IGF CultureWatch

Originally published May 4, 2000, in Bay Windows (Boston).

HERE IN VERMONT, I had read and heard, again and again, that "civil union" is "marriage" by another name. Just this past week, a letter to the Rutland (Vermont) Herald sounded that warning (along with the "fact" that homosexuals use children for sexual pleasures at a rate that is 30 times greater than that for heterosexuals). Good people - by definition, only straight people can be good - must oppose civil unions, because traditional marriage is threatened by the legal recognition of gay couples.

I'll admit that at first I didn't understand how two gay people getting hitched threaten Ozzie and Harriet next door. But the debate up here has made me see a bit more clearly where the threat lies and why some folks believe that civil unions and marriage are synonymous.

Forget, for a moment, that the civil union bill means that civilly recognized gay and straight couples in Vermont will enjoy identical state benefits under the law. (I have a harder time forgetting that we won't get federal benefits under the state bill.) Strangely enough, very few opponents to civil unions have argued against giving gay couples benefits. In fact, the leader of the main local pro-traditional marriage organization conceded before the state Senate Judiciary Committee that she personally didn't object to giving gay couples the legal benefits that straight married Vermonters enjoy.

So where's the beef?

For many people - and for me, as well - to say you are married means that you have had a marriage ceremony. And while that ceremony can be as simple as taking an oath before a civil magistrate or as furtive as an out-of-state elopement, for many people the ceremony means "wedding." And we all know what "wedding" means: tuxedos and taffeta, churches and clergy, organs and organdy.

I'll wager that the supporters of traditional marriage follow the same thought trail as I do. Since they cannot see how any couple can be legally recognized without a wedding of some kind, to them "getting unionized" means "getting married." They balk at the idea of two men or two women standing before a minister and vowing, "before God and these witnesses," to love and to cherish the other person "until death us do part." For them, there's either one bride too many or one too few, so there can be no kiss. To them, the whole idea of gay unions is ludicrous, because they cannot imagine what a gay wedding would look like.

Now, I know a few gay couples who want an old-fashioned wedding ("love and honor, yes, but not obey"). And I've been to a few gay weddings myself. But the debate up here reminded me: I really don't need or want a wedding. Church-goer that I am, I don't need my church's blessing on something that is already blest. My partner and I hate wearing tuxedos. And as a professional pianist, I can do without the organ.

Saying that we don't want a wedding tells me we don't want traditional marriage either. Let the straight couples have the marriage ceremony. And let them have marriage, traditional or otherwise.

Make no mistake: Mike and I do want the rights, benefits, and responsibilities that married people enjoy. But I don't require the rite to obtain the rights. And that's the beauty of Vermont's law: the state provides us benefits without the societal expectation that we'll have a wedding.

In fact, the opponents to gay marriage have a point that "marriages without weddings," which is what civil unions are, will weaken traditional marriage. Vermont's civil union law separates the religious aspects of the wedding ceremony from the civil recognition of committed couples. To my knowledge, no lawsuit has yet prevailed that has asked the government to separate religious marriage from civil marriage, even though we already separate religious and civil divorce.

But we would all benefit from a separation between church and state when it comes to marriage. Have a civil ceremony to receive the legal benefits of coupledom. Then, for those find the rite important, have a separate religious ceremony. Give marriage back to the church where it belongs. (My! It all sounds like Europe!)

So here is our opportunity to point out how civil unions are not only different from but are also better than traditional marriage. I want to be able to visit Mike in the hospital. I don't need to exchange rings to secure that right. I want him to inherit our property tax-free. I don't need a ministerial pronouncement to make sure that happens. I can do without the flowers and the caterer. I can do without a kiss in front of God's representative on earth. A party at our house with family and friends will be fine by me. (We're planning to certify our civil union at our home around the time of our ninth anniversary this October.)

Getting "C.U.'ed" works for us. Granted, Mike and I will only get the benefits that the state of Vermont confers upon us. But I can see the day when, after other states have followed Vermont and passed civil union bills of their own, someone on Capitol Hill will introduce federal civil union legislation, granting to gay and lesbian couples all of the federal rights, benefits, and responsibilities that married people enjoy.

I'm hoping it will be someone from the Vermont delegation who proposes the federal legislation. And yes, I'd like to see that legislation enacted sooner rather than later.

But if the Feds don't want to call it "marriage": that too will be just fine by me. By then, Mike and I will have a number of years behind us being "union men."

First appeared May 4, 2000, in The Weekly News (Miami).

America is a schizoid nation, as I've commented before. But lately, the number of events indicating progress in the struggle for gay and lesbian equality - right alongside those indicating the persistence of anti-gay intransigence and backlash - has presented a startling contrast. More and more, when it comes to acceptance and support of its lesbian and gay citizens, America seems like two nations, divided and unequal. Let me show you what I mean.

Progress: On April 26, Vermont's Gov. Howard Dean signed into law a bill creating "civil unions," a legal structure parallel to marriage for gay and lesbian couples. The landmark legislation extends to same-sex couples the same state law protections and responsibilities available to spouses in a marriage. The significance of this breakthrough, I believe, has not yet been fully grasped. Over the coming years, the Vermont model will be the new benchmark in the fight for legal equality and first-class citizenship.

Backlash: 32 states, including California, have passed laws denying recognition to same-sex marriages. And the federal Defense of Marriage Act, passed with bipartisan support (including the backing of Al Gore and Bill Clinton), denies same-sex couples all benefits available to married couples under federal law in areas such as taxes, Social Security, and immigration.

Backlash: In Georgia, a mother is being held in "willful contempt" by a county judge because she lives with her same-sex partner. Jean Ann Vawter and her partner participated in a religious commitment ceremony in 1996. But last year Ms. Vawter's ex-husband charged her with violating their divorce agreement by exposing the couple's children to her lesbian relationship; a Walton County judge subsequently ruled the relationship was "unwholesome" and ordered that Ms. Vawter and her children leave the home they have shared with her partner for more than four years. The same week that Vermont's legislature approved civil unions, Ms. Vawter filed an appeal with the Supreme Court of Georgia, asking that the state allow her to keep her family intact.

Backlash: On May 3, Mississippi became the third state, after Florida and Utah, to legally ban same-sex couples from adopting children. After the Mississippi Senate gave final, unanimous approval to the anti-gay bill, Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, a Democrat, signed the measure into law, supporters said the legislation was spurred in part by Vermont's new law giving same-sex couples the benfits of marriage. Similar bans on gay adoptions are pending in other states.

Progress: Nationwide, a growing number of localities and businesses now offer some form of domestic partnership benefits, usually including health care coverage, to the same-sex partners of their employees.

Backlash: Again, the same week that Vermont approved civil unions, the Virginia Supreme Court unanimously struck down a law in Arlington County (across the river from Washington, D.C.) that gave health insurance benefits to the domestic partners of local government employees. Voting 7 to 0, the court held that, on technical grounds, the benefits plan was "not a reasonable method of implementing [the county's] applied authority." A concurring opinion signed by three justices stated that "there can be no question that Arlington County seeks to recognize, tacitly, relationships that are violative of the public policy of this commonwealth." Virginia, like several other conservative states, still has a "sodomy law" on its books that technically makes felons of consenting adults who engage in same-sex relations in the privacy of their homes.

The conservative Family Foundation, which paid for the legal challenge to the Arlington County benefits plan, celebrated its overthrow. "Obviously, this is a victory for Virginia families," crowed the group's press release. Just how denying health benefits to same-sex partners in committed relationships might strengthen Virginia families was not explained.

Progress: According to a trends report from advertising giant Young & Rubicam, "Gay men and lesbians are increasingly finding themselves the focus of savvy marketers' attention," and gay-marketing consultants are increasingly helping mainstream firms reach these consumers. Ad revenues at gay publications rose 20 percent last year. It has now become acceptable for companies to openly solicit gay consumers as a desirable market segment without fearing repercussions from anti-gay forces.

Backlash: The gay left is appalled at corporate sponsorship of gay events, including the Millennium March on Washington. In an interview with wired.com, Alexandra Chasen, author of "Selling Out," a book condemning corporate influence on the gay community, says: "People think, 'They're advertising to us, then they must like us' ... That's dangerous." David Elliot of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force complains, "When these corporations advertise, they'll most likely show only middle-class white gay men." And an article in the left-wing magazine Mother Jones frets, "Are queers subverting capitalism? Or is it the other way around?"

Progress: Corey Johnson, the co-captain of a suburban Massachusetts high school football team, let it be known that he's gay and, afterwards, found support from his teammates. His coach, with the cooperation of the school's administration, arranged for a team meeting. Johnson stood in front of his fellow athletes and told them, "Guys, I called this meeting because I have something I really want to tell all of you. ... The reason I'm telling you all is because I don't want you hearing it from somebody else. I'm coming out as an openly gay man." His teammates and classmates rallied around the popular 17-year-old. Johnson noted that the high school's Gay-Straight Alliance has been a major plus. In March, Boston's Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network bestowed its Visionary Award on Johnson and his teammates.

Backlash: The Salt Lake City School District continues to forbid students from forming a high school club to discuss gay and lesbian issues. In 1996, after students proposed a support group for gay, lesbian, and bisexual students, the Salt Lake City School District banned all "nonacademic" clubs, and in 1998 a federal judge upheld the ban. A new lawsuit has been brought by students trying to form a student club with an explicit academic tie to history, sociology, government and biology classes, since it would look at homosexual perspectives on all those subjects. The assistant superintendent in charge of approving academic clubs refused the application because, in her words, the impact, experience, and contributions of gays and lesbians are "not taught in the courses you cite," and thus the club was not adequately related to curriculum. Apparently, filling in the gaps left by teachers who can't or won't discuss gay and lesbian issues is, in Salt Lake City, not a legitimate academic purpose.

Progress: For the first time, a major GOP presidential contender - John McCain - actively courted gay voters. Even the party establishment's nominee - George W. - finally agreed to meet with a dozen openly gay supporters and said he was a "better person" for listening to their stories. Nationwide, the number of lesbians and gay men holding elective office continues to advance, from school boards up to the US Congress, where Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Barney Frank (D-Mass.), and Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) are "out." The mayors of Tempe, Ariz., and Plattsburgh, N.Y., are openly gay men (and Republicans!).

Backlash: A gay-bashing Republican National Committee fundraising letter warned, "If a liberal Democrat is elected president and has a liberal majority in Congress, you can also bet our government will be endorsing the homosexual lifestyle before too long." The letter arrived in mailboxes the same day Bush told Republican gays, "I welcome gay Americans into my campaign."

Schizoid nation, indeed! Perhaps it will ultimately prove a good thing to fight the thousands of small fights for legal equality county by county, district by district, and state by state. That's how hearts and minds are turned, after all. So, in one sense, the gains that gays have made in some jurisdictions represent a triumph for pluralism and diversity, and for localities acting as "laboratories of democracy."

But there's a darker side as well. What does it do to a nation's sense of itself when one state grants spousal rights, while another forbids same-sex adoption or stops a county from granting partner's benefits? Or when students in one state are protected against anti-gay harassment and supported by administrators, while another state won't even tolerate the existence of a gay-straight alliance? How long can a house divided stand?

Here's hoping that sooner, rather than later, something's got to give.

A SPECTER HAUNTS THE "QUEER" LEFT: the normalization of gay life. Over the past decade, in movies, on television and in the theater, gay people have enjoyed unprecedented visibility. Further, the representations of gay people in these media have been fairer than ever before in showing the diversity of gay life.

Consider movies. Starting in about the mid-Nineties, fairness began to creep in. Priest and Philadelphia treated us to ordinary people who are sincere, responsible, hardworking, devoted to friends and family, and gay. These movies strongly suggested that in a better world, that last attribute would be among the least important facts about the characters. Their troubles stemmed from others' prejudice, not from their homosexuality. In movies like the Academy Award-winning American Beauty, it's homophobia that creates the problems.

Look at TV. Television shows from Frasier to Friends have woven gays into the story lines without much fanfare. Comedy Central regularly features openly gay comics. The "Will" of Will & Grace is an openly gay lawyer who dresses conservatively, lacks stereotypically gay mannerisms and gestures, and has all the usual vices and virtues you'd expect in a sitcom character. Will's hilarious friend Jack does have campy flair but at least he's seen as no more self-absorbed than any other character.

You would expect the American Family Association, the television reverends, and the various other anti-gay monitors of our culture to criticize such routine portrayal of unexceptional gay characters. And so they do; the routinization of gay life subverts every stereotype their prejudice feeds upon. But if you think they are alone in their alarm at the emergence of the ordinary homosexual, you are wrong. They are joined, for somewhat different reasons to be sure, by the self-described queer left.

The novelist Michael Cunningham, in a film review not long ago for the New York Times entitled "Just Your Ordinary (Gay) Guy," wrings his hands at the thought of masculine, "assimilated" gay men who are "just like everybody else, except for one little thing." Cunningham praises the character Diego in the film Strawberry and Chocolate. He likes the fact that Diego is "swishy and coy," worships the opera star Maria Callas, fusses over his collection of French teacups, and suffers unrequited love for a straight man. He praises the character - many of whose traits would fit neatly into the worldview of Lou Sheldon and the Traditional Values Coalition - as a "step in the right direction" in the portrayal of gay characters.

Other examples of this type of cultural criticism abound. There's the recent piece in Harper's in which the author lambastes periodicals like Out and Poz for showing clean, contented, freshly scrubbed gay women and men. Where's the unseemliness, the sex advertisements, the fetishists? asks the contemptuous writer. Pat Robertson might have asked the same thing.

The queer left saw cultural shift coming and tried to head it off at the pass. In her 1995 book, Virtual Equality, Urvashi Vaid denies that homosexuals are "just like" heterosexuals and describes gays as almost a subspecies of Homo sapiens, with their own peculiar values and ideas. In The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Daniel Harris laments the demise of gay camp and kink. A few years ago, a columnist writing under the pseudonym "Orland Outland" for San Francisco Frontiers magazine, bitterly criticized gays "who have put their own sense of being alien behind" them.

You may remember Luke Sissyfag, the former ACT-UP activist who once distributed graphically illustrated condom packages to schoolchildren, regularly pranced before cameras in lipstick, eyeliner, and pink plastic hair barrettes, and championed the idea of a natural gay "queerness." He now calls himself Luke Montgomery and appears on fundamentalist radio programs to decry the "gay lifestyle" as "totally devoid of any moral character" and consisting of nothing but rampant sex and continual drug use. He says anti-discrimination laws are "fascistic," promoted by a gay community that doesn't feel good about itself.

Some say Luke's present and past personas are inconsistent; I say they are perfectly consistent. If there is one person who literally combines in one body the fear felt by both the queer left and the anti-gay right that homosexuals might one day be considered ordinary members of society, it is surely he. Whether he's trashing us or defending us, it's all the same. He wants gays to be seen as somehow special.

And that's just it, isn't it? Behind all the talk of revolutionary values, the need for a "sense of being alien," the supposed subversion of gender roles, lies the fear of being ordinary. It is the childlike need to have everyone's attention. If it is ordinary to be gay, there's nothing special about you on that account. You have no secret rings or rites, no hidden passages or esoteric language, no distinct set of values, no special insight into human suffering or longing. You're only an individual who must make your own way in the world, unable to depend on the safety of belonging to an elect tribe.

It is mythologizing and harmful to show gays as the queer left has romanticized us - as sexual revolutionaries, with alien natures and values, threatening and iconoclastic, angry, ennobled, and enlightened by our oppression, not "just like them" in the sense that matters. But we are better, and bigger, than that. We need not fear being ordinary.

Originally appeared in the Chicago Free Press on May 3, 2000.

Susan Sontag put gays on the cultural map in her magisterial 1964 essay, or so the familiar story goes. In hindsight, however, "Notes on Camp" can be seen as neither as impressive nor as gay-friendly as it seemed at the time.

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IN 1964, A VIRTUALLY UNKNOWN 31-year-old named Susan Sontag made something of a slow motion splash with a 20-page article titled "Notes on Camp."

With a great display of learning, dozens of wide-ranging examples, and a host of distinctions and unexpected connections, Sontag's article took the notion of "Camp" seriously enough to analyze it - to explain what it was, where it came from, how it worked, and what its effects were.

Among her host of examples were Tiffany lamps, Bellini operas, "Swan Lake," "King Kong," old Flash Gordon comics, Noel Coward plays, Aubrey Beardsley drawings, Oscar Wilde's epigrams (the essay quotes several), feather boas, Ronald Firbank novels, and "All About Eve."

Sontag argued that there was more to Camp that just silliness or pretense or fake elegance. According to her, Camp is a whole sensibility that evaluates the world strictly in aesthetic terms.

More specifically Camp is characterized by a love of the theatrical, the artificial or exaggerated, which "converts the serious into the frivolous." It represents "a victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality," producing a kind of moral and political disengagement.

Perhaps most significantly for the time - five years before Stonewall - Sontag pointed to gay men as the primary conduits of Camp taste, its "vanguard" and its "most articulate audience." In fact, she said:

"Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. ... The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony."

Sontag's article, widely read and discussed in the next few years, certainly popularized the idea of camp, both the awareness and the use of it. The article even achieved enough notoriety to be parodied by humorist Fran Lebowitz in a piece called "Notes on Trick."

In retrospect, Sontag's essay does not hold up well. The show of graduate school learning seemed forced, more intended to impress than illuminate, and limited to the parochial knowledge base of the literary elite of her time. The categories often seem arbitrary, the generalizations too sweeping, the distinctions artificial, and examples often ineptly chosen.

For instance, Sontag seems unable to recognize her subject matter. Despite her claim, "Swan Lake" is hardly Camp. That it is so often parodied should prove that; how could you parody Camp? Samuel Barber's fine opera "Vanessa" is hardly Camp just because gay men wrote it and it contains stylized elements.

No one could say Alexander Pope's poetry was Camp if he read more than "The Rape of the Lock," which maybe Sontag didn't. Nor would anyone who loves music say that "much of Mozart" is Camp. Where did she get these bizarre notions?

At some point you begin to suspect that Sontag's knowledge is limited and her appreciation is shallow. In short, she does not know what she is talking about. And the essay begins to fall apart.

Nevertheless, reading the essay in pre-Stonewall America, many gays felt that Sontag was their champion. They felt she had put them on the cultural map, so to speak, and given them legitimacy. They had always wanted to believe they were an important and valuable creative minority and now Sontag seemed to affirm to everyone that they were the bearers of a major sensibility.

No doubt too many gay men found the article useful as a guidebook to social climbing. They picked up useful tips on what to read and see and what to think and say about what they read and saw, regardless of their own personal reactions.

But gays who felt affirmed and legitimized, even lionized, by "Notes on Camp" overlooked several troubling facts.

For one thing, Sontag's essay was published in "Partisan Review," at the time perhaps the premier organ of moral seriousness in political and cultural matters, Camp's chief rival sensibility. In short, "Notes on Camp" was intended as a reconnaissance map of the enemy's territory.

For another, Sontag acknowledged that although she felt drawn to Camp, she also found it offensive and even felt "revulsion" from it.

Further, the analysis of Camp seemed rooted more in many then-current, condescending stereotypes about gays rather than in any serious inquiry into the basis or coherence of Camp's purported properties. For instance:

Gays are playful because they are immature and refuse to grow up and become responsible adults. They are duplicitous and devious, always posing, not wishing or able to be authentic. They exhibit "the psychopathology of affluence" - too much money, too easily bored, too little purpose for living. They are frivolous and shallow, lacking emotional depth and attracted only to the superficial.

Then too, many casual readers failed to notice that Camp turns out to be not really an independent sensibility at all, but derivative and ultimately parasitic on the whole natural, moral basis of human existence, including serious art, undermining and destroying what it depends on.

Finally, Sontag viewed Camp as the core of what might now be called "the homosexual agenda," that is, a concerted effort to undermine morality so people would have no basis for objecting to homosexuality.

"Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense," she wrote. "Camp is the solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation. ..."

A decade later Sontag viciously attacked Camp and its aesthetic sensibility because it was corrupting and "the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous." But for those who read carefully, that was her view from the beginning.

Originally appeared May 3, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.

I WANTED TO BE A BOY SCOUT when I was a girl. I was a sash-wearing Girl Scout for years, but despite my love of its campfire camaraderie, there was something about the Boy Scouts that always seemed cooler.

Maybe it was those balsa wood cars they raced in the pinewood derby. Or the national parks they hiked in winter. Or the white water rafting, or bottle-rocket projects, or focus on service that actually meant something.

Whatever it was, boy scouting seemed to open up a world of adventure and possibilities. Girl Scouts was kinder, gentler and boring. Activities vary from troop to troop of course, but the only camping I did was in a plush site in the Catskills, where the tents had hardwood floors and beds. And my troop's annual service project entailed planting tulips in front of our suburban branch of the U.S. Post Office.

Times have changed, perhaps (a friend of mine is leading her Girl Scout troop on a trip to Hawaii), but Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were not equivalent then, and I doubt they are today. It is in response to this, after all, that the Boy Scouts started Venturing, a co-ed subdivision of the scouts for 14- to 20-year olds.

But the Boy Scouts keeps girls out and they keep gay boys and men out, too. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed this, hearing arguments in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale.

Most likely you've heard of the case. James Dale was an Eagle Scout assistant scoutmaster when a newspaper article profiled him as co-president of the gay organization at Rutgers University. When the Boy Scouts responded by kicking him out, Dale sued under New Jersey's anti-discrimination law, which includes sexual orientation.

Last year, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled for Dale, saying that the Boy Scouts were a public accommodation like the Rotary Club and the JayCees, and therefore not covered by the First Amendment's right of free association.

Now the High Court must decide what sorts of organizations can choose who can belong and what sorts can't. Does merely being gay connote political advocacy? If so, then the Boy Scouts may have the right to exclude gays, because Dale's membership would send a political message that is directly opposite to the message the Boy Scouts want to send.

But Evan Wolfson, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund attorney representing Dale, told The New York Times, "A human being is not speech, other than 'I am who I am.'"

Yet, I'm not sure it really matters if we win this one. Of course it would be wonderful if gays were allowed to openly lead Boy Scout troops. They would introduce generations of boys to the idea that being gay is not a moral failure. They would become role models for manhood.

After all, isn't it better to have men leading the troop, no matter what their sexual orientation, than women, since the boys are supposed to strive to emulate their leaders? I can't imagine a man leading a Girl Scout troop, but because of the shortage of volunteers, I know many women who have taken on leadership of their son's pack.

If the Boy Scouts recognized this on their own, more power to them. But I worry about the ramifications should they be forced to admit gay men and boys. Would they then also need to admit girls to full membership? (After all, as I've said, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts really aren't equivalent organizations). Would the Girl Scouts need to admit men? Would gay and lesbian organizations be forced to accept straight folks in leadership roles? There is a place for the supportive atmosphere of homogeneous organizations. A place for all-girl groups. A place for all-boy groups. A place for all-gay groups.

And, yes, even a place for all-straight groups.

The government shouldn't have the right to decide the membership of private organizations.

The Boy Scouts, however, should do its part, and take responsibility for its homophobia by explicitly saying in its rules that the Boy Scouts is limited to straight boys (right now they just say members must be "clean" and "morally straight." That language is offensive if used to exclude gays).

Perhaps the BSA should have the boys sign an agreement, like the military once required. If parents are made uncomfortable by such a thing, maybe the Boy Scouts will make an accommodation, as they did with girls, and start a special mixed troop.

Or maybe it won't. But then we must do our part. If gay boys and gay men aren't let into the Boy Scouts of America, then we must start our own troops. We must teach leadership to our own children, gay and straight, in our own way. Many minority groups have such a thing on large and small scales. We don't, but we should.

This issue is not simply one of discrimination, but of raising children of character, courage and spirit. Why would we want to hand this important job over to a right-wing organization? Far better for us to step in and do the job ourselves.

Originally appeared April 30, 2000, in The Washington Times.

Originally appeared April 19, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.

Of the religious folktales of the world, few have occasioned more hatred and cruelty, suffering and death than the Old Testament story of Sodom, the city purportedly destroyed by Jehovah because its inhabitants were homosexual. The story comes down to us in a highly confused state, and it seems unlikely that most of those who cite it have ever tried to puzzle out its contradictions.

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ONE OF THE MOST BEGUILING but baffling stories preserved in the Old Testament book of Genesis is the ancient folktale of Yahweh's destruction of the city of Sodom (Gen.18:20-19:38).

It would be possible to view the folktale as a charming example of comforting wish-fulfillment revenge fantasy by ancient nomadic tribesmen had the story not been taken literally by so many men who did so much evil: Few stories in the Old Testament have generated more hatred and cruelty, more suffering and death.

The usual interpretation is that the ancient god (1) destroyed Sodom because its inhabitants were homosexual, but (2) spared Lot because he offered hospitality to two angels and tried to protect them from the Sodomites.

It is hard to imagine anyone could believe this interpretation if he had actually read the story. The first element is undermined by inconsistencies in the story; the second by the words of the story itself.

To begin, it is worth pointing out that this god is not omniscient: he does not know for certain what is going on in Sodom, he has only heard reports - "an outcry" as it is expressed. So the god sends two angels to investigate.

When the angels come to the city gate of Sodom, in one of those remarkable coincidences possible only in folk tales, who should they meet but Lot who just happens to be sitting there. Why this is such a coincidence we will see shortly. Lot invites the visitors into his house.

As soon as they hear that two strangers are staying at Lot's house, the entire male population of Sodom - "young and old . . . every one of them" - surround Lot's house and demand that he send the visitors out so the mob can have sex with them.

"Bring them out," they shouted, "so that we can have intercourse with them." Or words to that effect.

Now it is impossible to take any such incident seriously as history. How could the entire male population of a city be homosexual? If all these men were homosexual, how could Sodom sustain its population? Where did the little Sodomites come from?

It is hard to know what a "city" might have meant, but a fair guess would be between 1,000 and 3,000 people. It scarcely seems plausible that so many men (500-1,500) could actually expect to have sex with just two men. Nor is it plausible that the visitors would appeal to the diverse tastes and behavioral preferences of every single man, even if they were homosexual.

Then too, consider the fact that Lot offers his two virgin daughters to be used by the crowd as a substitute. "Let me bring them out to you," he says, "and you can do what you like with them."

But if the men of Sodom had been homosexual why would Lot think they would have any interest in his daughters?

How long has Lot lived in Sodom? Years? You would think he would have noticed something like rampant homosexuality had it existed. You would also have to wonder why he chose to live there. You might even wonder how he could have found the prospective sons-in-law who were engaged to his daughters.

However that may be, when Lot's offer fails to appease the crowd, the visitors pull Lot back into his house and cause the men of Sodom to become blind. They then tell Lot to leave Sodom because they are going to destroy it.

Why? Because, says one angel, "The outcry against it has been so great that the Lord has sent us to destroy it."

This statement makes clear that the god had already decided to destroy Sodom long before the angels arrived and long before any attempted gang-rape. So the whole incident at Lot's house had nothing to do with the reason Sodom was destroyed.

It is also worth pointing out that the incident at Lot's house, however we understand it, is the only one anywhere in the Bible that could suggest any connection between Sodom and homosexuality. There are no others. And, to repeat, that incident was not why Sodom was destroyed.

But why then did the angels spare Lot and tell him to leave town? To reward Lot for his hospitality? Because he tried to protect them from assault?

Because he was the only heterosexual in Sodom? Not at all.

The angel explains that he had already been forbidden to destroy Sodom until Lot is safe: "I can do nothing until you are there" - i.e., in the neighboring town of Zoar, the only one of the five cities of the Plain that was not destroyed.

To understand why, we have to remember who Lot was.

Two chapters earlier in Genesis the god made his covenant with Abraham to create the Hebrew nation. Now it happens that Abraham's brother Haran was Lot's father (Gen. 11:27-28); that is, Lot is Abraham's nephew. Lot is to be saved not for anything he did, but because of who he is.

In the plain words of the folktale narrator: "Thus when God destroyed the cities of the Plain he thought of Abraham and rescued Lot from the disaster" (Gen. 19:29).

So to repeat, neither Sodom's destruction nor Lot's rescue has any connection with the incident at Lot's house nor with Lot's hospitality. The decision to destroy Sodom but save Lot were made by the god before the incident even happened.

The angels then were sent not to investigate at all, but to get Lot out of the city. Which is why it was such a remarkable coincidence that he just happened to be the very first person they encountered at Sodom.

Originally published in The New Republic, April 17, 2000

"HE WAS IMPATIENT with hygiene," Saul Bellow says of his protagonist, Abe Ravelstein. "There was no counting the cigarettes he lit in a day. Most of them he forgot or broke. ... But to prolong his life was not one of Ravelstein's aims. Risk, limit, death's blackout were present in every living moment." This tall, big-handed, almost perfectly bald man - flamboyantly erudite, instinctually elitist, viscerally Jewish - strides and then falters in Bellow's new novel, Ravelstein. He dies of AIDS, another corpse in a plague his political allies largely ignored or belittled. But victimology never tempted him. He almost seemed to embrace the role of outsider, to burnish it and touch it at regular intervals, like a talisman. He had what Bellow describes as "powerful unforgiving enemies" in the academic world and beyond. But "he didn't care a damn about any of them."

I believe it. In fact, I believe most of what's in this book. A roman ? clef, Ravelstein doesn't require a very intricate clef to figure out. It's a rumination on Allan Bloom, the late professor of philosophy and conservative eminence. It is written by a friend and imbued with the honest distance that true friendship uniquely confers.

And, although it is not a book about ideas, it is about a man who lived through ideas, even if he also longed to live beyond them. I still remember reading Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind as a graduate student in political philosophy. I remember its crude but irresistible critique of modern culture and its breakneck tour through Western philosophy in 150-odd pages. With chapters like "From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede," it was priceless preparation for my general exams, if a little abstruse for the legions who bought and never read it.

But, with the publication of Ravelstein, we are presented with two facts that Bloom kept to himself and his friends. Bloom was gay, and he died of AIDS. The salience of these facts is strengthened, not weakened, by Bloom's public silence about them. He knew they mattered. Of all people, he knew the centrality of the things about which we remain silent. So it bears repeating: One of the most influential conservative intellectuals of the last 50 years was gay and died of AIDS. For all our justified concern about privacy and a person's right to rise above his sexual or ethnic identity, we also know this matters. How could it not?

It matters not simply because so many of Bloom's defenders endorse a politics brutally dismissive of homosexual dignity. It matters because this knowledge helps us understand the work Bloom left behind. The core of Bloom's teaching was his insistence on the importance of eros. This "longing" was, for Bloom - following Plato - the essence of philosophy and, in some ways, the essence of living. Retaining the purity of that longing was his life's work. The reason he disliked the modern cult of easy sex was not because he scorned or feared the erotic life but because he revered it. He saw sexual longing as supremely expressed in individual love, and he wanted his students to experience both to the fullest. The writers he investigated most deeply - Rousseau and Plato - were philosophers of eros. "It's very important," Bellow writes, "to understand that he [Ravelstein] was not one of those people for whom love has been debunked and punctured - for whom it is a historical, Romantic myth long in dying but today finally dead. He thought - no, he saw - that every soul was looking for its peculiar other, longing for its complement. ... Love is the highest function of our species - its vocation. ... He never forgot this conviction. It figures in all his judgments."

This love was not a Christian love. Bloom was an atheist and a Jew. There are times, reading him, when one feels he has not merely understood Nietzsche; he has imbibed him. But this awareness of the abyss moved Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, toward love and political conservatism. Love, whether for the truth or for another, because it can raise us out of the abyss. Political conservatism because it best restrains the chaos that modernity threatens. And here Bellow reveals something absent from Bloom's public writing. He was deeply aware of the darkness of modern enlightenment, of the countless monsters from the heart of Goethe's and Nietzsche's civilization who hanged Jews alive - "the meat-hook people," as he describes them in the book. He kept track of them. He knew who they were. And his sober, unillusioned politics was framed to foil them.

Is it too much to think that Bloom's appreciation of love cannot also be extricated from his own experience? If there is a sense of true love's promise in Bloom's work, there is also a deep, deep sense of its difficulty. The book tells us matter-of-factly of Ravelstein's husband. "Nobody questioned the strength of Nikki's attachment to Abe," Bellow writes. "Nikki was perfectly direct - direct, by nature, a handsome, smooth-skinned, black-haired, Oriental, graceful boyish man." Bellow doesn't tell us much about the substance of this relationship. It is relegated in the book - as in our culture - to the shadows, where it nevertheless stands with clarity. It is Nikki who rushes to Ravelstein's bedside, Nikki who is "Ravelstein's heir and his chief mourner." Is it Nikki who appears in the dedication of Bloom's last, and finest, book, Love and Friendship: "To Michael Z. Wu"?

Perhaps Bloom's finest achievement was to write about human love from the perspective of homosexual love and have no one notice the seam. You cannot read him on Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra without seeing those works in a new light. You cannot read his account of Rousseau's La nouvelle Heloise without wanting to go back and read it - more closely - again. Bellow tells us how fascinated Bloom was by others' loves, their mishaps and misunderstandings. It is because he knew so well the deep, natural distinctions between men and women that his literary criticism is so sharp and his advice, according to Bellow, so good. Here is a homosexual who not only appreciates the heterosexual experience but marvels at it.

There will be those, of course, who see in this either hypocrisy or shame. They are wrong. I am unaware of any disparagement of homosexual love in Bloom's writing, although he was rightly revolted by much of what passes today for gay "culture." And he seems at ease with his sexuality in Bellow's book. Nikki is not hidden. Abe regales Bellow with every detail of his sexual escapades. In some ways, I think, Bloom's homosexuality may even have reinforced his conservatism. It helped inform him of the power of love and the lure of danger and the wisdom of a civilization that keeps both in some restraint. The resilience of sexual orientation is also, for many homosexuals, a testament to the awesome power of nature, of what simply is. In Bellow's words, Bloom had "a gift for reading reality - the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it." Part of that reality was Bloom's need for and witness to the love of one man for another. One day, there will be a conservatism civilized enough to deserve him.

Ours is a diverse movement. No, I'm not just referring to the standard boilerplate of gender, gender-identification, nationality, race, ethnicity, sub-ethnicity, ad infinitum. While those categories are important, our strength also lies in ideological diversity.

Consider the merry band of gay men and lesbians who follow the beat of a libertarian drummer. They've been garnering attention over the past several months by staking out unconventional positions - opposing hate crime laws, for example, because they penalize thoughts (motivation) rather than simply actions. Such arguments haven't endeared gay libertarians to the more mainstream activist community. And now, in the matter of whether the Boy Scouts of America should be forced by judicial decree to drop a ban on gay scoutmasters, the libertarians are being just as unorthodox as ever.

As you may recall, last August New Jersey's Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts could not exclude James Dale, a former Eagle Scout, from serving as a scoutmaster simply because he is an out gay man. Dale's cause had been taken up by the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, which successfully argued on his behalf before the New Jersey court. The Boy Scouts appealed, claiming that as a private organization they have a right to decide on their membership and what message they want to put out - including the message that homosexuality is not an acceptable lifestyle. The case was accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court, where it will be argued on April 26, with a ruling expected by the end of June.

Among the many "friend of the court" briefs submitted to the Supreme Court by various pro-gay and anti-gay advocates, the most unusual was filed by Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (GLIL), a lesbigay group that favors the Boy Scouts' position (that's right, the Boy Scouts position).

The GLIL brief argues that the Boy Scouts of America have a constitutional right to set their own standards for membership and leadership positions, even if that means excluding openly gay Scout leaders from participation. Not, mind you, that they think the Scouts are doing the right thing. "Our brief emphasizes our disagreement with the Boy Scouts' policy of excluding gay members and leaders," writes Richard Sincere, president of GLIL and a former Boy Scout. "But if government forces the Boy Scouts to change that policy, the constitutional rights of all of us - not just the Scouts, but everyone, gay or straight - will be diminished."

Sincere continues, "Freedom does not belong only to those with whom we agree. Gay men and lesbians have suffered when freedom of association has not been respected. We benefit when freedom of speech and freedom of association are vigorously protected. A Supreme Court ruling against the Boy Scouts will have the perverse effect of hurting gay and lesbian Americans."

The GLIL brief argues that the inclusion of gays in all facets of life is profoundly desirable because it sends "a message of tolerance and acceptance." But when a private association is involved, the First Amendment requires that "this message must not be communicated due to government coercion." GLIL points out that, as the Supreme Court has said in the past, freedom of association "plainly presupposes a freedom not to associate." Warning against "creeping infringement" on the freedom of association, GLIL notes that gay organizations often seek to maintain "gay environments," including clubs, retreats, vacations and professional and alumni organizations. Decreeing that the Boy Scouts cannot exclude on the basis of sexual orientation could mean that gay associations could be prohibited from excluding - or even just not welcoming - heterosexuals.

The brief, available at www.gayliberty.org, contains a lengthy history of how in the past the U.S. government has tried to deny gays the right of association - a right that GLIL says we must protect, even at the cost of allowing others to discriminate.

Cutting the Public Purse Strings

Now admittedly, the Boy Scouts case is something of a sticky wicket. Many opposing the Boy Scouts anti-gay stance feel that the Scouts really are not a private membership organization at all, but should be considered a "public" accommodation because of their close relationship with government - particularly the sponsorship of many individual Scouting units by local governments. I've seen strong constitutional arguments on both sides of this issue, which often comes down to debating the degree of the state's involvement in Scouting.

In light of this fact, some libertarians in GLIL have advanced an alternative proposal. They hold that even though the Scouts do receive taxpayer-funded government support and privileges, including those afforded to no other civilian nonprofit organization (such as the right to hold their national Jamboree on military property), the best response isn't to further extend the arm of the state over the Scouts, but to prohibit all instances of that very government patronage. If the Scouts claim a moral imperative to discriminate, perhaps we should treat them like a religious organization and impose a wall of separation between Scouts and state. No more Scout meetings at city halls, fire stations, or public libraries.

It's an intriguing idea, and it would certainly be interesting to see if (or, more likely, when) the loss of government largess would bring about a self-interested change of heart on the part of the Scout's leadership.

Under such a dispensation, if local, state, or federal government continued to directly or indirectly support Scouting activities, they could then be sued. In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union and American United for Separation of Church and State recently filed a lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Kentucky for contracting with Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, an organization with a religious policy against hiring gay men and lesbians. It's a more cumbersome solution, to be sure, but one that might avoid pitting the rights of gays to equal protection against the First Amendment's freedom of association.

Newfound Allies

Constitutional issues aside, there's another development related to the GLIL brief that deserves to be noted - the way in which these gay libertarians have been acclaimed by notable conservatives who haven't heretofore been sympathetic to any gay group. George Will recently wrote a column headlined "The Boy Scouts' Unlikely Friends," in which he applauds GLIL and highlights its argument that protecting freedom of association is good for gay folks, too. "America needs a livelier understanding of the ... rights that GLIL understands," writes Will.

Similarly, conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick wrote in his syndicated column, "Remarkably, the most eloquent brief comes from Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty. It says, 'The New Jersey Supreme Court's decision restricting the ability of the Boy Scouts of America to choose its own leaders and define its own membership criteria dangerously erodes the freedom of all Americans, including gay Americans, and should be reversed.'" Concludes Kilpatrick, "I find myself in complete sympathy with that point of view, too."

Of course, hard-core gay-bashers are still wailing that homosexuality is inherently immoral and thus gay people aren't entitled to any "special rights" (including, it often seems, equality under the law). But think about the way that Will and Kilpatrick used the GLIL brief to position themselves as supporting the Boy Scouts without attacking gays per se. In one sense, GLIL has given conservatives a way to spin their opposition to anti-discrimination provisions; on the other hand, conservatives weren't going to support court-ordered gay inclusion in private associations in any event, so at least the GLIL brief provided a way for them to do what they would have done, while eschewing outright homophobia.

And the fact that more and more mainstream conservatives feel a need to eschew outright homophobia is, to my mind, a rather significant cultural indicator - and a reason to cheer on our ideologically diverse community.

Originally published April 5, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.

Young gay people often embark on a crash course to learn everything they can about gay culture, which unlike (say) ethnic culture, is something they seldom have absorbed growing up from parents and siblings. Despite misgivings about whether "gay courses" belong in universities, careful scholarship does have a legitimate role to play in illuminating what gay culture is and how it has changed over time.

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THE MICHIGAN CHAPTER of the American Family Association is disturbed. More than usual.

It seems that University of Michigan professor David Halperin scheduled a course for the fall semester titled "How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation."

"Just because you happen to be a gay man doesn't mean that you don't have to learn how to become one," Halperin explained.

That set off AFA state chair Gary Glenn.

"It is wrong," Glenn said, "that taxpayers are being forced to pay for a class whose purpose is to recruit and initiate teenage men into the homosexual lifestyle."

And, he added, "Nobody has to take a class in how to be African-American or Irish." Take that, Halperin!

Glenn might be on solid grounds if he criticized all taxpayer-funded education. After all, it is nothing more than a forced subsidy for people with children by people who have no children - which would include a majority of gays.

But Glenn conveniently ignores the fact that gays are forced to pay taxes too. In fact, every single time religious right advocates get upset about the use of taxpayer money, they act as if no gays or lesbians ever paid taxes. We need to keep reminding them that we pay taxes too and we expect some representation for our taxation.

So long as I pay taxes, I think I would like my taxes to help pay for this course, or a similar one here in Illinois.

As for Glenn's sparkling observation that no one has to take a class in how to be African-American or Irish, the answer is: Of course not, because they already learned it at home from their parents and family.

For instance, most black children learn their family's history with its stories about slavery, forced segregation, and encounters with prejudice in the United States. They learn about the civil rights struggle, about civil rights leaders and important black people in science, the arts, politics.

They learn where they can go safely and where it is dangerous, how to behave with hostile police, how to cope with prejudiced people, how to cope with random insults and dismissive treatment. They may pick up different ways of talking with blacks and whites, different rules about eye contact, different body languages.

They learn - we might say absorb - these various facts and coping skills from their family as they are growing up.

By contrast, little gay children seldom grow up in a home where they learn information about gays or absorb the nuanced skills of being gay in a skeptical, not to say hostile world.

Most of us grow up alone, without a clue, keeping a furtive eye out for elements of the general culture that will reflect our own developing self-awareness and might, if we are lucky, validate our existence.

Young gays are often surprised to discover both how much gay history and culture there is and how the courtesies and modes of social conduct differ subtly from their previous experience.

When you track down Halperin's course proposal itself, it turns out this is exactly what he wants to explore: How the gay community teaches homosexuals how to be gay.

Halperin posits a number of "cultural artifacts and activities" that play a role in learning how to be a gay man: e.g., Hollywood movies, opera, Broadway musicals, certain classical and popular music, camp humor and drag, diva-worship, body-building or "muscle culture," fashion and interior design.

He says he wants his course to explore whether there are certain classical "gay" works and practices that all gay men need to know, what makes them so essential and what explains why gays are drawn to those things. These are good questions to ask.

Halperin's idea is not new, of course, but his questions are more probing than usual. And he deserves credit for treating gay male community and culture separately and not as part of some imaginary "LGBT community."

But the question is whether Halperin's example of gay "artifacts and activities" are any more than mere stereotypes. Although stereotypes often have a basis in fact, it might be worth asking how widespread those interests actually are or were and exploring whether his examples are limited to a certain time, place and social level.

All that cultural bric-a-brac was often present in pre-Stonewall middle and upper-middle class urban gay communities: At one point every gay home seemed to have a statue of Michelangelo's David and a Judy Garland record.

But the post-Stonewall gay culture saw many of those things dwindle into targets of bemused ridicule, especially among younger gays.

There is another difficulty. Gay men in Berlin in the 1920s, who surely count as gay, were probably not much interested in Broadway musicals or Hollywood movies. That would be even more true of the men in St. Petersburg's gay community at the turn of the last century.

What were they interested in? What did they find in the broader culture that reflected their interests? What did they borrow and adapt to legitimize their existence and tastes? It would be interesting to know.

Perhaps if "gay culture" is at least partly a response to hostility and prejudice, then gay men may adopt not so much specific things, but general types of things. For instance, they might adopt elements of high culture in order to assert some sort of intellectual superiority to compensate for social stigmatization.

Or they might be attracted to stylized or exaggerated elements of the general culture that implicitly offer the comforting thought that the source of oppression is faintly ridiculous.

If so, as gays achieve equality much of "gay culture" may become obsolete.