to marry the person we love or serve our country in the armed forces (both of which, somehow, get lumped in with "special rights").

This means that gays who eschew the entrenched, leftover left must fight against both radical gay lunacies and homophobic right-wing bigotries - an ongoing battle on two fronts, with no rest for the weary.

Originally published in the New York Native, August 1994.

ONE OF THE MOST interesting revelations in George Chauncey's seminal book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 is the depiction of a society in which men were not rigidly polarized into "homosexual" versus "heterosexual" identities. Instead, men-who-loved-men could be found in a range of groupings such as "fairies," "queers," "trade," and "gays." "Each," Chauncey notes, "had a specific connotation and signified specific subjectivities." And for the most part, as used within the emerging gay world, these identifications lacked the pejorative connotations they would later acquire.

While such "subjectivities" still exist today, the topic is nearly taboo. For although politically correct lesbigay activists make a lot of noise about "inclusion" within the "lesbian, gay, bisexual, drag and transgender community," the "diversity" they have in mind is extraordinarily homogenized. Not only are lesbians and gay men expected to merge into a more or less single cultural continuity (unisex yet ideologically feminist), but variations among male homosexuals are likewise amalgamated. One people, one culture, one "queer" nation.

Moreover, the lesbian and gay hierarchy's embrace of feminism's war against all-male institutions often manifests itself in a drive to obliterate whatever remains of pre-lesbigay gay male subcultures.

In previous columns, I've pointed to some of the resulting absurdities: gay men and lesbian S/M folk expected to "play together" in mixed-gender, "pansexual" spaces, or combined Mr.-and-Ms. Leather contests, sometimes with a drag queen moderating. Murmurs of discontent from the male masses (expressed in letters-to-the-editor in Drummer and other publications) are met with lectures about the need to destroy barriers within the lesbigay community (even if unique - and distinctly masculine - subcultural worlds are thereby lost).

One of the last true holdouts against the lesbigay tide is the "bear" phenomenon, probably because gay leftist PCers and lesbian feminists just don't understand what's afoot.

Gay men of a bearish persuasion tend to be big, masculine males - usually hairy, often hulking, wanting to socialize within a community of like-minded males without necessarily the kinks of SM or the 'uniform'-ity of leather (although there certainly are leather and S/M bears). Many of the letters to Bear magazine read like they're from desert wanderers who've stumbled upon an oasis - or like earlier coming-out pieces. The "I didn't know there were other men like me" sort of thing.

One of the better explanations of beardom I've come across is a document posted on the GayCom computer bulletin board's "Hirsute Pursuit" conference, accessible on many gay-oriented Bulletin Board Services. The article is by John Topping, who just completed a documentary about his seven-week, cross-country "Bear Journey." His film includes interviews with bear club members and footage of bear gatherings.

When Topping talks about his own early self-discovery, it sounds almost shamanistic - as in the selection of an animal spirit guide. "I thought I looked like a bear," he writes. "I thought I moved and picked things up like a bear ... I began to meditate on the thought that I really was a bear, or that I had bear spirit ... I felt better about myself. I felt more confident. I felt more powerful."

Topping describes a visit to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, "a celebration of alternative sexual lifestyle" in which he met "a lot of bears, not just people who looked like them and acted like them, but people who actually identified themselves as bears as well." During that city's annual Bear Expo, he remembers, "I would see a hot man and say, 'Wow, he's hot.' And instead of getting the incredulous You've Gotta Be Kidding stare, I got enthusiastic agreement. ... That was something I'd never had in my life, and it was no small thing for me to have it now."

During a Bear Hug Party, Topping looked around at all the men he had met that weekend, and all the men he had seen but not met, and remembered thinking, literally, "These are my people. I had found them at last. And they were bears."

Spontaneous, grass-roots, sexually-charged yet atavistically spiritual, the Bear Movement is unique - and, as I said, a holdout against lesbigay homogenization and one of the last preserves of a masculine-affirmative, self-avowedly gay male community. But not all gay men are bears, and those who aren't attuned to its particular "subjectivities" might ponder the value of reinvigorating fraternal male culture within the larger gay community.