IGF CultureWatch

I won't have any transgender people at my Christmas party this year.

Actually, I won't have any non-transgender people either: I'm not hosting a party this Christmas. But in years past I've hosted many, and I've never had any transgender people attending, unless you count one former women's studies student who identified as transgender "for political reasons."

I have nothing against transgender people; I just don't know many. Nor do I have anything against diversity-indeed, my parties have been quite diverse: young and old, gay and straight, nerdy academics and slick business types (not to mention slick academics and nerdy business types).

On the other hand, they've been populated by mostly white, mostly educated, mostly professional folks-the kind of people my partner and I typically encounter in our daily lives. Our parties have had relatively few lesbians and surprisingly few blacks, given that we live in a majority-black neighborhood in an overwhelmingly black city (Detroit). They would not impress most college diversity offices.

And I don't really care.

Please understand: I'm a proponent of diversity. I've written in support of affirmative action, and I vocally opposed the initiative that ultimately banned it in Michigan public institutions. But imposing it on our social gatherings is just foolishness-which is not to say that people don't try.

A few years ago some friends of mine observed that Detroit's lack of a "gayborhood" meant that gay city dwellers often felt socially disconnected. So we started brainstorming about ways to draw them together-an online community, a series of house parties, that sort of thing-and we formed a group. Then one of the local GLBT organizations got involved. Every time we tried to sponsor an event, they'd interrupt: "Wait; you don't have enough lesbians on board." So we brought more lesbians on board. "Wait; you don't have enough African-Americans on board." So we brought more African-Americans on board. "Wait; you don't have enough working-class people on board." And so on.

Now we have no one on board. The group never got off the ground, having collapsed under the weight of the artificial diversity imposed on it. What began as a band of like-minded gay Detroiters was forced-on purpose-into a hodgepodge of individuals with relatively little in common. Not surprisingly, those individuals very quickly decided they had other more pressing interests.

When "birds of a feather flock together," why fight it? It's one thing if those groups are hoarding resources that others are entitled to; it's quite another if they just want to hang out.

Ironically, the insistence on diversity sometimes results in a rather opposite problem, stemming from what I call the Diversity Fallacy. It would seem that, for any minority group X, having more members of X creates more diversity. But that's true only up to a point, after which the group is no longer underrepresented and the principle becomes fallacious. So, for example, adding another African-American to the Detroit City Council (eight of whose nine members are black) would not make it more diverse: it would make it less so, all else being equal. This is true despite the fact that, even in Detroit, African-Americans are thought to "count" toward diversity in a way that whites do not.

Obviously, this problem is not unique to the GLBT community. It arises anywhere cultural identity and diversity attempt to coexist. But the GLBT community has been revisiting it of late, mainly because of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).

ENDA passed the House in a version that includes sexual orientation but not gender identity. As a result, the GLB community has been accused (largely from within its own ranks) of throwing transgenders under the bus. Critics have recalled the women's movement of the early '70s, many of whose leaders denounced lesbians as a hindrance to the movement's goals.

The analogy is clumsy at best. Every lesbian is a woman; not every transgender person is gay. Sexual orientation and gender identity (unlike womanhood and lesbianism) vary independently, even granting that they have important affinities.

What the ENDA debate reminds us is that the GLBT "community" comprises diverse sub-communities, which overlap in various and sometimes awkward ways. No G's and L's are B's; some G's, L's, and B's are T's; all T's are either straight or GLB. Every one of us has both a sexual orientation and a gender identity, though one or the other of those traits may dominate our individual political agendas.

But the debate also reminds us that communities are at least partly a matter of choice: choices about which alliances to form, when to form them, when to honor them and when to break them. Choices that are easy to make when sending Christmas-party invitations become far more difficult when people's livelihoods are at stake.

John Corvino's "What's Morally Wrong with Homosexuality?" is now available on DVD.

On Nov. 30, a group of 28 retired generals and admirals released a letter urging Congress to repeal the law mandating the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy regarding gays.

Pointing to studies suggesting that there are more than one million gay and lesbian veterans and 65,000 gays currently in the armed forces, the generals and admirals point out, "They have served our nation honorably."

This letter in itself, of course, will not move Congress to act but it chips away a little more at the legitimacy of the law and it can provide additional support for politicians who are willing to speak out about the issue.

The letter followed by just two days a Nov. 28 CNN forum for GOP presidential contenders in which all the candidates (except Giuliani) expressed support for the current policy, arguing that it is "working" or that it would be disruptive to integrate open gays into the military. Sen. John McCain said specifically that senior generals had told him that the policy is "working."

Is the policy working? Well, a lot of deplorable policies have "worked," depending on your goal, but that doesn't mean that they are the best policies or that other policies would not work better. Racial segregation in the military "worked." For that matter, racial segregation in the whole Southern society "worked" too. At least for white people. Stalin's concentration camps "worked." Islamic "honor killings" of women who have been raped "work" too, I suppose, if you are not the victim. But do many people want to defend those policies as the best policy?

Remember those Arabic linguists a couple of years ago who, despite the military's crying need for Arab-language translators, were discharged because they were gay? Is that an example of the policy "working"? What about all the other skills gays may have been taught that are lost when they are discharged from the military? More examples of the policy "working"?

What is particularly interesting is that people on both sides point to the same fact-that the U.S. is at war-to support their position. In an op-ed article for the New York Times last January, Gen. John Shalikashvili wrote, "Our military has been stretched thin by our deployment in the Middle East and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job."

By contrast, the Republicans all say that it would be a distraction to allow open gays into the military during wartime. As former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee put it, morale and unit cohesion are paramount in the military and the DADT policy protects both. But Huckabee is not well-informed. First, gays are already in the military, an increasing number open about their orientation.

Second, a Rand Corporation study several years ago concluded that what counts is not "unit cohesion" but "mission cohesion"-a common commitment to completing the task at hand. And you might think that a military at war has a more important and easily identifiable mission than a military at peace. So integrating gays during a war would be the best time to do it.

Third, the British military began allowing openly gay personnel to serve several years ago and found-to its expressed surprise-that there were virtually no problems. And fourth, small surveys of military personnel have shown an increasing acceptance of open gays in the military.

The military itself seems to be ignoring the policy. The New York Times points out that discharges of gays dropped by 50 percent between 2001 and 2006-from 1,227 to 612. Military recruiters themselves, hard-pressed to meet their quotas, sometimes ignore the gay ban. I believe I have previously told the story of a friend who told the recruiter he was gay. The recruiter said, "I didn't hear a thing," and promptly signed him up. This is not just a policy that has lost its legitimacy, it is a policy in tatters.

Nevertheless, Republican candidates clutch at any possible rationale for keeping gays out of the military even if it has no basis in fact or prudence. I have no doubt that if the nation were at peace they would all say that because we didn't need more military personnel there was no real need for allowing open gays. (Giuliani, to his credit, has said that if it were peacetime, he would work to rescind DADT.)

No doubt for most of the Republicans, their position is rooted in a religiously motivated hostility to gays. But no doubt too they are aware that most GOP primary voters have similar views, so they are boxed into an inflexible position.

The Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law is one of our community's most important think tanks, producing high-quality studies on sexual orientation and public policy.

Its latest study, Geographic Trends among Same-Sex Couples in the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey, points to significant increases in the number of gay couples who report their status on government surveys-from 145,000 in 1990, to just under 600,000 in 2000. The Institute's study then uses the Census Bureau's 2006 American Community Survey (ACS) of 1.4 million representative adults to determine, among other things, the number of same-sex couples in the U.S. who reported their status. It found that 780,000 couples were willing to be counted.

Unfortunately, the accompanying press release unnecessarily contains a bit of misleading language about that finding. "Unfortunately," because it is a sad fact that some journalists on deadline will use the press release rather than the study itself as the basis for their news story. What the study itself always carefully stipulates as couples "reporting themselves," seems sometimes to be treated in the press release as a finding about the actual number of gay couples.

For example, the release says the report "document(s) a gay demographic explosion in some of the country's most politically and socially conservative regions." I suspect that most of these gay couples were already there. They just decided to acknowledge their existence. So the "explosion" is in self-reporting, not their existence.

The release also says, "The number of same-sex couples in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1990." Actually, the number has "quintupled" (145,000 to 780,000). That's minor. More important is that the language of the release implies that this is now the actual number of gay couples in the U.S.

That would be nonsense, of course. Nobody believes that there were only 145,000 gay couples in 1990, only 600,000 in 2000, and only 780,000 in 2006. Clearly only a fraction of gay couples were willing to acknowledge their existence in the 1990 and 2000 censuses and a somewhat larger fraction were willing to acknowledge their existence in the 2006 ACS.

So what this study is actually finding is an increase in gay couples' openness, not the actual number of gay couples, which remains unknown. To be sure, the release goes on to quote study author Gary Gates saying exactly that: "(M)ore same-sex couples are willing to identify themselves as such on government surveys like the ACS." Fine! But why not say that in the first place and avoid the misleading statement?

So how many gay couples are there really? Two million? Three million? Four million? No one knows. As social tolerance and acceptance increase, the number of gay couples reporting themselves-and perhaps the number of gays forming couples and living together-is bound to increase with each census and ACS report. You want a complete guess? I'd guess there are 2.5 million to 3 million gay couples. Check back in a few years and we'll see if I'm right.

However that may be, most laymen, if not the researchers themselves, seize on these current numbers of open gay couples, just as they seize on the latest survey of the number of self-acknowledged gays, and treat the results as a finding about the actual number, not openness, forgetting that the numbers keep rising.

For instance, last year's Williams Institute study noted that the government's 2002 National Survey of Family Growth asked its sample of more than 12,000 men and women aged 18-44 about their sexual orientation. The survey found that 4.1 percent said they were gay, lesbian, or bisexual. But here is Gates writing in his 2005 Gay and Lesbian Atlas based on the 2000 census: "(T)hese calculations suggest that gay men and lesbians represent 2 to 3 percent of the U.S. population."

And here is the 1994 Social Organization of Sexuality by Edward O. Laumann, et al.: "Altogether, 2.8 percent of the men and 1.4 percent of the women reported some level of homosexual (or bisexual) identity." They should have acknowledged that, of course, the actual number is undoubtedly much higher. But everyone wants to seem definitive.

So if this time the ACS finds that 4.1 percent of the population acknowledge being gay, in five years it will probably be 4.7 percent of the population, and in 2015 it will likely be 5.3 percent, and continuing upward. What is the actual percentage? Six percent? Seven percent? Eight percent? No one knows. All I ask is for demographers to acknowledge that they are not measuring the total gay population, only the current degree of openness of that population. Is that so hard to do?

My partner Mark and I introduced "Bob" and "Jim" at a dinner party at our place. Bob, 31, is recently out of the closet, and Jim, 27, just returned to the U.S. after living overseas for four years. We weren't trying to play matchmaker when we invited them, though the idea occurred to me as the party approached, and we rearranged the seating right before dinner to maximize their interaction.

That was two weeks ago. They've been inseparable since.

Young love is delightful, amusing, and-let's admit it-occasionally annoying. Delightful, because it reminds us of the simple joys in life. Amusing, because it makes grown people act like kids. Annoying for the same reason.

"Giddy as a schoolgirl," Mark reported after he had lunch with Jim later that week. "Ditto," I confirmed after checking in with Bob. To be candid, I was a tad envious. Having been out of the closet for two decades and in a wonderful relationship for six years, I am grateful for many gifts. Giddiness, however, seems like a bygone luxury.

Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't trade what I have. It even has its giddy moments from time to time. And I'm certainly thrilled for my young friends. Yet I know I'm not alone in feeling a tinge of jealously in the face of young romance.

I discussed this feeling with some friends who just celebrated their 10th anniversary. "Oh yeah, I know what you mean," one answered. "The most romantic thing we ever do anymore is share a flush." He was joking, of course, but the joke pointed to a deeper truth. Married life carries with it mundane rituals, the familiarity of which provides comfort. But this comfort comes at the cost of suspense, and thus a measure of excitement.

Part of the reason Bob and Jim are so giddy right now is that they mutually wonder "Does he really like me?" and then thrill at every affirmative indication. How joyous to expose oneself to another and have the risk rewarded with tenderness.

I don't wonder anymore whether Mark really likes me. I know he loves me, and vice-versa. A cynic would say that we're "taking each other for granted," and in one sense, that's true: part of the value of marriage is the knowledge that someone is there for you, always. With mutual commitment comes mutual security.

The danger of security, however, is complacency. It starts in small ways, many of them innocuous. If a person loves you "warts and all," then you don't feel the need to hide your warts, whatever form they take. Your unsightly back hair. Your stinky morning-breath. Your flatulence. Then there are the personality flaws you took pains to suppress during the courtship: your short temper, your constant tardiness, your fondness for Celine Dion. Soon, you don't even bother to conceal your vices, much less suppress them. You get lazy.

And thus you lose one of the great virtues of relationships: they encourage us to be better people. Initially, because we want to impress the other. Eventually, because we know they deserve it.

So as much as I envy Bob and Jim's honeymoon phase, I also take a lesson from it. Mark deserves my effort at least as much as Jim and Bob deserve each other's, as easy as it is to forget that in practice.

The good news is that ordinary things-done consistently over time-can make a big impact. Clearing the dishes even though it's his turn. Bringing home some of his favorite chocolates. Calling just to say hello. These events form the warp and weft of our relationships, our lives. I'm reminded of them every time our enemies try to reduce homosexuality to a "lifestyle." Loving someone is not a "lifestyle."

Similarly dismissive is our opponents' tendency to refer to "what homosexuals do in bed."

"My partner and I have been together over 25 years," an older gay friend recently remarked. "We do what most older couples do in bed. We sleep." He meant it as a punch-line, but it's no joke: sleeping with someone-not just next to someone, but with someone, for a quarter century-is an intimate and beautiful thing, morning-breath notwithstanding.

In this sense, it's good to "take someone for granted." That doesn't mean you stop valuing them. On the contrary, you learn that valuing goes beyond passive appreciation: it's an active commitment. You learn that love is not (or not merely) what you feel; it's what you do. You do it even when it feels mundane, which-if you're lucky-it eventually sometimes will.

John Corvino's "What's Morally Wrong with Homosexuality?" is now available on DVD.