IGF CultureWatch

RECENTLY, NEAR ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND, plainclothes police officers swooped into an adult video store, entered the video booths, and arrested those men deemed to be engaging in "lewd behavior." The Washington Blade newspaper reported that at least 48 men were taken into custody. One victim, Don Chandler, sat in a cell block with his hands and feet in cuffs from 9 pm until 5:30 am the following morning, charged with "indecent exposure" (behind the locked door of a video booth). When the Annapolis Capital newspaper published Chandler's name, address, and the charges against him, he was summarily fired from his job as director of music and organist at a local Episcopal Church. Chandler is now trying to make ends meet as a part-time piano tuner.

Sadly, his story is all too typical.

Many victims of police sex raids fare even worse. Outside the big cities, it's common for newspapers to publish the names of men taken into custody during police stings, making no distinction between those arrested in private commercial establishments (sex clubs, closed video booths in adult porn stores) and those arrested in public restrooms or public parks. One man committed suicide last January in Pulaski County, Ark., after the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock published his name among those arrested in a sex raid. The newspaper, by the way, did not report his suicide and ignored requests from five major gay organizations to discuss its policy of selective publication of the names of men arrested for misdemeanors.

The Fresno Bee in June reported that a sting of a restroom in a local park netted "five schoolteachers, some business executives and a high school football coach." In the case of the teachers and the coach, police were required by law to notify the supervisors of those arrested, ending their teaching careers. The paper noted that one teacher in an earlier raid asked for a court trial in which he was found not guilty. His lawyer argued successfully that an act wasn't lewd if it wasn't witnessed by someone near enough to be offended by it, and the activity in question took place at night, when the only people in that area of the park were police officers and men seeking sex.

Still, few arrestees are willing to take their cases to court and earn more publicity for themselves. Rock star George Michael (arrested in a Beverly Hills park restroom while alone with an officer who indicated an interest in some action) can survive being the center for a scandal; most working stiffs (ahem) can not.

It's been widely reported in the gay press that a slew of television stations from Miami to San Diego have run sensationalist news reports during "sweeps week," showing hidden camera footage of men cruising in parks and rest rooms. The news operations found these sites through listings on the web site cruisingforsex.com. The site is intended to inform about where quick, anonymous sex can be found, but it seems that many listed locales become subject to either police raids and/or local television hidden-camera news coverage. Yikes. Helpfully, the web site provides "alerts" of where recent raids have occurred. For example: At the Paradise Bookstore in Pomona, California, police entered video booths and made apparently random arrests. At the Adult Video store in Hallendale, Florida, undercover police entered booths and "grabbed themselves" before arresting the men unlucky enough to have fallen into their trap. At the Adult Superstore & Theater in Las Vegas, police left arcade doors ajar to invite in guests, who were then arrested. Come into my parlor, said the state-armed spider to the fly.

The alerts listed at the crusingforsex.com site go on and on -- a litany of entrapment. A report from Houston, Texas says that all over town the vice squad is actively monitoring and entrapping men in adult bookstore arcades and theaters. "They will grab their crotches and rub themselves to let people think they aren't cops. They dress sloppy to casual, wearing baseball caps sometimes, shorts and t-shirts, etc., straight looking to gay acting. Will stare at you, or just stand next to you watching the video acting as if they are getting off to it. Many guys are being busted every day."

The consequences can be devastating. One poor soul in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania left the following account: "Nine of us were arrested at Adult World for 'publicly masturbating while other men watched.' That's how it read in the paper with our names published for all to see. Official charges are public indecency and public lewdness. It has ruined my career and marriage. I have not been fired, but I am going to leave due to being either shunned or scorned. It is awful. My wife has thrown me out saying: 'I didn't know you were a queer!' I am without hope."

Finally, I should mention that in these self-reported accounts it is not unusual for the vice cops to extort money on the spot in lieu of arrest. Most men pay up and consider themselves lucky, given the alternative.

I've had my disagreements with the views advocated by the group Sex Panic! before, chiefly for its failure to distinguish between legitimate goals on the sexual privacy front and sexual "rights" that border on the absurd. However, among their aims that I agree with, on good libertarian grounds, are demands for an end to police raids on private sexual businesses, including adult theaters, book/video stores, and clubs. Humiliating and arresting consenting adult patrons and proprietors smacks of police state terror tactics that should not be accepted in a free society. Police entrapment -- often employing hot cops to elicit a solicitation -- also should not be tolerated. Ditto the frequent double standard -- cops will tell a straight couple going at it in a parked car to move on, but arrest a gay couple. The same is often true of those coupling in semi-private places -- such as the beach at night.

In fact, a convincing argument can be made generally against stings targeting sex in obscured outdoor spaces, hidden from public view during the day, or discernible only by flashlight-wielding officers at night. Again, if police would simply tell a straight couple to move on, they have no business treating same-sex couples as criminals, useful in upping their arrest quotas for the week. On the other hand, when Sex Panic! defends sex in public men's rooms as a "right," I still cringe. This is a fight that they will never win, even if (as its advocates claim) such activity takes place with extreme discretion, only when two partners indicate through time-tested ritual that each is interested, and often outside the sight of anyone who might intrude. In the court of public opinion, the majority will never countenance this activity in spaces that are officially public.

Moreover, a growing number of influential gay men (and lesbians) are speaking out against such behavior. Jeff Epperly, editor of the influential Bay Windows gay newspaper in Boston, ran a lacerating editorial last May (1998) against cruisers who want gay organizations to defend their public sexual activities, and the negative public images they generate. Wrote Epperly, "some guy who can't relate to other human beings on a mature level... wants you and me... to take time out from fighting violence and bias to protect his right to be a pig in public." Karen Boothe, president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, has said that the issue of public sex is not representative of the gay community because "as a lesbian, these stories have nothing to do with my life."

As I said, the "right" to restroom sex is not something that its adherents are going to win.

Let's make the fight one which we can, and should, win - the right to private, consensual behavior, and the rights of property owners to run sexually oriented businesses - including commercial establishments set up with the intent to provide private space for sexual encounters. I suspect that more gay men have been harmed by vice cop persecutions than by workplace discrimination. That the well-funded national lesbigay political groups have all but ignored this situation is appalling, and they should be called to account.

In addition, we should not hesitate to lambaste the sleazy slew of TV news reports on restroom sex - often, like the police, employing decoys to start the action and then, sometimes, turning their tapes over to the police so that those captured on film can be arrested. Nice to know the journalistic trade is attracting such public spirited citizens. These journalistic vermin should slither back to the holes in the ground from which they emerged. The same goes for their bubble-headed pseudo-reporters who like to imply that "your children are at risk."

When I was in college (many years ago), I was jolted by John Rechy's The Sexual Outlaw, a searing indictment of the criminalization of homosexuality. "You're making out in a car - and you're sentenced to prison for eight years," Rechy wrote. "Not merely told to move on - but sentenced to prison for eight years... And you keep wondering, why?" Don Chandler, the church director arrested in a video booth, kept in a cell with hands and feet in cuffs for over eight hours, and then fired after the self-righteous local paper printed his name, must be wondering the same thing.

Originally published in 1999.

Last month, a Michigan jury ordered the producers of the "Jenny Jones Show" to pay $25 million in damages for the 1995 murder of Scott Amedure by Jonathan Schmitz. The civil suit's "wrongful-death" verdict has set off a debate over whether it rendered a deserved punishment or was an extreme over-reaction. In either case, the culprit is said to be homophobia. But whose?

If you need a reminder, during an episode of the Jones show taped on March 6, 1995, the 32-year-old Amedure, who was openly gay, revealed his "secret crush" on his friend, a surprised, 24-year-old (and presumably heterosexual) Schmitz. Three days later, Schmitz bought a shotgun and bullets and killed Amedure at his home in Orion Township, Michigan. Throughout the first criminal trial, Schmitz's defense centered around his public "humiliation" as the provocation for murder -- a variant of the so-called "homosexual panic" defense. Schmitz was nevertheless found guilty, but the verdict was thrown out on a technicality. He's scheduled to be re-tried later this year. In the meantime, Amedure's family brought and won the civil suit against the Jones show.

Back after the 1995 murder, groups such as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) strenuously condemned Jenny Jones and her show, blaming its alleged sensationalism and circus atmosphere for "using" and debasing gay people -- although the openly gay Amedure seemed quite happy to be "used" as the instigator of the planned surprise. Schmitz, for his part, knew the situation was a unsuspected crush, and the show's producers claim he was told it could be from either sex. Nevertheless, through a supposed chain of dubious causality, the Jones show was accused of creating the "context" for Amedure's subsequent murder by intentionally setting up the killer for embarrassment and shame.

Others, however, objected to blaming Jenny Jones and/or her producers, and even suggested the show was being "inclusive" toward gay people. After all, no one would have objected if the "surprise crush" had been between two opposite-sex heterosexuals, one of whom was unsuspecting. GLAAD itself had frequently denounced what it termed "defamation by exclusion," such as leaving gay couples out of stories on romantic predicaments.

This apparent "damned if they do, and damned if they don't" conundrum was amplified by the civil suit and the resultant verdict against the Jones show. Was the program homophobic, or was the jury that convicted it? Will the verdict make talk show producers think twice about treating gay issues in a "sensationalistic" way, or will it make them think twice about treating gay issues at all? And if the show was a guilty party that instigated the killing, doesn't that make Schmitz "less guilty" of the murder he committed?

That, in any event, is the view of some activists over the $25 million verdict. "Homophobia has been victorious," states a press release from the Triangle Foundation, a gay-rights lobby in Michigan. "The verdict against the �Jenny Jones Show' and its producers is a tragic mistake," says Jeffrey Montgomery, the group's executive director. "Shifting blame from the actual, admitted killer and trying to establish some mitigating factor -- in this case a TV show -- is rooted in homophobia, as was the strategy to make the case against them." Regrettably, he adds, the victim's family "has written the script for John Schmitz's team to follow, virtually insuring that the killer of Scott Amedure will walk." All in all, "it's a shameful verdict," says Montgomery, "a shame for us all."

GLAAD, for its part, having gone on record condemning the Jones show in no uncertain terms, has apparently become sensitive to criticism that in doing so it abetted Schmitz's "panic" defense. In a fence-straddling statement after the civil verdict, GLAAD leader Joan Garry states that "It's important that talk shows and other media be held accountable for their sensationalism -- in that sense, at least, this ruling is encouraging." But she then adds, "The danger here is that this ruling will undermine the perception of Schmitz's culpability in Scott Amedure's murder....A ruling that denounces sensationalism and the conviction of a man who killed based on fear and prejudice are not mutually exclusive."

Try as it might, GLAAD really can't have it both ways, and I side with the Triangle Foundation and other critics of the verdict. If Schmitz felt justified in killing based on the fact he was "humiliated" by a public announcement that a male acquaintance had a "secret crush" on him, that is not the fault of the show's producers. To claim as the jury -- and GLAAD -- would that Schmitz could be so mortified by this revelation that he would predictably be driven to shoot Amedure at point-blank range with a shotgun is, in the words of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper, "an astoundingly unfair burden to place on any program."

Talks shows of this type deal in humorous and "embarrassing" set ups, and they should not fear to treat situations that bring gay and straight people together. Even premises such as Howard Stern's "lesbian dating game" -- also stridently denounced by GLAAD, although no one is forcing the willing lesbian guests to participate -- are a sign that gay folks are becoming part of American culture, including schlock popular culture.

You can't advocate for inclusivity on one hand, and then criticize scenarios that fall below an idealized presentation of gays as noble, oppressed victims. You cannot support the First Amendment for gay images that many find "shocking," and then approve of censorious civil suits that hold talk shows responsible for subsequent violence.

Memo to GLAAD: the killer was guilty, period.

Originally published in 1999.

As Rich Tafel tells it, being a gay Republican isn't easy. Tafel is the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, the national federation of gays and lesbians who lobby to make the Grand Old Party more gay-supportive, and to make gays and lesbians more open to a political vision that departs from the big-government ethos of the lesbigay left by advocating less government interference in our bedrooms and our boardrooms.

This counter-agenda calls for lower taxes, an expectation of personal responsibility, and support for that dynamic prosperity generator known as the market economy, unfettered by an overload of often irrational (and politically motivated) regulatory and redistributive mandates. It also calls for equal rights under the law for gays and lesbians, and for all Americans, while eschewing group entitlements.

But Tafel's just-published political memoir, "Party Crasher: A Gay Republican Challenges Politics as Usual," shows what strong opposition gay GOPers face, and not just from the religious right's supplicants in their party. Some of the most intense hostility gay Republicans confront comes from the left-leaning activists who dominate the "official" lesbigay political movement, who effortlessly seem to disregard their otherwise ubiquitous "diversity" mantra whenever the topic turns to inclusion of gay Republicans as a hue in the gay rainbow.

Tafel himself pulls no punches when it comes to what he terms "the knee-jerk, politically correct establishment that dominates gay thinking." Back during the '80s, as a young politico in Massachusetts, he was stunned when the local gay political leadership (including Congressman Barney Frank) chose to support a profoundly anti-gay Democratic nominee for governor, John Silber, against the extraordinarily pro-gay Republican nominee and subsequent victor, William Weld. Tafel notes with pleasure that he saw, not for the last time, "a tide of gay and lesbian voters swing hard against the entire gay political establishment and vote to put a Republican in the state house." In fact, according to exit poll figures, some 33 percent of self-identified gay/lesbian/bisexual voters across the nation routinely pull the Republican lever in congressional elections -- numbers just as routinely ignored by both the leadership of the GOP and the national gay establishment.

"The gay movement's one-party political strategy of simply working within the Democratic Party has clearly failed," Tafel argues. In recent presidential elections, "We were taken for granted by Democrats and written off by Republicans." Bill Clinton was endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest lesbian and gay political action fund, before the first GOP primary in New Hampshire -- and despite the fact that Clinton not only supported the Defense of Marriage Act -- which Tafel correctly labels the most anti-gay measure ever passed by Congress -- but bragged about signing it, in ads that ran on Christian radio stations.

Contrary to what he terms liberal gay "assimilationists" exemplified by the Human Rights Campaign, and radical gay "liberationists" exemplified by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force -- the two wings of today's "movement" -- he calls for recognition of a third alternative, namely gay and lesbian "libertarians," exemplified by the overlooked one-third to one-quarter of all gay voters who side with the GOP. "Histories of the gay movement divide it into two categories -- liberationist and assimilationist -- with no mention of the libertarians," he writes. "Gay libertarians stress their individualism, so they don't accept the labels of identity politics."

When the emphasis is placed back on individual rights rather than group entitlements, a different sort of gay agenda begins to emerge. As gay libertarian Andrew Sullivan contends in his book "Virtually Normal," the gay community should shift its focus from seeking government protection to removing government-imposed barriers to equal treatment. As Tafel himself notes, Sullivan argues for a new movement strategy: equal marriage rights for gays, lifting the ban on gays in the military, and the repeal of sodomy laws and other government prohibitions that treat gays and lesbians second-class citizens. And that's all. This is farther than Tafel himself is willing to go -- he supports government enforced anti-discrimination provisions, for example. But Tafel notes that while the gay activist leadership is slow to change, "the movement away from group identity politics toward a respect for individuals in all their complexity is growing."

This is the politics that rejects speech codes but favors vigorous debate; that rejects gender and race-based preferential treatment, but favors equal opportunity for individuals based on personal merit; that opposes a welfare state that seeks to redistribute income through taxation, but favors economic policies that foster a growing free market that increases everyone's prosperity.

But let me stop here, lest you think Tafel's book is mostly a snipe at gay liberals and their leftover-left nostrums. In fact, the book's main strength is in Tafel's support of libertarian values and his advocacy for a renewed GOP that remembers why personal liberty was the Republic's (and the Republican Party's) founding principle. It's a message that both the anti-gay leaders of the GOP and the left-liberal leaders of the lesbigay establishment both need to hear.

Originally appeared as two columns in The Weekly News (Miami).

GAY AMERICANS OF THE BEARISH PERSUASION have a new heartthrob - Richard, of the number 1 prime-time ratings leader Survivor. The show, airing from 8-9 pm Wednesdays on CBS, concerns a gaggle of disparate Americans transported to a South Seas island - male, female, black, white, urban, rural - and one gay guy, Richard. You know the shtick: they fend for themselves, but also have to engage in orchestrated contests of skill and/or endurance. At the end of each show, someones voted off in a hokey tribal council. As summer ends, the sole survivor will win a million bucks.

Writing about Survivor is tricky, because at least one other show will have aired by the time anyone reads this, and who knows what will be revealed. Still, it's worth noting that Survivor is as big a breakthrough as Ellen or Will and Grace - maybe bigger. And the reason is Richard Hatch (although the media refers to all the ersatz castaways on a first name basis). He's big, hairy, and usually shirtless. Which is to say, he's a bear-lovers' dreamboat. A 39-year-old corporate trainer, on the island he's the chief spear fisherman, which puts him several levels above some of the more obvious slackers. He's also a prime mover behind what has been a successful alliance with Rudy, Susan, and Kelly, who have been deciding in secret to pool their votes each week on one targeted victim, helping to ensure that they'll still be safe, for at least one more week.

This strategy has earned Richard some enemies back here in the real world. Writing in Entertainment Weekly, openly gay critic Mark Harris ripped him to shreds in a column titled "American Schemer." Harris, whose own photo is totally unbearish, called our man Rich a "conniving, manipulative, smarmy, fork-tongued...evil lizard-face, portly gay corporate trainer Machiavellian superstar," and that was just for starters. Comparing him to J.R. Ewing, Harris finally admits that Rich is "utterly mesmerizing."

So Rich flirted with Greg (the straight Ivy Leaguer, who also seemed to be flirting with him) and then voted Greg off while singing under his breath, "Good night, sweetheart, it's time to go...." The fact is, it's a game, fella, and strategy rules. Self-reliant, super-competent Gretchen, voted off a few weeks back, may very well have had the best physical survival skills, but she disdained the idea of sullying herself in an alliance, which she dismissed as nothing but "back stabbing" by "devious rivals." Corporate trainer Rich knows better. This show is all about manipulative relationships and making them work to your advantage.

It's not Gilligan's Island, and it's not summer camp. And while some lefty critics look at Rich's corporate background and paint him as a deceitful exemplar of free-market capitalism (again, the J.R. factor), they miss the point. This is not a "community," it's a contest. After all, no one's planning on sharing the million-dollar booty. Paranoia is the name of the game, and if you can't stand the heat, this island's not for you. As of this writing, several of the others have figured this out and are belatedly trying to put together alliances of their own, including one group of women (who may be trying to lure Kelly to their cause). Stay tuned.

EW's Harris says Rich has "single-handedly eradicated every antigay stereotype of the 20th century (he's not limp-wristed, incompetent...cowardly or effeminate)," but then complains he's "replaced them with every antigay stereotype of the 19th century: Duplicitous, secretive, allying himself with neither gender ... obsessed with bending others to his will...." On the magazine's website, one posting laments, "I wish Richard's being gay wasn't so much on the forefront." Someone else labels him Richard "Vader." Give me a break. Rich knows it's a big game show, and he knows how to play it. I doubt he'll win, but it's great watching him try.

Now, back to something more serious. Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. And in all the yammering about whether Richard is a brilliant schemer or a "fat yutz" (as the New York Post put it), the fact that the show is a gargantuan mega hit, and that Rich is, in fact, this season's J.R. Ewing, is downright revolutionary. This is the show that everyone talks about around the water fountain. I'd wager that high school kids are hip to it as well. And it's star player (at least as of this writing) is the gay guy.

There's a cultural paradox here. The U.S. Army has been advertising on Survivor, although openly gay people like Rich are barred from the armed forces. Yet if popular culture is a bellwether, then we know that the entrenched forces of intransigence, be they the U.S. military or Boy Scouts, can't hold out against the tide.

Not that many years ago, after all, there were no gays and lesbians on TV. None. Zero. Nada. Then the ice began to break. But a gay relationship was enough to cause sponsors to flee ABCs "Thirtysomething" a decade or so back. It all seems so quaint. From Melrose Place to Dawson's Creek gays became part of the contemporary video landscape. The producers are even promising that next season you can expect Will to actually start dating men in earnest, without Grace tagging along. Now that's progress.

The following column ran after the show's conclusion.

That the openly "gay guy" was the star and ultimate victor of CBS's mega-popular Survivor - which everyone is calling the '00s equivalent of Dallas - is a real breakthrough that isn't being given enough attention beyond the entertainment pages. The fact is, it just would not have been allowed to happen, network TV-wise, even just a few years ago. Before MTV's Real World made gays on reality TV shows OK for hip cable channels, before Ellen stormed the broadcast networks' closet door, and before Will & Grace was a ratings hit, Richard Hatch, millionaire extraordinaire and self-described "fat naked fag" would never have been considered for a high-profile network TV contest. And if he nevertheless had found his way in, would a jury of former co-contestants - including a hard-edged female trucker and a retired Navy Seal - have voted to give him the loot?

So the times they are a'changin, once more. And having won - and already appeared as the first openly gay person to do one of those "Got Milk" liquid mustache ads - Rich is continuing to break barriers. Just over a decade ago, when Greg Louganis won Olympic gold, he was one of the few top medalists not to be asked to grace a Wheaties box. Even Martina managed only a few, tennis-specific product endorsement spots. Everyone knew why. But having done the milk ad (I mean, how wholesome can you get?) and reportedly in negotiations with leading mega-brands across the spectrum, it seems such Madison Avenue discrimination may be consigned to history's dustbin, where it always belonged.

Next up, now that he's actually won the Survivor $1 million jackpot and become a celebrity gay, we're going to have to decide what to do with Richard. To some he's a hot bear whose proved his mettle, and to others an "evil queen" (as he was mercilessly characterized in a Washington Post sneer-fest). In any case, he's now someone to reckon with, given the massive coverage of his victory by the mainstream media. "Way to Go!: Many Gay Men Inspired by Rich's Win," proclaimed the Philadelphia Daily News. "Gays Hail Guy Who Shattered the Myth," declared the New York Post. These and other stories point to the pride that gays - and gay men, in particular - felt about one of their own coming out on top.

Richard (with whom America is now on a first-name basis, like Cher) gets kudos for being out and proud. He was forthright about being gay on the island, as he forged the now notorious "alliance" with homophobic ex-Navy Seal Rudy and self-described "redneck" trucker Sue, along with conflicted river guide Kelly.

And he doesn't shy from topic Q. Rich is at ease giving interviews about how, growing up gay and overweight, "you could either go inside and never admit who you are or you come out and be comfortable with yourself." He says that while he's not dating anyone, "my goal is to be in a committed relationship in the future with the right man." He appears genuinely pleased by the support he's gotten from the gay community.

One guy-on-the-street interviewee told the Philadelphia Daily News, "People don't usually see depictions of gay people as intelligent and powerful people, but we are like that. We've had to overcome a lot of adversity in our lives. Rich winning Survivor is a very positive thing for our community."

On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal has compared Richard Hatch to Shakespeare's loathsome Richard III; the Style section of the Washington Post characterized him as a representative "evil queen" one day and a "scheming nudist" on another; while Entertainment Weekly compared him disapprovingly with J.R. Ewing. Even Michael Musto, a gay columnist at New York's liberal Village Voice, called Rich's victory "a mixed blessing."

So, what do we really know about Richard? We've learned that the 39-year-old corporate trainer from Newport, R.I. is either a savvy strategist or a wily manipulator; a clever bluffer or an outright liar; a champion or a back-stabber; a loving parent of an adopted, emotionally troubled young son or an abusively strict disciplinarian who forces the overweight boy to join him in pre-dawn jogs (to the consternation of local child welfare authorities, who briefly removed the boy from his home but then dismissed their charges); a guy who happens to be at ease with his body or a shameless exhibitionist. See, we know plenty, don't we?

And that's the problem. While those watching the finale at gay bar Survivor parties seem to adore his moxie, the "official" lesbigay activists aren't rushing to embrace him. And why should they, you ask? Well, think of the battle against the "don't ask, don't tell" (i.e., "lie and hide") military policy. Rich not only is an army veteran who went to West Point (albeit briefly), but he forged and led the Survivor alliance with Rudy, who started out dismissive of "queers" and ending up expressing affection for Rich "but not in a homosexual way." Which proves you don't have to like homosexuals to serve with them - and to share close quarters while doing so. Perhaps being gay isn't so detrimental to unit cohesion after all.

But Rich isn't being touted as a gay posterboy. There's the nudism, the dropped "abuse" charge and the widely noted "arrogance." Much of the latter, I'd argue, is simple media homophobia. A straight master strategist is a master strategist; a gay master strategist is an "evil queen."

Rich, however, may yet become another accidental activist. After all , there will be product endorsements, book deals, highly publicized speaking engagements and sitcom cameos. Rich is hot. He may be not be the lesbian and gay establishment's idea of a role model, but he's likely to be someone to contend with for at least a while longer than the next 15 seconds.

And that, in the end, is not a bad thing at all. As Rich told the New York Post, when he was on the island and after, "there was no pressure about my being gay." And he noted, "if I'm also the gay me on TV, well, that's awesome." And it is.

THE MANTRA OF "DIVERSITY" has become the primary buzzword of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Movement. Too often, however, this notion is limited to diversity based on gender, race and ethnicity, but not political viewpoints. That appears to be changing, as moderate-to- conservative gays and lesbians insist on a seat at the lesbigay table, and the gay left reacts with thinly veiled scorn.

Example one: Consider the recent criticism by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) aimed at the Log Cabin Republicans, the organization of gay GOPers. The Log Cabin folks have chosen to give their annual Spirit of Lincoln Award to Ward Connerly, a member of the California Board of Regents, which governs the University of California system. Connerly spearheaded efforts to grant domestic partner benefits to gay and lesbian couples in all state universities. He withstood intense public and private pressure from California governor Pete Wilson and GOP leaders, but never wavered, and with his support the partnership measure squeaked through last year.

So why is NGLTF in an uproar? Because Connerly was also a chief backer of the 1996 California Civil Rights Initiative, which ended race and gender-based preferences in state hiring and state university admissions. Connerly, an African American, believes passionately that racial preferences perpetuate the destructive notion that black Americans lack the ability to compete on individual merit. As he sees it, governments, including government-run universities, should not discriminate, whether it's favoring some students because of their race, or limiting spousal benefits to others based on their sexual orientation. In short, everyone is entitled to equal rights and equal justice.

To NGLTF, Connerly's opposition to race-based preferential treatment makes him "a civil rights foe" and "honoring Connerly's work divides our community by race and sexual orientation." But to Log Cabin, honoring Connerly is "a positive affirmation of our values and our vision for the movement." I give the nod to Log Cabin here. It's NGLTF that's insisting we all march in lock- step. I bet, after all, there are plenty of positions on non-gay issues taken by NGLTF that Log Cabin disagrees with (remember NGLTF's denunciation of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement?).

Example two: Say good-bye to the "Faith and Family" theme originally proposed for the year 2000 Millennial March on Washington (for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender rights). Faith and Family had been put forth by the march's major proponents -- the Human Rights Campaign and the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches. This was smart politics, meant to focus Middle America's attention on gay and lesbian partnerships, gay parenting, gay children, and so on, and to stand up to the religious right's drumbeat that gay love is both "a sin" and a threat to families.

So you can guess what happened - the theme's been jettisoned. Seems the group Sex Panic! didn't care for it (if you don't follow the minutiae of lesbigay politics, Sex Panic! is a small band of New York and San Francisco academics and activists who oppose "normalizing" homosexuality). In fact Michael Warner, one of SP's top ideologues, proclaimed that "faith and family is an extremely exclusionary theme. ... It is a massive repudiation of the lessons of decades of gay activism" -- which, in Warner's view, has presumably been about opposing faith and family (just like the religious right says).

A similar argument was made by Alisa Solomon, writing in the Village Voice. Solomon declares that the battle over the faith and family theme represents "the conflict between liberation and assimilation," and that "as the country tilts rightward, the assimilationist agenda had become dominant, some would say hegemonic." That's Marxist speak, in case you didn't know. She adds, "With the Millennial March, this wing of the movement is ready to make the essential assimilationist gesture: Stigmatizing queer sexuality." Solomon ends her piece by attacking the Wall Street Journal for running an op-ed column by Jonathan Rauch favoring gay marriage.

A final example: During New York City's Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade, 20 demonstrators made themselves the centerpiece of TV and newspaper coverage by chaining themselves across Fifth Avenue as Mayor Rudy Giuliani neared. Giuliani, who marched with the local Log Cabin club, is one of the most pro-gay Republicans in the country. He supports gay rights protections, appoints gays and lesbians to high government positions, and just recently stood up to New York's anti-gay Cardinal John O'Connor and pushed through New York's city council one of the nation's strongest domestic partnership measures. He even proclaimed "Out in Government Day" and credited gay men and lesbians with playing an important role in the city's turnaround.

But Giuliani also believes in individual responsibility and smaller government. As the New York Times puts it, "his message, a progressive form of Republicanism, combines putting welfare recipients to work with championing gay rights." So naturally, the lesbigay left decided to throw a public tantrum and focus media coverage on their chants of "Rudy, get out of our parade."

Sure, why not attack one of the few Republicans who has vocally condemned the religious right bullies who increasingly seem to dominate the nation GOP? After all, as the lesbigay left sees it, a pro-gay Republican is a greater threat to the socialist revolution than an anti-gay Republican.

Recently, Sex Panic's Eric Rofes, the "liberationist" author and activist, said, "We have to switch from this idea that there exists a generic gay community that shares a similar politics to a realization that we don't. And those of us who do share certain values and politics need to organize together." Rofes meant this to castigate "assimilationists," but in fact it's been the lesbigay left that has consistently tried to eliminate any deviation from the party line from the movement. So maybe gay political moderates and centrists should have their own Millennial March on Washington for faith and family, after all. And if Sex Panic! doesn't want to come, that's all right too.

At the recently concluded [1998] Gay Games in Amsterdam, a major brouhaha broke out over a requirement that athletes who define themselves as belonging to the sex different from the one to which they were born should provide proof of what the rules called "completed gender transition."

You'd think this would be a no-brainer. After all, the reason that men compete against men, and women against women, is because the male body is, well, different from the female body and same-sex competition ensures a level playing field, gender wise.

Gay Games organizers, in fact, explained that concerns over fairness and legal liability made it imperative that transgender athletes be put into the proper physical category so that men, with their greater body strength, "whether born or created," did not compete unfairly (or perhaps even dangerously) against women.

But even to talk about "proper categories" is to raise a red flag to those activists nourished on queer theory and its offshoot, the new transgenderism, which holds that all sexual categorization, and the dual-gender system in particular, is by necessity oppressive. In a New York Times story headlined "Event Founded to Fight Bias Is Accused of It," Riki Anne Wilchins, leader of the transgender advocacy group Gender PAC and author of Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, complained that the organizers were "now forcing another group of athletes to go back into the closet or face a barrage of stigmatizing obstacles." Sydney Levy of the San Francisco-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission asked, somewhat overheatedly, "Where is their sense of fairness and justice�where does discrimination stop?"

It should be reiterated here that no one was trying to ban the transgendered from the Gay Games, only to require that those transsexuals who are (still) physically men compete against men, and women against women, while allowing those who had surgically and hormonally changed gender to happily compete with their new same-sex comrades. Where is the "discrimination" in that? It's certainly more liberal than the Olympic Games, where chromosome testing (to ensure that only men-born-men and women-born-women face off) has been required since 1968.

The reason for the emphatic condemnations of the Gay Games policy rests in the transgender advocates' academically trendy belief that gender itself is a "social construct," not a natural given, and therefore an individual's "self- definition" of gender should be all that matters. In an August 4th letter to Time magazine, Dean LaBate, head of the (take a breath) Michael Callen-Audre Lorde Community Health Center Transgender Health & Education Clinic, takes exception to Time's referring to transgender people as "those whose deepest awareness of their sexuality doesn't correspond to the physical parts they were born with." Writes LaBate: "The term 'transgender' is political and does not refer to any specific anatomy or sexual practice... Especially as a health center, we would deem it dangerously irresponsible to state a single definition of transgender for our clientele or anyone else."

This rejection of gender as an intrinsic concept is given full voice in a book by John Stoltenberg titled The End of Manhood. Stoltenberg takes the view that "The male sex is an abstract fiction," and lauds "the radical feminist critique of gender." He elaborates that "Manhood is a personal and social hoax that exists only through interpersonal and social injustice." Finally, in a virtuoso denial of any natural, underlying distinctions between the sexes (remember, gender is "a political and ethical construction"), Stoltenberg minimizes the physiological differences between a penis and a clitoris, blaming sex researchers for using "arbitrary criteria [to] fudge human experience in order to make 'scientific' distinctions between 'female and male categories' of human sexuality."

Ding, dong, reality calling. The idea that a penis marks a body as "male" only because of social convention influencing self-identification is not one that most gay men (or lesbians) would embrace. Rather than being a viewpoint in support of homosexuality, it's more like an argument favoring an androgynous unisexuality that even most gender benders would find unreflective of their lives.

In a sense, Dean LaBate is right: Transgenderism, the opposition to sexual identities as specifically dual, should not be confused with transsexualism, the desire to undergo sexual reassignment surgery because body and psyche don't match. Transsexuals, arguably, ultimately affirm gender distinctions (or why have the surgery?), whereas being transgendered is about "transgressing gender." What the Gay Games controversy highlights is the way in which ideologically motivated activists who have proclaimed themselves the voice of the new, utopian transgender movement are attempting -- and often succeeding -- in using liberal guilt and Generation X political correctness to impose their will on the community formerly known as gay and lesbian.

AT THE RECENT MILLENNIUM MARCH ON WASHINGTON (MMOW), the one topic that took predominance over all others was, yet again, the relentless demand for more diversity - that is, an acceleration of the fight for racial justice both within the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered/movement and in society as a whole. Of course, anyone who has been around gay politics for more than a millisecond recognizes the pre-eminence of the diversity issue. But is the LGBT movement really as racist (or sexist, or "classist") as we're so often told?

First, a few observations about the march as microcosm. One of the main objections of MMOW critics was that the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign and other organizers failed to sufficiently seek input from people of color. This, despite the fact that the organizing board of the MMOW had a 50 percent people of color requirement (yes, some would say quota). Mere tokenism, huffed the critics.

HRC has strongly supported affirmative action - including race- and gender-based preferences - as part of its legislative agenda. It's even a criterion they use to rate the politicians they'll support. And while most of speakers at the MMOW rally seemed to have been selected as representatives of their respective racial and ethnic minorities, many voiced their solidarity with MMOW critics and used their speaking time to attack the white majority attendees for their lack of commitment to diversity (that is, their racism).

Keith Boykin, a former executive director of the National Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum, spoke for nearly 30 minutes, saying, "I speak because we must broaden the movement to see the intersection of race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, and ethnicity. ... I speak as a member of the family because there are problems in the family that cannot be healed by sweeping them under the sterilized, sanitized rug of homogenized homosexuality. ... I speak to resist the commercialization and commodification of the mainstream gay lifestyle that enriches the privileged few and impoverishes the masses with a bankrupt culture of uniformity."

These quotes come from gay press accounts. What I remember of Boykin's address was his bitter denunciation of Republicans, all Republicans -- so much for celebrating the diversity of our community.

Speaker after speaker focused on issues of race. "Many of our groups and organizations that claim to embrace diversity still remain far too white," said Jack Jackson, a gay member of the National Congress of American Indians. Said Martin Ornelas-Quintero, executive director of the National Latina/o Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Organization (LLEGO), "One way that I see that we still have a long way to go is the fact that there had to be meetings of the Millennium March board to decide whether to allocate me an extra three minutes so my message could be delivered in Spanish. That speaks volumes about how much further we have to go."

LLEGO had endorsed the event and taken part in the planning process, but still grumped that Latino leaders had not been sufficiently included in initial discussions about the march.

Still another speaker bemoaned that the attendees were 75 percent white although the speakers were 75 percent not, blaming the "lack of diversity" among marchers on insufficient "outreach." And on and on, repeating demands that the LGBT movement make a "true" commitment to diversity and place more emphasis on racial justice issues.

It must have surprised outside observers that the fight for gay marriage wasn't a central issue for speakers. Even more glaring, the issue of gays in the military was positively shunted aside and given only a few moments at the rally's end - much to the chagrin of gay veterans. Other issues were lost as well. Consider Leslie Powell Sadasivan, a mother whose gay son committed suicide after years of teasing and harassment at school. She had been scheduled to give a three-minute speech at 4:20. As the event droned on, she was given all of 15 seconds at 6:30. The text of her prepared remarks, which she released over the Internet, is searing. Too bad the professional activists couldn't make time for her. Too much gay racism (and sexism and classism) to denounce.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which boycotted the march, declares on its website that it is "imperative that we develop an economic and racial justice agenda for the GLBT movement." It goes on to state, "Many mainstream GLBT organizations have abdicated their responsibility to serve the needs and incorporate the aspirations and values of people of color and low-income people within our communities."

Let's get some perspective here. Sure, racism exists - in society, and in the gay community. But does anyone really think gays and lesbians are as racist as the activists seem to believe? Our movement seems fixated on racial guilt-mongering and identity politics run amuck, with the predictable result that most non-activist gays and lesbians just tune it out. That's too bad, because diversity is a positive good, and we do need to celebrate our differences.

A recent study conducted by the National Conference for Community and Justice found that 83 percent of Americans questioned said blacks were victims of discrimination. And 76 percent said that Hispanics (or, in movement-speak, Latina/os) faced some discrimination. Women and American Indians were next with 67 percent. But when the question was taken beyond racial and ethnic groups, gay Americans were perceived to be the victims of discrimination in greater numbers than blacks. This was a survey of perceptions, of course. But one has to wonder why gay activists are so focused on racism within the gay community while other minority-rights activists pay, at best, lip service to homophobia in their own communities.

The study concludes that one solution to helping America bridge its racial divide would be open, honest conversations across racial, political, ethnic, and gender lines. There's merit in that. But endless denunciation of gay white racism doesn't foster such conversations; it merely shuts them down.

FROM 1992 TO 1993, I WROTE A COLUMN called Media Man for Genre magazine. My modus operandi was to skim through TV, motion picture, and print representations of gay folks, often with the critical eye of a still-zealous activist (at the time, I chaired the media committee of the New York chapter of GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation). In a column from August 1992, which I titled "Prime-Time Trepidation," I wrote that "a look back at last season reveals precious few recurring gay roles among the hundreds of characters inhabiting the tube's dramas and sitcoms." I noted that when gays did make an appearance, it was typically a one-shot deal. For example, on CBS's then-popular -- and firmly liberal -- "Murphy Brown," an openly gay co-worker named Rick joined the staff of the series' fictional network news program for an episode about heterosexual angst (Rick mistakenly assumed that series regular Frank Fontana was gay).

But Rick only appeared on that one episode, never to be mentioned again, with his disappearance never explained or alluded to. This, I wrote, was television's lame idea of gay inclusion -- despite the fact that, in real life, the countless gay staffers on network shows were increasingly open about being gay. In fact, on "Murphy Brown," Rick's mistakenly assuming Frank was gay made perfect sense -- every time I watched the show I couldn't help thinking that the dynamics would have worked better if Frank had been gay.

Flash forward to 1999. This past July, a Los Angeles Times headline declared "Gay Roles Proliferate" in the new post-"Ellen" era. During this fall's television season, you can find 17 out and proud gay characters on the four major networks, and some 28 all told, the story reported. More good news: "Gay characters on TV and the story lines surrounding them are also richer and more complex...." Last season, a character on the popular teen drama "Dawson's Creek" came out of the closet, while on "Felicity" the title character contemplated marrying her gay boss to help him with his immigration problems. The Times commented that last year's most promising new comedy was NBC's "Will & Grace" which is about Will Truman, a gay man whose best buddy is a straight woman, and their sitcom friends.

The most "controversial" thing about "Will & Grace" to date, aside from complaints that Will needs to start seriously dating (which, in the new season, he's begun to do), wasn't gay-related at all. Hispanic media activists were in an uproar when they learned that, in an upcoming episode, Grace's sort-of friend, the wealthy and utterly obnoxious Karen, says to a Latina domestic, -- Hey, you're on the clock, tamale. Get to work." The protesters declared "tamale" an ethnic slur of the worst order and, after a brief tempest, the line was changed prior to airing, with "tamale" replaced by "honey."

Which just goes to show that in the realm of media sensitivities, activist critics will be activist critics, whether straight or gay. As for the latter, a press release from GLAAD bemoans that the 1999-2000 TV lineup was "barely realistic" in terms of gay portrayals. Altogether, GLAAD lists a total of 27 "lesbian, gay, or transgendered characters" on broadcast and cable networks for the season, but finds that "the majority of these representations are small, recurring roles." (Memo to GLAAD: "Recurring" is good!)

The release goes on to state that "with over 540 lead or supporting characters on prime time this fall, the gay community encompasses less than 2 percent of total portrayals." Perhaps most worrisome from GLAAD's perspective, these characters are (can you guess?) too white and too male. While NBC has 8 gay characters, only 3 are women. On Showtime's "Rude Awakening," Jackie may be a black lesbian, but GLAAD characterizes her as only a supporting role (an arguable point, given the ensemble cast), and hey, it's only cable. Flippancy aside, it's true that television's representation of people of color is generally pretty dismal, but GLAAD could at least acknowledge that, after Will Truman, probably the most visible out gay character on network TV is Carter Heywood, an African-American who is the Director of Minority Affairs on ABC's "Spin City."

UPN, shockingly, "features no lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered characters this fall." Shame, shame.

Some late night TV comedians -- including Bill Maher of ABC's aptly named "Politically Incorrect" and Craig Kilborn of CBS's "Late Late Show" -- have taken potshots at the activists' claim that 28 (or 27, depending on who's counting) gay characters aren't enough. GLAAD, with its typical humorlessness, is now offended that its media criticism is being criticized. And so it goes.

But for those of us who grew up when there were NO gay or lesbian or bisexual or whathaveyou characters on our 3 network TV stations, save for the occasional child molester (on one notorious episode of "Marcus Welby, M.D." of all things), and then suffered through the inevitable era of the painful coming out of the one-shot gay friend (say, who remembers "Family"?), and still later groaned when advertisers pulled their spots from "thirtysomething" after the show dared to feature a gay couple, it seems that having 28, or even 27, homosexuals on the tube is incredible, and 2 percent of prime time gone lavender is something akin to amazing. So while GLAAD and other media watchdogs undoubtedly have a point or two somewhere in their morass of dogmatic announcements and denouncements, there's truly reason to cheer, as we await -- and anticipate -- even better things to come.

Like all movements for social change, the gay and lesbian struggle for equality has spawned radical offshoots. These can sometimes supply energy and verve, as with the early incarnations of ACT UP. But they can also fall prey to a nihilistic impulse and a counterproductive collectivistic ideology.

A recent example of the latter is a group calling itself Sex Panic, which dominated the annual conclave of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force this November in San Diego. Sex Panic was formed earlier this year in New York City by a group of "queer theorists" - primarily from New York and San Francisco academic and activist circles - who oppose the trend of gay "assimilation," which they see as nullifying the sexual outlawry they believe is central to gay culture. They also argue that efforts to curb expressions of outlaw sexuality - from closing sex clubs to crackdowns on "public sex" - demand a militant response.

On the opening day of the NGLTF conference, Sex Panic held a "national summit" that created and endorsed a Declaration of Sexual Rights, which included "an end to the prohibition and stigmatization of public sex."

Lest anyone dismiss Sex Panic as just another insular grouping, the media they're receiving has been extensive. Anti-gay activists are beginning to use the group's rhetorical claim that lots of anonymous gay sex is the answer to "the tyranny of the normal" to buttress anti-gay arguments that homosexuals are out to subvert the moral order.

But it's not just conservatives who are making hay out of the quotability of Sex Panic. A November 11 story in the New York Times focused on the group. The newspaper of record told America, in the lead paragraph no less, how Sex Panic bemoans the backlash against "the sexual practices of homosexuals," such as "police crackdowns on sex in public restrooms" as well as moves against "sex clubs, bathhouses and weekend-long drug parties where men have intercourse with a dozen partners a night." The Times quoted Sex Panic founders who argue that "anonymous sex with multiple partners" and "having as much sex as possible, as publicly as possible" is the cornerstone of gay liberation. The Times also noted that "the debate occurs against a backdrop of evidence that homosexuals are returning to what they call 'bareback sex,' anal intercourse without condoms," a practice that's been defended by some Sex Panic activists.

If the anti-gay right and not the gay left were promoting this image of gay life, our media watchdogs would be up in arms.

So, what can we make of a group that is in open revolt over efforts to gain "mainstream acceptance"? In fact, there are aspects of Sex Panic's agenda that have merit. The harassment and forced closure of private sex clubs which do not otherwise disturb community peace, and police entrapment in gay cruising areas, are indeed abuses of state power.

But just as the infamous North American Man-Boy Love Association holds fast against any and all age of consent laws and thus mixes together decisions by sexually mature teenage boys to engage in consensual sex and the supposed "right" of men to seduce toddlers, so Sex Panic is guilty of a failure to distinguish between association in private clubs and the "right" to have sex in public. And this, I believe, derives from their overall left-wing ideological core. Since socialism posits that there should be no private sphere, only public, it's easy to see why Sex Panic's queer theorists - who are steeped in a neo-Marxist tradition - refuse to see why the private should be held distinct from the public.

Of course, it's not very clear just what Sex Panic means by "public sex." Sometimes they seem to mean sex capable of being seen, or outside your bedrooom. But there's a great difference between "public" group sex in a private club, and sex in a public park - and even there a contrast needs to be made between sex out in the open, and sex obscured from public view. But Sex Panic isn't keen on defining these distinctions.

To get a sense of their confusion, consider the points made by Sex Panic's Eric Rofes at the NGLTF conference. Rofes mingled together "police entrapments, closures of commercial sex establishments [and] encroachments on public sex areas." As the underlying force behind this, he described (in good Marxist fashion) "class-based battles over massive corporate land-grabs" and the "concentration of wealth creating vast economic disparities." So-called "progressives" still insist that capitalism - which values protecting private property and defending personal liberty - is the enemy, while empowering the state to confiscate and redistribute wealth and control economic decisions will somehow lead to "liberation."

As I've hinted, a better strategy is to recognize the clear distinction between the privately owned and public (that is, government owned) arenas. Since sex clubs are privately owned, the state has no business interferring in consensual activities that happen there, even if the patrons choose to foolishly engage in unsafe sex. Using this public/private distinction, a legitimate argument could be made in support of Sex Panic's demands for decriminalizing consensual sex practices and ending harassment of "sex workers." But these activists should be called on to clarify what, exactly, they mean by ending the prohibition and stigmatization of "public sex." That police should not set out to entrap gay men or beat the bushes in the hope of capturing men in the act, is one thing. But to argue that men should be able to have open sex in public restrooms, or in public parks in view of passersby, just won't fly - especially when many "tea room" and park crackdowns follow complaints to the police that public space is being misappropriated.

Maybe progressive theorists should change their tune and start defending the capitalist principles of private property rights and the freedom to engage in business without odious regulatory burdens so long as the rights of others aren't infringed upon. Maybe if gay men want to engage in outdoor sex, they should fund private sex parks. And maybe the idea of further extending the public, government-controlled sphere at the expense of the private and corporate should be seen as fundamentally at odds with the protection of individual rights.

The primitive idea about gay men, shared by many Christian fundamentalists and other lovers of freedom, is that gays really want to be girls, or girlish. And the primitive idea about men who want to cross over to be girls is that they're really just gay, or just crazy.

Got it?

Gays are faggots, right? And former men like me who have changed gender, well...they're just extreme faggots, or sex-mad nut cases. Northwestern University psychologist J. Michael Bailey, whose new book has created quite a stir, believes both of these ideas.

"Most gay men are feminine," Bailey declares in The Man Who Would Be Queen, "or at least they are feminine in certain ways." The professor's gaydar can spot those Certain Ways from across the street - on the basis, for example, of the pronunciation a man gives the sound s: closer to the front of the mouth, like a woman's. OK, so it turns out Bailey is talking about most gay men...in America...in the late 20th century...or maybe just the ones he was able to find by asking around in Chicago bars. Fortunately, there are other tell-tale signs of homosexuality, such as a deep interest in clothing and show tunes - or, when it comes right down to it, a sexual interest in other men.

And from a long city block away Bailey can spot a real gender crosser - those are the pretty ones, the ones whom the professor feels are sexually "attractive." They're just an extreme form of gay men. He can distinguish them from former men who are not attractive to him, a type that, contrary to what they will say (they are all liars), experience "sexual arousal at the idea of themselves as women."

It's really quite simple, Bailey says. Weird born men (he doesn't talk about born women in the book) are driven by sex. It's either sex with other men or sex with themselves. Sex, sex, sex. "Identity" has nothing to do with it. You can think of Bailey as an identity politician's worst nightmare.

Bailey is attacking the by-now accepted scientific view that whom you love and who you identify yourself to be are not the same issue. Au contraire, says the professor. It's not that formerly male gender crossers have an identity of womanhood, felt or desired, the way you feel or desire that you want to be a lawyer, say, or a resident of Florida. Nor do the more feminine-looking (because earlier changed), pretty ones have such an identity. No "identity" about it. Both are driven by sex, because that's what men are ultimately interested in. Bailey calls gender crossers "men" throughout his book. Born a man, too bad. Like certain second-wave feminists, such as Mary Daly or Germaine Greer, Bailey is an essentialist. As the guys down at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post have always known, men are men and women are women. Period.

No one is surprised that Bailey's ideas have been seized on by the religious right. John Derbyshire, a homophobe who contributes frequently to National Review, wrote a nice piece about the book, drawing the moral: "Male homosexuality, in particular, seems to possess some quality of being intrinsically subversive when let loose in long-established institutions, especially male dominated ones." (Where is Roy Cohn when we need him?) For God's sake, let's not let the queers loose.

If you hated the 1960s and its "homosexual agenda" (thank you, Justice Scalia), you are going to love Bailey's theory. As the guys down at the VFW hall say, queers are just sissy guys; and a guy who wants to become a woman is either just another homo or just another loony. Bailey, to be fair, doesn't share all the scientific and political ideas of his allies the veterans, the homophobes, and the religious right. He wouldn't attack gays and gender crossers with a lead pipe, and I guess he doesn't think God hates fags. Some of his best buddies, after all, are gay or transgendered. Bailey is a very feeling guy. In fact, he spends a lot of time hanging around the less reputable gay bars in Chicago's Boys' Town. Doing research.

Bailey gets his research ideas from an outfit in Toronto called the Clarke Institute. The institute is one dusty corner of the academic study of gender, and until Bailey came along it wasn't doing very well. In 1985 the head of its clinical sexology program, one Ray Blanchard, a rat psychologist by training, devised a theory of "autogynephilia," a word and notion that ever since then he has been trying to float. According to Blanchard and his few but loyal fans (among them Bailey), unpretty, late-changing, nonhomosexual gender crossers (me, for instance) have internalized a female love object (that is, they are still men wanting to have sex, sex, sex with women) and confused it with themselves. They aren't "really" women. Bailey summarizes it flatly in the book: "Autogynephilia can be considered a disorder."

The word disorder is meant to evoke the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the so-called DSM-IV. (The Roman numerals are for the edition, like the Super Bowl.) Bailey and his conservative friends hope to get "autogynephilia" into the next edition of the DSM (Roman numeral V), in order, I suppose, to prevent free people from doing what they harmlessly please. Great idea.

Until the 1973 edition of the DSM, homosexuality was such a "disorder," justifying electroshock therapy for queer kids in the 1950s and early '60s; it did not entirely recover from its illness until the 1986 edition. We let homosexuals get away with it after 1986, say the conservatives; lest the gender crossers get away with it, too...well, it's a little unclear what Bailey would recommend. He's been running away from his book in the months since its publication in April.

But there's no doubt what Bailey's conservative friends want, and will try to get through the book and its sponsorship by the National Academy of Sciences (on that last point hangs a tale; stay tuned). The conservatives want to return to the 1950s in a 2003 form, with summer camps to butch up the sissy boys and feminize the tomboys, with psychiatrists closing down gender reassignment programs (thus the sad case of Johns Hopkins), with gays back in the closet. Bailey is part of the conservative revolt against the "permissive" society - that is, a society in which you can do what you want if it doesn't harm someone else. Sexual conservatives are not libertarians.

At the time, 20 years ago, that the Clarke Institute up in Toronto really got going on Preventing Them, no one paid much attention, except the unfortunate Canadian gender-variant kids and adults who fell into its clutches and were subjected to "cures" by any "therapy" that came to mind. Bailey has some long, sweet passages warmly praising the institute's "therapists." He notes, without suggesting he would disagree, that many people, including his students (he asked them: it was part of his scientific study), declare "autogynephiles" inappropriate for gender change. Stop 'em.

The Clarke Institute cannot bear the thought of adult gender changers like me succeeding as just...women: Episcopalian church ladies and female college profs. So if you come to the institute old, they get you to believe you are an "autogynephile," and can't really hope to be anything else. The institute makes you go out full-time in drag with no hormones or facial surgery to make it possible to pass for an entire year. This would be suicidal in many American towns; I guess Canada is less violent. If you show up with nail polish or, worse, evidence of having started hormones on your own, you are punished, and your clock is turned back to zero, Bailey reports. The result is "men" (Bailey's term, remember) who can stand to run around as guys in gowns forever, thus assuring that Blanchard's theory will hold, at least for this "sample." Men are men; it's hopeless, guys; you will never be women.

The evidence for the institute's notion of "autogynephilia" backing up this psychological violence against its patients is pretty feeble. It's hard anyway to get a reasonable sample of gender crossers. Lynn Conway, a world-famous professor of electrical engineering and computer science emerita at the University of Michigan and member of the National Academy of Engineering, who transitioned in 1968 (she was fired by IBM for it but remade her life and became eminent in her field as a woman without revealing her past; it came out a few years ago) reckons on her Web site (lynnconway.com) that about one in every 400 born males will want to change gender. About one in 2,000 - 40,000 women - already have transitioned. Conway shows that the official numbers - one in 30,000, according to the DSM; one in 20,000, according to Bailey's book, although he's rapidly backing away from that estimate - imply absurdly low figures for completed gender crossers: in the U.S. about 800, which is a factor of 40 or so below the actual number. Where are they? You probably know one. Many just disappear into their target gender. Many others are fearful, not without reason, of being studied by "scientists" like Blanchard or Bailey.

Blanchard's hypothesis suffered the fate of science that can't be replicated, and that's based on narrow data tilted to make things come out right for the scientist proposing it. There's no shame in that. Most scientists are tendentious arguers for their pet theories, the check and balance being that other scientists resist. Almost everyone in the scientific study of sex and gender has checked and balanced and resisted the Clarke Institute's theory. It has proven to be wrong and has been laid aside by the mainstream of gender researchers. But contrary to the high school version of scientific method, old scientific theories never die; they just fade away.

Defending himself from the tsunami of criticism the book has generated, Bailey writes on his Web site (psych.nwu.edu/psych/people/faculty/bailey/controversy.htm): "At one time, gender patients with clear signs of autogynephilia were deemed inappropriate for [surgery]. They were denigrated as 'not true transsexuals.' These practices were harmful, hurtful, and wrong. Autogynephilic transsexuals are true transsexuals, suffering every bit as much from gender dysphoria [which means 'gender discomfort'; Real Scientists Do Greek] as homosexual transsexuals [the second of the two possible types in Bailey's universe] do. Autogynephilic transsexuals tend to be about as happy as homosexual male-to-female transsexuals with sex reassignment surgery. And both groups are much happier, on average, after transitioning."

Bailey doesn't say anything like this in the book. That omission is quite important for understanding why the book has frightened so many queers and delighted so many conservatives. Bailey does not say in the book that it's OK for people in a free society to express their gender identity - butch lesbian, say, or cowboy straight or womanly gender crosser. Instead he sidles up to the programs on the religious and psychiatric right that try (unsuccessfully, as he admits) to "cure" gender crossers and homosexuals.

Contrary to Bailey and his friends, the real science says that formerly heterosexual gender crossers are not sex-crazed lovers of self. Formerly homosexual gender crossers are not "just" homosexual men (with the emphasis on just and on sex: Bailey never refers to gay people as loving; love, it seems, is something he's a little weak on; in Bailey's mind it's all about sex, sex, sex). And regular, four-square, iron-pumping Ulysses-King David-Socrates-Rock Hudson-type homosexuals are not, as Bailey wants us to believe, "just" feminine guys. Real gender science, to repeat, says that who you are - being "feminine" or wanting to be - is not the same thing as whom you love. That's not too hard to understand. I love my dog. But that doesn't mean I want to become a dog.

Nonetheless, against most of the evidence and all the common sense, Bailey continues to maintain the rejected theory that one's identity and one's affectional preference line up the way the VFW guys think they should. Again, no special shame attaches. In the end, after all, much of science will turn out to be wrong, from Aristotle and Newton down to the single-strand hypothesis for DNA. If this weren't so, science would have advanced at lightning speed, and we'd already know everything.

Bailey writes charmingly and has the knack of suggesting that he's reporting from the front lines of Science, inserting a lot of personal "guesses" and "hunches" into the prose as though he were an actual Scientist with a lifetime of serious consideration of alternative hypotheses and tons of data behind him. You can imagine Bailey with a pipe and a lab coat advertising laxatives on TV. But in his case we have what the physicist Richard Feynman used to call "cargo-cult science": The book has the style of an informal talk with a Serious Scientist who is getting down and personal with you about his science. The stuff looks a little like science, the way the "airports" the highlanders of New Guinea constructed out of coconuts and palm fronds to get the American cargo planes to come back after the war looked a little like airports. It's even in the title of his book, that Science. But sadly, it's scientific nonsense.

Harsh words? Judge for yourself. Throughout the book, Bailey makes a big deal of his academic position. (His bosses at Northwestern seem to agree: they recently promoted this alleged violator of their own human-subjects procedures to chairman of the Psychology Department.) All the way through the book he calls his findings "science." His main evidence for the femininity of gay men (aside from that study of how queers say the two s sounds in science) is a Scientific study of personal ads in some gay newspapers. His other piece of "research" - and the only research this Researcher did on gender crossers - consisted of, first, long talks with one gender crosser in Chicago (named "Cher" in the book; I know her well; she's one of the people who have filed legal complaints against Bailey) and, second, short talks with a half dozen young Hispanic gender-crossing prostitutes whom Cher brought to Bailey under the impression he wanted to help them. It's a sample of convenience of, say, size seven. (One was Cher herself, the only case of alleged "autogynephilia" Bailey has studied; the rest were the other type, of the two types allowed.)

The sample was collected by what looks like a violation of federal law. Northwestern's Office for Human Research is investigating. No one was offered a human subjects form to sign, no one was told she was under study, and no one was told her story would appear in a book. The subjects were enticed by the offer of a document crucial for their gender change. (Gender surgeons require a letter from a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist saying that the patient is in her right mind, if not his right body.) Their lives were used in the book with brutal disregard for their feelings to titillate readers. Bailey even "studies" one of their weddings, to which he was invited as a guest.

That's the legal problem Bailey and his university now face, but the scientific problem they face is worse. The entire sample, representing the world's hundreds of thousands of gender crossers, just happens to live in Chicago. Six-sevenths of the sample are first-generation Hispanic Americans, most working as prostitutes and professional drag queens. (Bailey dropped from his sample women who were not in sex trades.) That's not a very good sample. If most of Bailey's data come from young Hispanic sex workers in Chicago, then he has not put his theory (namely, that gender crossing is about sex, sex, sex, because gender crossers are men, men, men) in much jeopardy.

Randi Ettner, a clinical psychologist who has written the best book on gender problems, Gender Loving Care, and who has seen hundreds of every conceivable kind, has an office in Evanston, a few blocks from Bailey's. Not interested, says Bailey in effect: Leave me alone with my two-category VFW theory and my half-dozen pretty girls off the streets of Boys' Town. He didn't want to talk with gender crossers like, say, me - exhibiting no "autogynephilia," working not as a prostitute but as a professor of economics (now, now: no jokes).

On his Web site (after the book was published) Bailey defends himself by saying that he wasn't really doing original research himself; he was relying on Blanchard. But you know what the scientific community thinks of Blanchard. So that doesn't quite work. And the book keeps emphasizing its Highly Scientific character. Bailey writes, for example, of "recruiting [in gay bars] research subjects for our study of drag queens and transsexuals" and about his own "recent research"; and so on throughout (emphasis added). Those who glory in doing Scientific Research had better have something to back it up. Bailey doesn't. At a July meeting in Bloomington, Indiana, of the International Academy of Sex Research, John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute and one of the most respected sexologists in the world, stood up after Bailey's abbreviated talk and said sternly, "Michael, I would caution you against calling this book 'science' because I have read it, and I can tell you it is not science." Then he sat down, to stunned silence: The sexologists had finally gotten up the courage to resist Bailey, Blanchard, and the Clarke Institute.

Northwestern University seems to have a problem of this sort every 10 years or so. A member of their engineering school mightily embarrassed the place by becoming famous as a Holocaust denier. Now Northwestern has a homophobic, transphobic chair of its psychology department who allegedly violates human-subject review procedures to get dirt on the communities he wants to repathologize. Go Wildcats.

The book has outraged gays, lipstick lesbians, butch dykes, heterosexual cross-dressers. And formerly heterosexual crossers of gender like me: normal boyhood, repressed desires at age 11 in the repressed 1950s, 30 years happily married, two grown children (not talking to me yet: thank you, Professor Bailey and your pathologizing friends), successful, regular guy who decided to change at age 53, did so, and is now even more happy. In particular the book has annoyed academic gender crossers, of whom there are a surprisingly large number.

To name four: Joan Roughgarden, a famous professor of population biology at Stanford, who transitioned five years ago at age 52; Barbara Nash, a famous professor of geology at the University of Utah, who transitioned in 2001 at age 57; that famous Lynn Conway; and yours truly. The academics don't like Bailey's use of the mantle of Science to push a conservative, unscientific agenda worthy of National Review, or of The National Enquirer. They are up in arms; or at least up on the Web (at lynnconway.com). In July, Conway and I filed a formal complaint with Northwestern's vice president of research regarding Bailey's research conduct. That too is posted on the Web.

So is this statement by Ben Barres, a female-to-male gender crosser and professor of neurobiology and developmental biology at Stanford (yeah: the more eminent the university, the more relaxed it is about gender change: Roughgarden and Barres are not the only two at Stanford; and guess which provost helped them? Hint: she's not provost any more, and her first name is Condoleezza): "Bailey truly doesn't get the gender identity dissonance that transsexuals experience - it really is hard for people to understand what they haven't experienced themselves. I have talked with many MtFs [male-to-female gender crossers] who have contacted me, and have listened to the feelings they have gone through their whole lives, and it is always an exact mirror of what I have experienced as an FtM. These MtFs have no reason to lie to me, as I have no power over what treatment they receive. For Bailey to say that most MtFs are primarily doing the gender change because of a fetish [that is, sex, sex, sex] rather than a true gender-identity issue just doesn't ring true to me, or to many other people that have worked in clinics taking care of many MtFs. "

Bailey revives the long-dead notion - as scientifically dead as the psychoanalysis that spawned it - that gender crossers are repressed homosexuals. The revival is dumb on two counts. First, it's scientifically unpersuasive. Psychoanalysis ends up calling nearly everyone a repressed homosexual. Second, it's politically irresponsible. You might as well revive the long-dead notion that Jews are genetically programmed for making money.

Bailey adopts throughout an air of smirking knowingness, especially about gays. On the first page of the book he announces that his gaydar is infallible, that he can Spot 'Em: "Knowing [a man's] occupation and observing him briefly and superficially [is] sufficient, together, for me to guess confidently" that he was a sissy as a boy, is now gay-identified, and may well soon get gender reassignment surgery. He predicts of Danny, an actual 8-year-old living in a northern suburb of Chicago, that when he's grown up "on any October Sundays, he is more likely to be singing show tunes somewhere than to be cheering for the Chicago Bears."

Hey, that's really great, Professor, that you are able to "scientifically predict" little Danny's future, and in such an amusing way!

But consider. What exactly would be the point of "knowing" that Danny will become gay? Bailey never says. True, if one could know that Child X would otherwise become an ax murderer, or Saddam Hussein, intervention might be in order. But gay? Or, for that matter, a gender crosser? What exactly is the problem here? Isn't the "disorder" located in the society that worries about such nonissues rather than in the free person exercising her rights?

It would be like "knowing" that some 8-year-old Janey will grow up to be optimistic, or "knowing" that some 8-year-old Johnny will grow up to be interested in sports. Wonderful: What great Science. You are s-o-o-o smart.

Now: Why would you want to know such a thing? To prevent little Janey from being unreasonably optimistic, through therapy? To throttle back little Johnny's excessive interest in sports, through operant conditioning? Now answer the question when you do not have an intervention that works, like for being gay or being a gender crosser.

Let's assume Bailey got everything right about his informants. (Cher tells me he got much of it wrong, but he wouldn't listen when she told him so.) Suppose even (again contrary to fact, but let's be easy) that the Clarke Institute's failed theory is correct, 100 percent.

So? Why shouldn't a free person be able to express her notions of gender? (Gender expression - your right as a woman to wear pants, say - is the next frontier of this evolving revolution: see www.gpac.org, the Web site for GenderPAC, devoted to freedom whatever your chromosomes or genitals.) And if changing one's genitals is considered a violation of God's law, why aren't nose jobs or cancer cures also abominations?

Ask the libertarian question: Why not? No fair just declaring without sensible argument that it's contrary to natural law. Or saying peevishly, "I can't understand such a desire." Neither can I understand why some people let themselves pay first-year depreciation on automobiles or why other people write books in which they exploit for gain little boys interested in dolls and Hispanic women off the street desperate for a letter to allow gender surgery. But I'm not proposing to put these two disorders into the next DSM to prevent people from engaging in such behavior.

Bailey paints himself in the book and defends himself on his Web site as a helper of gender-varying people. Just what the doctor ordered. Get them help, for Lord's sake, through compulsory psychiatry backed up by the new DSM-V. It's like the old joke about the three most unbelievable sentences: "The check is in the mail"; "Of course I'll respect you in the morning"; and "I'm Mike Bailey, a follower of the Clarke Institute, and I'm here to help you."