All the talk of mavericks during the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate started me humming the theme from The Magnificent Seven. There they are, a ragtag bunch of rugged loners in a wild country. Will they learn to work together in time to save the beleaguered townsfolk from the marauding villains? Hey, wait a minute - they ARE the marauding villains.

Maybe I just have movies on my mind, since Washington's gay film fest starts next week; but the McCain campaign increasingly feels like a movie in which the director is desperately trying to make us suspend our disbelief and buy the Republican nominee as the guy to fix the wreckage wrought by the Republican incumbent over the past several years.

Barney Frank is having none of it. The congressman from Massachusetts pounds a simple point he has made for years regarding the gay dimension in politics: that the far better record of Democrats on gay rights points to a partisan conclusion.

Defending their endorsement of John McCain, Log Cabin Republicans tout his opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment; but he also endorses anti-gay state initiatives that Barack Obama opposes. They point to Democratic politicians' opposition to marriage equality (displayed by Joe Biden last week) to discredit gay Democrats, but Obama supports civil unions legislation while McCain does not. Sarah Palin's talk of tolerance mirrors the ex-gay movement's love-the-sinner rhetoric, and her suggestion that private contracts are sufficient for gay couples is contradicted by the experience of family law attorneys working to protect LGBT families, who have found that wills and powers of attorney are a poor substitute for marriage.

Frank wrote in 2004, "Only if an attempt to make gay bashing a national political platform clearly fails will Republicans who dissent from that view begin to get the political strength to free their party from its shackles." The Palin choice suggests that the GOP's shift in emphasis this year does not reflect an ideological change.

On Real Time with Bill Maher in 2006, Frank noted conservative dissent against the Supreme Court's 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling overturning sodomy laws: "The Republicans do think it should be a crime, and I think there's a right to privacy, but the right to privacy should not be a right to hypocrisy. And people who want to demonize other people shouldn't then be able to go home and close the door and do it themselves."

Long one of the smartest and wittiest people in Congress, Frank is now one of the most powerful. As Financial Services Committee chair, he has been instrumental in addressing the financial crisis. On Sep. 29, after a vote on the $700 billion financial recovery bill fell a dozen votes short and Republicans blamed partisan remarks by Speaker Pelosi, Frank was withering: "Because somebody hurt their feelings, they decide to punish the country.... Give me those twelve people's names, and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them, and tell them what wonderful people they are, and maybe they'll now think about the country."

Frank is one of the sharpest debaters the House has ever had, and his toughness is essential. A favorite Republican tactic during the current Congress is introducing motions to recommit in order to derail bills that are about to pass. Responding to one such motion in April 2007, Frank said, "Members on the other side had every opportunity at the committee and in this open rule fully to debate this and to offer amendments. They chose not to. They chose instead to legislate by ambush."

Frank was addressing a similar motion in November 2007 during debate on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act when he grew emotional while describing the impact of homophobia on 15-year-olds and concluded, "Please don't turn your back on them." The House erupted in cheers.

Frank has no shortage of detractors (a right-of-center gay Washingtonian recently created a Facebook group called "Capital Punishment for Barney Frank"), but that is a sign of his success. As I watched him respond to Bill O'Reilly's charges of cowardice and unmanliness last week by rebuking the Fox News demagogue for his ranting and bullying, I thought how lucky we are that Frank, as The Almanac of American Politics wrote in 2006, "is one of the intellectual and political leaders of the Democratic Party in the House - political theorist and pit bull all at the same time." He's one of us, he's right where he should be, and he's at the top of his game.

As part of the Chicago Public Schools' "Renaissance 2010" initiative, the High School for Social Justice submitted a proposal to the Office of New Schools for a new gay-inclusive Pride Campus, which would provide college prep education for Chicago students.

Chicago Public Schools held a "community forum" at the gay community center last week, giving a little, but not much, information about the proposal, but emphasizing that the school was not just for gay students but for all students-but for gay (GLBT) students too.

The proposal is rooted in the deplorable fact that many gay students do not feel safe at their present high schools. They are harassed and intimidated by some of the other students and they want a learning environment where they feel safe and can concentrate on their studies. It is hard to focus on solid geometry or the Civil War when you are worried about being beaten up between classes or after school. Instead some students just drop out, which benefits no one.

What the experience of gay students reveals is that many schools in the Chicago system do a lousy job of providing a safe learning environment, of keeping their students disciplined, of teaching them tolerance of other students.

In many schools teachers have their hands full trying to keep order in the classroom, much less teach a few facts. Some "students" read comic books in study halls. One former teacher told me that teaching at her school amounted to nothing more than "baby-sitting." And many counselors and administrators are simply uninformed and unsympathetic to gay students. I would no more have gone to a high school counselor for advice than I would have gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Two decades ago the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force at the initiative of its sainted director Al Wardell, himself a Chicago teacher, prepared and mailed to high school counselors a packet of information about gay youth along with a poster they could display that read, "Your counselor has information on gay issues."

Several weeks later Wardell called a large number of counselors to find out what they had done with the information. Only one-third said they had put up the poster. One-third said they had glanced at the material but not put up the poster. And about a third said they had thrown the whole packet away. Have things really gotten much better? I doubt it.

So as a stopgap measure until other Chicago schools learn to do their job adequately, the proposal deserves support, at least once it is unpacked a little more for public (our) inspection. The idea is not new, of course. New York already has Harvey Milk High School, and Chicago's initiative may encourage other cities to take similar measures-once they face up to the fact that they have gay students and need to do something to protect them.

No doubt, too, many closeted gay teachers, and they are numerous, would be delighted to teach at a gay-inclusive school where they do not have to hide their orientation. Openly gay teachers can provide empathetic advice to gay students and serve as important role models for students, many of whom probably know no gay adults and have difficulty separating out issues of sexuality and gender in their lives.

But perhaps providing safety is not quite enough. The schools would do a service to gay students by teaching coping skills. Many of us have learned those with some pain and difficulty during our lifetime and would have been glad to know of them when we were young. And what might really be useful would be voluntary, after-school classes in martial arts-judo, kick-boxing, etc., to help students protect themselves after school when they return to their own neighborhood. Knowledge of such skills would also boost their self-confidence.

And what should other Chicago schools be doing besides off-loading their gay students so they do not have to deal with them? Well, only a small minority of gay students are going to be able to go to the new school. Pity those who remain behind. Schools should help by undertaking serious educational efforts about gays and minority-gendered students. They should require history and social studies units on gays and gay history. They should host gay speakers at assemblies on gay holidays. They could foster Gay/Straight Alliances instead of opposing them. They should beef up security at schools and on school buses. They should require "in-service" programs about gays for teachers, counselors and administrators.

Administrators too? You bet. I know of one suburban principal who referred to an openly gay teacher derisively as "fag boy." Nice teaching environment!

Is there a new definition of "out"?

Time was, you weren't officially out (especially if you were a celebrity) until you declared it in public. You had to stand before a microphone and say, "Yes, I'm gay," or "Yes, I'm a lesbian."

Or you had to speak to Barbara Walters. Or become a spokesperson for a gay organization.

Or you had to give an exclusive magazine interview, where you declared - as Ellen DeGeneres did in 1997 - something like "Yep, I'm gay."

Clay Aiken did exactly that last week with his People magazine interview. The cover line? "Yes, I'm gay."

But unlike Ellen, who caused a firestorm of response and a temporary halt to what has turned out to be a long-lived career, people mostly looked at the Aiken cover and either shrugged or said they supported him.

Why the shrug? Because gayness is no longer something extraordinary or indecent. It is not longer about the Love That Won't Dare Speak It's Name.

Instead, it's become a lot more like heterosexual love - something to parade on red carpets, to sweeten with children, to commit to in sickness and in health.

Which makes me wonder: Is the Aiken cover the death knell of the public proclaiming of gayness?

Take Aiken's counter-example of Lindsay Lohan.

Lohan has no magazine interview where she declares, "For sure! I'm gay!" I've seen nothing on record where she identifies herself as a lesbian.

Instead, she has simply been very public about being in love with DJ Samantha Ronson. Not in the creepy, Tom-Cruise-jumping-on-a-couch kind of way, but in a quiet, respectful way. The women have been photographed holding hands everywhere; they seem to always be together.

And when Lohan was asked how long the two of them had been together on a call-in radio show, she simply answered, "A long time."

In other words, Lohan and Ronson act just like famous (and not-so-famous) heterosexual couples do.

There was no public proclamation, because there was no need for one. The world has changed, and with it, the definition of what it is to be out.

Public proclaiming always felt to me to be both necessary and unfair. On the one hand, what heterosexual had to give a magazine interview assuring people of his or her straightness? (Unless, of course, that heterosexual was actually "secretly" gay and trying to hide it.)

On the other hand, if we didn't proclaim in public - if we didn't take the microphone on National Coming Out Day or gather our families to tell them explicitly that yes, we're gay - then we were invisible.

Straight people could pretend that we didn't exist. And people who don't exist don't get civil rights.

I'm not saying that we're in the clear now. Of course we're not. We are still far, far from achieving full equality, and there are still plenty of people who don't think we should be able to recognize our relationships.

Studies have shown that knowing gay people makes a real difference in how straight people view LGBT civil rights - and celebrities often feel like friends. It is always wonderful to have a new, particularly beloved, celebrity join our parade. Clay Aiken is welcome.

But I think acknowledging one's gayness to oneself and others is becoming less a question of COMING out and more of simply BEING out.

We are more likely now, I think, to just be ourselves, living our lives. To hold hands with our girlfriends. To join our husbands at back-to-school meetings. To snuggle on the train.

Being out is something all of us can do. We don't have to talk to a magazine. We don't even necessarily have to have "the talk" with our families or friends. We don't have to have some intense, confrontational (or cathartic) coming out.

Instead, we can invite them to our weddings, and talk about our husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends the same way heterosexuals do.

We no longer need to proclaim our sexuality in public, because it is no longer assumed that all people are heterosexual. We no longer need to shout, "We're here! We're queer!" to show people that we exist.

We only have to be open about who we are and who we love.

And that is a world I'm happy to live in.