IGF CultureWatch

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.

Ayn Rand's work enjoys surprising popularity among gay youth. The author explores why.

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A WELL-INFORMED FRIEND asked me recently why Ayn Rand is so popular among young gays and lesbians.

"Is she?" I asked.

He assured me that he keeps running into young gay Rand fans in social circumstances and on the Internet. Just recently a gay man visiting his home page told him he should read Ayn Rand.

I had not thought much about it before, but it seems reasonable that a writer who stresses individuality, trusting your own perceptions and confidence in your ability to achieve against the odds would be popular among young gays who might feel particularly assaulted by social pressures contrary to their own deepest feelings.

Some background here. Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a novelist and philosopher best known for three remarkable, long novels: We the Living, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She also wrote plays, short stories, and five or six books of popular essays on ethics, economics, education, aesthetics and the importance of philosophy.

Born Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Rand saw the Communist revolution at close range. Disgusted with both collectivist theory and the reality of its practice, she realized she could not live in a society that instead of bringing a human liberation, sacrificed the individual, demanded conformity, stifled individual creativity and opposed personal excellence.

Much of her life's work would be devoted to developing a consistent philosophy that would defend the autonomy of the individual against government, religion, society and everything that would use him or her for purposes other than his or her own.

Determined to be a writer, Rand left the Soviet Union for America in 1926. She made her way to Los Angeles, where she worked in the film industry, first as an extra, then reading and eventually writing screenplays.

Her first major novel, We the Living (1936), was a popular failure. But her subsequent novels The Fountainhead (1943) and her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged (1957) were best sellers, each articulating in fictional form her ideas about the value of the individual, thinking for oneself, enlightened self-interest, personal integrity, the importance of creative and satisfying work, and the multitude of obstacles to all of these.

Today we seem to be in the midst of a Rand boomlet.

A documentary about Rand's life, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, described as "marvelously engrossing" by the Los Angeles gay publication Frontiers, was just nominated for an Academy Award.

A made-for-television movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand, based on episodes from a biography of Rand by Barbara Branden, is scheduled for broadcast on Showtime this fall [1998?ed.].

And the first full-length scholarly analysis of Rand's intellectual background and philosophical procedure, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical was published just three years ago by Chris Sciabarra, a gay visiting scholar at New York University.

Rand's writings continue to be popular as well. According to a March 9 article in U. S. News & World Report, her books still sell upwards of 300,000 copies a year. An English professor at the University of California at Berkeley who regularly survey's his students reading habits found to his dismay that The Fountainhead was the single most popular book.

So I asked several friends who admire Rand, both gay and heterosexual, what they thought her particular appeal might be for gays. Some of the answers:

• "Most lesbians and gays want the world to judge them for the content of their own character?not as a stereotype defined by somebody else."
• "Anybody who growing up has some special �marginality' problem with respect to society might well respond with enthusiasm to a philosophy and vision that upholds going one's own way as a very basic value, especially one as artistically powerful as Rand's. Gays of course are clubbed over the head with the fact of their marginality fairly early on, in the very important area of sexuality. So they may be a little more susceptible to Rand because of their special situation."
• "[It] seems to me that those who feel disenfranchised in a culture would find Rand's individualist stance psychologically, at least, very appealing. A kind of �in your face,' �I'll be whoever I want to be, so long as I respect others' rights to do the same' approach. This would be appealing to gays, especially, given that in all respects they could well be unassailable in character, etc., while being or having been assailed to no end for being gay."
• And novelist Robert Rodi (author of Closet Case, Drag Queen and other comedies of manners) replied, "The simplest and greatest appeal of Rand to me, as a gay youth, was that her world was a meritocracy. People there were judged my the quality of their minds and works, and by nothing else, which certainly appealed to me at that particular time, beleaguered as I was by religious and societal disapproval (and worse)."

There is another way of coming at this. The benefits Rand offers are not limited in their appeal. But considered separately, it is easy to see their particular relevance for young gays.

• An immunization against a great deal of popular, even pervasive, nonsense in religion, morality, psychology and political thinking that is helpful to anyone who is trying to make sense of the world and beginning to question and test whatever views they have been brought up to believe.
• A distancing from the general culture, even a kind of healthy alienation from it, based on substantive values?as distinguished from any sort of nihilistic alienation.
• Skepticism about government and institutional do-gooders and "helping professions" (coercers, politicians, planners, organizers, experts, moralists), about their claims regarding duties, obligations, traditions, moral imperatives, collective goods, and so forth.
• An appreciation for individual creativity, enterprise and achievement as the source of personal meaning and fulfillment, the connection between those and human freedom, and the falsity of any distinctions between "personal" freedom, "artistic" freedom and "economic" freedom.
• A profound and largely accurate analysis of the character and motivations of the "bad guys": their deceptions, their motives, their self-deceptions, their cynicism, their envy, their willingness to distort language and use sophistic arguments to tear down what they oppose.

In short, Rand shows people a way to understand themselves and their differentness, to see the problem as "out there" in society, not inside themselves. In doing so, Rand shows that you can be a good (gay) person in a bad (homophobic) society. That is no inconsiderable achievement.

IN MAY 1998 a group of social scientists announced in Science magazine that they had found much higher rates of stigmatized sexual behavior and drug use among high school age young men than anyone had previously reported.

The article "Adolescent Sexual Behavior, Drug Use, and Violence: Increased Reporting with Computer Survey Technology," reported a survey in which 1,672 youths, 15-19 years old, were divided into two groups. One group answered questions using a common written questionnaire. The other group heard and saw the questions asked by a computer and answered using the computer keyboard.

To the surprise of the researchers, the computer users admitted far more homosexuality and drug use than the questionnaire users.

In particular: Only 1.5 percent of those using the written questionnaire admitted any homosexual behavior, but 5.5 percent of those using a computer did so.

Some of the details were interesting.

In the more candid (less dishonest) computer wing of the survey, the most common homosexual behavior the youths admitted was being masturbated by another male (3.5 percent), followed by being fellated by another male (3.1 percent). Then followed masturbating another male (2.6 percent), fellating a man (2.3 percent), insertive anal sex with a man (1.9 percent) and finally receptive anal sex with a man (0.8 percent).

In each case, the written survey produced far lower estimates.

Not surprisingly, the more stigmatized the behavior the greater the difference between the two sets of answers. For instance, five times as many computer users admitted fellating someone, and eight times as many computer users admitted receptive anal sex. (Hardly anyone using the written survey admitted receptive anal sex.)

The researchers were amazed!

For years, social scientists tried to convince us that people give fairly honest answers on written questionnaires because that format assuages their concern about keeping their behavior secret. And they have doggedly, arrogantly, defended questionnaires against frequent criticism that they were showing absurdly low estimates for many activities, especially homosexuality.

So now all those earlier findings are shown to be palpable nonsense -- and by a factor of three or four.

"We had the analysis done and redone, but this is real," senior author Charles Turner confessed frankly to The New York Times. "It means everything you thought about the risks adolescents face is an underestimate, if you're deriving your perceptions from past surveys."

But trusting those previous surveys is exactly what Charles Turner told us to do in the past, with as much confidence in the old method as he now places in the new method.

The researchers wondered why the computer elicited greater honesty. They might better have wondered why written questionnaires do so poorly and wonder if the computer method is much better.

Pioneer sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey scorned written questionnaires, calling them "an invitation to lie."

As Kinsey wrote: "People, even when guaranteed anonymity, will not commit themselves on socially taboo and legally punishable activities like? homosexual activity, when they have to put it down in black and white. Practically all previous questionnaire experience indicates that they come out with figures very much lower?"

But the computer survey results are subject to many of the same objections as a written survey.

Kinsey and his colleagues were able to get greater candor from people because they asked a large number of questions very rapidly, minimizing the opportunity to lie, and used numerous cross checks on accuracy.

In addition, Kinsey's small group learned to use whatever language people were most comfortable with, depending on their educational level (e.g., sometimes using "fuck" instead of "have insertive anal sex"). They also were able to explain the question if someone seemed confused.

Finally the Kinsey group could change the order of the questions, dropping a line of inquiry if a person seemed uncomfortable, coming back to the topic later when the person was more relaxed.

Standardized questionnaires, whether on paper or on computer, are able to do none of these things. In fact, modern researchers, including Turner, strangely continue to assert the superiority of the standardized wording and question order for everyone, despite evidence to the contrary, and examples of inconsistency, lying and misunderstanding in this study.

The researchers would have understood this if they had read Kinsey, but modern researchers seem determined to forget everything Kinsey ever taught, and then congratulate themselves on rediscovering any small piece of it. Much social science progress occurs this way.

Consider some of the methodological problems and difficulties in the newest survey.

Most obviously, many people refused to participate at all, many perhaps having something to hide. These people are conveniently ignored.

The researchers asked ambiguous questions. For instance, they asked about sex with a prostitute, but not whether the sex was for money. They did not ask the gender of the prostitute, though I know of youths who have paid for sex with men.

The researchers seem naive. Nearly 4 percent of the youths said they themselves had been paid for sex, and most (3.5 percent) said they had been paid by women (twice the number who had sex with a prostitute). However, that is not the way the world works. Women rarely pay for sex. (Kinsey found that about 0.l percent of his female subjects had done so.) If the researchers had any knowledge of the world they would know they were being lied to, yet they report this without comment as a "finding."

Third, can the researchers really believe that more than twice as many young men are being anally insertive with males as are being anally receptive?

Fourth, Kinsey pointed out that stigma and hypocrisy about homosexuality, like homosexuality itself, are more common among the less educated. Here too, none of the youths who were below normal grade level in school admitted any homosexual behavior on the written questionnaire. But a higher than average number of them using the computer admitted homosexual behavior (6.2 percent). Turner reports this as if no one knew it before.

Given such clear evidence of homophobia, some youths are no doubt still lying. So the question is: Given this and other evidence of lying, why should anyone think the new computer technique has eliminated cover-up and finally gotten accurate answers?

ALL THIS REALLY HAPPENED. I could not have made it up. There would be no point in making it up; it is only interesting if it really occurred.

I can tell it now because more than 10 years have passed and the principals have moved on. Perhaps they have even forgotten about it. I have not. Although I only stumbled into it, it may have had more resonance for me than for them.

One Saturday afternoon in the late fall I was at home listening, as I sometimes do, to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast. The opera that week was Der Rosenkavalier -- the "Rose Cavalier" -- a romantic comedy by Richard Strauss. It is a beautiful opera, full of lush arias, sensuous waltzes, and an intriguing amount of transvestism.

I need you to understand part of the plot. Oversimplifying, a boorish old nobleman, Baron Ochs, decides to propose to a lovely young lady, Sophie. He engages a young man, Octavian, to take his proposal to Sophie and present her with a token of his esteem and desire?a silver rose. When Octavian and Sophie first meet each other as Octavian presents the rose, they instantly fall in love. Eventually they manage to scare off Baron Ochs and vow to live happily ever after. This is all accompanied by some of the best music anybody ever wrote for anything.

Part way through the first act, I got a call from the local gay bookstore, telling me a book I had ordered had come in and I could pick it up any time.

Oh, great! I wanted the book but did not want to miss the best parts of the music?and I did not have a Walkman.

I decided I would listen through the beginning of Act II, where Octavian presents the silver rose to Sophie, than I would run out for the book, and get back just in time for the series of waltzes in the third act. It would be close, but I could do it.

As he always does, Octavian duly presented the silver rose to Sophie -- the rose represented musically by high notes played on flutes and little silver bells -- and the two young people fell in love, as young people will. I threw on my coat and scarf and hurried out.

As I was walking up Broadway, one of the main arteries of Chicago's gay enclave, I ran into a young man I knew slightly. Robert was the teenage son of one of the couples I got to know when I served as the gay board member for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

Robert was standing outside a popular local restaurant looking around forlornly. He was holding something long and thin, wrapped in a sort of greenish translucent paper. When he saw me, he brightened up.

"Hi," I said. "How ya' doin'?"

"Can you do me a favor?" he said. "A really big favor?"

I hesitated. "I don't know. I'm in kind of a hurry. What is it?"

"You're Paul, right?" he asked. "I really need somebody to do this. See, there is this guy in there" -- he pointed into the restaurant -- "that I met in the gay youth group and I think I'm in love with him. I want you to give him this."

He thrust out the long thin object wrapped in translucent green paper.

"What is it?" I asked.

"A rose," said Robert. "I bought him a rose." He looked sheepish. "I wanted him to have it."

The world tilted slightly.

"Is this some sort of set up?" I asked warily.

"No," said Robert. "I bought this for him. Could you give it to him?"

"Listen," I said. "Do you know what is on the radio right now? Do you know what the Met is playing?"

"I don't know anything about that," insisted Robert. "I just want to give him this."

"Why can't you do it?" I asked, still suspicious.

"Oh, I couldn't do that. I don't want him to know who it's from. Could you give it to him? It'll just take a second."

I resisted. Something was fishy. This was too coincidental to be a coincidence. I shook my head. "I really can't," I said. "I'm in a hurry. Hope you find someone. Good luck."

I walked on. When I looked back he was still standing there holding the rose, looking around anxiously for somebody, anybody he knew.

I got to the bookstore, picked up my book, leafed through a few magazines then started back home.

When I got as far as the restaurant, Robert was still there.

"Could you do it now?" he said, coming up to me. "I can't find anyone to help me. Please?" He thrust the rose at me.

"He's still in there?"

"He's with a bunch of guys from the gay youth group. They have a snack after their meeting."

"What does he look like?"

"You'll do it?" His face brightened.

"What does he look like," I repeated, reaching out to take the rose. I listened. No silver bells.

"He's really good looking and he has bright red hair. His name is Brian."

Feeling very self-conscious and a little foolish, I walked into the restaurant carrying the rose, looked around and spied the table of young men, accompanied by one or two adult advisors. Among them was, unmistakably, an engaging young man with bright red hair. I drew myself up and walked over to the table.

"You are Brian?" I asked the young man.

"Yes," he said. "Why?"

"I am to give you this," I said, as I handed him the rose, still wrapped in its green florist's paper.

He unwound the paper and took out the single, long stemmed red rose. The entire table fell silent and stared at it. So did other diners.

"What is this for?" Brian asked. "Who is this from?"

"It is from? An Admirer," I said.

"Who are you?"

A harder question than he knew.

"I? am The Messenger." I said. Then I bowed slightly. "Have a good day." And I walked back out.

Robert rushed up to me. "Did you find him? Did you give it to him?"

"Yes, of course."

"That's great. Thank you. Thanks a lot. That's really great."

We shook hands and I walked on, feeling a little odd, a little detached from the world around me. When I got home, Octavian and Sophie were singing a final duet.

Love, I suppose, doesn't always win out; but it always has a chance. And, somehow, we always wish it well, don't we?

WHEN GAY NON-DISCRIMINATION LAWS are subject to a popular vote, gays generally lose. When gay non-discrimination laws, and, even more, gay marriage laws are put to a vote in a legislature, gays generally lose.

At the same time, several major business firms have recently made outreach to gays and lesbians, advertising to them and fashioning products and services for them. Large numbers of major corporations have adopted gay non-discrimination rules and some are providing health insurance for domestic partners.

The marked contrast between the political and the business realms suggests that the economic marketplace is friendlier to gays and lesbians than the political marketplace.

Put another way, actors in the economic marketplace, subject to profit and loss, have an incentive to be friendly to gays because their goal is to retain skilled employees and to lure dollars from every possible consumer. By contrast, actors in the political marketplace have a disincentive to be friendly to gays because they need to lure votes from all citizens; that is, they are subject to democracy or majority rule.

As author Grant Lukenbill remarked recently, "Gay employees of Apple Computer in Texas have more rights at work than they do in their own home."

Bluntly, the free market is better for gays than democracy.

It is worth looking more closely at some of the ways in which the economic market provides better protection for individuality and individual choice than the political market.

Votes that really register

In the economic marketplace, when you cast your "dollar vote" for the product you want, you get the product you want. That is, you win no matter what other people do with their dollar votes, and your approval registers economically with the firm whose product you bought.

In the political marketplace, you get what you want only if half of all the other voters already agree with you. If you voted for a losing side, you get nothing. And your candidate gets no reward for making outreach to you. In fact, he may be being penalized.

In short, the economic marketplace fosters a pluralism of values and a plurality of results�i.e., a variety of ways of living. In the political marketplace, the winner's values are imposed on the losers.

For the political marketplace to achieve the value pluralism of the economic marketplace, you would have to imagine a country (state, city) in which you could choose which politicians made the laws for you, and everyone else could do the same.

A second advantage of the economic marketplace is that you can use your dollar votes for the things you want most, and forgo (if necessary) the things you want less. In other words, priorities count. For people with limited incomes, this is a particularly important feature of the marketplace.

In the political marketplace, by contrast, you get to case only one ballot vote for each office, even if on particular race is very more important to you and some others are not important at all.

Say a gay candidate were running. If the political marketplace had the same respect for individual preferences that the economic marketplace does, you could abstain from voting in races you did not care about and then use all those votes in the race you felt strongly about.

Package deals

A third advantage of the economic marketplace: In the political marketplace each candidate has an "issues package," a set of positions on different issues, some of which you will agree with and some of which most likely you will not. But you are stuck with the package and if you vote for the candidate you get the positions you dislike just as much as the ones you like.

In the economic marketplace, by contrast, you can use your dollar votes for a wide variety of disparate items, buying the products, styles, and brands of each that you want, putting together a personal "products package" that is different from everyone else's. There are no package deals where you have to buy, say, Guess jeans, Arrow shirts, Adidas tennis shoes, and Pepsodent toothpaste in order to get any one of them.

A fourth advantage of the economic marketplace is that it encourages rational consideration in advance of acting.

Before you buy a major purchase, you tend to read up on the subject, ask friends, comparison shop, and so forth. You have a definite incentive to do this because the more time you invest in making a prudent "dollar vote" choice, the more you benefit directly by having and using a good product.

In the political marketplace, by contrast, there is little benefit to spending your time investigating the candidates' voting records, analyzing the issues, and so forth. An informed vote has no more influence on the outcome than an uninformed one, and practically no influence in any case, so there is no incentive to be an informed voter, no "payoff." Your vote can still be canceled out by someone who does not know or care about the issues and votes on whim.

Recourse for Defective Merchandise

A fifth advantage of the economic "dollar vote" is that if the product you bought turns out to be defective or fails to live up to your expectations, you can cut your losses immediately. You can throw the product away, return it to the store, get it repaired, sometimes even get your dollar votes back.

No so with the political marketplace. No politician ever came with a guarantee of "Full refund if not completely satisfied." One you have "bought" him (or her) with your vote, you are stuck with him no matter if he changes his positions, compromises his principles, or turns out to be totally ineffective in advancing the ideas that led you to vote for him. Perhaps a few names come to mind.

The political marketplace is open only once every two, or four, or sometimes only once every six years. In the economic marketplace, people are voting every day.

Pluralism: The Genuine Article

Perhaps the root difference between the economic marketplace and the political marketplace is that the economic marketplace is voluntary. It respects people's individual choices in what they buy or sell, including the choice not to participate, because it cannot do otherwise. It embodies as well as fosters values pluralism.

The political marketplace, by contrast, is coercive. It allows a majority to make one rule for all, usually to the advantage of the majority, and requires all who dissent to obey. It gives short or no shrift to differing desires, needs, or conditions. Which of these better benefits minorities like gays seems clear.

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but I have been spending the last couple of weeks getting ready for Gay History Month, which we celebrate in October each year.

• I've taken out all my CDs and old records of music by Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber and (a personal favorite) the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski and put them next to the CD player for easy access. And I went through the program guide for the local classical music stations and marked the pieces by other gay composers.
• I dug out that dauntingly long, definitive biography of Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann that I have been meaning to read for years and put it beside my big leather easy chair.
• I pulled my copy of Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy from the bookshelf and put it on my nightstand so each evening before going to sleep I can re-read a few of Cavafy's surprisingly frank and level-headed descriptions of street cruising, man-watching, love and loss in early 20th century Alexandria, Egypt.
• I made a short list of the buildings designed by architect Louis Sullivan that I want to make a point of going to see. And I want to make a special effort to spend some time just sitting and looking around in Ralph Adams Cram's neo-Gothic Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue, trying to figure out what makes it so remarkable.
• I went to the post office and bought a bunch of the new stamps honoring composer Samuel Barber that the U.S. Postal Service issued Sept. 13, just in the nick of time for Gay History Month.
• Luckily for me Henry Gerber, founder of the first American gay advocacy organization in the United States (the Society for Human Rights founded in 1924), lived here in Chicago at 1710 N. Crilly Court, a street just one block long just west of Wells St. in the Old Town area. I've never actually gone to look at that site, so I shall put on a coat and tie and make a small pilgrimage to honor our venerable ancestor.

As one of the small band who were early proponents of the idea of a Gay History Month way back in 1994, I admit that my celebration may be a little more thoroughgoing than other people's, maybe even obsessive. But the point is, anyone could easily do one or two of these things, or something similar. I myself may punk out on a few of these (Ellmann's book does look pretty long), but the opportunities exist.

Though the idea of a Gay History Month is less than four years old, the idea of gay history itself has been around quite some time.

Perhaps the earliest form of gay history was the list of famous homosexuals.

"The list," as we could call it, appears even in classical times. It was used by gay writers or characters seeking to offer a justification or precedent for their sexuality. One notable example is in the 2nd century Greek writer Athenaeus: anecdotes about the gay sexuality of several gods, heroes and ancient figures are offered by guests at a dinner party (in Book XIII).

The list's first appearance in modern times may have been in Marlowe's play Edward II (written in 1596), and it became a staple of 19th and early 20th century apologetic writings and early gay fiction. The list eventually became so long and inclusive that it became an object of parody by Chicago playwright Rick Paul and by novelist Larry Kramer in his labored, unfunny satire Faggots.

As modern candor about sexuality increased through the 1960s, researchers began to ask more interesting questions about the lives of famous gays?about the social environments they lived in and the friendship networks they formed, and about how their sexuality, and the social response to it, influenced their lives and entered into and shaped their creative works.

An extreme case, for instance, would be Henry James' almost excruciating attention to the nuances of people's behavior and the details of cultural coding.

Another example would be Walt Whitman's backing away from his early celebration of male physical bonding and "adhesiveness" and degenerating into windy vagueness about "democracy" and invented stories about illegitimate children as he was at first attacked and then grew better-known as a poet.

A still more recent third phase of gay history now takes as its task the attempt to find out how ordinary gay men and women actually led their lives: how they discovered one another, the informal institutions they developed, the coding they used, how they coped with persecution and prejudice, how they thought of themselves, and how their self-understanding may have influenced their lives.

George Chauncey's Gay New York, though not a zippy read, is a prominent example of this sort of history. Allan Berube's 30-page history of gay bathhouses (contained in the anthology Policing Public Sex) is another.

And the fascinating thing is that even for the much earlier periods new material keeps coming to light: A European archive divulges a group of letters, an ancient library is discovered in a Near East archeological dig, a Greek vase depicting sodomy is found hidden in the basement of a museum, a mummy is found wrapped in papyrus that preserves a same-sex love-spell, etc.

If history, as Oscar Wilde?who should know?said, is "merely gossip," then of what use is gay history, besides being merely a charming antiquarian hobby?

I think the answer is that George Orwell was absolutely right when he said in his anti-Christian (as well as anti-Communist) novel 1984 that "Whoever controls the past, controls the future." The Catholic church knew this full well when it burned Sappho's poems and destroyed other ancient literature, when it sought to have records of gay court cases and interrogations burned with those found guilty, when it sought to make sodomy a literally unspeakable "thought crime."

History is a way of finding out that one has a past, that there have always been gays and lesbians who struggled and survived, who failed nobly or prospered, who provide models to emulate or transcend. History can increase our self-understanding by showing us the richness of our past.

At the same time history can be a way escaping the present, of getting a bit outside oneself and one's limited viewpoint, of seeing that the world was once different from the way it is now, and realizing that it could be?surely will be?different in the future.

And one almost inevitably wonders what gays and lesbians 100 years hence will think as they look back on us as a part of their own history. It is an odd feeling, really.

LET'S SEE NOW. As a gay man, I am single with no dependent children. Most gay men, in fact, are (legally) single males with no dependent children. In the same way, most lesbians are single females and fewer have dependent children than do heterosexuals.

That being the case, where is my gain, my tax cut, our tax cut, in the recent, much heralded, balanced budget and tax cut agreement? There wasn't one.

Keep in mind some of the major provisions of the new law:

• A $500 dollar income tax credit for each child. People who earn up to $25,000 but who do not owe income taxes can deduct the amount from their social security tax.
• A $1,500 tax credit for each of the first two years of a child's college, and eventually a $2,000 credit for each of the next two years.
• Higher taxes on cigarettes to pay for medical care for?cigarette smokers? No?children again, specifically, children whose parents do not provide health insurance for them.

As the Chicago Tribune tersely headlined its front page analysis of the agreement, "Got kids? You'll cash in."

But if you are single person with no dependent children, that is, if you are a typical gay person? Then there is nothing much here for you.

Now no one need begrudge anyone else's paying lower taxes. After all, it is their own money to begin with, not the government's money. They worked for it, they earned it, they should be able to keep it. The objection here is that other people got a tax reduction and most gays did not. That is, the "tax cut" effectively raised the proportion of the total tax burden that we will be paying, including even the social security tax. Our taxes, in short, just rose compared to everyone else's.

No doubt the conservative wing of the Republican Party was happy to provide such conspicuous support for its "pro-family" agenda and produce benefits for "pro-family" voters. That is called "servicing your core constituency."

But what about President Bill Clinton? In 1992 (and promising a "middle class tax cut"), Clinton received two-thirds of the gay vote. In 1996, by all accounts he was estimated to have received at least 60 percent. According to The New York Times (Nov. 10, 1996), Clinton received 57 percent of the singles' vote, about twice Bob Dole's 31 percent.

Was Clinton aware that this law would benefit everyone but gays and others without children? Despite our national leaders' claims, echoed by Democratic fund-raisers, that we are a Clinton "core constituency," we seem to have been ignored. No one seems to have mentioned this during policy discussions. No one seems to have made an issue of it. But it is at least worth pointing out that this looks like another example of a double standard policy between (most) gays and (most) heterosexuals?something like "don't ask, don't tell" surfacing in the economic realm. And it looks like a policy that is of a piece with the Defense of Marriage Act and the Communications Decency Act.

It would have been possible for our national gay and lesbian organizations to raise the issue with the administration, or with our supporters in Congress, while the agreement was still in the discussion stage. But they almost surely did not?and did not, I suspect, for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, they do not think of gay interests in economic terms. They do not see most gays as having an economic life at all, much less an economic life that is differentiable from that of most heterosexuals. Nevertheless, earning a living is how most of us spend about half our waking hours, and spending (and enjoying) our income is how we spend a good deal of the other half, so any economic benefit that accrues to us represents an increase in our quality of life.

There is a sense, of course, in which the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is about our economic life. Specifically ENDA is about increasing the number of jobs open to gays and lesbians. In practice that means it would enable gays to choose from among more jobs, choosing a higher paying (rather than lower paying) one. But, of course, reducing the taxes we pay would have the same effect as opening up access to a higher paying job, and it would involve less coercion of others, and therefore less resentment and less opposition.

Then, too, people who have more money are less likely to be discriminated against, and it certainly enables them to cope with discrimination when it occurs, so lower taxes would benefit us all now without having to wait for a change in employment law.

A second reason could be that our national organizations have little or no experience in working for lower taxes or reduced government expenditures. When they are concerned with money issues, it is usually in trying to obtain more government expenditures, as for subsidies for AIDS drugs, or money for AIDS research or AIDS education.

But they have little idea of how to work for lower taxes, and perhaps not much commitment to it. They lack the vocabulary, the arsenal of arguments, and ultimately the congressional contacts among the mostly Republican (and conservative Democrat) zealous budget cutters to make the case that gays, if only as people without children, should be included in the tax reduction package in some way.

For instance, let everyone equally spend a college tuition credit on further education or job training or any other personal improvement program, including travel or book purchases. Or let each of us add the same amount, $7,000, to a personal IRA. Or use the cigarette tax-derived money to cover the deductible in everyone's health insurance program. None of these is an ideal example, but they are a start.

But a far better solution would be to let individuals make their own decisions about what will most benefit them in any given year by simply reducing everyone's taxes by $500, or $1,000 or whatever. Period. Or reduce the income (or social security) tax rate by some amount across the board for everyone. After all, it is our money too. We worked for it. We earned it. We should be able to keep it, just like people who have children.

Lesbians often make the claim, and it is a very plausible one, that they more often feel discriminated against as women than they do as homosexuals. So they join women's advocacy groups, such as the National Organization for Women.

In the same way, I suspect, gay men often experience, deprecation and even dismissive responses as "singles" or "childless" more than they do as homosexuals. But there are no effective organizations to lobby for us and represent our interests in those capacities.

THE STORY GOES that shortly after the 17th century English poet John Milton published his great epic Paradise Lost, he ran into a Quaker friend who told him, "John, Thee has written well of paradise lost, but Thee must also write of paradise gained."

Suitably admonished, Milton went on four years later to compose Paradise Regained.

In a similar way, it is not enough for us to condemn religions for being anti-gay; we need to help gay people make their religions more gay-affirming.

This is work that must be done. Religions are not likely to wither away. So while some people may choose to oppose all religion, it is also important to work to improve what exists.

Can the churches change? Of course they can. Even the most hierarchical or fundamentalist religions are not immune to moral suasion, new information, reinterpretation of texts and dogmas, claims of supervening love, social pressure, the need for self-preservation and even cash flow.

Some churches have changed their doctrines; many more have changed their attitudes and let doctrines fall into desuetude. How many Catholics still condemn usury, once a mortal sin, or Presbyterians still believe in predestination, once a basic doctrine?

Changing religious attitudes is work that can best be done by people within those denominations.

The most basic contribution to change anyone can make is to be openly gay in their own religion. This may not be easy, of course, but it is both urgent and solidly traditional. For Christians, at least, personal witness to the truth is the one great commandment, and hypocrisy one of the great moral evils.

If you feel that you absolutely cannot be honest about being gay in your church, ask yourself seriously whether you are supporting the right church, whether your church contributes to your spiritual development as a whole person, whether your church welcomes or turns its face from the truth and its responsibilities.

By being open you affirm as you can in no other way your own dignity and worth and the firmness of your own moral convictions. You enable other church members to know gay people and learn that gays are decent citizens, contrary to what they may have heard. You provide inestimable encouragement to young people in your church who may fear they are gay, even if they never talk to you about it.

And you serve as a learning experience for a pastor and a living counter-example to any pastor who thinks about denouncing homosexuality as sinful.

Participate in the life of your church. Volunteer. Getting involved in church lay leadership is vital.

"The congregation needs to see gay people as contributing members to the life and health of the church," one friend wrote to me. He reported that even at his predominantly straight congregations, openly gay people are involved as board members, vestry members, greeters, Sunday school teachers, choir members and coffee hour hosts.

When the Wake Forest Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., decided recently to permit same-sex union ceremonies, the Raleigh News and Observer reported, "Members said it was the presence of gays in their midst that convinced them they were ready to recognize their lifelong commitments."

"They've been extraordinary, good, faithful members," church deacon Richard Barnett told the newspaper. "They're hard-working and deserve as complete a level of participation as any member should have, including the blessing of their relationships."

If you have a partner, try to obtain some sort of commitment ceremony as a recognition of your relationship. It will help fellow church members get used to the idea of gay partnerships. With or without a ceremony, treat yourself and your partner as married and people will begin thinking of you as married. Eventually they will start wondering why their church is refusing something so reasonable as gay marriage.

Urge upon your minister, priest, rabbi or bishop that as a moral leader of the community he or she should sermonize and speak out publicly against hate crimes, especially against anti-gay violence. You can also point out that relentlessly denouncing any person as a sinner generates hostility that some people inevitably act out.

Try to help other members with their problems. Remember that being gay can give you insight into how internal conflict, self-doubt, self-esteem and psychological needs work in a way that many people don't ever think about. Be willing to share that understanding with others so they can gain something useful from you.

With the help of your pastor, or on your own if necessary, start a study group on gay issues, or sexuality issues or the history of religious treatment of minorities. The more people see current topics in a historical perspective, the more open they will be to reconsidering their own views.

Organize a candlelight or prayer vigil for some gay-related issue. Invite the congregation to participate. Hold candles. Pray. Nothing impresses religious people and shatters our opponents' self-confidence more than the notion that people on our side are confident God is with us.

Be careful where you put your money. Try to support projects that will help gays, or gays in your church, rather than any anti-gay hierarchy. If necessary, make directed donations instead of a general contribution.

Many gay Episcopalians who supported foreign missions learned that lesson last August when recently converted Africans bishops voted to oppose gay sex, gay clergy and gay marriage at the Lambeth conference. Spend your money foolishly and you deserve the consequences!

Suggest a designated offering for some gay-related purpose. Use the occasion to provide information about the issue and how the money will help people in need. For instance, agencies trying to help homeless gay youth are in chronic need of funding. Point out the parental hatefulness, the church's responsibility.

Finally, it is important to support the gay-affirming people in your religious community. I have been surprised and impressed by the number of courageous men and women in several denominations who have stepped forward to speak on behalf of gay equality and gay marriage.

Theologians and clergy members have put their reputations and careers on the line on our behalf, witnessing their faith in a way most of us will never be called upon to do, opening themselves to church persecution like nothing we have seen since the 17th century.

We need to honor and help these people financially and organizationally, to show them how much we appreciate their support.