IGF CultureWatch

Originally appeared in Reason magazine, February 2000.

Rediscovering the social norms that stand between law and libertinism.

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LATELY I HAVE BEGUN TO UNDERSTAND how a Methodist must feel when everyone he meets calls him a Lutheran. People often describe me as a libertarian. All right, it's true that I often write in a skeptical vein about government. Yes, I have come to see a higher, Zen-like power in leaving things alone. I generally do subscribe to H.L. Mencken's dictum, "All persons who devote themselves to forcing virtue on their fellow men deserve nothing better than kicks in the pants." But still. I know, in the visceral and insistent way the Methodist knows he is not a Lutheran, that my worldview is not quite congruent with what most people today regard as libertarianism.

It is hard to evade one label, however, when you can't offer another. If not "libertarian," then what? For a while, I tried "curmudgeon." A curmudgeon, in my own enlightened sense, is a person who is against improving things for the sake of it. (These days, "curmudgeon" is not the same as "conservative," because, ever since Barry Goldwater, many American conservatives have been radical reformers.) I tried "radical incrementalist." A radical incrementalist is a person who seeks to foment revolutionary change on a geological time scale. The trouble is that "curmudgeon" and "radical incrementalist" both describe my temperament but say nothing of my beliefs. So I gave up. And then, a little while ago, I figured it out. I am, I discovered, a soft communitarian.

A what? You roll your eyes, and I can't blame you. Bear with me, however. There is a fair amount of undesignated soft communitarianism about these days, and it signifies the emergence of an important sort of thinking.

A soft communitarian is a person who maintains a deep respect for what I call "hidden law": the norms, conventions, implicit bargains, and folk wisdoms that organize social expectations, regulate everyday behavior, and manage interpersonal conflicts. Until recently, for example, hidden law regulated assisted suicide, and it did so with an almost miraculous finesse. Doctors helped people to die, and they often did so without the express consent of anybody. The decision was made by patients and doctors and families in an irregular fashion, and, crucially, everyone pretended that no decision had ever been made. No one had been murdered; no one had committed suicide; and so no one faced prosecution or perdition.

Hidden law is exceptionally resilient, until it is dragged into politics and pummeled by legalistic reformers, at which point it can give way all at once. The showboating narcissist Jack Kevorkian dragged assisted suicide into the open and insisted that it be legalized (and televised). At that point, the deal was off. No one could pretend assisted suicide wasn't happening. Activists framed state right-to-die initiatives, senators sponsored bills banning assisted suicide, and courts began issuing an unending series of deeply confused rulings. Soon decisions about assisted suicide will be made by buzzing mobs of lawyers and courts and ethics committees, with prosecutors helpfully hovering nearby, rather than by patients and doctors and families. And the final indignity will be that the lawyers and courts and committee people will congratulate themselves on having at last created a rational process where before there were no rules at all, only chaos and darkness and barbarism. And then, having replaced an effective and intuitive and flexible social mechanism with a maladroit and mystifying and brittle one, they will march on like Sherman's army to demolish such other institutions of hidden law as they encounter.

The enemy of hidden law is not government, as such. It is lawyers. Three years in law school teach, if they teach nothing else, that as a practical matter hidden law does not exist, or that if it does exist it is contemptibly inadequate to cope with modern conflicts. The American law school is probably the most ruthlessly anti-communitarian institution that any liberal society has ever produced.

For eons, hidden law has coped sublimely with adultery. As long as the adulterer was discreet and the wife either didn't know what was going on or was willing to pretend she didn't know, everybody else also pretended not to know. Public law's rather different way of handling the situation was on display in the Clinton-Jones-Starr-Lewinsky affair, and it was not superior. So, also, for sexual conduct involving adults in the workplace. Hidden law was imperfect for situations where flirting got out of hand, but today's sexual harassment law, in which platoons of lawyers scour office e-mails for hints of unwelcome overtures, is proving itself not just imperfect but grotesque.

What about the "soft" part? Why a "soft" communitarian? Because there is a harder variety that replicates the lawyers' mistakes in a communitarian direction. The hard communitarian, seeing that hidden law has broken down, demands a series of public laws or subsidies to re-establish it. Require children to support their aging parents, require students to do involuntary volunteer work, make voting mandatory - that sort of thing. The archetype of the hard communitarian is Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore. In America, an example might be Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor of New York City.

We softies, by contrast, understand that hidden law works precisely because it is not formal: The very act of formalizing it destroys it. We believe, therefore, that public law's next big project should be to sit down and shut up. That is, public law should be careful, infinitely more careful than at present, not to burst into every room it sees and immediately begin breaking crockery. It should strive to stay out of hidden law's way, rather than obliviously trampling it with each elephantine footfall. When personal behavior needs regulating, we soft communitarians prefer exhortation to legislation and shame to jail. A good, albeit controversial, example of an effective soft-communitarian activist is Bill Bennett, with his Book of Virtues, his "index of leading cultural indicators," and his denunciations of gangsta rap. Bennett says he opposes legal regulation of song lyrics, but he certainly does not oppose confronting recording company executives and demanding that they read aloud some of the lyrics they sell. He practices censoriousness rather than censorship. That is "soft" in a nutshell.

We soft communitarians are soft in a further sense: Like F.A. Hayek (who in some ways was a soft communitarian), we do not believe in taking an uncritical attitude toward social norms, even deeply embedded ones. With all due respect to folk wisdom, I favor gay marriage, even though nothing could be less traditional. Now that we know that homosexuals exist - that they are not just neurotic heterosexuals who need a few jolts of electroshock - the extension of the nuptial contract to them is not a sundering of tradition but an extension of it. Thoughtful criticism allows us to see this. Soft communitarianism is not blind obeisance to tradition. It aspires to be rigorous rather than rigid.

An interesting question about soft communitarianism is: So what? Who could be against such a mushy and innocuous doctrine? Or who, anyway, apart from everyone who ever went to law school? You might point out that soft communitarians can be found toward the drab center of both political parties, where everyone is for "values" and "civil society." You might also note that soft communitarianism is perfectly consonant with most major strands of libertarianism. The reason I am often mistaken for a libertarian - even though I am more comfortable talking about rules than rights, I prefer reasonableness to reason, and I care about government's effectiveness rather than its size - is that my soft communitarianism leads toward a persistent skepticism about the oozing encroachment of public law into every pore of daily life. Maybe the soft communitarian and the libertarian, like the Methodist and the Lutheran, are just two versions of basically the same thing.

But not so fast. The fact is, many libertarians I know react with discomfort, often bordering on hysteria, to soft-communitarian talk. They feel that if their life is not the law's business, then it also is nobody else's business. They are deeply uneasy with social instruments like shame or opprobrium, which smack of big-nosed authoritarianism in a new guise.

And here a certain sort of libertarianism comes full circle to join hands with a certain sort of leftism. The libertarians and the leftists come to blows over economic issues - who should run the health care sector, for instance - but they glare in hostile unison at the soft-communitarian project (which, remember, also enlists some libertarian types of its own; this gets complicated). Underlying their hostility is an implicit theory of coercion that is worth grappling with, because it lies at the heart of today's culture wars. In that connection, consider Michael Warner.

Warner is, to begin with, an English professor at Rutgers University. But he is probably better known as a leading queer studies scholar. And, more than that, he is an activist, closely associated with an extremely controversial group called Sex Panic!, which organized in the mid-1990s to oppose what it regarded as the squelching of sexual freedom by gay and straight conservatives alike.

I ought to say, not that it matters, that I am discussed in passing in Warner's new book, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (The Free Press). Warner quotes me on gay marriage and says I am "more honest than most" of his ideological adversaries: a compliment I can return in kind. Because The Trouble With Normal is, in large measure, an answer to Andrew Sullivan and other gay conservative advocates of homosexual marriage and assimilation, and because it concerns itself with various intramural disputes in the gay world (strategies for AIDS prevention and the like), booksellers will confine it to the "gay interest" shelves. That is a pity. Warner is that rarest of writers, an honest extremist who is smart enough to see through to most (though not all) of the depths of his own positions and who is fiery enough not to flinch. His agreeably written and commendably concise book thus turns out to be, among other things, a 200-proof distillation of the case against soft communitarianism.

For example, Warner is shrewd enough to see that the standard defense of gay marriage by gay activists is wrong. This defense holds out marriage as just one more lifestyle option. It is available to heterosexuals, so it should be available to homosexuals as well, and that's all there is to it. But this is wrong. Marriage, as Warner aptly puts it, is "a social system of both permission and restriction." Spouses and society alike view matrimony as something special and exalted; it is not merely allowed, it is encouraged. Far beyond merely creating legal arrangements, it is freighted with the social expectations and implicit requirements of hidden law. It is a bargain not just between two people but between the couple and society: The spouses agree to care for one another so that society does not need to, and society agrees in exchange to view their commitment to each other as inviolable and sovereign and, indeed, sacred.

Traditionalist conservatives understand that marriage confers special status under hidden law, which is why they so fiercely oppose extending it to homosexuals. I understand that marriage confers special status, which is why I favor extending it to homosexuals. And Warner, piping up from the radical left, also understands marriage's special status, which is why he opposes gay marriage. When marriage is available to gay people, he understands, gay people will be expected to marry, and married homosexuals will conduct themselves with the same (let's face it) smugness that characterizes married heterosexuals. "The effect," Warner says, "would be to reinforce the material privileges and cultural normativity of marriage." Homosexuals who do not marry will be regarded as less respectable or less successful than those who do.

In Warner's view, that would be a profound miscarriage of social justice. For Warner is against not just the sexual norms of the moment but the very notion of sexual norms. That is not to say he would decline to pass harsh judgment on a rapist. But where consensual sex is concerned, he insists, society should just butt out. Not only should the law stay out of the bedroom (a standard libertarian position), so should norms, because all norms create "hierarchies of respectability."

Warner opposes sexual norms for two reasons. The first is that he is a radical egalitarian. He believes in the moral virtue of diminishing differences - moral, economic, or political - between people and groups. There is no arguing with a radical egalitarian on that point, so I won't.

The second reason goes a little deeper. Warner makes a move which ordinary classical liberalism rejects out of hand but which has an undeniable kind of deep sense to it. In standard liberal theory, coercion and force involve violence or the threat of violence: "Your money or your life." Because, in modern democracies, the state possesses a monopoly on legitimized violence, a coercive policy will be, by definition, a state policy. Nothing that private people or institutions do by way of criticism or exclusion is coercive.

To Warner and others of his school, that view of coercion is laughably narrow and naive. Norms use the clubs of stigma and shame to punish deviants, nonconformists, and radicals. Many people would much rather be jailed than humiliated or ostracized, which is one reason American prisons are so crowded. In a psychological sense, the denial of respectability can be just as coercive as the denial of physical freedom. Nowhere in his book does Warner argue the theoretical case for his extended notion of coercion, but it is apparent on every page. He regards moralizing as a kind of mandating, speaks of "the effect of coercion in the politics of shame," and refers to the "deep coerciveness" of the sort of thinking that privileges marriage. In his world, all social norms are more or less coercive, which means that all of them are oppressive when applied to consenting adults' sexual or social lives.

Whatever its theoretical shortcomings, this sort of thinking exerts a broad attraction in today's America. Lots of people view Gary Bauer's or Jerry Falwell's strident condemnations of the "homosexual lifestyle" as being every bit as oppressive and intrusive as, say, sodomy laws. For that matter, lots of people believe that moral criticism causes violence by fostering hate, or that moral criticism actually is violence ("words that wound"). Many people in America - a majority, maybe - feel queasy talking about "virtue" and "vice," because that sort of talk implies judgmentalism, which implies a "hierarchy of respectability." People prefer sanitized expressions like "values." I would be curious to see what would happen if you visited a randomly selected college campus and asked the students whether it is right to judge other people's lifestyles. My guess is that most students would be appalled at the notion.

What is useful about Warner is that, being both bright and radical, he has no use for the mushy middle, where most ordinary people are content to leave such ideas. He understands the implications of his view of coercion and does not shrink from embracing them. The sort of nightmare society that a Falwell or a Bauer dreams up in order to scare donations out of church ladies is precisely the sort of society Warner wants to create. To be sexually free, we need to be able to explore all possible sexual avenues with an open mind, and thus without fear of shame or stigma. Keeping certain sexual behaviors hush-hush means that most people never think about trying them, which amounts to "constraint through ignorance." There should be no more closets of any sort. Rather, says Warner, let "all the gerbils scamper free."

And so, in the end, it is not gay marriage Warner opposes: It is marriage, and all the conventional notions of shame and responsibility that go with marriage. He does not actually demand that marriage be abolished, because, being a pragmatist, he would rather undermine it by extending all its benefits to unmarried partners - in fact, to everybody. He is likewise not foolish enough to imagine that sexual norms could be eliminated anytime soon, but he believes that the proper role of socially enlightened activism is to favor de-norming at every turn.

Although Warner's view is extreme, it is more influential than you might suppose. All three of the states and all but a handful of the municipalities that offer domestic partner programs for their workers include opposite-sex couples, who, of course, could perfectly well get married if they wanted the benefits of marriage. The large majority of corporate partnership programs also allow heterosexuals to participate. Who is to say, after all, that marriage is better than some other arrangement? Only recently, and with great effort, was the national welfare debate retrieved from the hands of nonjudgmentalists who argued that government's job was to help the indigent, not to judge them.

I am not a soft communitarian because I think shame and stigma are sweet and lovely things. They are not. A weakness of the soft-communitarian position is its unwillingness to admit the truth in much of what Warner says. In some respects, norms are oppressive and shaming is coercive. Having admitted this, however, one can go on to see what Warner, and other anti-communitarians, do not: that soft communitarianism is less oppressive, usually much less so, than the real-world alternatives. Shame and hypocrisy are not ideal ways to deal with philanderers and small-time mashers, but they are better than Paula Jones' litigators and Kenneth Starr's prosecutors. Shame is valuable not because it is pleasant or fair or good but because it is the least onerous of all means of social regulation, and because social regulation is inevitable.

The implication of Warner's view is that the only just society is one without any sexual norms regulating the conduct of consenting adults. But, of course, a normless society is as inconceivable, literally, as a beliefless individual. What would a culture without shame or guilt or "hierarchies of respectability" look like? How is a shameless society even imaginable, given the unbudgeable fact that humans, like dogs and chimpanzees, look to each other for guidance and approval and clues on how to behave?

The fact is, there are going to be norms; the question is always, What sort of norms? In Warner's world, the norm would be one of extreme social permissiveness. People who expressed anything but approval of sexual adventurism would be stigmatized: shamed for engaging in the oppressive act of shaming. If you don't think this can happen, ask any student or professor who has been on the receiving end of a P.C. vilification campaign.

It is also a fact, I think, that shame is a core constituent of a social animal's temperament. Human beings crave the admiration of other human beings more than they crave anything else - even, in many cases, life. Warner seems to view shaming as a political sanction that, with enough effort, we can teach ourselves not to use. But not to shame or be ashamed is like not loving, not laughing, not eating or talking. So the Warnerian project is to repeal not just shame but humanity. In that sense, Warner's utopia is like the Marxist utopia, which repealed greed. My guess is that Warner's normless sexual utopia would be about as successful, and about as good for the downtrodden and marginalized, as Marx's classless economic utopia turned out to be.

Oddly, the words child and children scarcely ever appear in Warner's book. This is an astonishing blind spot in a work of social criticism. Being a defender of gay marriage, I'm as tired as the next fellow of people who use children as a cover for all sorts of authoritarian arguments. Still, Warner seems to find the very concept of parenting unfathomable. The thought that sexual adventurers might be expected to keep certain of their activities out of the sight of 10-year-old boys and girls, in exchange for being left alone, does not seem to have occurred to him. ("No, darling, that's not a game. Those two people are doing what we call `fistfucking.'") If you believe, as seems plausible, that there is a genuine clash of interests between parents and sexual adventurers, then the old dictates of hidden law - "keep it out of sight," for instance - seem to be a pretty ingenious way to strike a balance.

Some especially conservative parents are indignant because sexual adventuring is too visible, while some especially radical adventurers are indignant because they are not allowed to copulate in front of City Hall. Everyone else wishes the conservatives and the radicals would stop pushing the envelope before the bargain collapses altogether, leaving nothing but cops and politicians and lawyers to tell us how to behave. In the end, the man who wants to replace norms with nothing is the best friend of the man who wants to replace norms with laws. Dr. Kevorkian no doubt thinks of himself as a great champion of the right to die. In fact, as is obvious to everybody but himself, he is a godsend to opponents of assisted suicide. Michael Warner is the Jack Kevorkian of sexual liberty.

The good news is that Warner will fail in his mission of de-norming the world. He will be unable to persuade American homosexuals to rise up and rebel against hidden law and its Main Street codes of behavior. The tide is running against him, and he knows it. Perhaps the most heartening aspect of Warner's book is its rage and despair over what Warner regards indignantly as the taming of homosexual politics and culture, the growing ascendancy of "gay" over "queer." Homosexuals are moving toward embracing the contract with hidden law. They want to follow the rules and be respectable, and the heterosexual majority seems more and more inclined to let them.

The further good news is that gradually, quietly, Americans are becoming aware of the existence of hidden law. Slowly - OK, sometimes very slowly, and with the legal establishment still winning more battles than it loses - Americans are beginning to rediscover the lost continent of convention that lies between law and libertinism, between banning and condoning. They are, I like to hope, beginning to see that the hidden constitution, with its elaborate rules of etiquette and its byzantine architecture of pretense and its elaborate hierarchies of respectability, is much like the written constitution: It restricts us so we can be free.

Like other gay conservatives, I spend a lot of time on critiques of the gay left. Turnabout is fair play, so here's some advice to my gay conservative compatriots:

COME OUT. Years ago, when I was still substantially closeted, a straight friend observed that it's hard to change the world from a hiding place. He was right. All conscientious gay women and men should make coming out a top priority. But I think gay conservatives have an especially great obligation to do so. We know there's no gay lifestyle, no gay or "ungay" thought or idea. We must convince the rest of the world, including some gay people, of that. You can't do so unless you're seen and heard.

Of course, there's some risk of rejection or career impairment in being visible. But you should be dedicated in your life to something other than your own wealth or career. Otherwise, you may one day find yourself sixty, rich, and empty.

GET INVOLVED. Conservatives, by disposition and ideology, are reluctant to be "activists." Unless it's got a hammer and sickle tattooed on its forehead, we tend to think it's benign or just foolish, and hence disregard it. But the truth is, if you're gay in America today you're something less than a full citizen, even if you drive a Mercedes and drink 25-year-old port. It will take work, our work, to change things.

Join political and civic organizations. Write to newspapers and magazines when you read something wrong or offensive. Engage the gay left and the religious right in debate. And don't quit at the first sign of trouble or resistance.

DON'T WHINE. Lots of my conservative gay friends say they hate going to pride parades and other gay events because everybody there is in drag or leather thongs and tit clamps. They also lament the dominance of the left in gay organizations. They say that such people represent only a small fraction of all gays and that this distorts the picture the rest of the country gets of us.

They're right that the parades and the outlandish public behavior and dress that often occur at them do not portray most gay lives, but they're wrong to stay away. The antidote to the false impressions created by the parades and other public events is not to stay home and disdainfully watch them on TV; the answer is for us to go ourselves. The answer is to ensure that at such events, and in gay organizations and media, we are present to provide the necessary corrective. We cannot blame anyone else - certainly not the "marginal" elements of our community - for misrepresenting gay life. By our silence and our absence, we have allowed that false picture to be painted.

TOLERATE DIFFERENCE. While we're on the subject, this is probably a good time to repeat the truism that not all gays, not even all gay conservatives, wear suits and ties and act like proper ladies and gentlemen. We should be striving to secure equality for all gays, including those who dress and behave differently from the mainstream.

We can still criticize theatrical excesses, such as public nudity, and we can still condemn real moral wrongs, such as pedophilia. But we will have to respect the right of others to craft their own public image. It may not be the image we would choose for ourselves, and we will want to counter it with more representative depictions of gay life, but we must grasp that we are part of a diverse and colorful movement.

FOCUS ON THE REAL ENEMY. This I promise you: when the bullies are menacing your bloodied body, the person standing betwixt you and eternity will not likely be your Heritage Foundation debate partner. It will be that bull dyke with a nose ring who thinks a single-payer health-care system is really cool. Even taking into account the stifling effect of high taxes, counter-productive social welfare programs, crime, and the encroachment of "hate speech" regulations, the most organized threat to our civil rights today comes from the religious right. A gay leftist may think you're overbearing or self-righteous, may call you names and grossly misunderstand you at times, but I've yet to hear one request the state to lock you up under the rubric of a sodomy law. So let's try to keep our squabbles with the gay left in perspective. When you get frustrated, remember the line from an old movie: they may be rancid butter, but they're on our side of the bread.

EDUCATE. Many, though by no means all, gay political leaders and writers have only a dim view of what gay conservatives stand for. That fact is both disappointing and a measure of how much work we must do. Yet the animosity and suspicion with which the gay political establishment views us is partly understandable: the only people they've ever known as "conservatives" told them they were immoral, unnatural, or worse.

We must painstakingly correct their impressions of us and fill in the large gaps in their understanding of our ideas. And we must emphasize again and again that we stand with, not against, them in the pursuit of equality for gays.

YOU'VE ALMOST GOT TO PITY the hapless organizers of the grandly named Millennium March on Washington (MMOW) for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) civil rights. The event, scheduled to take place in the nation's capital April 30, has been castigated since it was announced two years ago. Sometimes criticism can shed light, but in the case of the MMOW there's little real debate, and even less light, just endless polemics between the gay left and the "queer" far left. It's hard to side with the critics, but it's also difficult to support the event's organizers.

You might recall that back in February 1998, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's biggest lesbigay lobby, and the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, the nation's largest lesbigay religious association, proposed a gathering on the National Mall in Washington during the millennial year. The theme would be as novel as it was straightforward: "Faith and Family." This seemed to be smart politics, meant to focus Middle America's attention on gay and lesbian partnerships, gay parenting, gay children, and so on, and to stand up to the religious right's drumbeat that gay love is both "a sin" and a threat to families.

Immediately, there was an uproar of dissent by grassroots "queer" activists. Michael Warner, one of leaders of an "anti-assimilationist" group called "Sex Panic!" proclaimed that "faith and family is an extremely exclusionary theme. ... It is a massive repudiation of the lessons of decades of gay activism" - which, in Warner's view, has presumably been about opposing faith and family (just as the religious right says).

Shortly afterwards, in spring 1998, the Ad Hoc Committee for An Open Process was formed. The network of anti-MMOW grassroots activists charged that the organizers of the march were top-down authoritarians who blithely ignored the supposedly "democratic" organizing principles that had buttressed previous gay marches in the nation's capital. "The way the Millennium March was conceived, articulated, promoted and put out there has really been an insult and a slap in the face to our own history as an l/g/b/t movement," said Leslie Cagan, a long-time New York City-based lesbian activist and member of the Ad Hoc Committee. Of course, others pointed out that what the Committee seemed angriest about was that its cadre of long-time activists, many on the political far left, hadn't been in control of the process this time round.

That's not to say that those activists who did wind up in control of the board of directors for the MMOW have done any kind of a rational job. In fact, they quickly caved into the radical critics and jettisoned the Faith and Family theme. And, as with previous marches, they have taken the admirable goal of racial diversity to an extreme, resorting to race- and gender-based quotas that border on the absurd - a requirement that their governing board be at least 50 percent people of color, regardless of who actually shows up willing to do the work. Is it churlish to note that all non-white minorities together are well under half the U.S. population (which is still 73 percent non-Hispanic white)?

Nevertheless, that wasn't enough for the critics, who are, of course, even further to the left than the MMOW board. Despite the quota, several groups representing people of color have formally distanced themselves from the march due to concerns about "non-inclusivity." As Ad Hoc Committee member Mandy Carter said recently, "One of the ongoing lines that MMOW uses is that 'we have a 50 percent people-of-color board.' When you hear that, you might make an assumption that there would be a huge people-of-color presence for the march and in issues being discussed out there. But that hasn't been the case."

No, as quota critics have long maintained, heavy-handed quota schemes don't promote true racial diversity, only politically correct tokenism. In short, rigid quotas create superficial diversity but work against the equality necessary for true community.

Also in response to charges that the march wasn't "inclusive" enough, the MMOW formally made "racial justice" one of its eight announced "priority issues" on which the march and rally will focus. By this, of course, the organizers mean support for affirmative action programs based on government-mandated racial preferences.

Another "priority issue" announced by the MMOW is hate-crimes legislation. This goal has long been at the forefront of the HRC's political agenda. What's been obscured is that many gays and lesbians, including some activists, think that hate crime laws are a terrible idea, and that punishing a crime based on what the perpetrator was thinking is a dangerous precedent. Hate crime laws would make the penalty for bias-motivated crime more severe. But the criminal justice system has worked well in recent bias-crime cases, including the Matthew Shepard murder. What "greater sentence" than life in prison would hate-crime advocates have demanded? Certainly not the death penalty, which many progressive activists also oppose.

Before concluding, let's look back at the previous March on Washington for gay rights in 1993, which the Ad Hoc Committee has been holding up as a model of democratic organization. In fact, march organizers had mandated 50-percent minority quotas on state organizing committees. Again, if anything less than representation reflecting actual demographics constitutes discrimination (as affirmative action advocates maintain), then gay white men were discriminated against by their own rights march.

Moreover, the '93 event had come under fire for extraordinary poor execution: Due to a complicated march route thousands spent the day waiting to step off the green, and many had still not done so at the end of the day as the rally on the Mall across town was ending. Writing in the liberal "New Republic" magazine, Jacob Weisberg noted that the '93 march "was appallingly organized, failed to coordinate even a single time for a photo-op on the Mall and had as its most memorable quote a lesbian comedian's remark that Hillary Clinton was 'at last a first lady I could fuck.'"

The PC quotient at the '93 event, broadcast live on C-SPAN, was taken to bizarre extremes. The march platform made opposition to welfare reform one of its key planks. Not one speaker who wasn't squarely on the gay left was allowed to address the rally, and the scarcity of gay white male speakers at the all-day event (you could count them on one hand, literally) didn't go unnoticed by the crowd.

Back to the future. In addition to "racial justice" and "hate crimes legislation," the other "high priority" issues announced for the MMOW range from ending GLBT discrimination in the workplace (i.e., support for the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act) to GLBT health care issues (i.e., support for some version of nationalized health care). But shockingly, the whole issue of the right of gays to serve in the military is missing from the MMOW list. And this, despite the fact that in a poll conducted over several months by MMOW organizers and promoted as a "national ballot" that would make for a democratic agenda, that the "right to serve" took eighth place. But MMOW organizers completely dropped it from their announced listing of priority issues.

So I wouldn't hold my breath expecting this year's event in Washington to be much more "inclusive" of the entire lesbian and gay community, at least if diversity is defined as a variety of ideological viewpoints. You won't be hearing anyone from, say, the Independent Gay Forum, a group of libertarian, moderate, and conservative lesbian and gay writers. And I'd be shocked if someone from the Log Cabin Republicans were actually allowed to speak.

The MMOW's currently output of uninspiring, politically correct boilerplate was, I suppose, predictable. But what an opportunity has been missed to take a novel approach away from the politics of grievance. In fact, the MMOW had once shown some promise of originality in delivering a powerful statement for gay affirmation and equality that would have been stronger than the litany of give-me's that will now be the event's focus - and which still won't appease the critics on the left.

Maybe it's time to jettison the idea that we can all come together for one event with a common call for action. But maybe, just maybe, that in itself is a sign of progress.

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.