IGF CultureWatch

First appeared Jan. 26, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.

YOU HAVE PROBABLY ALREADY SEEN the news reports that comedian Ellen DeGeneres will soon be shooting a pilot for a CBS television series about a woman who hosts an "old-fashioned variety show."

The series, and DeGeneres' character, will also have a fictional behind-the-scenes component along the lines of the "Larry Sanders Show."

Would the character be gay, everyone wanted to know? CBS said it did not care one way or the other and it was up to DeGeneres. As for DeGeneres, she told inquiring reporters, "I'm playing me, so I will be gay. Because as you've heard, I am. Yeah, there was this whole thing about it."

DeGeneres' return is excellent news. She is talented, charming, funny, and pretty. And-a relief after too many years of "Seinfeld"-she seems genuine, authentic. She is the kind of person you would be happy to have as a neighbor.

The new CBS series is a vindication of sorts after ABC canceled her earlier series. But the new program also provides a fresh start, an opportunity to use what she learned about what works and what does not.

It is a little late to do an autopsy on the earlier "Ellen" but perhaps two points are still relevant. People said the earlier show was not funny. That is not fair. It was very funny.

But the humor, like the show itself, ended up focused on the character's lesbian life rather than on Ellen Morgan as a lesbian who is leading a life. That was not enough to draw large audiences. Not yet, anyway.

Second, the studio audience harmed the show by laughing uproariously, excessively, at every gay or lesbian reference -- as if to prove that they "got it." Yet the humor itself was usually very gentle and understated.

The disproportion between the humor and the raucous audience reaction may have had an alienating effect on viewers and given them the uncomfortable feeling that they had intruded into a private performance for an invited audience.

The new program, by contrast, will not focus on DeGeneres' being gay, but on the plot situation: problems running the variety show, managing the staff, coping with guests, conflicts between DeGeneres' life and her program, etc.

The fact that the character is herself gay will be part of the background most of the time but will get noticed once in a while -- a reference, a conversation, even a source of occasional conflict. That is enough to make an impact but keep a larger audience watching so long as the show also entertains them.

Will the fictional audience of the fictional variety show be supposed to know DeGeneres is gay? That is, will she be "out" on the fictional show? There would probably be more opportunity for humorous and illuminating conflict if she were not.

What we are seeing here, in any case, is the triumph of "Will and Grace." Just as DeGeneres' earlier series made "Will and Grace" possible by pioneering an openly gay lead character, now "Will and Grace" makes DeGeneres' second series possible by showing how such a program can be popular and successful if you handle it right.

Almost surely, this is the recipe for future gay characters in the mass media. The homosexuality is there, but not obtruded; the character is gay, but his character is not about being gay. "Entertainment, not preachment" is the motto.

Remember those earnest shows not so long ago where the only thing gay characters did was come our or die of AIDS. Now gays are being shown with rounded lives in which being gay is an aspect but not the whole of our existence. That is a truer and more positive message to communicate. One-dimensionality is crippling in art, as in life.

In a way, the treatment of gays on television recapitulates the four phases many individual gays go through in their own lives. Phase one was total invisibility. Phase two was similar to Tony Randall's short-lived "Love, Sidney," in which people were vaguely aware of the homosexuality but no one ever talked about it.

Phase three, like "Ellen," was a gay person newly out, coping with being gay and trying to discover what that meant for her. Phase four is now to be about gay or lesbian characters who are (more or less) comfortably out of the closet and living their lives -- which may or may not include coping with occasional hostility and looking for a relationship.

What the mass media are now able to depict are the different kinds of lives gays lead, at least the interesting ones. No doubt, most of our lives, like most heterosexuals' lives, are not all that interesting. So there is always going to be some exaggeration, some stylization, some distortion of gay lives, just as there is exaggeration and distortion of everything else on television.

But the gain is that the media will be displaying a variety of gay lives so instead of having just one template for understanding and relating to gays, heterosexuals will have several different ones available to offer a slightly better fit for each new gay person they meet.

This may have little impact on adults who already have a template by which to understand gays and lesbians and are not likely to change.

But young people tend to accept as normal whatever they grow up experiencing. By seeing a variety of gay lives even at second hand through the media, young people will be less likely than their parents to think of gays solely in terms of their sexuality or a fast-lane lifestyle.

By overcoming those one-dimensional stereotypes, we come closer to being viewed as individuals worthy of respect and equal dignity.

Originally appeared Jan. 24, 2000 in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and in other papers.

HAS THE TIME COME to ban heterosexuals from the armed forces? Evidence that straight GIs weaken America's defenses continues to accumulate.

Sex between male and female soldiers disrupts numerous military installations. The Army Inspector General reported in July 1997 that leaders at one boot camp "believe it unrealistic" to stop sex between coed recruits thanks to "the chain of command's inability to provide adequate oversight in the barracks, given the high frequency of such incidents." Exasperated, the Army has tried a technical fix. According to the Washington Times' Rowan Scarborough, the Army has installed alarms and surveillance cameras to keep male and female enlistees in their respective quarters.

That often fails. At Fort Bragg alone, the Army Times notes, about 200 unmarried, pregnant soldiers are on base at any given time. According to Penna Dexter of Concerned Women for America, "the Navy now takes it for granted that 10 percent of women will be pregnant when they return from long cruises." In the first 13 months of America's deployment in Bosnia, 118 soldiers got pregnant and were shipped out. Expectant GIs move from bunks and barracks to cozier housing and lighter duties. Then they become single moms, with the attendant consequences for them, their children and taxpayers alike.

These cases involve consensual sex, however misguided. But it's more troubling when military personnel abuse their power to solicit or coerce sex.

Retired Army Major General David Hale was court-martialed and paid a $22,000 fine last March for having improper relationships with the wives of four subordinate officers. He admits to sleeping with two of the women. Three of these couples are now divorced.

According to the Associated Press, seven male and three female sailors engaged in group sex in a Hong Kong hotel room during a July 1998 port visit. The next day, one of the females claimed she had been sexually assaulted. She was punished "based on illicit sexual acts prior to the alleged sexual assault," according to Navy spokesman Lt. Dave Oates. Except for one male, all the sailors were found guilty of adultery, sodomy and fraternization. They saw their ranks cut one grade, pay sliced in half for two months and were restricted for 60 days to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

Tailhook and Aberdeen have grown synonymous with sexual harassment. Some male drill sergeants have demanded sex from their female trainees. From 1993 through 1997, the Pentagon cites 3,177 "substantiated complaints" of sexual harassment in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

So does this behavior hinder readiness?

"All these things have had an enormous impact on the general mental and spiritual health of the military," says defense scholar Dr. John Hillen, a former Army captain and Gulf War combat veteran. "The very fact that all these episodes have thrown the armed forces into a state of cultural angst in and of itself affects morale and unit cohesion."

A ban on heterosexuals in uniform is tempting but ultimately unfair. Despite these shocking cases, the overwhelming majority of straights serve with distinction and deserve America's gratitude for defending democracy. Critics should not use the misdeeds of a relative few to tar heterosexuals as a class. Americans understand the importance of judging individuals rather than discriminating against groups.

How about a regulation whereby heterosexuals could serve, if they kept their orientation quiet? Call it "Don't Inquire, Don't Inform." It would be absurd to force heterosexuals to pretend to be what they are not. So long as their sexual behavior remains out of the barracks and off duty, they should - if asked - be truthful about their personal relationships. Discharging a soldier for telling a military chaplain that he and his girlfriend back home are struggling over romantic issues would be nothing less than inhumane. Instead of subterfuge, honesty is the best policy.

Rather than ban heterosexuals or ask them to conceal a key part of their identities, the Pentagon should heed a 1993 report from the hawkish Rand Corporation. It recommended "a policy that focuses on conduct and considers sexual orientation, by itself, as not germane in determining who may serve."

Here is an equal standard for all servicemen, independent of sexuality: Keep your hands on your weapon and you may continue to fight for Old Glory. Place your hands on another GI, and you'll return swiftly to civilian life. Such a crystal-clear rule would be easy to understand, follow and enforce. Adopting such an even-handed policy is the right thing to do. After all, heterosexuals are people, too.

IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THE SHOWERS, doesn't it? Sure, some experts defend the military's anti-gay policy with abstruse concepts like "unit cohesion." But those are just words. Behind the words is sexual anxiety about homosexuals. A retired Marine commandant who helped design President Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy recently said on national television that he would be uncomfortable sharing "body heat" with a gay soldier on a cold battlefield.

It's tempting to laugh at the paranoia behind that kind of talk. But there is a serious question of sexual privacy here, one that has to be addressed if openly gay soldiers are to serve their country.

The argument has to start with a recognition of what the U.S. military is and what it is not. It is the most powerful and efficient killing machine in the world. That's a good thing for the liberties of more than 250 million people.

The U.S. military is not an extension of civil society in smart uniforms and shiny medals. Rights that civilians take for granted are routinely denied to military personnel. They are told when to wake up, when to go to sleep, where to live, what to do, what to say and what not to say, and they are stripped of privacy. These, too, are good things for the rest of us. Whatever we do in any area of military policy must preserve the effectiveness of our fighting force.

Defenders of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" argue that mixing gays and straights in the military's atmosphere of forced intimacy will threaten that effectiveness. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, sociology professor Charles Moskos offers an analogy to male-female relations. "Nowhere in our society are the sexes forced to undress in front of each other," he observes. So we segregate men from women in the military. "If we respect women's need for privacy from men, then we ought to respect those of heterosexuals with regard to homosexuals," Moskos argues.

Opponents of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" tend to dismiss this sexual privacy argument, and the male-female analogy in particular. One snickering response is that heterosexual men will now get the same unwanted sexual objectification they've given women for centuries. Unfortunately, that answer only reinforces the concerns it laughs at.

Another bad response goes to the other extreme, suggesting that gay soldiers will be asexual models of propriety. Let us in, it is suggested, and we won't make sexual advances or suggestions; we won't even look at our comrades in the showers.

Please.

Back in the real world where real people feel real sexual attraction while living and working in close quarters, what will it mean to have an openly gay man among all those glistening, athletic heterosexual male bodies?

We must first recognize that the issue is not, "Shall we let gays serve?" Gays have always served in the military and always will. The issue is, "Shall we let gays who serve be honest about being gay?"

We can segregate men from women, or exclude women, but either way we'll know who is who. The military can't effectively segregate gays, can't effectively exclude gays, and can't always know who is who. That makes the whole question different from rules governing men and women.

Under present policy, the straight soldier doesn't know who might be leering at him in the shower. So he has to wonder about everybody - hardly a reassuring prospect. Under a policy of openness, he'll have a better idea who might find some of his 2,000 body parts especially appealing. Thus, he can take whatever modest precautions are available to minimize his exposure.

Although openly gay soldiers will not be sexless, my hunch is they'll be hypersensitive to the perception that they're constantly on the make (a perception straight men don't always mind when it comes to women). So, unlike straight men drooling after women, openly gay military personnel will likely be especially careful not to let their eyes wander or their hands linger in places they're not welcome.

The male-female analogy also misses the gay-straight dynamic in important ways. In the male-female context, the anticipated sexual aggressors (heterosexual males) are in the majority. Their aggression is often approved and even encouraged by their peers. Under those circumstances, the need for formalized separation from the objects of their desire is understandable.

In the gay-straight context, on the contrary, the anticipated sexual aggressors (known gays) are a tiny minority of the whole. Their aggression is disapproved by their peers, and therefore far less likely to occur or be as intimidating when it does.

Because straight men and women are the overwhelming majority in the military, the expected problems associated with mixing them in close quarters would be frequent and widespread. Mixing straights with a tiny number of openly gay personnel, on the other hand, would occasion comparatively few incidents. To say it would impair the military's effectiveness is silly.

Too, the military separates men and women because it rightly assumes that at least some of the attraction between them will be mutual. We separate straight men and women because they can't keep their hands off each other.

Yet straight men, some of whom recoil even at homosexual body heat, would be the first to say they'll be strictly hands-off with gay men. I say let's take them at their word.

Originally appeared January 3, 2000, in the author's syndicated column, "OutRight," before the Vermont legislature's enactment of a bill providing for "civil unions."

Some will say the Vermont Supreme Court has freed a few of us at last. It might be more appropriate to say it has bound us at last. Further, in determining that gay couples must be treated legally the same as straight couples, the Vermont court has lighted a path to equality that emphasizes gays' similarity to straight Americans, avoids civil-rights dogma, and reinforces the primacy of marriage. That's not a bad day's work for a court that sits in a state with about as many people as Memphis.

Before we get too excited, however, it's important to note what didn't happen in Baker v. State. The Vermont court didn't require that state to recognize same-sex "marriages." The state has to give a gay couple the same rights and obligations as a married straight couple, but the state doesn't have to call it marriage.

Indeed, the state doesn't have to do anything right away. Vermont now has a "reasonable period of time" to weigh its choices - during which an effort might be made to override the court's opinion by amending the state constitution, as happened in Hawaii. For complex reasons beyond the scope of this column, it's also doubtful other states would have to recognize a Vermont-sanctioned gay relationship whatever it's called.

Finally, because of its reliance on an uncommon provision of the state constitution, the opinion will have little immediate precedential value in other state or federal courts. So Dorothy, you're still in Kansas.

Yet the Vermont opinion marks important progress in thinking about gay equality - progress that goes beyond both homophobic prejudices and stale civil-rights ideology.

The gay civil rights movement focuses on achieving civil rights, but has not much considered corresponding civil obligations. Marriage is not so lopsided. To be sure, it offers a host of advantages, ranging from health benefits to inheritance rights. But it imposes a concomitant obligation to care for the other participant, even after the relationship ends. As the Vermont court said, marriage offers "the right to receive, and the obligation to provide, spousal support, maintenance, and property division in the event of separation or divorce."

Most domestic partners laws in the country provide a nice portion of legal right (like health benefits) but require little more than signing a document. No wonder no one thinks of domestic partnerships like a real marriage.

Vermont's state-sanctioned same-sex relationships, whether called marriages or domestic partnerships, will be very different. They will grant hefty privileges and charge a hefty price - the same as any marriage. That's a first. It means we're getting some balance in the law.

The Vermont court's rationale for its result is also instructive. The court emphasized that "the marital exclusion treats persons who are similarly situated for purposes of the law, differently." Gay people, the court is saying, are like straight people in all relevant senses. So the law can't treat them differently.

This simple conclusion gives the back of a hand to any notion that gays are significantly different from mainstream America - whether that notion comes from the religious right or from the progressive left. We were successful in Vermont because the court saw the importance of our similarity, not the centrality of our difference.

The Vermont court also eschewed the reliance on feminist theory found in many gay-rights decisions and commonly espoused in the gay civil rights movement. The court repudiated the idea that the marital exclusion is just another form of sex discrimination (as the Hawaii Supreme Court concluded), for example. It found no evidence that "the authors of the marriage laws excluded same-sex couples because of incorrect and discriminatory assumptions about gender roles or anxiety about gender-role confusion."

In other words, it is possible for the law to treat men and women "equally" - as by prohibiting both to marry members of their own sex - and yet still single out gays for discrimination. Thus, the Vermont court showed that an approach to gay equality, at least in some cases, need not be tethered to feminism.

Similarly, the court rejected an approach that would treat gays as a special protected class under the law. Under the protected-class approach favored by the civil-rights establishment, courts aggressively overturn laws disadvantaging the class. In this case, the Vermont court conceptualized marriage discrimination as fencing gays out of an important institution. Thus, the court reaffirmed the importance of social inclusion without obsessing about gays' beleaguered status as a minority.

Further, the Vermont court achieved its historic result without undermining marriage's privileged position as the primary means by which our society encourages stable, committed human coupling. It's clear, for example, that nothing in the opinion commands the Vermont legislature to create a domestic partners system for opposite-sex couples who want to shack up but don't want to commit to marriage. And nothing in the opinion opens marriage to groupings of three, four, or five people or to connubial bestiality.

Finally, the Vermont court models a sensible, incremental approach to major social reform. The opinion points to the long list of legislative changes in the state - eradicating sodomy laws, adopting anti-discrimination statutes, protecting adoption rights, etc. - that render senseless the continued resistance to equality in the area of marriage. Those changes came serially, not all at once. One change laid the groundwork for the next.

Similarly, gay "marriage" will now be the law in one state, not all, allowing the rest of the country time to adjust. We may still be in Kansas, but Topeka won't be quite the same.

Originally appeared in The Washington Post, December 28, 1999.

ON DEC. 20, VERMONT'S SUPREME COURT held that the state is required by its constitution (not the federal one) to provide homosexual couples with the same benefits that are available to married heterosexual couples, either through actual marriage or through some sort of partnership program (the legislature can choose). "Here we go again," sighed many conservatives. "Another social revolution imposed by activist judicial fiat."

In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not restrict a woman's right to an abortion during the first trimester, and may restrict abortions only within certain limits after that. When Roe v. Wade was handed down, states were gradually moving toward legalization of abortion. The Roe decision smashed that slow but discernible progress toward consensus by leaving no place in the sun for those who dissented. Out of Roe sprang a deeply aggrieved pro-life movement that challenged not just abortion but the very legitimacy of the courts. The cost to the country's social fabric has been immense.

Is Baker v. State of Vermont simply Roe all over again? Not really. This time we are getting it right.

I should say that I firmly favor gay marriage, both on humanitarian grounds and because I think it is good social policy. If gay people exist - that is, if we are not just neurotic heterosexuals who need to get our act together - then surely we ought to be encouraged to marry and settle down. It has never been clear to me why discouraging stable gay relationships in favor of sex in parks and porn shops is good for the American family, or anyone else.

Nonetheless, gay marriage is a deeply polarizing issue, to put the case mildly. To impose it judicially on a predominantly hostile country would beg for a backlash - against gays, against the courts, against government broadly. Not long ago, it seemed likely that Hawaii's courts might rule in favor of gay marriage there, and that other states would be required to recognize Hawaiian marriages. That would indeed have been Roe redux.

The grenade, however, has been disarmed. In the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, Congress decreed that no state need recognize another state's homosexual marriages. A majority of states have subsequently passed similar laws. The result is that, for the time being, the issue of gay marriage has been de-nationalized. In California, voters will decide an anti-gay-marriage initiative in March, and they may also face a pro-gay-marriage initiative in November. I expect to live long enough to see at least one state legalize gay marriage through the conventional legislative process.

Vermont, of course, has not used the conventional legislative process. It has used judicial fiat. Doesn't the court's decree undercut the democratic process?

Yes: of course it does. In my own ideal world, the Vermont legislature would approve gay marriage and that would be that. In many traditionalists' ideal world, the legislature would disapprove gay marriage and that would be that. Neither side, however, lives in an ideal world. Both must settle for second best. In the case of gay marriage, as in the case of abortion, real-world second-best means localism.

Judicial minimalists argue that courts - federal or state - should simply absent themselves from policy disputes when the law does not give them clear and explicit grounds to intervene. Vermont's constitution includes a so-called "common benefits" clause, which says that the government is "instituted for the common benefit, protection and security of the people, nation or community, and not for the particular emolument or advantage of any single person, family or set of persons who are a part only of that community." To read this clause as offering clear or explicit grounds to mandate marriage or domestic-partner benefits for homosexuals is a stretch, to say the least.

On the other hand, gay marriage, of its nature, implicates a core constitutional issue, namely equal protection of the law. Vermont's court held that the exclusion of homosexuals from marriage "treats persons who are similarly situated for purposes of the law, differently." Legislatures cannot withhold the right to drive or vote, say, from blacks, at least not without offering the courts a constitutionally compelling rationale. Can they, then, withhold marriage from homosexuals, or withhold the state benefits that flow from marriage, without facing judicial scrutiny?

Here the comparison with Roe is instructive. If abortion is indeed the killing of babies, pure and simple, then the courts can no more bow before legislatures' desire to legalize it than they can agree to let a legislature legalize any other form of murder. The great mistake in Roe was not that the courts became involved; judicial scrutiny was inevitable. The mistake, rather, was that the federal courts became involved, long before there was anything like a national consensus.

On gay marriage, most state supreme courts probably would not have ruled as Vermont's did. But then, most states are not Vermont. It is entirely conceivable that some other state eventually will approve gay marriage or partnership benefits legislatively, only to see the arrangement knocked down by an activist conservative court. C'est la vie. The beauty of a federalist arrangement is that it does not require that the states all get either the process or the answer right; it requires merely that they all get it different.

Gay marriage's "Roe" moment will arrive if the U.S. Supreme Court decides that states cannot treat marriage differently. Both opponents and friends of homosexual marriage ought to hope that that day is long in coming. Whatever you think of the outcome in Vermont - or in Hawaii, whose court this month finally threw out the gay-marriage claim - federalism is working.

Originally appeared Dec. 23, 1999, in The Weekly News (Miami), and San Diego Update.

Mary Daly, the fighting feminist professor, has created quite a stir - again. What's interesting about the latest brouhaha is the way it's exposed fault lines within the feminist movement, with implications for the lesbigay movement as well.

For those who haven't been following the story, here's a rundown. Professor Daly, now 70, is considered one of the founding mothers of the feminist movement. She is the author of seven works of feminist philosophy taught in many women's studies courses, and she herself has taught a women-only course in women's studies at Jesuit-run Boston College since 1974. On the heels of a lawsuit brought by a male student claiming that federal anti-discrimination statutes bar any college that receives federal aid from discriminating on the basis of sex, the college is demanding that she stop excluding males from her classroom - or retire. Daly is fighting back.

"I don't think about men," she is quoted as saying in a recent magazine interview. "I really don't care about them. I'm concerned with women's capacities, which have been infinitely diminished under patriarchy. That takes all my energy. I'm not interested in the differences between women and men. I really am totally uninterested in men's capacities."

A recent New York Times story described Daly as "a lesbian feminist battling patriarchy from within a Jesuit institution." Daly has also described herself as a "radical elemental feminist" and has said, "We're living in hell," as she listed "the horror of phallocracy, penocracy, jockocracy, cockocracy, call it whatever - patriarchy."

Some prominent feminists, including Gloria Steinem and Eleanor Smeal, have rallied to Daly's defense. But other influential feminists are distancing themselves from her. Katha Pollitt, for instance, has criticized same-sex education in general and Professor Daly in particular. The media attention Daly has received "confirms a certain stereotype about feminists, which is lesbian separatism," Pollitt disapprovingly told the Times.

In defending the exclusion of male students from her women's studies course, Daly has reflected that, minus the male element, "There's quite an intimate connection in the classroom. ... There's a circulating energy that's extremely exciting and is felt by everybody, that somehow puts me in touch with something real in women."

Here's the rub. It's easy to vilify the Mary Daly school of feminism, with its men/bad women/good ethos. On the other hand, I'll confess there's something about Daly's fighting spirit that appeals to me - especially given the triumph of so much of today's whiny "victim feminism," with its speech codes and star-chamber inquisitions (where an accusation of sexism is tantamount to a finding of guilt). I suspect Mary Daly is not the sort who would run to college authorities complaining that she had been "sexually harassed" by the "male gaze" of a student.

Leaving aside the issue of federal anti-discrimination law, and ignoring for a moment the anti-male animus within Daly's worldview, I'd argue there is, in fact, something is to be said for the maintenance of "women's space." But I'd also argue, contra feminist dogma, that there's something to be said as well for "men's space." Moreover, what is somewhat refreshing about unrepentant lesbian separatism is that it departs from the politically correct assertion that there are no significant differences between men and women.

Anthropologist Lionel Tiger wrote in his classic study "Men in Groups" that, cross-culturally, men have a deep need to bond together in all-male societies and clubs. Today, such bonding rites are often verboten by unisex authorities. Witness what's happened at many liberal arts colleges, subject of an AP story titled "Fraternities Go Underground to Defy College Ban." At colleges where single-sex social organizations have been banned and students are barred from participating in any all-male fraternity activity - even off-campus - fraternity brothers have been turned into outlaws, meeting in secret. So much for freedom of association.

Unseen is how the assault on male association doesn't just strike at our heterosexual brethren; it's also aimed at expunging the ideal of fraternity to which gay male culture once aspired - the chance to revel in the company of men. It has now become difficult in many areas to form new gay men's social organizations (aside, that is, from sex clubs), since any gay male group (a hiking club, for example) immediately faces pressure from the local lesbigay establishment to admit women. Lesbian groups and gatherings promoting an exclusive women's culture for women who love women, in contrast, have typically not faced pressure to gender integrate.

Maybe we could recognize that their is something special about same-gender socialization, and that it's not parallel, say, with racism. Then perhaps we could let people gender associate the way they want to, without making a big deal of it if some want female-only classrooms - or bars, or male-only bridge clubs.

"Iron John" author Robert Bly, an advocate of the "mythopoetic" men's movement, wrote recently in Harper's magazine that "High school girls can usually rattle off any number of reasons to feel pride in their gender, but most young men are hard put to identify any good quality of masculinity, and that is sad indeed." Hmm. Perhaps it's time for male-only courses in men's studies?

FOR ANYONE who thinks gays should stand irredeemably apart from society - either because we ought to be outcasts or because we ought to be revolutionaries - the past decade must have been a frustrating one. The political causes that most defined our movement in the 1990s sought to weave gays into the larger fabric of American life. We fought to be Boy Scouts, to join the military, to worship God and preach His word, to raise children, and yes, even to marry each other. We wanted to be a part of these traditional institutions, not apart from them. We wanted a place at the table.

No author better crystallized this deep and widespread yearning than Bruce Bawer in his 1993 work, A Place at the Table, the decade's most important book on the gay movement. Containing few wholly original arguments, it nevertheless articulated better than any book before or since gays' rightful place in our culture. Although reasoned and mostly restrained in its rhetoric, the book drew a torrent of criticism that never seemed to rebut its underlying message. And although Bawer advocated no single political agenda, he fueled a self-conscious movement of gay moderates and conservatives that is still redirecting gay politics.

Most books go unread. When read, they are misunderstood. When understood, they are forgotten. But A Place at the Table was different. Why? For starters, the book made some simple yet compelling points. First, it argued that gays are a varied lot, found across the spectrum of life. Second, it declared that no one should be allowed to define how gay individuals should live, think, act, or dress based on a gay "identity." Third, it observed that "America is basically a tolerant nation," and the wisest approach for a despised minority, then, is to foster understanding, not antagonism. Fourth, it urged that mainstream gays - those not caught up in a subculture fixated on identity and separation - have an "obligation" to be visible.

Bawer strongly advocated legal equality and tolerance for homosexuals but emphasized that these were not enough. Full acceptance in our families and in our social institutions was necessary. He thus saw the importance of improving the whole of our lives.

Next, consider the book's effect on critics, especially those who rightly saw it as a threat to their conception of gays as a band of social rebels who would undermine every cherished traditional value - from sexual sobriety to free enterprise. They may have hated the book, but they could not ignore it, as the volume and vituperation of their often-misplaced criticism amply demonstrated. In a year-end roundup of gay-themed books for 1993, one critic for San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter called the book "terrible," but nevertheless "important" because of its widespread impact. Gay professor and author David Bergman chided Bawer for allegedly failing to appreciate "the great spectacle of human difference," but acknowledged that Bawer had expressed "what many people feel." A recent collection of essays, The Columbia Reader on Lesbians & Gay Men in Media, Society, & Politics, snidely dismissed Bawer as "a newly hatched gay figure" but included an entire chapter titled "A Place at Which Table?"

Finally, even more telling is the effect of A Place at the Table on what Bawer called the "silent majority" of gays. In the early 1990s, gay women and men were coming out of their closets from every nook and cranny of America. This wave included a lot of people who were uncomfortable with the prevailing notion of gays as a radical, sex-obsessed fringe. What they saw to their dismay was a gay movement that often reinforced that stereotype, failed to reflect their outlook and attitudes, derided religion, deliberately offended middle America with its language and dress, and increasingly called itself "queer."

Bawer spoke to this generation in a way no one had before. One of my gay friends recently recalled that, as he read A Place at the Table alone in his living room, he came across passages that literally caused him to jump up on his couch and shout "Yes!" It was an experience shared by many others for whom reading the book was a revelation. Finally, someone was speaking for them and to them. Bawer told them they could, they must, be a part of a cause that had somehow always seemed alien.

So in the wake of A Place at the Table, this new generation got involved in politics through groups like Log Cabin Republicans and made the moderate Human Rights Campaign the largest and richest gay political organization ever. They insisted that gay organizations put issues like marriage at the top of the agenda. They went back to church. They published their own essays in Beyond Queer, a book that self-confidently "challeng[ed] gay left orthodoxy." They set up a popular Web site, the Independent Gay Forum (www.indegayforum.org), for their writings. They refused to sit still for lectures - from either the gay left or the religious right - about who they should be and what they should think.

A Place at the Table wasn't solely responsible for all of this. Much of it would have happened anyway, sooner or later. But the book brought it together, nurtured it, and sent it on its way. Bawer's world, to a very large extent, is now our world; his methods, our methods; his goals, our goals. He wrote the book of the decade and changed gay politics forever.

MY DICTIONARY defines "racism" as "racial prejudice or discrimination." If that's right, there's no other word for what happened recently at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's annual "Creating Change" conference, held in Oakland. By supporting it, NGLTF has crossed the line of common decency and skirted the boundary of the law.

On Saturday, November 13, I showed up for a conference workshop provocatively entitled, "Challenging Issues of Race, Class, and Gender Within the Movement: How to Work With Our Allies Without Killing Them First." The conference guidebook promised that the workshop would address "the links among economic, social, and cultural attacks on People of Color within the LGBT movement."

As about 20 men and women of various races gathered, one of the workshop co-chairs announced that the program guide had mistakenly omitted a notice that this session was to be for "people of color" only - one of several sessions so designated at the conference. Hearing this, the approximately six white women and men present got up from their chairs and walked silently out of the room.

Stunned, I asked aloud if I was being told to leave because I am white. "Yes," answered the co-chair quickly and without elaboration. I left. A sign was then posted outside the door to the room that read, in large Magic Marker: "The Workshop 'Working w/Our Allies' is part of the people of color track. Hence, it's open to people of color only. Thank you." The word "only" was underlined twice for emphasis. The irony of excluding allies from a session about "Working with our Allies" was evidently lost on the leaders of the workshop.

I then approached NGLTF Communications Director David Elliott, a capable and articulate spokesperson by any standard, who confirmed that the Task Force backs race-based exclusion for some workshops at the conference. Why? I asked. "When one of our coalition allies requests a safe space we will respect that request," he responded.

"Safe" from whom, I wondered. From like-minded whites who want only to help fight continuing racial prejudice? It turns out that "safe space" is an Orwellian euphemism employed since at least the 1970s to justify all manner of race- and sex-based exclusion at events around the country. It has been used, for example, to exclude men from the annual Texas Lesbian Conference and to exclude both men and transgendered women from the annual "Womyn's" music festival in Michigan.

Would the Task Force support a presenter who allowed only white people to attend? No, responded Elliott, because "we're not dealing with an equal playing field." Well then, under this leveling no-whites policy, would NGLTF support the exclusion of Jews (a group targeted for racist genocide in this century)? I asked. There was a long pause. "I don't know the answer to that," he said.

OK, well, is NGLTF concerned that it may have violated federal and state laws prohibiting racial discrimination? I continued. After all, the event was held at a taxpayer-funded convention center and NGLTF opened the conference to anyone willing to pay the $200 registration fee. An even longer pause ensued. "We've never thought of that before," Elliott finally answered.

NGLTF could argue, of course, that it is a private organization legally entitled to include or exclude anyone it wants on any basis it wants, "discriminatory" or not. But then that would sound uncomfortably like the arguments we hear these days from the gay-excluding Boy Scouts - arguments NGLTF has harshly criticized.

Back inside the actual workshop, a less high-minded defense of excluding whites was heard. (I know this because I obtained an audiotape of the proceedings.) When a couple of attendees questioned why whites were not allowed in, the response was frank: "I think it's a good learning experience, even though it is rude, that they [whites] experience what we experience," answered one participant. An eye-for-an-eye, anyone?

Another attendee asserted that the leaders of NGLTF, a "white-run organization" in his view, "would ask the white people in the room to leave because that was their [NGLTF's] commitment to being anti-racist." War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and racism is anti-racism. "We ought to allow white people to do their work," he continued, "and their work is to give us space. And it's compensatory."

I don't contend that racial discrimination has historically inflicted anywhere near the damage on whites that it has on racial minorities. It hasn't. But I do contend that, wherever and against whomever it is enforced, it needlessly divides and engenders resentment. It denies the humanity of the person it is practiced against, whatever the color of that person's skin. It's especially distressing that the left, which led the fight to end racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, is today either silent about racial double standards, or worse, actively supports them.

In the last 50 years, the gay civil rights movement has come full circle. We have gone from a movement that excluded people on the basis of race, to one that embraced racial non-discrimination, to one that established racial quotas to ensure minority representation, to one that excludes people on the basis of race. Dress it up and excuse it however you will, it is fragmenting us, and therefore weakening us.

THE REFORM PARTY has come in for a good deal of ribbing from the nation's press. It has been dismissed as flaky, a circus and "a ship of fools."

It is easy to understand why. The party seems to have attracted an odd assortment of egocentric candidates with little political experience and almost no political principles in common.

Editorial cartoonists have had a field day with Ross Perot's ears, Jesse Ventura's bald head and feather boa, Donald Trump's hair and Pat Buchanan's pinched face. Truly an odd lot.

But not all the criticism is merited. A good deal of it stems from a desire to dismiss some of the ideas being offered without having to argue against them. It is a familiar ploy of the national press and one of the reasons why so many people say they do not trust the media.

Take a second look, if you will, at Jesse Ventura. The Reform Party may not interest you very much, but Ventura should. In a recent Playboy interview the Minnesota governor showed himself a solid, decent man not much given to tolerating prejudice and not afraid to say what he thinks.

If you are looking for a prominent politician in any party who supports gay equality, you cannot do better than Ventura. He makes Bill Clinton and Al Gore look like cold fish.

What does Ventura, a former Navy SEAL, think about gays in the military?

"Who am I to tell someone they can or cannot serve their country? I couldn't care less if the person next to me is gay as long as he gets the job done."

This is almost exactly what Sen. Barry Goldwater, a general in the Air Force Reserve, said when he supported letting gays serve in the military: "A good soldier will respect those who get the job done. . . . You don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight."

When Playboy asked about gay marriage, Ventura said he opposed the use of the word, but favored some policy like that: "I don't oppose gay people forming some type of legal bonding, but you can't use the word 'marriage.'"

Fair enough. Give gays the equal status and the language will eventually follow. In Norway, many people already use the word "marriage" for the legal partnerships of gays and lesbians even though technically those are not marriages.

Ventura explained his reasons for supporting gay partnerships during an October 1998 election debate with his Republican and Democratic opponents:

"I have two friends who have been together 41 years," he said, "and if one of them becomes sick, the other one is not even allowed to be at the bedside (in a hospital). I don't believe government should be so hostile, so mean-spirited. Love is bigger than government."

I suggest if you want a motto for the gay movement that will fit on a bumper sticker, you could not do much better than that: "Love is bigger than government."

It is useful to make another point explicit here. Ventura is saying not only that gay relationships should be acknowledged because we need to be more tolerant, accepting, etc., but also because we need to prevent the government from intruding into all our lives with a moralistic agenda that makes invidious distinctions among love-relationships, approving of some and disapproving of others.

Ventura, in fact, said his objection to the religious right is that religion "tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. The religious right wants to tell people how to live." And, of course, have the government impose that way of living on everyone.

Again, this is reminiscent of Goldwater, who said "every good Christian ought to kick [the Rev. Jerry} Falwell right in the ass," and told the Advocate in a 1993 interview, "I don't have any respect for the religious right. They are a detriment to the country, and the sooner they get their asses out of politics, the better."

On other issues generally, Ventura describes himself as "fiscally conservative but socially liberal," a thoroughly consistent combination which can produce some surprising results.

When Playboy asked how he felt about protesters who burn the American flag, Ventura shot back, "If you buy the flag it's yours to burn."

This is a good example of how someone can come to a supposedly liberal position but based on a supposedly conservative support for property rights. Ventura does not bother with any appeal to First Amendment protections for symbolic speech. He simply points out that the flag you buy is your property to do with as you like, a point that would never occur to liberals.

The same general libertarian approach leads Ventura to oppose both gun control and the death penalty. The connection seemed to escape a writer for the New York Times Magazine who found those positions inconsistent. But the connection is clear: Government has no business taking away people's ability to defend themselves (from the government itself, Ventura makes clear), nor should the government have the power to take away people's lives.

Ventura's support for lifestyle libertarianism extends further than most politicians would advocate in public, whatever their private behavior. He opposes prosecuting people for prostitution or using drugs. He acknowledges paying for sex and smoking marijuana. "I have smoked a joint, and there is nothing wrong with that," he said. "I have done far stupider things on alcohol."

Playboy is not good at asking follow-up questions to find out why Ventura holds these positions, but we can guess he would say that your body is your property and the government should not control what you do with it. When asked why he opposes mandatory helmet laws, Ventura gave a one-word answer: "Freedom."

ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE aspects of George Chauncey's social history Gay New York 1890-1940 is the abundant evidence it provides that governments were consistently the enemy of gay people, but business entrepreneurs were often much friendlier.

This should not be surprising. Governments tend to impose the opinions and prejudices of the majority. By contrast, the free market is where people have an incentive to suspend their prejudices and simply try to make money from every available source. Thus free markets are the great solvent of prejudice.

And while government necessarily makes one law for everyone, the market is always open to a variety of minority tastes that can find themselves served as a "niche market." Government is unitary; markets are pluralistic.

Chauncey's book offers several examples of entrepreneurs ignoring pubic prejudice or evading the law in order to make money by catering to gays even when it was risky to do so.

Early in this century some heterosexual Turkish bathhouses began quietly tolerating gay men. According to one hostile account Chauncey quotes, "not a few of the places which cater to the public demand for steam baths are glad to enjoy the patronage of pansies [gay men]." The writer added that managers of the baths often received "fat tips" from their "degenerate patrons."

Strictly gay bathhouses were open as early as 1902, and as such were among the first gay commercial spaces in the city. Chauncey notes that there was considerable financial incentive for a bathhouse to develop a reputation as gay since that lent it a competitive edge in a period of declining public use of bathhouses.

Police generally ignored the baths, presumably because they were bribed to do so. The few raids were usually prompted by reformist and social purity groups who sent in their own investigators and then tried to force the police to shut them down.

A remarkable example of gay-tolerant entrepreneurship is provided by the history of the "Raines Law hotels" early in this century. When a law was passed forcing saloons to close on Sunday unless they were part of a hotel, many bars created several small cubicles with beds to qualify as hotels, which they then rented out to couples for sexual activity. Bars found to be fostering prostitution in this way were closed and allowed to reopen only if they did not admit women. Some bars then proceeded to garner income by renting out the cubicles to gay male couples.

The rooming houses where many of New York's single men lived also often accommodated gay men as tenants, respecting their privacy and permitting them to bring home male visitors. One major reason was simply the competition for lodgers among the city's many rooming houses. A few even became largely gay.

Chauncey comments: "Some landladies doubtless tolerated known homosexual lodgers for the same economic reasons they tolerated lodgers who engaged in heterosexual affairs, and others simply did not care about their tenants' homosexual affairs."

In the same way, many of the cafeterias and restaurants where most of those lodgers took their meals ignored the "disreputable character" of even their conspicuously gay patrons, "primarily because they were patrons."

By the 1920s, some restaurants and automats were heavily populated with gay men, especially late at night, and a few places openly catered to them. Chauncey points out that the gay men provided regular patronage at places that welcomed them, and sometimes the men's campy behavior attracted other patrons who found them entertaining.

Social purity groups and other "reformers" strongly disapproved of such open gay socializing, but often the police (or the politicians who controlled them) were simply bribed to not bother the restaurants. And some of the large restaurant chains had enough political clout to protect themselves from police interference.

By the early 1920s and into the 1930s gays and lesbians began to engage in more entrepreneurship themselves, opening their own speakeasies and restaurants and holding dances. Chauncey mentions one major gay entrepreneur first opened a small lunch counter, then opened a restaurant (promoted with the image of a sexually ambiguous couple), and later organized a "dinner dance and rumba review" at yet another restaurant.

Pay off the police, or "hire" them.

In some cases gay and gay friendly establishments paid off the police, in other cases they hired the police, ostensibly to provide security from public harassment, but also to provide protection from the police themselves. Chauncey reports that one entrepreneur who ran a gay cabaret protected his business by making his facilities freely available to a social club that included many policemen, allowing them to drink and socialize with female prostitutes.

Gays had always attended masquerade balls sponsored as fundraisers by local clubs, drawn by the opportunity to "dress up" or dance with a male partner in female costume. An investigator for a social purity group reported in 1918 that "a prominent feature of these dances is the number of male perverts who attend them." Organizers welcomed the gays who drew crowds of curiosity seekers.

But the police kept a watchful eye on the dances, uneasy about the gays and same-sex dancing ("disorderly conduct"). One dance organizer who stopped two men from dancing together later apologized to them, saying the police had forced him to stop them. Eventually the threat of police raids forced organizers to cancel the balls.

One of the oddest examples of entrepreneurship benefiting gays occurred when Prohibition ended. When the State Liquor Authority began to crack down on the gay presence in bars with mixed (gay and straight) clientele, gays tended to cluster at bars that were willing to risk serving them. But many bar owners found the cost and risk too great because police kept closing them for illegally serving gays (a gay presence was defined as "disorderly").

"As a result," says Chauncey, "organized criminal syndicates, the only entities powerful enough to offer bars systematic protection, took over the gay bar business." The syndicates, which developed during Prohibition, had enough money, political clout and inside police contacts to provide protection for the bars and their patrons; and the syndicates cared little about public opinion. The famed Stonewall Bar itself was a syndicate-owned bar.

One obvious subsidiary theme in all this is that laws often have surprising unintended consequences, but that is another column.