IGF CultureWatch

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

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

Many conservatives also have these two contradictory beliefs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That could lead us to a final antinomy:

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

First published in the Bay Area Reporter on February 16, 2006.

Perhaps more than any invention since the printing press, the Internet has decentralized information and opinion. The marketplace of ideas, including ideas about the appropriate tactics and even direction of the gay-rights cause, is more robust than ever. Gay-conservative bloggers and Web sites, of which there are now dozens, are major competitors in this marketplace.

When I began writing my syndicated OutRight column in 1994, a narrow ideological band monopolized the gay press. The views expressed in gay periodicals, either explicitly in opinion columns or implicitly in "news" features, ranged from liberal to radical. It brought to mind what Dorothy Parker once said of Katherine Hepburn's performance in a movie: "She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B." This limited range could and did produce disagreement that the protagonists regarded as profound. But to an outsider it was all pretty dismal.

Gay publishers and editors acted as gatekeepers of opinion, defining what was acceptable. There were a handful of libertarians writing for gay papers, but real conservatives could hardly be found. Even gay periodicals that ran my column back then often felt the need to run a left-wing counterpart, as if doing so was necessary to provide "balance" in a paper already dominated by liberal views and reporting.

Two nearly simultaneous developments changed this. First, beginning in the 1980s mainstream gay people, whose wide spectrum of political views mirrors the country's, came out of the closet in large numbers. They could not be ignored. And they could not understand why their sexual orientation necessarily entailed support for things like high marginal tax rates or liberal abortion laws.

Second, the flowering of the Internet in the mid-1990s ensured that anybody could become a self-publisher whose views were immediately available to millions of people.

The day of the opinion gatekeeper is finished. What has taken its place? A cacophony of views, including those of gay conservatives and libertarians, whose energy and intellectual vibrance seems disproportionate to their numbers.

Here are a few of the Web sites and blogs by gay writers who dissent in important ways from the tactics and goals of the gay left and its organizations. Not all of these writers can easily be categorized as either conservative or libertarian. All are committed to equality for gay Americans.

(1) Independent Gay Forum (www.indegayforum.org): This ought to be the first stop for anyone interested in gay conservative and libertarian views. It features columns from more than 40 different writers (including me) on just about every gay-related topic. It also features a terrific blog called CultureWatch, written by Steph H. Miller, who has something trenchant to say about everything.

(2) Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com): Sullivan is the granddaddy of all bloggers, and easily the most widely read gay blogger in the country, getting 70,000 to 80,000 visits a day. Passionate, perceptive, and wickedly smart, he's interesting and challenging even when he's wrong. Cruise him daily.

(3) Jonathan Rauch (www.jonathanrauch.com): Rauch is one of the most influential and finest gay authors on the planet. He writes for respected mainstream publications, like The Atlantic and National Journal, on a wide range of issues. His recent book, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, is the best and most concise argument for gay marriage I've ever read. While his Web site is not a blog, it will quickly get you to his irreplaceable work.

(4) Bruce Bawer (www.brucebawer.com): Bawer wrote the most important book of the 1990s on gay issues, A Place at the Table. It awakened a generation of gay Americans to the possibility of an alternative to gay-left orthodoxy. Now he's defending classical liberal values against Muslim extremism. Also not a blog, this site will give you entree to Bawer's best stuff.

(5) Beth Elliott (www.thebethzone.com): Elliott, who has been active on gay issues since the 1970s, calls herself "a girl-kissing California girl with a Southern heritage and a Jesuit education." Her irreverent blog effectively takes on lesbian-feminist shibboleths from a libertarian perspective.

(6) Gay Patriot (www.gaypatriot.net): Two skillful and informed pundits take turns whacking at Democrats and the gay left on this blog. It's probably the most reliably conservative gay blog on the Internet.

(7) Tim Hulsey/My Stupid Dog (www.mystupiddog.blogspot.com): Hulsey, a "gay, conservative grad student and former writing teacher," ruminates articulately on culture and politics. When I want a thoughtful analysis of a movie I'm thinking about seeing, I go to Hulsey's blog.

(8) Jon Rowe (www.jonrowe.blogspot.com): Rowe is a libertarian college professor with a law degree. His blog covers everything from constitutional theory to sex to religion, all the things one shouldn't talk about in polite company. It is intelligent, refined, and measured—qualities badly lacking in much of the blogosphere.

There are many more good ones:

• anothergayrepublican.blogspot.com
• averagegayjoe.blogspot.com
• bigapplegop.blogspot.com
• blogcabinca.org
• boifromtroy.com
• bovinestare.typepad.com
• cakeordeath.wordpress.com
• dyneslines.blogspot.com
• gayandright.blogspot.com
• homocon.com
• lloydletta.blogspot.com
• malcontent.typepad.com
• northdallasthirty.blogspot.com
• queer-conservative.blogspot.com
• republicofm.com
• ricksincerethoughts.blogspot.com
• rightrainbow.com
• thatgayconservative.wordpress.com

and too many more to list.

Be aware that many blogs often offer little more than links to, or quotes from, substantive points made by others, contributing nothing original of their own. But whether you're a budding gay conservative looking for some intellectual support or a skeptical gay liberal monitoring the right, you'll find something on the gay-conservative Internet to keep your mind humming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It turns out that:

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

Similarly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the question about bans on "homosexual relationships:

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

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

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

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