IGF CultureWatch

FOR THE LAST SIX YEARS, sociologists Charles Moskos of Northwestern University and Laura Miller of UCLA have conducted periodic small surveys of Army personnel's attitudes about letting gays and lesbians serve in the military.

In June 1992, before gays in the military became a contentious national issue, 67 percent of the Army men "strongly disagreed" with letting gays serve openly in the military.

By August 1998 however, the survey found that only 36 percent "strongly disagreed" with letting gays serve openly. That represents a nearly 50-percent decline in strong hostility to gays

Here are the results for those who "strongly disagreed":

• June 1992: 67 percent
• June 1993: 61 percent
• July 1994: 57 percent
• Oct. 1994: 49 percent
• June 1996: 44 percent
• Aug. 1998: 36 percent

Total anti-gay sentiment (combining "disagree" and "strongly disagree") actually peaked in mid-1993, near the conclusion of the vigorous campaigns by the Pentagon and U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) against letting gays serve. In the June 1993 survey, 78 percent of the Army men opposed or "strongly" opposed letting gays serve; only 11 percent of the men (and 27 percent of the women) favored including gays.

Since then, however, there has been a steady decrease in overall hostility and a steady increase in support for gays. As of August 1998, only 52 percent of the men opposed letting gays serve (16 percent opposed and 36 percent "strongly" opposed); and 26 percent favored allowing gays, an all-time high.

Interestingly, more than one-fifth (23 percent) said they were "not sure," the highest that number has climbed. That may mean those men have not thought much about the issue, or do not care, and are simply less judgmental about such things. Equally likely, they are simply waiting for the Pentagon to tell them what to think.

It is important not to place too much stock in these figures. The surveys are small, ranging from 200 to 400 men and even fewer women, and they are "convenience samples" not random samples. But the data do show a reasonably consistent trend.

The data also gain credibility because the findings for men and woman run a parallel course.

Women have long been more gay-accepting than men, in the military as well as civilian society. Even at their least supportive point, during the Pentagon's 1993 anti-gay crusade, 27 percent of Army women favored letting gays serve in the military; only 42 percent opposed the idea.

Since then, anti-gay passions have declined and pro-gay views have steadily increased. In August 1998, 52 percent of Army women favored letting gays serve and only 25 percent disagreed. And as with the men, more than one-fifth (22 percent) of the women said they were "not sure" about gays serving.

How can we account for these changes and what do they mean for us?

The simplest explanation is that attitudes in the military are influenced, at least somewhat, by attitude changes in civilian society.

Over the years gays have become a more familiar part of the social landscape, more people have come to know gays as friends and co-workers, seen gays on television, heard gay issues discussed. Particularly for young people, gays are part of the world they have always known, so gays do not seem new or bizarre or threatening. Thus, we have seen anti-gay attitudes among college freshmen drop rapidly in the last decade.

Young people presumably bring those same attitudes with them when they join the military. With the gradual turnover of military personnel between 1992 and 1998 newer recruits brought the more recent set of attitudes in from civilian society.

This effect may be being supplemented by a second: that under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy some military personnel are quietly becoming more open about being gay, only without making the formal declaration. If that is true, then more military men are discovering that those men and women do not cause the tensions or problems the Pentagon predicted and are, in fact, pretty good coworkers.

It is hard to imagine how to test that possibility, but with "don't ask, don't tell" the military is certainly acknowledging that gays are now serving and that very fact may be helping personnel get used to the idea of gays.

That growth in acceptance of gays suggests that even if we cannot have a direct effect on military policy, we can have an indirect effect by continuing to work in civilian society for public acceptance of gays.

As our work influences public attitudes, new enlisted men will continue to bring those more accepting civilian values into the military with them and they will find the military's ban on open gays to be unaccountable, unfair, and bizarre. And we should continue to denounce the gay ban at every opportunity as unjustified, hypocritical and superstitious.

The question then remains whether there is a point at which military opposition to gays sinks so low that the military hierarchy can no longer plausibly use the excuse that its personnel will not accept gays and that gays threaten "unit cohesion" and "mission readiness."

Many of us think that is not a very robust argument to begin with, but at some point the decline of intolerance will render it laughable even to those who find the reasoning persuasive.

That point may already have been reached for women. Since only 25 percent of Army women oppose letting gays and lesbians serve (and only 16 percent object "strongly"), the rationale exists for urging that we should now at least let lesbians serve openly in the military.

Such a policy would largely eliminate the egregious lesbian-baiting that now occurs in the military and the disproportionately high discharges of lesbians over gay men. It would also further chip away at the remaining homophobia.

The Pentagon will inevitably be slow to acknowledge the fact that its new recruits and enlisted men are increasingly comfortable with gays. The upper echelon military has less contact with civilian society and little recent contact with its evolving values. Most military men probably hold roughly the values of civilian society at the time they joined the military, which may be decades ago. In addition, the officer class is disproportionately from smaller towns and suburbs, less tolerant places to begin with.

They may see growing civilian acceptance of gays as signs of decadence and social collapse, and may dig in to oppose such trends all the more strongly.

At this point, changing military policy looks both more reasonable but, for political reasons, less likely than it did six years ago.

EARLY IN MAY, Judge Jonathan Heher of the Johannesburg High Court struck down South Africa's sodomy law on the grounds that it violated the nation's new constitution barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Just a few months earlier Ecuador's Supreme Court ruled that nation's sodomy law unconstitutional. And Romania's new prime minister recently promised to repeal his nation's sodomy law so it could join the European Union.

In the civilized nations of the world there are few sodomy laws remaining. Mostly they linger in ignorant and savage nations of the third world, where religious faith inhibits rationality, provincialism is praised as patriotism, and fanaticism is proof of piety.

As South Africa's judge Heher noted with unusual eloquence in his ruling, to penalize a gay or lesbian person "for the expression of his or her sexuality can only be defended from a standpoint which depends on the baneful influences of religious intolerance, ignorance, superstition, bigotry, fear of what is different from or alien to everyday experience and the millstone of history."

Among the developed nations of the world only the United States of America still retains sodomy laws-in 20 of its 50 states.

Half of those states are in the heavily Baptist, former slave-owning Confederate South. If the Old South is no longer a "solid south" for racist Democrats, it is, at least, still largely solid in its legislated homophobia.

The other states are the western strip of Arizona, heavily Mormon Utah and Idaho; the traditionally Catholic states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland; Lutheran dominated Minnesota; and the conservative midwestern cluster of Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma.

These sodomy laws are seldom enforced. They do not appear to impinge on the lives of most gays and do not seem worrisome to most gay-friendly legislators. That would help explain the remarkable anomaly that three states with gay non-discrimination laws still have sodomy statutes: Minnesota, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. And the only states to have reelected openly gay congressmen by large margins are both states with sodomy laws: Massachusetts and Arizona.

However, anti-gay politicians who, like pro-gay politicians, seem content with non-enforcement of sodomy laws nonetheless fight vigorously to retain them.

This is extremely odd because no one claims that the laws actually reduce the incidence of sodomy. In fact, in arguing before the Montana Supreme Court, the the state's attorney general tried to make it an argument for retaining the sodomy law that no one had been arrested under it for decades.

But why then retain them?

When George W. Bush was running for governor of Texas he was asked whether he favored retention of Texas' sodomy law (currently in legal limbo). He said, yes, he thought the state should keep the law, chiefly for its symbolic value.

A symbol of what? A symbol, I think, of social disapproval. A symbol that society regards gay sexuality as defective, inferior and distasteful, tolerates it only contingently, and reserves the theoretical right to prohibit gay sexual expression because it is something we have no natural right to do.

It is a symbol that not only our pleasures, but our deepest relational commitments are shallower and less deserving of respect than those of heterosexuals, and, in short, that we are simply inferior human beings, not to be accorded the full autonomy, dignity or esteem granted to other citizens.

It follows from this that sodomy laws not only express social disapproval and lesser regard for gays, but they also serve the conservative function of reinforcing existing social disapproval and giving it a stamp of legitimacy.

One has to wonder why some bright young reporter did not speak up to ask the young Bush, "Do you mean to suggest, sir, that in your view the superiority of heterosexuality is not sufficiently evident to the public without the support of such legal symbols?

"And, sir, a follow-up question if I may? If the social superiority of heterosexuality is not readily evident to people, then wherein does its non-evident superiority lie?"

But heterosexual reporters probably did not think to ask the question, and gay reporters likely were too far in the closet to feel comfortable asking it.

Bush's statement, however, suggests he believes it is legitimate to devalue some people in order to bolster some other group of people. This is an odd claim to make in a country dedicated to either liberty or equality, though it may have a certain intelligibility in the Confederate South.

But apart from the devaluing function of sodomy laws, there are also substantive "collateral harms" that sodomy laws create.

They are used to label gays and lesbians as known law-violators and thus create evidence of unfit character for responsible positions such as custodial parent, foster parents, teachers and the like.

Sodomy laws create opportunities for police abuse. They can invite corruption (bribery, extortion), entrapment of gays, and selective law enforcement. It is important to remember, too, that the police absorb their attitudes toward gays from the way the law categorizes them. If the law states that gays are felons, the police will tend to treat known gays with less civility.

Rhode Island prosecutors acknowledged that the state's sodomy law was useful because it enabled juries to convict on the lesser sodomy charge in cases of alleged sexual assault involving sodomy where consent was uncertain. But that seems to be an argument against sodomy laws. If oral or anal sex is not wrong, then why should people engaging in anal or (chiefly) oral sex where consent is uncertain be convicted of something while those engaging in vaginal sex with uncertain consent not be?

By devaluing gay lives, sodomy laws also subtly encourage and legitimize young male vigilantes who assault, rob or even kill gays. On this ground, one could argue that legislators who support sodomy law are accessories before the fact in gay-bashing incidents.

Despite their offensiveness, sodomy laws remain on the law books in many states because local gay activists have not made repealing them a priority. But for all these reasons, repeal should be a higher priority.

One of the best arguments for the marches on the 50 state capitols in 1999 is that they will provide an occasion to demand the right to sexual privacy and the repeal of state sodomy laws.

Sodomy laws anywhere in this nation are a offensive reminder to all of us that legislators think that our lives are defective and less worthy of respect.

First appeared in the Windy City Times.

AFTER EQUALITY, what?

That is to say, at some point in the indefinite future when gays and lesbians achieve equality, when we are fully accepted as equal, what will gay life be like? What will the gay community be like? Will there even be a gay community?

o one knows. But it is not an idle question. Equality is, after all, the end-state toward which most of our political effort, our time, our energy, our money, is aimed. So asking the question amounts to asking "What are we working toward?"

To begin with, it is far from clear that gays will ever achieve complete (social, legal, moral) equality. Have other historically stigmatized groups been fully accepted as equal? We do not have a lot of evidence that that happens.

Just as likely, we will asymptotically achieve acceptance -- that is, gradually approaching equality but never quite reaching it. Eventually it just may not be possible to make any further progress against a hard core of resistance. In some places or among some social/cultural groups gays may continue to be thought of as inferior, defective, immoral, evil or threatening.

For one thing there may always be sources of hostility that will disseminate a message hostile to us. Just as there are still backwoods racists, anti-semitic groups, even anti-Catholic zealots in this country, so there may always be homophobes promoting their message to people seeking some definable group to blame for their own alienation, discontent or lack of success. And there will always be doctrinal groups that define themselves by rejecting something else (fundamentalist Islam comes to mind).

Then too, what if humans have hard-wired into their psychology a root notion that reproduction and success with the other sex has intrinsic merit? If that is inborn, then there will be a point beyond which our quest for equality cannot go. We do not currently know whether it is inborn or culturally induced. We may find out.

Even if we achieved complete acceptance it seems unlikely that we will ever be regarded as "the same." We are, after all, only a small percentage of the population. If two men walk down the street holding hands they may draw notice in a way that a man and a woman doing so might not, not because people will be disapproving but because it is uncommon, like a man in a top hat. So we will, at least on occasion, never be completely invisible to others.

For the same reason, we will never eliminate the so-called "heterosexual presumption," the assumption that you are heterosexual unless otherwise stated. The T-shirts and buttons that say "How dare you presume that I'm heterosexual" make an arresting consciousness-raising statement, but no statistical sense at all.

If 95 percent of the population is heterosexual, people are going to assume, reasonably enough, that any given person is heterosexual. It need not be hostile; it is simply a safe bet. (In most parts of the U.S. Jews encounter the "Christian presumption" and in most gay enclaves Republicans encounter the "Democratic presumption.")

The point is that we are not likely to cease being aware of ourselves as members of a minority, even if we become fully accepted. Those who long for a feeling of identicality, unobtrusiveness or unself-consciousness that they may (at best) now feel only in a totally gay environment are likely to be disappointed.

Will there be a gay community, even gay bars, when equality happens? Partly, of course, gays coalesce socially and politically in response to hostile external pressure. If there is no hostility, there will be no pressure forcing gays together. But gays may still converge because of a kind of natural attraction rooted in a desire to be among people like themselves, people whose erotic and emotional vectors are intuitively comprehensible.

So many gays will still gather together in enclaves, social groups or friendship clusters as an "affinity group" like any other. Other gays may feel it less imperative than they do now to escape suburbs or small towns. That is beginning to happen some places even now.

There is also an obvious statistical reason to join a gay group or go to a gay bar: The chances are far better that some man there will find me interesting and erotically appealing than in the typical neighborhood bar. So for the single, the young or the randy (and these categories may overlap), gay institutions usefully increase their erotic opportunities and chances of finding a compatible life-partner.

However, there may be less contact between lesbians and gay men than now, since those groups have little in common except similarly stigmatized status. Rhetoric aside, our sexual orientations are, in fact, opposite rather than similar.

Apart from romantic aspirations, are our lives, our lifestyles, our psyches really much different from heterosexuals? I don't know and frankly no one else does either.

That means that equality for gays will be not only a minor social experiment (how does the presence of lots of open gays affect society?), but also will tell us a lot about gays too. That is, how much of our difference, or our sense of difference, is inherent and natural, and how much is induced by growing up and living in a society that has in a variety of ways communicated disapproval of us.

We may find out if some of the psychological qualities (irony, creativity, aestheticism) believed common among (some? many?) gay men are created by growing up under a condition of stigma (and our fumbling youthful efforts to resist or compensate for it), or are in some mysterious way actually a function of same-sex attraction, or whether the whole notion of gay difference is just an illusion, a self-serving, compensatory myth.

Will gays, individuals and couples, want to live their lives pretty much like heterosexuals, sinking into bourgeois normality, living within the same range of options and in roughly the same proportions (ostensible monogamy, suburbs, family ties, etc.)? Not entirely, I suspect, partly because of men's well-attested inherent sexual and social adventurousness, but it may take forms we cannot anticipate.

But equality will not entail that every conduct or lifestyle will be equally acceptable any more than every conduct by heterosexuals is now equally acceptable. Majorities seem to provide acceptance only on their terms, so people will apply the same standards to us that they apply to everyone else. Those who find those standards limiting will continue to feel some disapproval, but based on how they act rather than who they are.

IT CAN SCARCELY BE DOUBTED that the primary, and perhaps only sources of our culture's anti-gay hostility are the Christian denominations.

When most anti-gay zealots are pushed very hard, they do not come up with sociological or philosophical reasons for their hatred. Instead, they usually retreat to citing Leviticus, or the Epistle to the Romans, or the ancient Palestinian myth of Sodom.

As the bumper sticker says, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

One can only imagine how it might have been written otherwise.

The two male angels who sojourned to Sodom might have been welcomed as honored guests, lavishly fed and entertained by the townspeople who assumed they were a gay couple. When they departed the next morning with abundant provisions for their journey, the angels blessed the generous town for its hospitality and Sodom prospered for seven generations.

But no. The Hebrews of ancient legend were a nomadic people who could not even imagine such a thing as a "good city." They were deeply anti-urban, anti-technical, and anti-political. The Genesis legends of Cain and Nimrod, Babel and Sodom uniformly attribute impiety, pride, idolatry, luxury, crime and moral depravity to all cities and their founders, Sodom included.

And the Apostle Paul, the possible author of Romans, was never a better Roman citizen than when he grafted Stoic notions about "nature" and what is "natural" to the messianic Jewish sect he adopted as his own, producing a doctrine that reluctantly accepted sex only as a painful accommodation to human frailty and rejected homosexuality as wholly without value.

Had he been less a Roman, or, one might say, a better "Christian," he might have rejected such extraneous philosophy and written otherwise:

"The holy and loving are drawn to God who is their likeness in heaven, and God loves them because they are His image on earth, like cleaving to like. Just so among us those who are drawn to others like unto themselves should especially be valued and honored, for their love is an image for us of God's love for His creation and His people, their love holding no other purpose or consequence than mutual contemplation, emulation, and enjoyment."

But it was not to be.

Had it been so, where then could homophobia have arisen or how could it have become pervasive in a culture that took the Bible as its moral guide. No other primary cultural source preaches homophobia as a primary value.

Several years ago novelist Bette Greene, who writes young adult fiction, interviewed more than 400 gay bashers as part of her research for The Drowning of Stephan Jones, visiting jails in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Washington state.

I tried to find out where the hate comes from," she told Boston's Bay Windows in 1992, "and one of the places that it came from was the pulpits of America."

Greene said that when she asked teenagers why they attacked gays, "they got sort of exasperated with me and they talked about what their preacher said, what the televangelists have said. They felt they were doing what society wanted them to do."

"Again and again, I got the connection with the church," she explained.

When Greene told this to some of the teenagers' ministers, they insisted that they preached love: "love the sinner, hate the sin." But Greene shook her head. "Nobody I know has been able to make that separation."

In the same way, independent filmmaker Arthur Dong interviewed several men convicted of murdering gays for his recent film, Licensed to Kill.

"They were all influenced by their environment, whether that be the social environment, political environment, religious environment." he told ABC's Nightline.

Discussing one man he questioned about why he murdered a homosexual, Dong quoted the man as saying that he had no opinion about homosexuals except that "they ought to be all 'taken care of'"�i.e., killed.

Dong went on to report that the murderer remembered reading about homosexuality "and hearing about it in church and he, in the film, he actually says, 'Well if the Bible says it's right, that's what it is.'"

God said it. I believe it. That settles it.

Psychologist Karen Franklin, who studied anti-gay crimes committed by young college students, found the same thing.

Although Franklin discreetly avoided any specific reference to religion, she acknowledged that "many of the assailants view themselves as social norms enforcers who are punishing moral transgressions."

The point here is: No one is born hating gay people. They learn that hatred somewhere�from the culture and from its predominant moral influences. And the primary institutions teaching right and wrong are? The religious denominations.

Bette Greene is blunt: "If there's one problem we can end in a hurry, it's [anti-] gay violence. We just have to start preaching that it's wrong."

Not preach "hate the sin, not the sinner." That is a factitious distinction. You cannot denounce one without denouncing the other. You cannot punish one without punishing the other. You cannot beat up one, without beating up the other.

So we need to encourage ministers and priests and rabbis and bishops to speak out from the pulpit against anti-gay violence and gay bashing. We need them to speak out against hostility.

But we need to go further than that. We need to assert to everyone that our sexuality is not sinful at all. There is nothing wrong with homosexuality, nothing immoral.

Our sexual behavior is just as moral as anyone else's, with the same capacity for love, closeness, relatedness and harmless pleasure.

Nor should we let "moderate" religious people get away with condescendingly saying, "Well, the church welcomes gays because, oh, well, aren't we are all sinners, after all."

That is just another way of saying that homosexuality is sinful, but they are too squeamish, too "moderate," to say so explicitly. We need to smile and say, "Speak for yourself: The sin is not homosexuality, but homophobia."

Religions must stop preaching hostility to homosexuals or homosexuality.

They must begin condemning attitudes that lead to gay-bashing.

They must accept same-sex love for what it is�love�and, as such, deserving of all the encouragement and honor they traditionally offer to that emotion.

Churches and religious people are not accustomed to being held accountable by people claiming the moral high ground. They are going to have to get used to it because that is where our position legitimately is. It is up to you to make that clear to them.

First appeared in the Chicago Free Press.

THE PEW RESEARCH CENTER recently released a group of polls assessing public attitudes on a variety of issues, trying to categorize voters according to their opinions, attitudes and demographic characteristics.

According to the center, its most significant finding was that voters now are more moderate and less extreme and angry than they were five years ago.

"Centrism, so characteristic of post-war American politics, is back. More moderation is not only apparent among Independents, but also evident on the right and the left," the center announced. What mainstream press coverage of the polls failed to notice was the finding of a slow but ongoing shift in public sentiment toward accepting gays.

As they say on public radio's "Marketplace," "Let's look at the numbers!"

The most general question on gays asked how much people agreed or disagreed with the statement, "Homosexuality is a way of life that should be accepted by society."

In eight Pew Research Center surveys from 1994 to 1997, between 44 percent and 47 percent agreed with the statement, while the number disagreeing hovered slightly higher, between 48 percent and 50 percent.

By the summer of 1999, however, the relative strengths had decisively reversed, with 49 percent agreeing that homosexuality should be accepted and 44 percent saying it should not be.

Although the change is small, it should be encouraging because it shows that gays are continuing to make progress.

This particular change, though, may be even more significant. Political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann suggests in her remarkable book "The Spiral of Silence" that people have a fairly keen sense for what most other people are thinking on issues and tend to shift in that direction themselves.

If that is true, then at long last we are over some sort of hump and instead of fighting against a public mood, we now have the public mood "on our side," as it were, gently luring people that way.

Not surprisingly, 54 percent of Democrats agree that homosexuality should be accepted, and only 35 percent of Republicans. But even among Republicans 35 percent is not bad for a question about "acceptance" - not merely "toleration."

Interestingly, self-identified Independents are even more pro-gay than Democrats: 55 percent think gays should be accepted.

Other gay-related questions suggest the same trend. For instance, back in 1987 51 percent thought school boards ought to be able to fire teachers who were "known homosexuals." The percentage agreeing dropped to 32 percent by this fall, while 62 percent disagreed - nearly a 2-1 pro-gay proportion.

The particularly interesting thing about this question is that it immediately follows questions about the existence of God, the importance of prayer, Judgment Day and miracles, all of which condition people to give a religiously based or moralistic answer to the gay school teacher question rather than a secular civic one - and gays still come out far ahead.

More remarkable still, this pro-gay change took place during a decade of increasing religious sentiment. Not only did more people describe themselves as "religious," but the already large majority of religious people became somewhat more certain about their beliefs.

That suggests either more religious people are accepting gays or more people are distinguishing between homosexuality and their religious/moral views, perhaps seeing homosexuality as some sort of personal matter.

Neither explanation offers much comfort for the religious right or politicians who try to play to their sensibilities.

A third survey question asked whether the respondent considered himself or herself "a supporter of the gay rights movement."

In 1987, 66 percent said they definitely were not gay movement supporters. By 1994 that number fell to 56 percent. And by this summer only 50 percent insisted they were not gay movement supporters.

During the same time period, the number saying they were gay movement supporters shifted upward from a minuscule 9 percent to 17 percent.

This means gays have picked up a sizable number of heterosexual supporters. But it also means, of course, that there are a lot of people somewhere in the middle: 31 percent of the population is skeptical, or uncertain, or selective, or just plain not interested in gays as a movement.

In any case, it is useful to notice that this drop in anti-gay sentiment occurred even though the number of liberals did not change, the number of conservatives increased and support for the "pro-life movement" (the questionnaire's wording) increased.

What did correlate with the rise in gay movement support was the sizable increase of people who said they supported "the women's movement." That number rose from 29 percent in 1987 to 41 percent this summer.

Finally the survey asked, "Do you have a friend, colleague or family member who is gay?" To that, 60 percent said "no," and 39 percent said "yes." This is appallingly low considering the number of friends, colleagues and family members each gay person has.

What is significant though is when the Pew Center broke voters down into categories, the groups that were most pro-gay also had the highest percentage of people who said they had a gay friend or family member.

For instance, 60 percent of the group Pew labeled "Liberal Democrats" said they had gay friends and 88 percent said homosexuality should be accepted by society. That was the highest percentage in each category.

Similarly, 52 percent of the Republican leaning "New Prosperity Independents" said they had gay friends and they were the most "socially tolerant" group on that side of the spectrum. So we continue to find a correlation between knowing gays and supporting gay acceptance. Keep that in mind.

Reprinted with permission from the "Encyclopedia of Homosexuality" (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1990), copyright Wayne R. Dynes, 1990.

This word is found only in some manuscripts of the New Testament Gospel of Matthew at 5:22, where the King James Version reads:

"But I say unto you that ... whosoever shall say to his brother, Racha, shall be in danger of the counsel...."

The text of the gospel includes no explanatory gloss, as is usual with foreign words that would otherwise have been unintelligible to the Greek reader, and the majority of modern commentators understand the word as Semitic: raka = Hebrew reqa, "empty, emptyheaded, brainless."

Yet there is an alternative meaning proposed in 1922 by Friedrich Schulthess, an expert in Syriac and Palestinian Christian Aramaic: he equated the word with Hebrew rakh, "soft," which would thus be equivalent to Greek malakos/malthakos, which denote the passive-effeminate homosexual.

Further, in 1934 a papyrus was published from Hellenistic Egypt of the year 257 before the Christian era that contains the word rachas in an unspecified derogatory sense, but a parallel text suggests that it had the meaning kinaidos ("faggot"). It would thus have been a loanword from Hebrew in the vulgar speech of the Greek settlers in Egypt.

A modern counterpart is the word rach, "tender, soft, effeminate, timid, cowardly" in the Gaunersprache, the argot of German beggars and criminals, which has absorbed many terms from Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic because of social conditions that created a linguistic interface between the Jewish "fence" and the gentile thief.

The import of the Gospel passage is that whereas the old Law forbade only murder, the new morality of the church forbids aggression even in purely symbolic, verbal forms, and the ascending scale of offenses and penalties is tantamount to a prohibition of what is called in Classical Arabic mufaharah, the ritualized verbal duel that is often the prelude to combat and actual bloodshed.

So Jesus is represented as forbidding his followers to utter insults directed at the other party's masculinity - a practice that has scarcely gone out of fashion in the ensuing nineteen centuries, as the contemporary vogue of "faggot" well attests.

So it cannot be maintained that Jesus "never mentioned homosexuality," as some gay Christian apologists claim.

In the sphere of sexual morality Jesus demanded an even higher standard than did contemporary Palestinian and Hellenistic Judaism, which uncompromisingly reflected and condemned the homosexual expression that was commonplace and tolerated in the Gentile world. Thus Christianity inherited not merely the Jewish taboo on homosexual behavior, but an ascetic emphasis foreign to Judaism itself which has always had a procreation-oriented moral code.

What the text in Matthew demonstrates is that he forbade acts of violence, physical and verbal, against those to whom homosexuality was imputed, in line with the general emphasis on self-restraint and meekness in his teaching. The entire passage is not just a legalistic pastiche of Jewish casuistry, but also a polished gem of double entendre and irony.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Warren Johansson, "Whosoever Shall Say to His Brother, Racha (Matthew 5:22)," Cabirion, 10 (1984), 2-4.

EARLY IN THIS CENTURY, most people, if they thought about homosexuals at all, tended to believe that there were more lesbians than gay men.

Women, after all, had always been more openly affectionate in public. And pioneer German sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld had estimated that there were perhaps twice as many lesbians as gay men. Perhaps, too, popular views in the post-World War II era were influenced by the pulp paperback novels, written primarily for a male audience, in which lesbian themes played a highly visible role.

American sex researcher Alfred Kinsey himself took notice of the prevailing view: "There is a widespread opinion which is held both by clinicians and the public at large that homosexual responses and completed contacts occur among more females than males."

But then Kinsey proceeded to turn this conventional wisdom upside down: "This opinion is not borne out by our data and it is not supported by previous studies which have been based on specific data." In fact, just the opposite seemed to be true.

In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) the Kinsey team reported, as is now familiar, that 37 percent of their men had at least one gay experience to orgasm since puberty, that 4 percent of their men were exclusively homosexual, and that 13 percent of men had more homosexual than heterosexual experience for at least some three-year period between ages 16 and 55.

Five years later in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), the Kinsey team reported that 13 percent of their women had at least one gay experience to orgasm (vs. 37 percent for men); even including homosexual "experience" that did not lead to orgasm raised the figure for women only to 20 percent. In addition, somewhere between 1 percent and 2 percent of their woman were exclusively homosexual (vs. 4 percent of the men).

Kinsey noted in summary that "the incidences and frequencies of homosexual responses and contacts . . . were much lower among the females in our sample than they were among the males . . . . There were only about a half to a third as many of the females who were, in any age period, primarily or exclusively homosexual."

Originally a zoologist, Kinsey was careful to point out in a footnote the human similarity to other mammals in this regard: "In the class Mammalia taken as a whole, homosexual behavior among males is more frequent than homosexual behavior among females."

Even the famous "10 percent" figure for gays repeatedly proffered by gay activists (a claim Kinsey never made) turns out on examination to be an average composed of the 13 percent of men who have had more gay than straight sex for some three-year period, and a 7-percent estimate for the same category for women.

Surveys conducted since Kinsey, using various research techniques, have varied widely -- from Kinsey and from one another -- in their estimates of the incidence of homosexuality. But despite their differences, for the most part they have tended to reproduce his finding on the proportion of gay men to lesbians.

A study published in Nature by a British team in 1990 reported that 9 percent of the men and 4 percent of the women contacted said they had "some" homosexual experience.

In 1993, psychologist Sam Janus published survey results showing that 22 percent of the men and 17 percent of the women had had at least one homosexual experience. Perhaps more importantly, 9 percent of the men and 5 percent of the women said their homosexual experience could be described as "frequent" or "ongoing." (Slightly less than half of those called themselves homosexual.)

In 1993, a team at the Harvard School of Public Health reported that 6.2 percent of men and 3.6 percent of women reported a same-sex partner in the pervious five years. (Interestingly 8.7 percent of the men and 11.1 percent of the women reported feeling some same-sex attraction but not engaging in homosexual behavior.)

Sociologist Stephen Murray counted the unmarried males and females in San Francisco who checked the "unmarried partnership" category in the 1990 census. He reported in his recent book American Gay that he found 5,437 male couples and 1,379 female couples. While both these figures are absurdly low for several obvious reasons, Murray observes that they do approximate "what I think is the true ratio of three or four self-identified gay men for every self-identified lesbian."

Murray also cites an unpublished study by sociologist Diane Binson, who conducted a random sample of households in multi-ethnic neighborhoods in San Francisco and found 3.4 times as many exclusively homosexual men as exclusively homosexual women.

And finally, a ponderous National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study published in 1994 as "The Social Organization of Sexuality" found that 9 percent of the men and 4 percent of the women reported engaging in at least some homosexual behavior since puberty.

In addition, the NORC study found that 6.2 percent of the men report being attracted to a man while only 4.4 percent of women report any sexual attraction to women. Finally, 2.8 percent of the men and 1.4 percent of the women acknowledge a homosexual or bisexual identity.

There are, however, two anomalous studies. A 1993 survey by the Louis Harris organization had results that were all over the map. They found that 3.8 percent of the men and 2.8 percent of the women had a same-sex sexual partner in the last year; and 4. 4 percent of the men and 3.6 percent of the women had a same-sex partner in the last five years; but 1.8 percent of the men and 2.1 percent of the women reported a same-sex partner in the previous month.

Also anomalously, marketing consultant Grant Lukenbill reports in his book Untold Millions that a 1993 survey of consumer behavior by Yankelovich Partners found that 5 percent of the men contacted identified themselves as gay men, and 6.4 of the women identified themselves as lesbians.

The point of gathering these results together is not to estimate the number of gays and lesbians, but to try to see what basis there is for the current belief by both gays and heterosexuals that gay men are not only more visible but more numerous than lesbians.

The studies have varying degrees of reliability. And they clearly measured very different things-behavior, attraction, identity, openness. But they seem to converge on a finding that there about twice as many gay men as lesbians, no matter what measures are used.

Review of Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life.

In this entertaining but superficial read, Michelangelo Signorile assails the gay circuit's obsession with the body. The hectoring passion is there, but the analysis mostly isn't.

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LIFE OUTSIDE: THE SIGNORILE REPORT on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life fulfills the first rule of contemporary publishing�to entertain. Michelangelo Signorile knows what sells�sex�and he knows how to tell a popular tale with great panache.

In this, his third book, he tackles the gay "circuit parties" with all of the exploitative sense of a local newscast during a sweeps month. Readers of his column in OUT magazine will find the arguments familiar. He maintains that the sex, drug, and steroid world of overpumped gymbos, his "cult of masculinity," defines what it is to be a gay man today. His logic is that even though only a small percent of the total, perhaps tens of thousands, are part of the circuit, the buff image has become so ubiquitous that it has become defining. And, to Signorile, that is bad. We have to change.

He sees the gay press and its ads as playing a major role in promulgating this image. But in fact the press runs of the gay media are so tiny, both locally and nationally, that the vast majority of gays never see them, let alone read them on a regular basis. He blithely ignores the far greater impact of mainstream advertising and its increasingly homoerotic content.

He also assumes that a new stereotype drives out the old, when it fact it is merely added to the mix. It is the media which fixates on the "new," while much of society continues along with the old, only slowly and partially incorporating elements of the new.

Like the voyeurism of tabloid TV, Signorile lingers luridly on the circuit, giving us page after page of glistening pecs and drugged frenzy. He gives short shift to the positive alternative. Simple page count is one indication, about a 2:1 ratio. So is where he evidently spent his time. It appears that evil is, as always, more fascinating than good. Thus we read a detailing of seemingly every hour he spent at a White Party in Palm Springs, while the second part of the book lacks a similar weekend accounting of life among what he would have us become.

A book often says as much about its author as it does about its subject. Signorile's world view is shaped by the gay ghetto of Chelsea. He has been at the fringe of the circuit and one suspects that in his heart of hearts he would like to be among its stars. But the reality of advancing years, genes, and marriage deny him the possibility.

So he speaks with the voice of a convert, always the most fervent of opponents. He has tasted the sin and by doing so claims righteous rejection of it. If Larry Kramer was a Jeremiah of AIDS in castigating the community, Signorile is a Jeremiah lite. His denunciation is that of a kid with his nose pressed against the window of the party to which he was not invited. It is one of pique, not righteous indignation.

Signorile pities "the lonely old queen" and notes that "a proclivity for rejection is indicative of deep unhappiness." Yet he is not willing to make the same judgment of gymboids whose self-abusive behavior likely stems from those same deep seated feelings of inadequacy. Perhaps because he identifies with one and not the other, he is unwilling to view them with the same degree of objectivity.

He is amazed to discover that there is gay life outside of the ghetto. But, like many Manhattanites who gaze across the Hudson, his discovery is shallow, of short duration, and without a great sense of local context. He is a jet set anthropologist who stops in for a speaking engagement and in a day or two thinks he has come to understand the locals.

Signorile largely ignores what to this reader would have been fascinating questions to explore: a look at the psychological and societal underpinnings of anorexia/bulimia, the straight counterpart the gymboid syndrome most closely resembles, the surge of homoerotic content in mainstream media, the extent to which gymboids are the attempt of a generation to create its own differentiation.

Or the premise that growth of the party circuit was in part a result of the war mentality (where moral/sexual standards are loosened) of fighting AIDS. But what then is the impact of the "armistice" of protease? Wouldn't that logically lead to the decline of the circuit?

Signorile writes with great force and conviction. Were the argument decide solely on the craft of his words he would win hands down. But the contest isn't so simple. Ideas do count for something, and so does proof of assertions. By those measures his book is far less convincing.

It is perhaps best to approach much of it as closer to fiction rather than scholarship. Still, despite its significant flaws, it is essentially a kind hearted book, and a great, fun read. Enjoy it, but don't take it too seriously.

Adapted from: Same Sex Marriage: Pro and Con, ed. Andrew Sullivan (Vintage, 1997).

I'M NOT SURPRISED - who could be? - by the furor over homosexual marriage, which Hawaii's courts may (or may not) legalize. What does surprise me is the line that opponents are taking. When the fuss about gay marriage began, I assumed the main case against it would revolve around adoption rights. In fact, the main objection has turned out to be, essentially, this: If homosexuals can get married because they love each other, why not polygamy? Why not incest? A man may love several women, after all, or his mother.

People who use this line of attack seem to regard it as a trump card, a devastating objection. In Time magazine, Charles Krauthammer declared that marriage is two-sex for the same reasons - tradition, religion, utility, morality - that it is two-person. "Not good enough reasons, say the gay activists," he gloated. "No? Then show me yours for opposing polygamy and incest." Ha!

All right, I'll show him, and it isn't difficult.

The hidden assumption of the argument which brackets gay marriage with polygamous or incestuous marriage is that homosexuals want the right to marry anybody they love. But, of course, heterosexuals are currently denied that right. They can not marry their immediate family or all their sex partners. What homosexuals are asking for is the right to marry, not anybody they love, but somebody they love, which is not at all the same thing.

Heterosexuals can now marry any of millions of people; even if they can't marry their parents or siblings, they have plenty of choice. Homosexuals want the same freedom, subject to the same restrictions. Currently, however, they have zero marital choice (unless, of course, they try to fool heterosexuals into marrying them - a bad idea for a lot of reasons). To ask for a comparably, but not infinitely, broad choice of partners is not unreasonable.

Do homosexuals actually exist? I think so, and today even the Vatican accepts that some people are constitutively attracted only to members of the same sex. By contrast, no serious person claims there are people constitutively attracted only to relatives, or only to groups rather than individuals. Anyone who can love two women can also love one of them. People who insist on marrying their mother or several lovers want an additional (and weird) marital option. Homosexuals currently have no marital option at all. A demand for polygamous or incestuous marriage is thus frivolous in a way that the demand for gay marriage is not.

Suppose, though, that someone insists that he can't be happy without several spouses, and that this is a basic constitutive need for him. Or suppose he says he can't be happy unless he marries a close relative. For argument's sake, let's say we believe him. Shouldn't at least this person be allowed to marry two people, or his father?

No. The reason is that, from society's point of view, the main purpose of marriage is not, and never has been, to sanctify love. If the point of marriage were to let everybody seek his ultimate amorous fulfillment, then adultery would be a standard part of the marital package. In fact, society doesn't much care whether spouses love each other, as long as they meet their marital obligations. The purpose of secular marriage, rather, is to bond as many people as possible into committed, stable relationships. Such little societies-within-society not only provide the best environment for raising children, they also domesticate men and ensure that most people have someone whose "job" is to look after them.

Polygamy radically undermines this goal, because if one man has two wives, it follows that some other man has no wife. As Robert Wright notes in his book The Moral Animal, the result is that many low-status males end up unable to wed and dangerously restless. Over time, a society can sanction polygamy only if it is prepared to use harsh measures to repress a menacing underclass of spouseless men. It is no coincidence that no liberal countries have been polygamous, and no polygamous countries have been liberal. In that respect, the one-partner-each rule stands at the very core of a liberal society, by making marriage a goal that everyone can aspire to. Gay marriage, note, is fully in keeping with liberalism's inclusive aspirations. Polygamy absolutely is not.

Incest, of course, may produce impaired children. But incestuous marriage is a horrible idea for a much bigger reason than that. Imagine a society where parents and children viewed each other as potential mates. Just for a start, every child would grow up wondering whether his parents had sexual designs on him, or were "grooming" him as a future spouse. Holding open the prospect of incestuous marriage would devastate family life by, effectively, legitimizing sexual predation within it.

The rather peculiar idea underlying the "If gay marriage, then polygamy" argument is that, at bottom, there really is no very good reason to be against polygamy other than tradition - you just have to be blindly against it, and ditto for gay marriage. But there are ample grounds to oppose polygamous and incestuous marriage, grounds that have nothing to do with whether gay people will be allowed to partake of society's most stabilizing, civilizing institution. I don't ask to break the rules that we all depend on. I just want to be allowed to follow them.

FEW OF US, over the course of our lives, will see our photographs and real names splashed across full-page ads in leading newspapers. In still fewer cases will the ads disclose some of the most private, intimate details of our personal feelings and sexual histories. Even less often will we be subjected to this unveiling because someone was seeking advantage in some topic of acrimonious public controversy. And least often will this happen at the wish of our "own", rather than our opponent's, side in the debate.

All this, and more, has happened to several prominent "ex-gays" within the past year or two. As everyone knows, the religious right has lately decided to accord ex-gays a central role in its agitation on the subject of homosexuality. By purchasing ads and conducting a general public relations offensive, it has sought to establish that homosexuality is not innate, and can be changed; that homosexuals can and should proceed down an "ex-gay" path typically involving some combination of fervent appeals to religious renewal with "reparative therapy" practiced by therapeutic professionals; and that homosexuals who resist pressure to go down such a path ought rightly to be held up to reproach, much as we hold alcoholics up to reproach if they resist pressure to enter treatment.

Over and over again, it has been said that the strongest support for these claims lies in the personal life stories of leading ex-gays -- men like John Paulk, Anthony Falzarano, and Michael Johnston. There is therefore no more direct way to engage the religious right's claims on this issue than to take up the challenge, and examine these life stories with an eye to what lessons they might yield. Of course it is worth keeping in mind that many thousands of persons have passed through ex-gay ministries, and we have very little reason to think that Paulk, Falzarano and Johnston are in fact typical in their histories. But presumably one of the reasons these men have emerged as leading ex-gay spokesmen is that their backers view their personal stories as among the most compelling to be found for their purpose -- the most credible in detail, the likeliest to evoke admiration in doubting audiences, and the most indisputable in documenting the claimed transmutation process from gay to straight.

"We are the evidence," is what the most prominent ex-gays are asserting, in effect. But in that case we are entitled to ask: evidence of what?

John Paulk

John Paulk currently works as an analyst for Focus on the Family, the prominent religious right group associated with Dr. James Dobson. Along with his wife Anne, he was prominently featured in the ex-gay advertising campaign, which landed the couple on the cover of Newsweek; he also appeared in the religious right's "Gay Agenda" video, produced at the height of the gays-in-the-military controversy.

According to Paulk's website and his autobiography, Not Afraid to Change, Paulk had an unhappy childhood. His parents divorced when he was five years old, and he was frequently teased by other children for being effeminate and poor at sports. He began drinking at the age of fourteen and in his senior year of high school entered a gay bar for the first time. Shortly thereafter, he entered into a relationship with another man, which ended after a year. Paulk was so upset by the breakup that he dropped out of college. His drinking increased and he entered into a deep depression.

Inspired by the story of a successful male escort he read in a gay pornographic novel, Paulk decided to become a male prostitute, hoping to become as wealthy and desired as his fictional "hero". He signed up for an escort service and began selling his body for 80 dollars per hour. Eventually, Paulk racked up over 300 sexual partners. However, writes Paulk, he became tired of being "sexually used". After a while, he dropped out of the escort business. Without the income it had provided, he experienced some financial hardships, bouncing checks, and having his power shut off for non-payment. Worse, Paulk developed a habit of periodically stealing cash from one of his best friends.

As a hobby, Paulk decided to become a female impersonator, adopting the name of "Candi" and trying to be "the best woman I could [be]." Paulk also began to take LSD on a regular basis every weekend, supplementing his alcohol consumption. One night, he became particularly depressed and attempted suicide. He subsequently tried to cut back on his drinking, but found it difficult to stop.

According to Paulk's account, his crucial religious experience came one night on the dance floor. In the version given on his website, Paulk spoke to God, praying "I know you can help me -- someday I'll come back to you." This story has, however, changed with regard to some rather significant details over the years. In an interview with a Washington Times reporter much later, Paulk said it was God who spoke to him on the dance floor that night, telling him, "Come back to me and I will set you free from all this and change your life." Being spoken to by God represents a considerably higher and more significant order of religious experience than calling on him for help, and it is surprising that such a memorable detail would have escaped Paulk's memory during an earlier rendition of the tale. It would be understandable, however, if Paulk could not clearly remember the details of what happened that night, since according to his book he was stoned out of his mind at the time.

Shortly after this experience, Paulk met a number of Christian evangelists who showed him a Bible and told him he wasn't born gay. Paulk says "the truth came shining through," and he promised God he would try to change. Among the things that upset Paulk about his "gay lifestyle" was the fact that his relationships with other men never lasted and that he was "sexually used" by hundreds of men, but never found satisfaction. But one of Paulk's Christian friends told him that "Jesus was someone that would never leave" Paulk. "A lover who never leaves?," Paulk asked himself. "If that is really true, Jesus is the person I've been searching for all my life."

Paulk entered the ex-gay ministry Love In Action, which sponsored a live-in program for gay men wishing to turn straight. However, Paulk and the other live-ins had great difficulty overcoming their homosexual feelings; a number of them secretly had sex, and Paulk fell in love with one of the men. That did not stop Paulk and the others from participating in an advertising campaign for Exodus, the umbrella group for ex-gay ministries. Paulk and his fellows posed for a picture with the caption, "Can homosexuals change? WE DID!" despite the fact that his group was still undergoing counseling and, by his own admission, continued to have homosexual feelings. In fact, one of the directors of the program stated frankly, "The goal of this program is not to turn you into a heterosexual by the end of the year. But if you leave this program closer to Jesus Christ than when you arrived, the program will have been a success."

After a year of therapy in the ex-gay program, Paulk says he prayed to God for three things: that he'd marry a former lesbian; that the two would have a child together; and that God would "use our story to blow the world away." Why it was necessary for Paulk to find an ex-lesbian to marry is not clear. "I just thought that it'd be cool [to marry a former lesbian]," Paulk told a Washington Times reporter. Paulk discovered an ex-lesbian named Anne and married her in 1992.

Shortly after his marriage, Paulk conceded to the Wall Street Journal that "I don't know if I'll ever have the intensity for sex with women that the average man in the street has." Nevertheless, he claimed that his attraction for his spouse was developing, even if he was not totally heterosexual. "When you begin a relationship with a woman that you believe God has led you to, then you develop attraction to that person. To say that we've arrived at this place of total heterosexuality -- that we're totally healed -- is misleading." Five years later, Paulk declared to Newsweek, "I still find men can be attractive. [But] my orientation is as a straight man." In his autobiography, Paulk quotes the philosophy of one of his ex-gay friends, John Smid: "There's a verse in the Bible that says, 'As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.' Our self-image begins in the mind; that's where changes really are born."

Anthony Falzarano

Among the most politically active ex-gays is Anthony Falzarano, who has just been ousted as head of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (P-FOX), a small organization located in Washington, D.C. P-FOX has received heavy funding from the Family Research Council, one of the leading religious right organizations, and Falzarano has assisted the religious right by making media appearances and testifying against gay rights laws across the country.

Falzarano claims that his childhood experiences fit closely with what the traditional psychoanalytic model argues to be conducive to the development of homosexuality. Falzarano's father was frequently absent from the home, and his mother was the dominant personality of the household. In addition, Falzarano claims that he was sexually molested by an older brother in his childhood, an event which he believes played a large role in causing his homosexuality. In fact, Falzarano states he was molested by no less then five different men before he reached adulthood.

Entering the "gay lifestyle" at the age of sixteen, Falzarano says he quickly became a "sex addict," racking up over 400 sexual partners in the course of nine years. Falzarano became a prostitute to older, wealthy gays, and claims he was a "kept boy" of the infamous Roy Cohn for a short time. One night at a bathhouse, Falzarano had sex with twelve different men. The day after this memorable occurrence, the guilt-stricken Falzarano went to his therapist pleading, "I'm sick, I need help." However, he says his therapist was unhelpfully nonjudgmental.

At the age of 26, Falzarano allegedly left the "gay lifestyle" and made a gradual conversion to heterosexuality. The story of this conversion has remained murky, however, because he has told several different and not entirely consistent versions of it.

Version One was told to me personally one day while Falzarano was recruiting for the ex-gay movement in a gay neighborhood of Washington, D.C. According to Falzarano, after many years of living his "gay lifestyle," he became depressed about the fact that he wasn't in a relationship, despite the fact that he was an intelligent and attractive person. Why was this?, he wondered. He had been in relationships before, but they never seemed to last more than a year or so. Shortly thereafter, the AIDS epidemic broke out, and Falzarano watched a good number of his friends die of the disease. Falzarano became convinced that these misfortunes were due to the fact that homosexuality was inherently unnatural and immoral. As he later related during an appearance on "Good Morning America," "I ... realized, when I began to see 35 of my friends die of AIDS, that I probably made the wrong lifestyle choice." Subsequently, Falzarano left the "gay lifestyle."

Version Two of Falzarano's conversion can be found on Falzarano's web site. The website describes in some detail Falzarano's childhood and life as a gay man. It then goes on to describe how one night, Falzarano had an anonymous sexual encounter with a man who was trying to go straight. After the encounter, the man got out of bed, ashamed at what he had done. He told Falzarano that he was a Christian who had "fallen" and regretted his actions. He showed Falzarano the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible and told Falzarano that they were both doomed if they did not repent. Falzarano became persuaded by this preaching, and subsequently gave up prostitution. Gradually, he dropped out of the "gay lifestyle" altogether.

Falzarano married his wife Diane in 1983. However, he continued to be plagued by fantasies about men, which he tried to suppress. Then one day, a year after his heterosexual wedding, Falzarano received a call from a former boyfriend who was dying of AIDS, who urged him to get tested. Says Falzarano: "I remember hanging up the phone and kneeling down on the floor, and it hit me that I had slept with over 400 people in the 1970s. I said, 'God, I must be infected.' ... So I prayed: 'God, if you can give me a negative test result, I will kill this [homosexual orientation] off inside of me." Falzarano says he received his "miracle" and tested negative. Afterward, he underwent counseling at an ex-gay ministry, which helped him eradicate his homosexual urges altogether.

Version Three of Falzarano's story was told by Falzarano on a recent segment of "The Roseanne Show," on which he made an appearance to discuss the topic of ex-gays. According to Falzarano, he had been living a gay lifestyle happily for nine years. One day, in 1982, Falzarano was walking down the streets of Boston when God spoke to him (literally, not metaphorically -- Falzarano claims God's voice was "audible"). God said, "Anthony, I've been patient with you for long enough. If you don't give up the homosexual lifestyle now, you will die of AIDS." At that time, says Falzarano, the number of AIDS cases in the country was very small, and no one had any idea AIDS would turn out to be a huge, fatal epidemic. But as a result of this direct warning from the Almighty, Falzarano became an ex-gay. Says Falzarano, "God pulled me out of the gay lifestyle before AIDS hit." Moreover, claims Falzarano, until the warning from God came, he was not at all miserable as a homosexual: "I was happy being gay ... until the voice [of God] came, I was really, totally happy. I was pretty well-adjusted in the lifestyle. I had no reason to change." His only motivation to change was his "born-again" experience, direct from God.

Some of the elements of the three versions of Falzarano's story can be harmonized with each other, and Falzarano has on occasion chosen to explain his life history by combining elements from more than one version. However, other elements of these stories are in considerable tension with each other. In Versions One and Two (the latter presented on the P-FOX website), Falzarano is unhappy being gay, and this is his primary motivation to change -- nothing is said about God speaking to him, memorable though you might think such an occurrence would be, especially when it takes place in "audible" fashion. In Version Three, Falzarano is "really, totally happy" being gay and changes only because God told him to. In Version One, doubts about whether to continue in the gay lifestyle set in when his friends start dying of AIDS. In Version Three, Falzarano has gotten out of the gay lifestyle before AIDS's ravages, thanks to God's timely warning in 1982. In Version Two, Falzarano leaves the gay lifestyle, finds out a friend has AIDS in 1984, and is shocked at the thought that he [Falzarano] might have been infected back in the 1970s, leading him to plead with God for a negative test result.

At times, it might seem that Anthony Falzarano is two different people. At the 1997 conference "Homosexuality and American Public Life," held at Georgetown University under the sponsorship of the American Public Philosophy Institute, Falzarano told a sad tale of his life as a homosexual, how he was "addicted" to sex and pornography, how he continued to have sex and sell his body despite the fact that deep down he felt homosexuality was wrong, how he went to a therapist after a night at a bathhouse with twelve different men, how he desperately sought help but did not receive it. At several times during this tale, Falzarano appeared from an audiotape to be breaking down in tears. Yet a year and a half later, on "The Roseanne Show," Falzarano smiled and blithely told the audience that he was "really, totally happy" being gay and "had no reason to change" until God told him.

Falzarano's recollections of his childhood, in which he says he was molested by five different men, raise touchy questions as well. Existing studies put the prevalence of sexual victimization of males at somewhere between 3 percent and 11 percent of the general male population -- that is, approximately 3 to 11 percent of men were molested at least once as children. Being molested once, then, is a relatively uncommon occurrence. When such a child is molested more than once, the usual pattern is for him to be molested multiple times by the same offender. There is every reason to believe that the number of male children molested by five different people, as Falzarano claims, is exceedingly small. Was Falzarano as a little boy simply the victim of extraordinarily bad luck? Or could he be interpreting as molestation occurrences that not everyone would have categorized as such?

In fact, light is shed on this last point by comments Falzarano made in a friendly interview with Tom Bethell in the conservative magazine American Spectator (October 1998), which appear to take a rather broad view of what constitutes molestation. Falzarano asserted that "inappropriate touching" could constitute molestation, and added the cryptic comment that children can be "molested with candy or gifts." When pressed by Bethell to precisely describe his molestation by a family member, Falzarano admitted that the experience was not so serious, it was "really just groping, acting out." According to Bethell, it was the sort of experience that could have happened "to anyone." Nonetheless, apparently on the strength of that episode, Falzarano told a religious right group six months later that he was a "a victim of incest."

Falzarano, who claims in defiance of mainstream scientific opinion that 80 percent of gay men were molested as children, may also be prone to resort to molestation hypotheses as a explanation of why children grow up to be gay or lesbian. One letter writer to the Washington Blade described his experience as a counselee to Falzarano:

I called Mr. Falzarano. During our phone call, he went over a checklist to determine more about my orientation and possible causes for it. He asked if I had a domineering mother (no), a father who travelled a great deal (no), a good relationship with my father (very good), if I had ever been picked last for a baseball team (never), and got along with the other boys (yes). Mr. Falzarano said that he could not figure out what had made me gay, and that he had seen only one case of a gay man who had bonded with his father. Finally, he asked if there was anything unusual at all about my background. I told him that I did not learn to talk until I was 4 1/2 years old, after going to a speech therapist for a short time. Mr. Falzarano jumped on that and enthusiastically announced that I likely had been sexually abused before that age, and that caused me to be gay.

In recent years, Falzarano has claimed that he is a fully functioning heterosexual, that he is not merely repressing homosexual desires, and that he is happily married to his wife. However, even on this matter, his stories show considerable fluctuation in emphasis from one audience to the next. In 1996, on the CNN show "Talk Back Live," an audience member asked Falzarano, "Are you still attracted to men at all? When a good-looking man walks by ... does your head still turn?" Falzarano replied flatly, "No." However, in his 1998 interview with the American Spectator's Bethell, Falzarano replied to the same question as follows: "I have to be absolutely truthful. I can notice a very attractive man. Do I want to sleep with him? No." The question of whether one finds members of the same gender attractive, as opposed to whether one can resist the desire to sleep with them, is obviously relevant to whether one can accurately report having eliminated as opposed to repressing a same-gender sexual orientation.

Then there is the question of the quality of his marriage to his wife, Diane -- the sort of subject that in the case of most public figures might best be passed over in silence, had Falzarano himself not so insistently thrust it upon listeners as evidence in his case against homosexuality. According to Falzarano's website, during the first several years of his marriage, he was "happily" married, albeit while experiencing occasional homosexual temptations. However, at the "Homosexuality and American Public Life" conference, he told a different story, relating how the first four years of matrimony were a "disaster" (even during the engagement, he continued to have sex with men), and how only counseling from Exodus International saved his marriage.

Falzarano has blasted the gay rights movement as being filled with the "spirit of the anti-Christ," and his language abounds in the sorts of conspiratorial and apocalyptic tropes that one might think would embarrass some of his backers in religious right and conservative circles. At the "Homosexuality and American Public Life" conference held at Georgetown, in which such figures as ABC News commentator William Kristol and neoconservative cleric Rev. Richard Neuhaus played prominent roles, Falzarano declared that the media is "controlled by" a 1,200-member gay journalists' organization, and that "their objective is to homosexualize America and destroy Judeo-Christian values. ... Disney studios is [also] controlled by the gays." Appearing on a CBS News special report, Falzarano was quoted as saying, "AIDS comes from the devil, directly from Satan. He uses homosexuals as pawns and then he kills them." At a recent P-FOX conference, Falzarano described Matthew Shepard, the 105-pound boy who was brutally beaten and killed by thugs, as "a predator to heterosexual men." One of Falzarano's recent projects is to gather a group of parents who have lost children to AIDS to sue the American Psychiatric Association for malpractice, on the grounds that the APA's declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness in the 1970s led to the creation of a generation of homosexuals who died of AIDS.

Michael Johnston

Founder of Kerusso Ministries, an ex-gay counseling center, Michael Johnston has also played a prominent role in the "Truth in Love" advertising campaign. His mother, Frances Johnston, appeared in a television spot aired on Mother's Day. Like Paulk and Falzarano, Johnston has worked extensively with the religious right, lobbying against gay rights laws in Alaska and elsewhere.

Johnston tells his story in a video sold by Kerusso Ministries entitled "On Wings Like Eagles." Johnston says he experienced an unhappy childhood. He claims that as a result of watching the television program "Dark Shadows" as a child, he developed the idea that "there was power and there was success available in the Dark Side." One day, he went inside a closet, lit some candles, and prayed to Satan, "if you make me wealthy ... then you can have my heart." He believes that this incident might have led him into homosexuality later as a teen and adult.

While in high school, Johnston began to take drugs, and it was not long before he was "habitually stoned" and selling drugs to others. One night he met a friend who took him to a gay bar, whereupon he entered the "gay lifestyle." Over time, Johnston's life became a "revolving door of drugs, alcohol, and sex," with every weekend turning into an opportunity to find a new sex partner. Says Johnston, speaking it would appear very much for himself, "The very creed of so-called 'gay liberation' precludes any constraints on sensual pleasure or even the contemplation of so quaint a concept as self-control." However, Johnston's childhood dream of being wealthy and envied by others remained unfulfilled, despite the fact that he was "doing everything to uphold my end of the bargain with Satan."

In 1984, AIDS began to take the lives of men Johnston had known. In 1986, Johnston himself tested positive for the HIV virus. He proceeded not to tell anyone of his test result, not even his lover. Johnston claims that he felt guilty about the danger to which he was exposing the other man, however, and eventually sabotaged the relationship with the lover "for his own protection". After leaving this lover, Johnston continued his promiscuous lifestyle. When later asked by a reporter if he had put others at risk for infection, Johnston admitted that he had, but said he no longer felt guilty because of his born-again experience: "If it weren't for the fact that I knew I had the forgiveness of my Father in heaven, I would have a great deal of difficulty living with that. That forgiveness is what sets me free from the guilt."

Johnston eventually found his way to an ex-gay ministry, Love in Action, where he claims a "supernatural transformation" helped him to achieve heterosexuality. Interestingly, Johnston dismisses many of the claims for "reparative therapy" made by others in the ex-gay movement, arguing that real change is not a matter of "rational thought or rational discussion" but of divine intervention. In an interview in the Village Voice, Johnston stated, "I don't believe men and women can go into therapy and come out the other end heterosexual." Although God changed his sexual orientation, he says, he doesn't think most ex-gays have experienced a dramatic transformation. To tell an unhappy homosexual that he or she can be cured is "setting up someone for a great deal of frustration. Christian law is not about eliminating sinful desires, it's about overcoming them." In response to the argument that ex-gays are simply repressing their homosexual orientation, Johnston has forthrightly replied, "There is a kernel of truth in what they say, that those of us who have chosen to follow Christ are repressing. ... What comes naturally to us is not righteousness, it is sin."

Colin Cook

Despite his prominent role in the history of the ex-gay movement, Colin Cook is perhaps understandably not a figure featured prominently in current religious right publicity. A former Seventh-Day Adventist minister, Cook was expelled from his ministry in 1974 when it was discovered he had been having sex with a man in his church. Over the course of a decade, Cook had sex with over 1,000 men, many of them anonymous encounters in places such as public restrooms. But by the late 1970s Cook became convinced that homosexuality was wrong and decided to go straight and marry a woman. The foundation of Cook's self-therapy was his fervent belief that that all people are created by God as heterosexual. "Man was created in the image of God, male for female. I am created as a heterosexual person."

Cook succeeded in convincing the Adventist Church that he had truly become heterosexual, and worked to set up the "Quest Learning Center," an ex-gay ministry, in 1979. The next year Cook also co-founded "Homosexuals Anonymous," an ex-gay program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous.

In 1986, however, Cook admitted that he had been having sexual contacts with men who had sought counseling at the Quest Learning Center in hopes of changing their sexual orientation. (According to Cook, he had been giving nude massages to men and teenage boys in order to "desensitize" them to the pleasures of male flesh.) The Quest ministry collapsed and Cook resigned as the head of Homosexuals Anonymous. Homosexuals Anonymous itself survived, however, and was later taken over by one "John J," a man who had once served time in prison for molesting boys. Six months later, Cook was again ministering to gays, under strict Church supervision. By 1993, Cook claimed that therapy had made him "98 percent free" of male fantasies.

Cook moved to Colorado and founded a new ministry, "FaithQuest Colorado." This new ex-gay ministry of Cook's was publicized widely by religious right groups, and he appeared twice on the Phil Donahue show. Colorado for Family Values endorsed Cook and showcased him at various anti-gay conferences. In 1995, however, The Denver Post reported that Cook was again engaging in inappropriate sexual conversations with his counselees. According to the accounts, Cook had engaged in sexually provocative conversations with clients over the phone, and also given them long, grinding hugs and asked them to bring homosexual pornography to sessions so that he could help "desensitize" them to it.

John Smid

John Smid directs Love in Action, an ex-gay group in Memphis, Tennessee, which sponsors a live-in program for gays wishing to become heterosexual. At one time, Smid was married to a woman. He later came out of the closet and adopted a "gay lifestyle," but returned to heterosexuality and married another woman when he became convinced that homosexuality was wrong.

Smid's Love in Action program has attracted some controversy for the methods it employs to supervise its counselees, with some former members denouncing it as a "cult." The live-in program is rigidly structured, and contacts with the outside world are extremely limited. Persons expressing doubts about the efficacy of the program are asked to leave, so as not to undermine the efforts of the group. One former participant in the program, Tom Ottosen, has stated that during his time in the program, he became extremely depressed and had suicidal thoughts. Ottosen went to Smid expressing his concerns and doubts about the program, whereupon, according to Ottosen's version of the story, Smid told him he would be better off if he committed suicide than if he left Love in Action and returned to the gay lifestyle. According to Ottosen, Smid said, "in a physical death you could still have a spiritual resurrection, whereas returning to homosexuality, you are yielding yourself to a spiritual death from which there is no recovery." Smid denies he told this to Ottosen.

Smid's own alleged transformation into heterosexuality has been less than convincing. Smid told a reporter that his sex life with his wife was "very normal," "the same as any other marriage." However, he states frankly on his website: "I am not totally healed from homosexuality. It is part of my emotional, physical and spiritual history. It will not be erased as though it did not exist. I still struggle at times. ... I will shut down with my wife at times. I periodically have sexual thoughts regarding men." He compares these thoughts to the temptations that married heterosexual men have for women other than their wives. The difficulty with this analogy is that the temptations of a "very normal" husband are heterosexual, not homosexual. A conventional heterosexual does not have to practice self-control over unwanted homosexual thoughts.

Comments that Smid has made suggest that his fervent faith may operate as something of a denial mechanism. In a recent interview, Smid discussed how difficult it was for him to adjust to heterosexuality. As an example of his struggle, Smid pointed to a gold-colored wall in the room and stated, "I want to believe that that wall is blue. ... It's blue, it's blue, it's blue. ... [T]hen God comes along, and He says, 'You're right John, it is blue.'"

While John Paulk, Anthony Falzarano, Michael Johnston, and John Smid can be regarded as among the leading current stars of the ex-gay movement, a number of other, somewhat less prominent ex-gay personalities have also been promoted by the religious right. Three such figures are David Kyle Foster, Bob Van Domelen and Steven Short.

David Kyle Foster founded "Mastering Life Ministries" in 1987 and is the author of a book entitled Sexual Healing, a guide to overcoming homosexuality. He has spoken at religious right conferences and his radio program has been carried by James Dobson's Focus on the Family satellite network. Before his conversion, Mr. Foster was a Hollywood actor and male prostitute for ten years. Later, Foster joined the "Divine Light Mission," a cult led by a self-proclaimed messiah who owned several houses and a fleet of luxury automobiles, thanks to the generosity of his followers. After leaving the cult, Foster was finally "saved" from homosexuality. Says Foster, "I was healed with a supernatural bonding with God the Father." According to Foster, the problem with homosexuals is that they suffer from a case of "arrested emotional development."

Bob Van Domelen is the director of Broken Yoke Ministries in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, part of the Exodus International network of ex-gay ministries. During his college years, Van Domelen struggled with his sexual orientation and frequented public restrooms for homosexual encounters. After graduating from college, Van Domelen became a teacher and married a woman. As a teacher, however, he developed the troubling habit of molesting his male students. Fourteen years later, in 1985, he was confronted by a former student who reported him to the police. Van Domelen was sentenced to five years in prison for first- and second-degree sexual assault against minors. He spent his time in prison studying the Bible, which led him to repent and seek to overcome his homosexuality. When Van Domelen was released, he started his Broken Yoke ex-gay ministry. Today, Van Domelen says that he is mostly healed, but that he still has to say a quick prayer before entering a public restroom.

Steven Short appears in the recently produced Family Research Council video, "Coming Out of Homosexuality: Stories of Hope and Healing." Starting at the age of 18, Short began to dress as a woman; in his twenties he underwent plastic surgery to become a woman. At the age of 40, Short became involved in illegal activities (the nature of which he refuses to specify) which led him to prison. The warden, after some consideration, sent Short to the women's section of the prison. About a year and a half into his prison term, Short says he met a "true Christian woman" who showed him the light. Subsequently, God made it known to Short through "supernatural intervention" that his homosexuality was a choice and could be changed. Today Short claims to be living as a heterosexual male.

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Although each "ex-gay," like each human being, is fundamentally unique, there are some striking commonalities in what can be documented from these stories. These are before-and-after stories, with the finding of religion being the key event which divides the halves of the story. During the "before" phase, many of these ex-gays were remarkably deficient in self-control and restraint, prone to addictive behavior, and often lacking a moral center altogether. With their faith to lean on, they today lead more stable and responsible lives. This faith is never presented as less than an intense one that permeates virtually all aspects of their lives; in some instances it would be hard to distinguish it from fanaticism.

It is not unusual for people who lead irresponsible and uncontrolled lives to be deeply unhappy, and one can readily credit the ex-gays' tales of how unhappy they were in the "before" phase of their stories. But they go on to accuse the "gay lifestyle" of being inherently unrestrained and decadent. Such a claim amounts by implication to an evasion of personal responsibility, a way of blaming one's past on a handy scapegoat rather than on one's own personal folly. Some gay persons lead overindulgent, irresponsible, out-of-control lives. Countless other gay persons do not. Homosexual orientation is not a choice, but what one chooses to do with it is.

The experiences also cast doubt on one of the most commonly made of all claims for the ex-gay movement, namely that it offers a proven method of replacing homosexual desire with conventional heterosexual desire. While the accounts of leading ex-gays range along a continuum, evidence is remarkably lacking of a disappearance of same-sex desire, a striking fact given that these cases are presumably selected from among the most successful ones that the ex-gay movement has to offer. Indeed, many ex-gays have been remarkably frank about the extent to which homosexual thoughts persist.

It is hardly a secret that homosexuals are capable of marrying, having deep emotional relationships with members of the opposite sex, and having children. After all, they have done so for thousands of years, before anyone came up with the idea of ex-gay ministries. (Surveys conducted during the 1970s estimated that 15 to 20 percent of homosexual men had been married to a woman at one time.) Sometimes marriages that suffer a dearth of fundamental erotic attraction on one side are saved because other values, such as friendship or familial love, prove unusually strong. In a majority of instances, unfortunately, such values prove neither deep enough nor satisfying enough to sustain a happy marriage for a lifetime.

A recent article by Dr. Richard Isay in the Journal of Orthopsychiatry details a study of sixteen homosexual men married to women. A persistent pattern was found, in which the men were able to have a relatively successful family relationship in the first several years, albeit with low sexual and emotional intensity. But after this initial period, the desire for sex vanished, and the men became anxious and depressed. Typically, separation or divorce would occur by the 15- to 20-year mark.

If ex-gay groups are successful in their expensive campaign of recruitment, we can expect to see more persons lured into unsuitable heterosexual marriages which prove unsatisfactory and eventually fail, resulting often in broken homes and deep unhappiness for the participants. Are "pro-family" groups even capable of seeing the irony of such an outcome?