IGF CultureWatch

Originally appeared May 30, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

The effort to promote freedom and legal equality for gays and lesbians has made significant progress in the United States and western Europe.

But there are vast portions of the world where gays and lesbians must live closeted, unrealized, unfulfilled lives blighted by the pressures of rigid social conformity, primitive religious intolerance, fear, prosecution, and even death.

In eastern and central Europe, gays face hostility from authoritarian governments heavily influenced by medieval Catholicism or reinvigorated revanchist Russian and Greek Orthodox religions.

In central and southern Africa, petty tyrants and fundamentalists ministers inveigh against homosexuality as non-African, denounce gays as criminals and threaten to have gays jailed or exiled.

In Islamic countries from Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, gays are persecuted, arrested, jailed and sometimes executed.

In India mobs of Hindus, unhindered by the government, have closed theaters showing a gay film. In Communist China, authorities arrest gays at their whim despite liberalization of the penal code.

If multiculturalism means that different cultures have different values and there is no way to prefer one set of values over another, then multiculturalism is a sham and the final enemy of gays and lesbians.

These are nations sunk in ignorance, superstition, barbarism, and moral darkness, and we should say so loudly and repeatedly.

But what we can do about it?

Let us try a thought experiment. Ignoring current political realities, try to imagine some of the things the U.S. government could do if it really want to help gays and lesbians in backward nations.

The U.S. State Department could protest the prosecution and jailing of gays and lesbians, warning that such actions are of "serious concern" to the U.S. government and "not helpful" in maintaining cordial relations with the world's single remaining superpower.

The State Department could designate a "sexual minorities" desk to collect, monitor and report on incidents of anti-gay persecution-arrests, jailings, beatings, acts of censorship and anti-gay statements by government officials..

That desk could make the information public rapidly on a website so target nations would see that they are being monitored. Taking a page from "Atlas Shrugged," the website could list gays and lesbians who flee foreign countries and list the skills and education they take with them so the countries could see what their bigotry is costing them.

Congress could reduce foreign aid to countries that retain sodomy laws or persecute gays. Since much U.S. foreign aid seems to end up in the bank accounts of government officials anyway, the threat of cuts could have significant impact on their behavior.

We could say to them: "You have no natural right to our taxpayers' money. If you want their money you must earn it by good behavior. Stop repressing your citizens. Repeal your sodomy laws. Halt your censorship of gay publications and websites. Educate your citizens."

The Dutch government sends small grants to gay groups in third-world countries. The U.S. could do the same. One hundred grants of $10,000 to $100,000 would cost little but help fledgling gay groups and send a clear message to anti-gay governments.

The most powerful weapons the U.S. has are its ideals of liberty and individuality, free speech, free markets and democracy. In the past we promoted those ideals through a network of U.S. radio stations around the world. We should revive and expand that project.

The Voice of America and Radio Liberty could include substantial programming about U.S. gays, the legitimacy of gay freedom, music by gay artists and reading by gay authors. Since its beginning, the VOA has done exactly one program on gays.

The U.S. could send openly gay ambassadors to anti-gay governments. Forget gay-friendly Luxembourg. Think Saudi Arabia, Namibia, Romania, Cuba, Pakistan. That would force officials to deal with someone gay who represents the world's most powerful nation. [Editor's note: In the fall of 2001, President George W. Bush named openly gay foreign service officer Michael Guest as U.S. ambassador to Romania.]

Gay ambassadors could attend public events with their partners, speak to civil groups and visit gay clubs where they exist. He or she would be an encouragement to gays and lesbians in those countries and a tacit rebuke to the government. Don't worry about sodomy laws: A nation's embassy is by law its own sovereign territory.

So long as the U.S. has an ambassador to the Vatican, that person should be gay. It is high time those men in cassocks at the Vatican secretariat met a gay men who is not repressed, closeted or a hypocrite. It might be a new concept for them.

And finally, the U.S. military must accept openly gay and lesbian servicemembers so that when troops are dispatched to serve in foreign countries, local inhabitants might see openly gay people and, it may be, find it necessary or interesting to interact with them.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of the possibilities, but it give us a sense of how little is being done that could be done, and the beginnings of an activist agenda for the next two decades.

Originally published May 28, 2001, in The New Republic.

THERE'S A LITTLE BOTTLE in my medicine cabinet, prescribed by my doctor. The pills are perfectly spherical, opaque, and shiny, like tiny pearls. The medication is called Marinol. It's an anti-nausea medication I take sometimes to deal with what most people on the AIDS cocktail manage day after day, meal after meal. The pills are perfectly legal, and their active component is THC, the main active ingredient in marijuana, which human beings have known for centuries to be able to cure an upset stomach and increase appetite.

Unfortunately, Marinol isn't that good a drug. The relief from nausea quickly dissipates; even the docs prescribing the stuff don't believe it's as effective as the real thing.

So why can't I legally have the real thing? This week, as expected, the Supreme Court struck down an appeal from some cannabis collectives in California for an exemption from a federal law banning marijuana distribution. It turns out this Court isn't the highest in the land after all. (Bada-bing.) But, of course, the Court is simply interpreting a pretty transparent law that bans pot distribution for medical use - so transparent that I'm surprised the Supremes even took the case. The deeper issue is why our society bans medical marijuana at all.

The answer, to anyone who has ever swallowed a Marinol pill, is obvious. The illegal thing in pot is not THC; it's pleasure. The only difference between the pill and a toke is enjoyment. Sure, there's some risk of inhaling smoke into your lungs - but cigarettes are legal (at least until the Democrats win back Congress). The physical dangers of pot-smoking are trivial compared with the dangers of, say, alcohol, even if you factor in an unusually large case of the munchies. And, compared with nicotine or caffeine, marijuana is about as addictive as Gatorade. Yes, you can get psychologically addicted to it - but the same can be said about watching "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" or subscribing to The New Republic.

No, what the government is worried about is that you might actually have some fun while conquering your nausea. It's enjoyment that the feds want to outlaw. Bush's prospective drug czar, John Walters, seems to believe that a person who derives pleasure from smoking a plant is immoral because he's pleasantly altering his consciousness. But why? Is drinking alcohol immoral? Is the physical and mental enjoyment of a fine wine more moral than the physical and mental enjoyment of a joint? Beats me if I can find any distinction that isn't based on irrational panic.

Besides, we often feel pleasure because we're doing our bodies good. And, sure enough, marijuana's medicinal qualities - for a wide variety of physical problems - are now a matter of record, whatever Congress says. A fascinating piece in last Monday's Los Angeles Times recounted scientists' discoveries about weed's effects on mental and physical functioning. It turns out that marijuana affects a whole range of what are called cannabinoid receptors, and these receptors in turn regulate any number of physical functions. The Times reported that "[i]t is now known that THC mimics chemicals made naturally by our brains - chemicals that influence a smorgasbord of bodily functions including movement, thought and perception. Studying these brain chemicals (known as `endogenous cannabinoids') is increasing our understanding of an array of medical conditions - among them pain, Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome and memory loss. Drug companies are working busily to develop new therapies based on this knowledge." In other words, marijuana works on the human mind and body because it mimics substances we already have, substances that God or evolution gave us. It merely elevates feelings we are already programmed to feel - but in a way that might both heal illness and give pleasure.

Of course, other, more dangerous drugs do this as well. They mimic adrenaline highs or serotonin rushes. But, unlike these other drugs, which have little or no therapeutic value and which require elaborate manufacture or processing, marijuana is a medicine that grows in the earth. It has been used medicinally for centuries. Banning it not only robs us of potential medical breakthroughs - since more widespread use would likely turn up new and unthought-of effects - but it also denies people what should be a perfectly legal pleasure. The tired argument that pot is a "gateway drug" to more serious narcotics is a fallacy. Sure, if you ask hardened drug addicts whether they started with pot, they usually say yes. But I doubt many of them are teetotalers, either. Why wasn't their first beer a gateway drug? And if you ask a bunch of white-collar professionals in their fifties whether they have ever smoked marijuana, they'd probably say yes as well. My favorite example of this is Al Gore. Here's a man who, by all accounts, smoked weed in college. For him, it was a gateway to one of the most responsible careers in public life you can imagine. Yet he was vice president in an administration that presided over almost five million arrests for marijuana use in eight years. The sole tangible way in which pot is a gateway to other illegal drugs is that it is illegal. The best way to end this easy path to worse narcotics is to legalize it and take it out of the hands of criminals and gangs.

Besides, it is only our puritanical culture that insists that health and pleasure are incompatible. Nature suggests the opposite. Good health is deeply, subtly pleasurable. And pleasure - with its reduction of stress and encouragement of positive thinking - is related to good health. I think of an old friend of mine with AIDS who, in a matter of months, turned from a strapping man into a skeleton. He had almost no immune system and no appetite. He spent most of his days in bed, trying to keep himself from throwing up his medications, moving from time to time to take the pressure off his bedsores, and listening to music as he faded in and out of fevered consciousness. Then he smoked pot. His distress eased; he loved listening to music more and more; his appetite slowly came back. He survived long enough to get the protease inhibitors that saved his life. He's now fit and healthy. He has no doubt that pot saved him.

And pleasure was part of his recovery. It helped dissipate the appalling pain and depression that beset him. It made him human again, because a central part of being human is the enjoyment of life's pleasurable gifts - physical, intellectual, artistic, culinary, mental. We need to play as much as we need to eat and sleep. It is bizarre that, in a country founded in part on the pursuit of happiness, we should now be expending so many resources on incarcerating and terrorizing so many people simply because they are doing what their Constitution promised. Pleasure isn't the same thing as happiness, of course, but the responsible, adult enjoyment of the pleasure of something God gave us is surely part of it. Our continued attack on a medicine that, by some divine fluke, is also highly enjoyable demeans everyone who participates in it. If you'll pardon the expression, it's high time we ended it.

Originally appeared May 17, 2001 in Update (San Diego).

Sometimes the anti-gay brigade can't help itself. Its activists drop their pretensions and reveal that what they're about isn't really "upholding traditional family values." Instead, it's anti-gay animus, pure and simple, that stokes their passion.

Here's an example. In Washington State, a bill aimed at curtailing bullying and harassment in public schools became stalled in the legislature after Christian conservatives complained that it amounted to a gay rights measure. How's that? The bill would have required school districts to set up policies against harassment, bullying and intimidation. It also would have mandated that districts train employees and volunteers in the prevention of bullying.

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? To most people, perhaps, but not to the anti-gay brigade. In lobbying against the measure, Christian rightists claimed it would amount to censorship of the bullies' rights to "condemn homosexuality." The director of the Christian Coalition of Washington made a dire prediction that this sort of thing would lead to homosexual sensitivity training in schools.

The State Attorney General offered to add language to the bill making it "perfectly clear" that it would not abridge anyone's right to criticize homosexuality on moral grounds. But the anti-gay brigade would have none of it, and the bill, which had sailed through the state Senate with bipartisan support, never made it out of the House Education Committee.

"I think that people thought that this was going to give some special protections to the gay and lesbian communities," said one supporter, Rep. Dave Quall. He commented that what opponents seemed to want was not an anti-harassment bill, but a bill that "protects people's rights to be a bully" under the guise of expressing their religious convictions - as if calling someone a "faggot" in the school yard is a theological discussion.

Let's think about this. Hurling homophobic epithets has become the prime means of harassing and humiliating any student - gay or straight - who is seen as vulnerable. Usually the victims have little choice but to put up with the constant stream of abuse, often internalizing the hate. On rare occasions, lawsuits have been brought against school administrators for their woeful failure to protect the kids in their charge, but it's hardly a viable course of action. And sometimes, in extreme cases, the victims become mentally unhinged, and seek violent revenge against their tormentors - or innocent parties.

None of this seems to concern the anti-gay brigade. If having teenage brownshirts terrorize gay youth (or those whom they perceive as gay) will ensure that homosexuals know their place (i.e., in the closet), then that's fine with them. God's in his heaven, and all is right with the world.

Need another example? In Vermont, that state's historic civil union legislation is under siege. Civil unions, passed last year, allow same-sex partners to formalize their legal relationship and to share all the benefits the state provides to married couples (as well as the same barriers to dissolution, which requires family court action - just like marriage). The anti-gay brigade is beside itself. But in Vermont, the state Supreme Court ruled that gay couples must have access to the more than 300 state rights and benefits that flow from marriage, if not the right to marriage itself.

So, if civil union can't be overturned outright, what is to be done? The solution they've hit on is to try to replace civil unions with what would be termed "reciprocal partnerships" which - get this - would allow unions between sons and mothers, brothers and sisters, and any other two people whether related by blood or not, as long as neither is currently wed to anyone else. That's to say, reciprocal partnerships would not be limited to those who now can join together in a committed and loving (and sexual) relationship, but would instead apply to any two unmarried people who want to share their health insurance, or obtain other benefits heretofore reserved traditionally for committed adult couples.

This means that in the guise of protecting traditional family values, the anti-gay brigade would like to see any two friends or blood relatives gain the special status that marriage has had in the law. You'd think that would be one of the worst possible scenarios if your goal is actually to protect marriage. But if your motivation is to see that gays don't gain equality to marriage rights and to demean gay couples who have joined together in civil unions, then by all means let's devalue the special relationship between committed couples. It's a wonder they didn't include "reciprocal relationships" between people and their pets in their bill (as long as both are otherwise unmarried).

The anti-gay brigade was hard pressed, in testimony before the state legislature, to show that there's a huge demand for reciprocal partnerships between a child and parent, siblings, or a nephew/niece and their aunt/uncle. On the other hand, many couples united in civil unions put forth a powerful case for leaving the law in place as is. "I do not want our civil union weakened by reciprocal partnerships that would equate my relationship [with her partner] to my relationship with my mother, sister, great aunt," said Deb Reed. "Those relationships are qualitatively different."

Obvious, right? Except when the anti-gay brigade is showing its true intentions, which aren't much different from the schoolyard bullies they seek to protect.

IF YOU'VE BEEN THINKING how nifty it would be to convert to heterosexuality, there's good news and bad news. The "good" news is a recent study concluded that, for a very small number of gays, it's possible. The "bad" news is don't bet on it. Whether or not you were born gay, you will almost certainly die gay. So you'd better learn to like it.

Proponents of so-called "reparative therapy" - the effort to make homosexuals into heterosexuals through a variety of techniques, including counseling and religious instruction - have treated the study as a vindication of their efforts. Gay political groups have reacted with horror, attacking the lead researcher himself as biased. Some news outlets described the study as "explosive."

However, it turns out the furor is much ado about very little. The study makes an exceedingly modest conclusion based on questionable methodology.

First, it's important to know what the study did not conclude. It did not conclude that conversion is possible for most - much less for all - gay people, even if they want to change. It did not conclude that homosexual orientation is a matter of choice, like whether to have the chicken or the beef in a restaurant. It certainly did not validate a particular method of conversion.

In fact, Robert Spitzer, the professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who led the study, does not endorse conversion efforts at all. Indeed, he was one of a group of pioneering psychiatrists who successfully lobbied to have homosexuality removed from the official list of mental disorders in 1973. If there's nothing disordered or sick about a trait, why change it?

What the Spitzer study did conclude is that (1) some (2) "highly motivated" (3) gay people can achieve (4) "good heterosexual functioning" (5) for a limited time (6) after more than a decade of effort. Each aspect of this rather limited conclusion deserves closer scrutiny.

Spitzer's study, which has not been published and has not been professionally reviewed for validity or methodology, is based on telephone interviews conducted with 200 people who claimed to have changed from homosexual to heterosexual attraction for a period of at least five years. Each interview lasted approximately 45 minutes, during which the subjects answered 60 questions about their sexual attractions and behavior in the period before and after their effort to change.

That's it. There were no face-to-face interviews; no tests for physiological reactions to various sexual stimuli; no objective verification of the respondents' answers; no long-term study; and no control group.

Of the 200 self-professed converts to heterosexuality, Spitzer concluded that only 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of the women had actually accomplished their goal.

Moreover, this was a very select group of people. It was not 200 gay people taken off the street at random and put through some conversion exercises to see what the outcome might be. Two-thirds of the participants were referred to Spitzer by "ex-gay ministries" that teach homosexuality is sinful or by a notoriously anti-gay outfit called the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. These groups have a vested interest in showing their effectiveness, so they're likely to submit for review only their strongest candidates.

Also, there's a good chance many of the participants had been indoctrinated with powerful and repeated doses of anti-gay ideology and religion. Such people are likely to be "highly motivated" (to borrow Spitzer's description of them) to report they've successfully changed even when they haven't.

We can't even be sure they were ever really "gay" at all. It could be that many of them were basically straight but had an occasional, experimental gay experience in their teens or 20s causing them so much guilt they decided to "change" so it would never happen again.

But since we know so little about the participants, having been acquainted with them over a telephone line for less than an hour each, it's hard to say anything about them with confidence.

The male participants claimed to have been trying to change for fourteen years; the women, for twelve years. That's about one-fifth of the adult years of the average person's life span.

And what was the return on this huge investment of time and energy? For the one-year period before the interviews, they achieved "good heterosexual functioning," defined by the researchers to mean having an emotionally satisfying relationship with a person of the opposite sex, having satisfactory sex with that person at least once a month, and rarely or never thinking of gay sex while doing it. Only 11 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women interviewed reported a complete absence of homosexual attraction. Even these figures are almost certainly high, since they are entirely self-reported.

What this study really proves is that, after a heroic and protracted effort, it is possible for a person suffering from an extraordinary level of internalized homophobia to refrain from having gay sex for a limited period of time. It shows that behavior can be modified; it does not show that a person's basic sexual orientation can be altered.

We didn't need a study to reach that conclusion. The long and tragic history of efforts to "repair" gay people - from electric shock to hormone injections to hectoring lectures about damnation - have amply demonstrated that it's possible to ruin gay people's lives. Unfortunately, this limited and flawed study will only fuel that destructive fire.

Originally appeared May 16, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

Dr. Robert Spitzer recently presented a controversial study to an American Psychiatric Association convention purporting to show that "some people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that."

But his new study is seriously flawed and instead of showing that some "highly motivated gays can change to heterosexuality," it nearly demonstrates the opposite.

Spitzer admits that he had "great difficulty" finding people who claimed to have changed their orientation from gay to straight. Ex-gay groups regularly claim to know of "thousands" of people who have "changed" or "left homosexuality." But after searching for nearly a year and a half, Spitzer could only find 274 possibilities.

Most of the subjects were referrals from religious ex-gay or "change" therapy groups and many were public advocates of change therapy who had a strong incentive to describe their past and present lives in terms of the narrative they absorbed about "overcoming" homosexuality.

Even so, 74 of these carefully selected subjects did not even minimally qualify as "changed." They were just people who had stopped having homosexual sex or stopped calling themselves homosexual.

I would not be any less homosexual if I stopped having gay sex or if I called myself "heterosexual." Yet those are exactly what the ex-gay groups call "healing," "change" and "freedom from homosexuality," and the only sort of change many "ex-gays" experience.

So how homosexual were the remaining 200 candidates before their supposed change? Few seem to have been fully homosexual. Most were bisexual.

Nearly 40 percent of the men said they had felt opposite-sex attraction "sometimes" as a teenager and more than half (54 percent) had engaged in heterosexual sex before trying to change. More than 10 percent of the men never engaged in any gay sex at all.

Barely 60 percent of the women said they felt same-sex attraction "often" as a teenager and nearly 60 percent said they had "sometimes" felt opposite-sex attraction as a teenager. Fully two-thirds (67 percent) had already engaged in heterosexual sex before trying to change.

How heterosexual did these not-fully-homosexual people become after their "change"?

Only 11 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women said they now had "no" homosexual thoughts, feelings, desires, yearning or actual sex. That means almost all the men and most of the women still had at least some minimal homosexual desires.

About 70 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women said they still had more than "minimal" homosexual desires, feelings, etc.

A third of the men still occasionally felt strong homosexual desire and even daydreamed about having gay sex.

Of the 112 men (out of the total 143) who acknowledged that they masturbated, more than half (56 percent) said they used homosexual fantasies some of the time and about one-third (31 percent) said they seldom had opposite-sex masturbation fantasies.

Barely a third (37 percent) of the women said they had no homosexual thoughts, desires, yearning or sex. Nearly half (45 percent) still felt homosexual desires sometimes. And more than a third said they had more than "minimal" homosexual desires.

As psychiatrist C.A. Tripp wrote two decades ago about another "change" therapy, "Anyone gullible enough to see this as any kind of secure change - or any change at all beyond a brittle, desperate, tenuous hold on a forced heterosexuality - is probably lost to reason."

So how did Spitzer define "change" as in "some people can change from gay to straight"?

His definition of "change" was "good heterosexual functioning" which included: a year in a "loving," more than adequate heterosexual relationship; fantasizing about gay sex during heterosexual sex less than 20 percent of the time; and heterosexual sex at least once a month.

If you think heterosexual sex "at least once a month" suggests something short of rampant heterosexual lust or even much heterosexual desire at all, you are probably on the right track.

But even by these loose criteria, one-third of the men (34 percent) and more than half the women (56 percent) failed to qualify. So even with the most likely candidates out of "thousands," a complete switch in sexual orientation scarcely seems to occur.

What Spitzer found instead is some degree of movement along the sexual continuum by people who are fundamentally bisexual. No doubt that is "change," so people can "change" in a sense. But this kind of change is very old news.

In his 1948 volume on the human male, pioneer sex researcher Alfred Kinsey wrote that in his thousands of interviews he noted "frequent changes in ratings of individuals on the heterosexual-homosexual scale ... in the course of their lives" (p. 663).

Since some people spontaneously shift somewhat along the continuum over time - by chance, opportunity or a new perception of attractiveness - it seems more than interesting that Spitzer could find so few who could force themselves to make significant change by conscious effort using therapy, counseling, prayer or will-power.

Originally appeared May 9, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

Most of us can recall anti-gay taunts during childhood, whether or not they were directed toward us. I remember the first time I heard someone taunt someone else with "homo"--I didn't know what it meant, but it sounded bad.

In the back of my elementary school bus, large sixth graders would make vicious chants using faggot and fag and homo and 'mo. I heard these slurs bounced around the hallways almost playfully, and spit out by boys who were about to fight. I heard them in quiet corners of the playground, during social events in front of parents and in the middle of the classroom with teachers present.

I never heard any adult insist that the slurs stop.

Bullying playground insults are sometimes dismissed as a harmless rite of passage, but words have power. I knew being gay was bad before I knew what being gay was. Cathy Renna, GLAAD's news media director, explained the power of taunting in The Gay & Lesbian Review: "We learn the emotional content of a word before we learn its definition. As the meaning becomes better understood by us, we often get another surge of emotion--one of power. By using this word or that in the presence of someone else, we can assume the mantle of privilege, for example, or the power to put someone else down. Now if just using a word can be an easy ticket to status and power, the seduction of its use can be irresistible."

Renna was talking about Eminem's use of faggot - but the same can be said of the pervasive use of homophobic slurs on the playground and in the classroom.

Up until now, childhood homophobia may have seemed like it was only a gay issue. But late last month, researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that 30 percent of children in sixth through 10th grades reported either bullying other children, being bullied or both.

Let's say that again. Thirty percent of American children have been affected by bullying. Yet an editorial in the same issue of JAMA points out, "These issues have not been as prominent a part of the last two decades of public health efforts to prevent violence as they should."

Bullying, the JAMA study makes clear, has deleterious effects on all involved. Bullies have higher rates of alcohol and tobacco use and are four times more likely to be convicted of criminal behavior by their 20s than those who don't bully. The majority of bullies had at least one conviction--more than a third had more. As for the victims of bullies, they have higher rates of anxiety disorders, depression and low self-esteem. They report troubled relationships with classmates and a high degree of loneliness. Both bullies and victims were more likely than other children to get into fights.

Interestingly, anti-bullying networks in the United Kingdom (where the problem of bullying has been taken much more seriously much earlier than in the U.S.) note that homophobic bullying is the hardest type of bullying to stop. Not because it's more venomous than other types of bullying, but because teachers feel like their hands are tied.

Education and intervention turn out to be the keys to stopping childhood bullying - schools with intervention programs report up to a 50 percent decrease in bullying. But because many teachers are forbidden to "promote" homosexuality, they are afraid to educate students about the realities of gay and lesbian life in order to stop homophobic bullying - in case their actions are seen as being too pro-gay.

Even after the bullying study was released, teachers and activists in the United States continue to fight that same battle. Just last week in Olympia, Wash., state legislators blocked an anti-bullying bill because Christian right constituents protested that it could lead to homosexual sensitivity training in schools.

This is ridiculous, because the children who are targeted, the children who are hurt, aren't necessarily gay children - they are all children. They are children who are being labeled as faggots before they reach puberty; before they even know that their sexual orientation is; in fact, before many of them know what sexual orientation means.

So bullying will be permitted to continue, simply because school districts are afraid of gays and lesbians. Thirty percent of American children will continue to suffer now, simply because school districts are worried that positive images of gays and lesbian might be harmful sometime in the future.

This would be food for satire if it weren't so disastrous. Though the authors of the study didn't link bullies or victims to violence, it seems clear there must be some effect. Gay bashers, after all, are nothing more than bullies with bats. And some of the school shootings, such as the one at Columbine, seem to have bullies' victims - especially victims of homophobic bullying - at their tragic hearts.

Homophobic bullying is more than just a gay and lesbian issue. It is a national public health issue that leads to dangerous social consequences. We know how to stop it. It is irresponsible and inhumane that we do not.

Originally appeared May 2, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

It is a striking fact that at least half of the dozen most important American composers of the twentieth century were gay.

They include Charles Griffes, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Virgil Thomson and Gian-Carlo Menotti. Except for the earlier Griffes, each made lasting contributions during American music's "Golden Age" (1935-1955) as well as later.

Of these, only Menotti (born 1911) remains alive and active as a musical entrepreneur, stage director and composer.

On July 7, he will turn 90.

Born in Italy, Menotti came to the United States at 17 to study composition at the Curtis Institute. Virtually the first person he met was 18-year-old Samuel Barber, "spoiled," he recalled, but "very handsome."

The two quickly became fast friends, partners, and creative stimuli for each other. For 30 years between 1943 and 1973 they lived together in a large L-shaped house in the countryside north of New York. After a painful separation, Menotti moved to Scotland, which is now his home.

Menotti is best known as an opera composer. He has written more than 20, of which the most popular is the familiar Christmas opera "Amahl and the Night Visitors" (1951).

Menotti said he did not set out to be an opera composer, but the surprise success of his early "Amelia Goes to the Ball" (1936) decisively changed his plans. The short, tuneful overture quickly became one of Menotti's "Greatest Hits."

Barber often teased - and irritated - Menotti by telling him that "Amelia" remained his best opera.

Later operas include "The Medium" (1947), "The Consul" (1950) and "The Saint of Bleecker Street" (1954). Each ran for several months on Broadway and the latter two won Pulitzer prizes. "The Consul" is generally regarded as his finest work.

Many of Menotti's more recent operas have been "children's operas," including fantasies like "The Bride from Pluto" ("She looks like a pinball machine," one character frets) and "Help, Help, the Globolinks," which pokes fun at modern music by having the invaders from outer space talk in electronic music, afraid of melodies.

Some might say that Menotti's best opera is Barber's "Vanessa" (1958), perhaps the greatest American opera, since Menotti wrote the libretto (the words) that Barber set to music.

Menotti once explained that he hums melodies for all his librettos as he is writing them and he hummed his own melodies for the words he wrote for Barber: "So there is a Menotti's 'Vanessa' floating around somewhere," he said.

Later, when Barber was writing his own music for the words Menotti would shout, "Oh no, it doesn't go like that!" and he said "Barber would get very angry at me."

But for all this, perhaps I am not alone in preferring Menotti's orchestral music. It is not as well known, but I think the music is better. It is not shaped and limited by words and it gives Menotti a chance to develop his musical themes instead of just moving from one to another.

Let me give a few examples.

• The Piano Concerto in F (1945) is an exuberant, light-hearted work, full of catchy tunes and rhythmic vitality. The middle section is a soulful melody that would fit well into one of Menotti's operas. The last section has a brief allusion to George Gershwin whose own earlier piano concerto is in the same key.
• The Violin Concerto (1952) is a melodic work throughout, with a haunting, unforgettable first section and another of Menotti's warmly lyrical songs as the middle section. I do not know why this piece is not more popular.
• The later Triple Concerto (1970) is lighter, playful piece more like 18th century concertos where different instruments alter and play each other's tunes.
• The ballet "Sebastian" (1944) has a melodramatic plot set in 17th century Venice, but the music is excellent. The gently rocking "Barcarole," is often played separately and counts as another of Menotti's "Greatest Hits."
• Finally, the fantasy-ballet "The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore" (1956) is a satire on mindless conformity and equally mindless artistic fads and innovations. For this little work Menotti wrote some of his most ingratiating chamber music.

The plot involves a poet who lives in a castle and takes a different fantastic pet for a walk each Sunday. The townspeople imitate him, callously killing their old pets and getting new ones each week.

When the poet is dying, the townspeople visit him only to find that all his own pets are still alive and surround him at his deathbed. "How could I destroy the children of my fancy?" he asks the shamefaced townspeople. "What would my life have been without their company?"

Barber, who died in 1981, asked that this last section be performed at his own funeral.

In a 1985 interview Menotti said that when he dies he would like to be buried beside Barber where there is a plot waiting for him.

Barber instructed that if Menotti is buried elsewhere, a marker should be put on the empty plot reading "To the memory of two friends."

"But," Menotti said, "I fully expect to be with him."

Originally appeared in slightly different form May 2, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

Our own fear is not the only thing that keeps us closeted. Sometimes the fear of others can affect us more powerfully - especially the dark fears of our families.

When we come out, our families have a rainbow of reactions. Some of us are lucky enough to have families - or at least family members - who welcome the news of our sexual orientation with open arms. Others hold such anti-gay positions themselves that they can't reconcile their love for us with their hatred of gays and lesbians, and so they kick us out of their houses and shut us out of their hearts.

But the majority of families fall in the messy middle. They love us, but don't know how to handle the idea of us being gay, lesbian or bisexual. Stereotypes may be all they know about our new community and they are afraid for us. Will we contract AIDS and die? Will we be lonely and beaten and isolated? Will we be fired from our jobs and denied housing?

But perhaps more importantly - and more invidiously - they are afraid for themselves.

Particularly if they don't already live in diverse communities. They look around and think that they are the only ones like them with a gay family member. They don't see the gay uncles and lesbian aunts tucked away in the closets of other families. They don't see the prodigal bisexual daughters and the queer transgender cousins who have moved to cities far away. They only see themselves and know they are different.

And so they worry. Our parents may be concerned that others will think they are bad parents, that they raised us wrong. Our grandparents may worry that others will think they have an immoral family or that they will lose their social standing; our siblings may fret that others may think they have gay tendencies, too. And the one gay, lesbian or bisexual relative that even we don't know about may shake with fear, thinking that his or her closet is about to be burst open before he or she is ready.

This leads to a strange disconnect with our families. They may like our significant others, but be unable to talk to us about gay issues. They may love us and continue to treat us like a valued family member, but refuse to acknowledge our sexual orientation in public, even to close friends. They may buy us the occasional rainbow-themed gift, but ask us not to tell other people they know - our fathers, our grandparents, our siblings, our grandchildren, the neighbors - because those are people "who wouldn't be able to handle it."

What they are really saying is that they themselves can't handle other people knowing - because they are afraid.

Most of us have been conditioned by society to believe that homosexuality is something less than normal. But those of us who are gay, lesbian or bisexual are driven to overcome our fear of abnormality and isolation because before we are out, we already feel abnormal and isolated in our home communities. We already know we don't belong - or that there is a part of us that doesn't belong. We come out because we want to find someone to love, or someone to have sex with, or simply someone - or a community of someones - who understand what we feel. We come out because we cannot do otherwise.

But our families don't have that same motivation. Our families, most of them, have communities that they are happy with already, communities chosen because they share similar values, interests, worries. They don't want to lose their place in a society that they feel safe in.

They can't possibly understand that by coming out as a family with a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender member that they will become part of another community, the GLBT community, which will value them for their support. They do not yet know that they are only one family amid dozens in their communities who are hiding gay family members - and that, by coming out, they create room for other families to come out as well.

That's where we have to help. We need to show our families that there are many places in the world where being GLBT is both accepted and celebrated. It is not enough for our families to just know us--because then we become the exception. They need to know our friends and our extended families. They need to come home with us and see other gays and lesbians holding hands on the street. They need to meet the straight people who love us and the children we babysit and the softball teams we play for. They need to be assured that we live happy lives much like theirs. They need to learn that being accepted as gay is not an exception at all. In many communities, it is the rule.

WE OUGHT TO BE ashamed of the way the gay community has responded to the death of Jesse Dirkhising.

At the age of 13, Jesse was befriended by an adult gay couple in Rogers, Ark., who convinced him to engage in kinky sex play.

On the night of Sept. 26, 1999, Joshua McCabe, then 21, acted out a detailed bondage scene designed by boyfriend Davis Carpenter, 37, feeding the teen tranquilizers, strapping him facedown on the bed, stuffing dirty underwear in his mouth and taping it over with duct tape, and repeatedly sodomizing him. When McCabe stopped to eat a sandwich, he noticed that Jesse had stopped breathing and called for an ambulance. The youth died that night of asphyxiation.

Conservatives have jumped on the case as proof that the mainstream media and the gay press are less willing to report stories when gays are perpetrators than when we are victims.

The underlying aim of these activists was undoubtedly to publicize the case as an example of how they say gay men are predatory toward the nation's youth, and how deviant gay sex - meaning all gay sex, in their eyes - can kill. Backed into a corner, most of the people we count on to speak responsibly on behalf of gay America let their knee-jerk defensiveness overwhelm any compassion over the awful death of this gay teen.

Responsibility for the death of Jesse Dirkhising no doubt lies primarily with the two men who drugged, raped and tortured him. But there are important lessons for us to be taken from this tragedy.

First and foremost, our leaders should reaffirm that gay adults bear an awesome responsibility to respect the confusion and innocence that comes with youth. Teens the age of Jesse Dirkhising cannot meaningfully consent to sex play of any sort, much less the extreme S&M scene that led to his death. Gay newspaper columnist Paul Varnell, who argues in these pages this week that straight society is more to blame for Jesse's death, made a public case in May 1999 that "child sexual abuse," a term he always bracketed in quotation marks, was in fact not harmful to many teenage males, some of whom found it enjoyable and adventuresome.

Varnell by no means bears personal responsibility for Jesse's death four months later, but he does owe it to his readers to re-examine his thesis about whether we can all "breathe easier, glad that something we thought was harmful turned out not to be so harmful after all."

Second, the leaders of the S&M and leather communities should loudly repeat that responsible gays should steer well clear of the line between the fantasy of non-consensual sex and taking physical advantage over another. The violent end that Jesse met may be unusual, but that makes it all the more important to condemn any scene involving physically dangerous settings and drugs that inhibit good judgment.

It will not be immediately apparent to mainstream Americans, and many gays, that fantasizing about raping and torturing another human bears no connection with acting out that fantasy.

This newspaper reported last year that even the larger gay adult studios are producing videos that depict gang rape. The victim, almost always younger and soft-featured, usually winds up enjoying and consenting to the attack - an especially dangerous message to send. These videos and magazines like them almost never feature the "safe words" that are the keystone of consensual sadomasochistic sex.

The burden is rightly on those who would advocate and celebrate such fantasies to make the case that they are not contributing to a culture of violence and abuse that is more likely to victimize its participants. Third, those with a pulpit to talk about gay male culture ought to explore publicly the dangers that can come from treating each other as sex objects, not human beings.

Joshua McCabe told police that he didn't even know Jesse's last name, even though he had spent considerable time with the youth and had sex with him several times before the night of the rape. He told a fellow inmate that his only use for Jesse was for sex every now and then.

Feminists have long made a connection between how straight men objectify women sexually and how that can lead to disrespect, dehumanization, mistreatment and worse. The powerful story of Jesse Dirkhising presents a unique opportunity to see how the same dynamic plays out among gay men. To many, even acknowledging cultural factors like adult-teen sex, S&M sex play and sexual objectification is too dangerous to countenance. They worry that conservatives will enjoy a P.R. bonanza, trumpeting how even gays admit their deviance comes with a body count.

Sure enough, a Washington Times cover story on the Dirkhising case quoted from a Southern Voice editorial that merely asked the question whether gay culture bore any responsibility for what happened in Rogers, Ark. We can reliably expect more of the same anytime we take responsibility for addressing the social ills within our own community.

But we betray our own kind if we allow that fear to silence us. And we make ourselves hypocrites when we then turn to straight America and ask it to accept its complicity in violence against us.

Just this week, Judy Shepard told a college audience in Hollins, Va., that she does not blame the two men who robbed and beat her son Matthew and left him to die on a Wyoming fencepost.

"I blame society for giving them permission to kill Matt," she said instead. "They never thought they would be in any kind of trouble for killing another fag."

As long as words associated with gay men and lesbians are perceived as insults, she argued, society will implicitly condone anti-gay violence. Those are powerful words, and they're hard for most heterosexuals to hear because they don't personally harbor violent feelings towards us and certainly don't feel responsible for the horrific behavior of Matthew's killers.

If we want them to take seriously Judy Shepard's call to change how mainstream society views us, then we should happily and eagerly take up the cause of rooting out anything in our own backyard that could have contributed to the death of Jesse Dirkhising.

Of course there are important differences in how the two young men died. Matthew's brutal treatment was largely the result of hate for him as a gay man. The subsequent calls for bias crime legislation introduced a public policy element that justified the massive media coverage.

Jesse's brutal treatment was not the result of hatred toward a group of people, but more accurately was the product of gross disregard for the worth of a gay kid. That's not something that legislation can address, but it sure is an issue that ought to be of central importance to our community.

Religious conservatives instinctively understand the damage George W. Bush is inflicting on the dying and discredited anti-gay aspects of their world-view.

By appointing Scott Evertz, an openly gay man, to head the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, Bush has crossed an important political and cultural threshold. Incredibly, some gay leaders and writers - who once predicted Bush would never hire an openly gay person - have missed the significance of this moment.

Just as it took a scion of wealth to bring us a New Deal, a Southerner to end segregation, an ardent anti-Communist to open diplomatic relations with China, and a Democrat to end welfare as we knew it, it will take a conservative Republican to cement the gains made by the gay civil rights movement over the years. Bush's action both reflects and reinforces the emerging national consensus that gays should have an equal place in the life of the nation.

Evertz becomes the first openly gay person ever appointed by a Republican president. He also becomes the first gay person to lead the federal AIDS office. Either of these alone would be significant; together, they are a watershed.

The appointment not only proves Bush's oft-professed willingness to hire people regardless of sexual orientation, but it also signals the importance he places on combating AIDS. Just before the Evertz appointment, Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that AIDS is a national security issue. When Republicans call something a matter of national security, you know we mean business.

Evertz will report directly to Margaret La Montagne, Bush's domestic policy advisor, which means he will have access to the highest levels of decisionmaking in the White House. He will also be part of a task force of heavy-hitters - including Secretary of State Colin Powell and gay-friendly Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson - who will address the long-ignored international aspects of the AIDS epidemic.

It's instructive to review the reaction of some gay politicos who toiled mightily to find fault with Bush despite the appointment. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, the organizational embodiment of the gay left in Washington, conceded it was "an historic, positive step," but devoted more than half of its press release on the subject to criticism of Bush's proposed budget freezing or barely increasing some elements of federal AIDS funding. This reaction was predictable.

Far more disappointing was the response of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), usually a more sensible and centrist voice for gays in Washington. HRC spokesperson David Smith pooh-poohed the appointment of Evertz, comparing it with the alleged 152 openly gay appointees under Bill Clinton.

Yet none of the Clinton appointees served in a position more critical to gays than the one Evertz will hold. Few, if any, of Clinton's gay appointees had the direct access to the White House that Evertz will have. Personally, I'd rather have one openly gay person serving as the AIDS czar than a hundred appointees under Clinton, the most important of whom labored over patents, housing, and relations with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

The most tortured reaction from the left criticized the appointment because it supposedly represents - I love this - identity politics. Thus, "Queer in America" author Michelangelo Signorile, whose career has skillfully exploited identity politics, has suddenly found Jesus on the issue: "[T]here are pitfalls and limitations to identity-based politics," he announced in a column, "and we're about to find out the hard way."

Similarly, a board member for the Milwaukee gay community center worried the appointment would reinforce stereotypes about gay men: "I almost would have rather heard that a woman was heading [the AIDS office]."

Never mind that many of the country's top experts on AIDS are gay men (who are still disproportionately afflicted by the disease) and that not one of Clinton's three appointees to the position was gay. For people like Signorile, Bush is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

Religious conservatives have a far better grasp of what's happening now on gay issues in the GOP. They were furious at news of the Evertz appointment and became downright apoplectic when it was learned, just days later, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had hired another openly gay man to screen applicants for jobs in the Defense Department.

James Dobson, an influential evangelical leader, charged that Bush is "creating confusion and frustration for millions of pro-family, social conservatives." The Family Research Council complained that the appointment "sends the wrong message [about homosexuality] to the American people." Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition indicted the Bush administration for being "absolutely disloyal" to religious conservatives and for "stab[bing] us in the back." Robert Knight, on behalf of Concerned Women for America, accused Bush of "advancing the homosexual agenda through appointments."

The most noteworthy reaction on the right came from Republican leaders in Congress, who said ... nothing. Knee-jerk homophobes in the GOP today, like hold-out segregationist Democrats in the 1960s, are increasingly isolated politically.

When the history of the gay civil rights movement is written, the spring of 2001 will mark an important season of consolidation. It was then, the history will say, that a Republican president finally had the courage to defy the anti-gay rogues in his own party. Though such progress is reversible, Bush, cautiously but perceptibly, is truly "advancing the homosexual agenda," which is, after all, about nothing more than equality.