IGF CultureWatch

Ever since Howard Dean went on Pat Robertson's "700 Club" to proclaim (inaccurately) that the Democratic Party platform calls for "marriage between a man and a woman," the party chair has received a chorus of condemnation from gay rights groups and even gay Democrats.

Patrick Guerriero, the Log Cabin Republicans president, was predictably caustic, quipping that, "Howard Dean puts his foot in his mouth so often that he should open a pedicure wing in the DNC."

That was actually charitable, given that Dean's pronouncement on Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network wasn't another of his famous gaffes; he's said the same thing too many times after being told it misrepresents the party's official stance, which is to leave the issue to the states to resolve.

Dean's deliberate misstatement was the latest in a series of disses that ought to convince even the most ardent gay partisan that the Democrats, tasting a return to power after six years on the outs, aren't about to let gay rights stand in the way.

Dean is clearly betting that gay Americans are so disgusted with six years of Republican-controlled Washington that he can afford to anger a few activists while moving the party to the political center. The strategy isn't new; Republicans have been doing it with the Christian conservatives since the Reagan years.

But Dean is miscalculating for two important reasons: First and foremost, gay Americans are fighting for their own civil rights, unlike their counterparts on the right, who are pushing to limit someone else's freedoms. One reason America's history reflects progress by minorities despite hostility from the majority is that the minorities are far more motivated than their foes, not to mention the "mushy middle" that doesn't feel strongly one way or the other.

Second, by treating gay civil rights like just another "special interest" to be alternatively pandered to or ignored, Dean and the Dems only contribute to their party's worst image problem: that of a do-nothing party without clear positions, principles or a plan.

You can forgive Howard Dean for thinking he can get away with it. After all, the nation's richest gay political group has long been willing to play lapdog to the Democratic Party, even after Dean's repeated disses.

It is a central article of faith at the Human Rights Campaign that the success of the gay rights movement is inexorably linked to the success of the Democratic Party, and herein lies the single biggest internal obstacle to equality for gay Americans.

There's no question, of course, that Democrats in general, and almost always in particular, are better on gay rights than their Republican counterparts. And gay rights legislation no doubt stands a greater likelihood of passage if Democrats control Congress -- though history suggests otherwise.

But that doesn't mean that gay rights leaders should sacrifice the movement at the altar of the Democratic Party, and continue crafting their message off the DNC's transparently political talking points.

Yet that's what we see, time and time again, especially at HRC, whose leader Joe Solmonese came from Emily's List, a partisan Democrat group.

True, HRC issued an angry press release after Dean's "700 Club" dalliance, slamming his "serious lack of leadership" on the issue of gay marriage. So why, days later, was Solmonese once again following him?

On Tuesday afternoon, Dean's DNC issued a press release taking to task Bill Frist, the Senate GOP Leader, for ignoring First Lady Laura Bush's recent advice about not using gay marriage "as a campaign tool." Frist and the Republicans don't need to be engaged on the issue of gay marriage, the press release argues, because they're really just trying to change the subject from their own political problems.

(Typical of the Democrats' stealth defense of gays, the primary target audience for the DNC statement was apparently gays. The release isn't posted on the DNC website.)

Still, despite Dean's "serious lack of leadership" on gay marriage, Solmonese and HRC were quick to play follower. Just one hour after the DNC press release went out, HRC issued its "Amen, sister!" reply.

Titled "Senator Frist Pushing a Campaign Strategy Opposed by First Lady Laura Bush," the HRC press release hits all the same talking points, accusing Frist of not taking Laura Bush's sage advice.

Besides the lapdog posture, HRC's willingness to do Dean's Dems' bidding causes lasting harm to the gay rights movement.

Rather than actually defend gay families and make the case for gay marriage, HRC is stuck in a three-year strategy of arguing that the American people don't -- and shouldn't! -- care about marriage equality for gay couples.

"Voters want candidates focused on soaring gas prices, a health care crisis and national security," Solmonese says in the release, "not putting discrimination in the United States Constitution."

What sort of gay rights strategy is it, when the attention of Americans is focused on our issues, to argue that our rights aren't important, and refuse to engage our opponents in the debate over our equality?

Sure it makes political sense for Dean and the DNC to issue press releases, delivered only to us, defending us, and then have the party's senators respond to conservative attacks on our families by arguing that the issue isn't as important as rising gas prices. But what self-respecting gay rights group would echo that argument?

Can anyone imagine Martin Luther King Jr., responding to an attempt to rollback the gains of the Civil Rights Movement by arguing that the issue shouldn't be debated because rising gas prices are more important?

Worst of all, HRC's lapdog strategy reeks of lacking confidence in the arguments for our own equality.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, approximately 36,000 same-sex couples are living in America where one partner is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident and the other is a foreign national. Thousands more of these binational couples had to emigrate to keep their families together. My own lover is a refugee from Africa currently living in Europe, and even with a sponsorship letter, he cannot obtain as much as a tourist visa.

I met Patrick five years ago during an overseas trip. As our love grew in the months and years that followed, he has survived a murder attempt by his family, lengthy struggles over his papers and asylum applications, unemployment and international wandering. Somehow, despite all of that, we have also known great joy. To the U.S. Government, however, our love is either invisible or a threat to homeland security.

The plight of many similar couples is documented in a report released on May 2 by Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality entitled Family, Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial, and the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples under U.S. Law. Nearly 200 pages, it is available online at immigrationequality.org and hrw.org/reports/2006/us0506/, and documents a broad range of cases, including these:

After a Colombian gay rights activist writes to a guerilla group urging it to end its anti-gay violence, he receives death threats and a savage beating. His American partner helps him get a training visa to the U.S., after which they begin the lengthy, expensive process of filing an asylum claim. After doctors document the Colombian's injuries from the beating, he is interviewed by a clearly hostile official, and weeks later receives a written "Notice of Intent to Deny" in which the word "faggot" is used without quotation marks. The decision is overturned on appeal.

A North Carolina woman's Hungarian partner is forced to leave the country with the children both have raised. A male-to-female transgender is detained for months, housed with male prisoners, denied medication or outside contact and taunted by fellow prisoners with Buju Banton's murderously homophobic song, "Boom Bye Bye."

Even when couples successfully navigate the system, such as by juggling tourist and student and work visas, every plane trip risks deportation or detention. For example, an American woman's Danish partner of nearly 18 years is detained twice while entering the U.S. to visit her. "They asked me why I was going to school, what I was doing there, if I could prove it, why I had left the states, why I was coming back … I was bombarded with questions."

The footnotes accompanying these stories are filled with phrases like "names changed at their request," "requested anonymity," and "last name withheld at his request," in order to protect the security of the interviewees. All this unavoidable secrecy is chilling in itself.

As the report shows, the recent irrational furor over immigrants is nothing new, any more than the stoking of sexual fears. In 1896, one congressman said that immigration needed to be limited "to preserve the human blood and manhood of the American character by the exclusion of depraved human beings." In 1952, during the "red scare" period, the McCarran-Walter Act barred "aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, epilepsy or mental defect," and Congress made clear that this included homosexuals. The gay immigration ban was not lifted until 1990. A misguided and counterproductive ban on HIV-positive immigrants was passed in 1993 amid similar nativist hysteria, and was signed into law by President Clinton. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) effectively excluded gay couples as families for immigration purposes.

To help end the discrimination against binational gay families, Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality make several recommendations, including repeal of DOMA and the HIV immigration ban, and passage of the Uniting American Families Act. This bill, introduced by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), would add "permanent partner" to the classes of family members who can sponsor a foreign national for immigration to America.

We can learn from South Africa. Its Constitutional Court, in a decision last year affirming equal marriage rights, wrote, "What is at stake is not simply a question of removing an injustice experienced by a particular section of the community. At issue is a need to affirm the very character of our society as one based on tolerance and mutual respect."

Some day America will recognize this, and will extend its longstanding policy favoring family reunification to encompass same-sex couples. But the thousands of us who are affected cannot put our lives on hold indefinitely while waiting for the light to dawn. We must summon the fortitude to carry on. Even for those whose relationships last, a great price is paid in isolation and anguish in addition to the plane tickets, phone bills and legal fees.

I dislike having to politicize the most cherished relationship of my life. I wish I could just marry Patrick and have him come live with me as he wants to do. But others who know us only as demonized abstractions have come between us, and I will not be bullied into submission. For me the stories in Family, Unvalued are not only depressing and infuriating but also inspiring. But whether our stories are comforting or discomforting, we must keep telling them and supporting groups like Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality - and electing more politicians who defend equal immigration rights - until our homes and families are whole.

Last week Pope Benedict spoke out against gay marriage and civil unions. "Only the rock of total and irrevocable love between a man and a woman is capable of being the foundation of building a society that becomes a home for all mankind," the pope declared, speaking at a conference on marriage and the family on May 11. He added that marriage was between a man and a woman "who are open to the transmission of life and thus cooperate with God in the generation of new human beings."

The Catholic Church's opposition to homosexuality has never been mainly about the bible. This fact is to its credit: taken literally and as a whole, the bible is an unreliable moral guide; taken critically, it fails to provide good grounds for a blanket condemnation of homosexuality.

Instead, the Church's main arguments against homosexuality have been rooted in "natural law," and specifically the premise that sex must be open to procreation. Thus, all deliberately non-procreative sex is sin.

Consider for a moment the implications of this premise. Contraception is an obvious no-no, given the Church's position. So is masturbation. These facts are enough to make hypocrites of many Catholics who condemn homosexuality "because the Church says it's wrong."

Also, forbidden, though far less often discussed, is orgasmic non-coital sex between married heterosexual partners, such as oral sex, masturbation of one's spouse, or anal sex. (Such acts are permitted as foreplay, but never on their own.) Official Catholic doctrine permits no exceptions here. Imagine the case of a man injured in such a way that he can no longer pursue coital sex, but still enjoys performing oral sex on his wife for the intimacy it achieves between them. It would seem permissible (perhaps even selfless and admirable) for him to engage in such sex, but the Church says no.

Thus far, at least the Church is consistent in its views. (Stubborn, perhaps--even foolish--but consistent.) But there's one implication of the "openness to procreation" premise that the Church refuses to acknowledge. If sex must be open to procreation, then it should be wrong for sterile (or postmenopausal) heterosexual married partners to have sex. Imagine a woman whose ovaries and uterus have been removed for medical reasons. Clearly, her sexual acts will never be "open to the transmission of life" in any morally meaningful way. But the Church declines to condemn such acts.

Why the apparent inconsistency? Catholic natural law theorists answer that such acts can still be of "the reproductive kind." But it is difficult to make sense of this claim, except as a lame attempt to deny unpalatable conclusions that clearly follow from the Church's position. If a sexual act cannot result in procreation and the couple knows it, then how is the act "of the reproductive kind"? Political scientist Andrew Koppelman expresses the problem well. In his book The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law, he writes:

"A sterile person's genitals are no more suitable for generation than an unloaded gun is suitable for shooting....Contingencies of deception and fright aside, all objects that are not loaded guns are morally equivalent in this context: it is not more wrong, and certainly not closer to homicide, to point a gun known to be unloaded at someone and pull the trigger than it is to point one's finger and say 'bang!' And if the two acts have the same moral character in this context, why is the same not equally true of, on the one hand, vaginal intercourse between a heterosexual couple who know they cannot reproduce, and on the other, oral or anal sex between any couple? Just as, in the case of the gun, neither act is more homicidal than the other, so in the sexual cases, neither act is more reproductive than the other" (pp. 87-88).

I once presented this argument before a university audience, and one conservative Catholic student told me that I was ignoring the possibility of miracles. I told him that if he's going to invoke miracles, then why can't I get pregnant? He responded--I'm not making this up--"But that's impossible!" Apparently, God's miraculous power is limited by conservative comfort-levels.

Italy is clearly on the brink of recognizing same-sex unions. Anticipating this, the pope declared that "it has become urgent to avoid confusion between [marriage] and other types of unions which are based on a love that is weak." If only the pope could see the weakness of his own stance.

Amidst this winter's worldwide violent protests over the 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper, the words of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi did little to ease the tensions. "Let Friday be an international day of anger for God and his prophet," he proclaimed several days before a massive, February 3rd protest in which hundreds of British Muslims descended upon the Danish Embassy in London. They bore placards that read, "Butcher those who mock Islam," "Behead those who insult Islam," and, more generally, "Kill those who insult Islam." One protestor was arrested a few days later for dressing as a suicide bomber.

The man who called for the protest is not some obscure Imam known only to radical Islamists. The Egyptian born and Qatar-based Qaradawi is the head of the International Association of Muslim Scholars and one of the Arab world's most well-known television preachers. The Daily Telegraph observes that, "he is considered one of the most influential men in modern Sunni Islam." Qaradawi is most known to Britons for his cozy relationship with the left wing Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who has praised him as a "leading progressive Muslim" and hosted him at a conference in 2004.

Following the London bombings of last summer, Livingstone again invited the man he has called a "moderate" to London with the hope of easing inter-cultural tensions. This, in spite of the fact that Qaradawi has called homosexuality a "disease that needs a cure" and the website of which he is the chief scholar, www.islamonline.net, suggests that gays be executed via "burning or stoning to death."

Following the Asian Tsunami of 2004, Livingstone defended Qaradawi after he said that "Tourism areas are areas where the forbidden acts are widespread as well as alcohol consumption, drug use and acts of abomination...Don't they deserve punishment from Allah?" by stating that the Sheikh was a victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Qaradawi has endorsed suicide bombings in Israel as "martyrdom operations," proclaimed that "We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America!" and is banned from entering the United States.

Despite the fawning he has received from Livingstone and the ambivalence that much of the British left has demonstrated towards his remarks, Qaradawi has had a vocal, liberal critic ever since he became a prominent figure in British debates over Muslim assimilation. He was right then and he is right now. But much of the left doesn't want to hear him.

Peter Tatchell can no longer meet with journalists in his home for fear of physical attack. Requesting an interview, I could have been one of his myriad political enemies out to entice him into a trap. It has happened before; a group feigning to be a black student television crew recently lured Tatchell into welcoming them into his office space only to assault him over his campaign against the Jamaican dance hall "murder music" which calls for gays to be maimed and killed. Had security guards not been in the building at the time, Tatchell says, he could have been seriously injured. There is something wrong with the state of liberal politics when many on the left are upbraiding the avowed socialist Peter Tatchell as a right-winger. But that is just the place where Tatchell, whom the reactionary populist Daily Mail once labeled a "homosexual terrorist," finds himself today.

Though born and raised in Australia, Tatchell is the most visible gay rights figure in Great Britain and part of a long tradition of English radicalism and social activism. For his entire public life he has been associated with the far-left reaches of the British political spectrum, a spectrum that stretches much farther left than it does in the United States. From forming the London chapter of the AIDS direct-action agitation group ACT-UP to standing up for the rights of those perennial targets of the British Conservative party, asylum seekers, Tatchell never deviates from a left-liberal perspective in his approach to politics. His noisy tactics, like commandeering the Archbishop's pulpit during the Easter Sunday service at the Canterbury Cathedral in 1998 to denounce the Church of England's hostility to gays, are a composite of Larry Kramer's self-righteousness and Abbie Hoffman's mischief-making.

Born in Melbourne in 1952, Tatchell founded an anti-Vietnam war group, Christians for Peace in 1970. He immigrated to the UK the following year in order to avoid being drafted to fight alongside American troops. In 1973 he organized a gay rights protest in East Germany but was assaulted by the Stasi and kicked him out of the Communist bloc country. He first came into national British consciousness after he stood as a Labor Party candidate in a 1983 parliamentary by-election for a seat in the southeast London constituency of Bermondsey. Tatchell lost by a large margin and the race has entered the annals of British politics as one of its most notorious because of its rank homophobia. Ironically, Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat who won the seat and just lost a campaign to be leader of the party, recently came out of a closet of sorts to pronounce himself bisexual. While most in Tatchell's situation might evince bitterness, Tatchell was astonishingly gracious. "That was 23 years ago-I don't hold a grudge," he told Britain's Independent. On his website, he even went so far as to write, "I don't support the Lib Dems, but if I was a member I would vote for Simon as leader."

Sticking so determinedly with his liberal principles, Tatchell has taken on a number of causes in recent years that are bete noires for many on the left and celebrated by the right. One of his most high-profile targets is Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who has shut down independent newspapers, jailed political opponents and denounced gays as "worse than dogs and pigs." In 2001 the Belgium government feted the African dictator while Mugabe¹s goons beat Tatchell about the head after his second unsuccessful attempt at a citizens' arrest (the first was in 1999), leaving him with permanent damage in one eye.

In March, the Zimbabwean government accused him of helping to fund a coup against Mugabe, to which Tatchell responded, "I can't raise enough money to staff an office for my own human rights work, let alone fund an insurrection." Tatchell has found little solace from the supposedly anti-totalitarian left, which, at best views Mugabe as a side effect of Western imperialism rather than an intrinsic evil that should be directly opposed. "Mugabe has killed more black Africans than even apartheid," Tatchell says, an observation that while likely true, hardly represents a consensus in left-wing circles.

Tatchell has also angered blacks due to his lonely campaign against Jamaican reggae dance hall music, a genre whose most popular singers call for the mauling and death of gays in their lyrics. He felt compelled to raise the issue because many gay Jamaicans approached him and were afraid to speak publicly due to the violent homophobia so prevalent in their home country.

In late November, for example, the gay Jamaican AIDS activist Steve Harvey was shot to death just a year after the murder of Brian Williamson, a founder of Jamaica's gay rights movement. "We were deluged with denunciations from black and left activist groups who accused us of having a racist and imperialist agenda," Tatchell said of the black response to his campaign. A spokesman for the Black Music Council threatened, "Don't you even try to change us, because you can't change us. We will never, ever bow. We are ready and we are coming because what you are doing is racism to the extreme," and the New Nation, a black British newspaper, bestowed Tatchell with its "Pest of the Year" award in 2004. When Tatchell called upon the BBC to rescind its decision to broadcast the Music of Black Origin Awards due to its celebration of homophobic Jamaican reggae singers, black Guardian columnist Joseph Harker wrote, "Instead of seeing a sympathetic figure trying to engage with them, black people see only a white man acting like a modern-day missionary, trying to impose his views."

After Tatchell claimed that Malcolm X might have been gay, the British branch of the Nation of Islam branded him a "Godless sodomite." The Voice, a black British newspaper, wrote that "Unwittingly, Tatchell falls into a tradition of many white right-wing historians who have attempted to rewrite important chapters of black history that effectively disown people of the African Diaspora of their own heroes -- re-presenting them in ways that have little meaning or attraction to the young." Tatchell received enough death threats due to his anti-homophobia campaign that the London police placed him under their protection. Meanwhile, Amnesty International, Tatchell says, halted their support of his campaign out of fear of angering the black community. "If the neo-Nazi BNP [British National Party] was advocating the murder of black lesbians and gay men the left would be rising up in mass demonstrations," he says. "When some Jamaican reggae stars advocate exactly the same thing, large sections of the left run a mile."

In the spring of 2005, Tatchell again came out in opposition to Amnesty for their failure to recognize the grievances of gay Palestinians. The silence is caused by what Tatchell believes is the human rights organization's fear of engendering a backlash likely to come about by faulting a movement that holds a firm place in the pantheon of left-wing conscience. He has battled with pro-Palestinian groups -- whom he has frequently stood alongside protesting Israeli occupation -- over their failure to acknowledge the Palestinian Authority's militant homophobia. In 2005, Tatchell presented Amnesty with a dossier on Palestinian oppression of gays culled from interviews with gay Palestinian exiles. He characterized Amnesty's response as, "We're too busy and we don't have time."

But it has been Tatchell's latest crusade against the Mayor of London's favorite imam that has divided the left in a way that is indicative of a much larger trend in European politics, that is, the problem of Muslim integration. Tatchell was amazed that Livingstone, whose political career he had endorsed from his first race for leader of the Greater London Council in 1980, would carry the water of a man the left ought to have condemned as a bigoted theocrat. "I was utterly astonished that this longtime left-winger and supporter of gay rights was prepared to roll out the red carpet for a fundamentalist cleric who believed in the execution of apostates, unchaste women and gay people," Tatchell says. "It went against everything he's ever stood for." Livingstone had always been a prominent and outspoken leader for gay rights, and supported Tatchell in his 1983 race when the leadership of the Labor Party (including Party leader Michael Foote) opposed his running out of a fear that he was too radical and too gay.

Livingstone, known affectionately and derisively (depending on your politics) as "Red Ken," has long been a thorn in the side of Prime Minister Tony Blair and has been a rallying figure for the party's left wing. He is also something of a thug. In March, he called the US Ambassador to Great Britain Robert Tuttle a "chiseling little crook" after Tuttle requested that US envoys not be forced to pay London's congestion out of respect for diplomatic tradition. Livingstone was temporarily suspended from his duties as Mayor in February, after a 2005 incident in which he compared a Jewish journalist to a Nazi. Approached by Oliver Finegold, a reporter for the Evening Standard, outside an event, Livingstone said, "What did you do? Were you a German war criminal?" Informed that Finegold was Jewish, Livingstone added that the reporter was acting like a "concentration camp guard."

Bob Pitt, a member of Livingstone's official research staff who has worked in Britain's Marxist political circles for decades, regularly derides Tatchell and other Muslim moderates on his blog, Islamophobia-watch.com. Late last year he wrote that, "Tatchell, along with many of his fellow self-styled defenders of Enlightenment values, takes refuge in mindless sectarian bigotry." Tatchell points out that Pitt, in the run-up to the NATO invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks, wrote that, "It is perfectly principled for socialists to defend the Taliban against imperialism." On March 25, Tatchell headlined a Freedom of Expression rally in London's famed Trafalgar Square to protest Muslim demands that the cartoons not be printed. Though some right-leaning British organizations like the Libertarian Alliance and the Thatcherite Freedom Association co-sponsored the rally alongside Outrage!, some of Tatchell's left-wing and Muslim critics ("preferring to remain pure and marginal," Tatchell said at the rally) alleged that he was colluding with the fascist British National Party, which he and the rally organizers emphatically deny.

In January, Tatchell was denied an invitation to attend a conference held by a bi-partisan Parliamentary caucus on equality whose stated purpose it is "To raise awareness of the need for measures to provide parity of protection from discrimination and promote equality and dignity for all." On January 31st, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Equalities held a seminar on "potential conflict between different kinds of rights" and one of the panelists was an adviser to the Muslim Council of Britain, a group which has called for a boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day and whose leader supported the Fatwa on Salman Rushdie, and of which Tatchell has been a perennial target. The organizers claimed that the event was only open to Members of Parliament, but when Tatchell asked an MP who attended the event if such a rule was applied, he found otherwise. "Tatchell now suspects an orchestrated plot to prevent him attending the bash," the Independent reported.

A regular target of verbal and written attack, Tatchell has become used to physical abuse as well. He has been beaten up, threatened with murder, and his house has been vandalized countless times. Yet up until recently most of these assaults came from far right groups. Now, the threats that Tatchell receives come from those normally assumed to have left-wing sympathies: blacks and Muslims. Several years ago he placed bars on his apartment windows.

His lonely work is not only thankless; it also leaves him close to penniless. His is not the glamorous life of many high profile, media-savvy activists. He does not charge expensive lecture fees or have a massive fundraising operation like established, American gay rights organizations. He makes next to nothing (earning a few thousand pounds a year from donations and journalism) and lives in public housing. His is a one-man, thankless, human rights organization

"There are large sections of the left who have now twisted the virtues of multiculturalism into a new form of moral relativism whereby anti-humanitarian practices in non-Western cultures are ignored or even defended in the name of 'cultural sensitivity,'" he says. "It's an ethical and political acrobatics on a monumental scale." But he has found little support amongst his social democrat peers for his political courage. For much of December and January, the Outrage! Website was down, and Tatchell suspects that any number of his new found enemies on the left could be responsible for the hacking. "It was a highly sophisticated cyber attack," he confirmed. "The huge effort involved could only have been politically motivated, with the aim of putting us out of action for a long time. Our site was mined with hundreds of viruses and some curious bits of Arabic script, which may be a pointer to the culprits."

Though Tatchell was, and remains, an opponent of the Iraq war, he had a credible, anti-statist alternative to the Bush-Blair plan that would have warmed the hearts of neo-conservatives like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Just a few days before Coalition troops commenced hostilities, Tatchell was arrested for jumping in front of Prime Minister Tony Blair's limousine in Piccadilly Circus with a sign that read, "Arm the Kurds! Topple Saddam." After his arrest, he said, "The Left's do-nothing, oppositionist stance borders on appeasement. It colludes with Saddam's oppression, and is a shameful betrayal of Iraqis struggling for democracy and human rights." He points out that he has been a vocal opponent of Saddam and the Ba'ath party for decades, joining protests outside the Iraqi embassy in the 1980s, long before the left, (or the right, for that matter), took any interest in Iraq. One would be hard-pressed to find another anti-Bush left-winger of Tatchell's prominence holding such nuanced views.

Though conservatives might like to claim him as a convert, Tatchell is hardly a member of their ranks, in either the philosophical or practical sense. He opposes the "assimilationist" approach of gay conservatives like Andrew Sullivan, because "my agenda is about liberation...I don't want queers to fit in with society as it is, I want them to take the lead alongside liberal progressive straights to fundamentally transform society for the benefit of everyone." He supports lowering the age of consent to 14 and the disestablishment of the Church of England. He is a political radical on nearly every issue and in 2004 defected from Labor due to its rightward drift under Tony Blair and joined the Green Party. "Go red and go green," he wrote in the run up to the 2005 parliamentary elections. This is no Log Cabin Republican.

Many of his former comrades have decried Tatchell as an opportunist and a right-wing dupe seeking support from a public rendered amenable to anti-Muslim arguments by fears of terrorism and cultural incompatibility. But Tatchell has not changed his values one whit in his over four decades of activism. It is not Peter Tatchell who has left the left. It is the left who has left him.

I was at a bar the other day when someone I'd just met shouted at me across the table, asking me how long I've been writing my column.

"Oh, 10 years," I shouted back.

He was startled. "I thought you were in your early 20s."

He meant it as a compliment, of course, more a reflection on what I look like than on my intellectual maturity. My sister has commented on it, too. She just turned 23 and the last time I saw her, she looked me up and down and said, "You dress like my friends."

But I've been thinking lately about what it means that I and my mid-30s friends all look-and act-like our compatriots in our 20s.

Adam Sternbergh of New York magazine calls people like us "grups": grown-ups, condensed. Grown-ups who refuse to grow up. Grown-ups who aren't sure what, exactly, being grown-up means.

"This is an obituary for the generation gap," he wrote. "This cohort is not interested in putting away childish things. They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their 30s and 40s-and even 50s-clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies, content that they can enjoy all the good parts of being a grown-up with none of the bad parts (dockers, management seminars, indentured servitude at the local Gymboree)."

We hang out in bars. We watch "Grey's Anatomy." We drink the newest drinks and watch the coolest movies and listen to the same music in the same iPods as the 25-year-old sitting next to us on the train. Heck, we're probably dating the 25-year-old sitting next to us on the train.

Adulthood is even more compressed for gay men and lesbians, I think, because there are fewer of us and we tend to clump together and we follow the general American trend of wanting to be younger than we are instead of older. So instead of young lesbians and gay men aspiring to be like their wise elders, the wise elders are getting tattoos.

Is this a bad thing? Well, not really. People should be able to wear and listen to what they want, right?

What struck me in the New York article was not the riffs on our grupster clothes-I thought those were funny and true. What struck me was this sentence: "For a grup, success isn't how many employees you have but how much freedom you have to walk or boogie-board away."

That sentence struck me because oh, that, that right there, is the problem for so many of us in our 30s and 40s. We define success as freedom. And freedom means no defined roles and an overabundance of choices.

So we wake up in the morning and our choices include not just what we're going to wear or make for dinner, but whether we're going to quit today, whether we should move across country and take up snowboarding, whether we should be single again or move in with our girlfriend and whether we should go back to school and try something completely new.

We grups are a people without a map. Especially we gay and lesbian grups, who don't have the traditional heterosexual plan to follow, who may not be asked by our families when we're going to have kids or get married or settle down.

Even if we are settled down-even if we have kids-we likely don't have a plan. Instead, we are literally unsettled, insecure in the knowledge that we can leave anything at any time.

We chose this shedding of obligations and requirements because it's how our generation defines freedom. We don't want to be the company men or women. We don't want to be trapped in gender or social roles. We don't want to be the person with a lifelong regret that we had never tried to make it as a rock musician or a novelist.

So we've immersed ourselves in youth culture-and not even our own youth culture but the culture of the millennials (whose music, admittedly, is very similar to the Gen X music that we played on our Walkmans growing up). We have immersed ourselves in a youth culture where, like in all youth cultures, the driving force is the individual pursuit of our own passions, whatever passions those happen to be at the moment.

This differentiates us, I suppose, from the "Greed-is-Good" corporate types of the 1980s. If that's what being grown-up is, we don't want it-and good for us.

But maybe it's time to define what being grown-up is for us grups. Because pursuing our own passions seems to make us happy in the short term but not content and secure in the long term. Many of us are still looking for purpose. We're still trying to find our way.

I suspect that this contentment will come when we start devoting ourselves to our community-our communities-instead of the latest band.

But until we solve the puzzle of who we're going to be when we grow up, we'll continue being grups-dressing and acting like we're in our 20s, as if seeming younger will give us more time to figure life out.

The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, which opposes gay marriage, has just issued a new report finding that relatively few gay couples are getting married in jurisdictions where gay marriage is permitted. Is this correct? If it is, why are there so few gay marriages so far?

Here's a summary of the findings from the report:

The highest estimate to date of the proportion of gays and lesbians who have married in any jurisdiction where it is available is 16.7% (Massachusetts). More typically, our survey of marriage statistics from various countries that legally recognize same-sex unions suggests that today between 1% and 5% of gays and lesbians have entered into a same-sex marriage.

The report derives these numbers by comparing the total number of same-sex marriages in a jurisdiction to an estimate of the total number of adult homosexuals in the jurisdiction (based on survey data). While we could quibble over the estimates of the number of gays in a given jurisdiction, the report uses a range of reasonable assumptions.

Which way do these preliminary findings cut? On the one hand, the report gives some ammunition to opponents of gay marriage, who may argue that marriage will have little practical impact among gays. The legal benefits of marriage will remain unavailable to the many gays who don't marry.

On the other hand, even assuming that marriage rates among gays remain low, there will still be legal, social, and other practical benefits to those gay couples who do choose to marry. To them, marriage will be important regardless of whether others choose to marry.

Low marriage rates among gays make it even harder to see how this tiny fraction of the population will cause any practical harm to marriage as an institution (such as by the flaunting of non-monogamous behavior by some gay-male couples). Of course, if you believe that a "change in the definition of marriage" to include same-sex couples is itself harmful to marriage then marriage will be worse off even if no gay couple actually gets married-but you don't need studies to make this argument. To me, this definitional fear has always seemed far too abstract to count for much.

Assuming it's true that relatively few gay couples are getting married where it's allowed, why is that the case? Many reasons come to mind, especially the fact that even now a gay married couple in Massachusetts is not considered "married" by the federal government and 49 states. This complicates their legal status and precludes them from getting the full benefit of marriage.

Let me address four additional reasons for initially low gay-marriage rates.

1. The idea of marriage is still novel to gay people. As the report suggests, such "novelty" can produce excitement. But it can also produce fear, specifically fear of the unknown. Britney Spears aside, I doubt many people get married for the novelty of it. Marriage is a huge legal and social commitment. People who have never even imagined it would be a prospect in their lives are understandably hesitant.
   
   
2. Gay couples have no gay married role models to follow. Related to this, there is as yet for a gay person no peer or familial expectation that one will get married, as there is for heterosexuals.
   
   
3. Without the social encouragement and support that marriage provides for relationship formation, there are probably relatively fewer long-term and stable gay couples to begin with, and thus relatively fewer couples who would immediately demand marriages. As new relationships are formed under a regime of marriage, more gay couples will eventually reach the point where someone pops the question, "Will you marry me?"
   
   
4. Reinforcing the fear of the unknown is the fact that many gay people have actually constructed an oppositional identity for themselves partly based on the unavailability of marriage. Excluded from marriage, they have made a virtue of this necessity.

This oppositional identity takes many forms in the writings of queer theorists and in the things even ordinary gay people can be heard to say when the subject of marriage arises. One hears expressions like: "We don't need marriage with all its patriarchal and heterosexist trappings." Or: "I don't want to mimic straight people." Or: "Marriage is such a mess, with 50% divorce rates, why would we want to join it?" Or: "Just give us the benefits of marriage and you can keep the word."

Some people will retain this oppositional identity no matter how much time passes. But for others, primarily those younger people whose identities are formed in an environment where marriage is an option, oppositional identity of this sort should fade.

All of this suggests there will be an adjustment period of some duration while more marriage-inclined gay couples form and while marriage becomes a comfortable and normatively appealing option to them.

I doubt that marriage rates among gays will ever equal marriage rates among heterosexuals, primarily because gay couples will be less likely to raise children. Even after marriage culture settles in, straight couples will be most likely to get married, followed by lesbian couples (who are more likely to raise children than gay males), followed by gay-male couples. But a disparity in marriage rates among heterosexual and homosexual couples is not an argument in itself against recognizing same-sex marriages.

Whatever our views of gay marriage, we should not be surprised to find gay couples and communities taking things slowly.