IGF CultureWatch

First appeared June 10, 1999, in the Windy City Times.

THIS YEAR IS BEING billed as the 30th anniversary of "Stonewall Riots" of June, 1969 in New York's Greenwich Village.

Hallowed in story and song, "Stonewall," as it is now called, was a weekend-long series of skirmishes between gays and the police that followed a bar raid, often taken to mark the beginning of the modern gay movement.

To be sure, a great deal of gay self-disclosure, activism and institutional development followed rapidly after "Stonewall."

But focusing on "Stonewall" as some sort of beginning or defining moment for the gay movement is deeply misleading. It blocks recognition of the important fact that there was a rapidly growing gay community consciousness in the 1960s, and that there was already a gay movement that not only grew rapidly but accelerated as the 1960s progressed.

Stonewall, we could say, was as much an effect as a cause.

As New York gay historian Jim Levin pointed out in a 1983 monograph on the gay movement, "Stonewall was the trigger for the gun, but the gun was so well loaded that any number of other events might well have fired it."

And veteran activist Frank Kameny comments to me, "I've always believed that our public demonstrations in 1965 and the subsequent ones in 1966, and at Independence Hall thereafter, created the mindset which made the 1969 public demonstration at Stonewall possible, and without which such a public demonstration would have been so unthinkable that it would not have occurred."

Although speculating about alternative history is risky, it also seems safe to say that even if no such catalyzing event as "Stonewall" had happened at all, gay progress would have continued from the 1960s on into the 1970s at an ever-increasing pace. It would simply have happened differently.

Let me give a generous dozen examples of pre-Stonewall gay activism and growth. Notice how the pace accelerates as the decade progresses.

• San Francisco entertainer Jose Sarria, the first openly gay man to run for public office, received 6,000 votes in the 1961 race for city supervisor, the same office Harvey Milk won 16 years later.
• Illinois in 1961 was the first state to decriminalize sodomy. Connecticut followed suit at the end of the decade.
• The first gay business association, the Tavern Guild, was formed in 1962 by gay bars in San Francisco. Within five years, gay bars in other cities formed similar groups.
• A gay magazine distributed in San Francisco's gay bars had a circulation of 7,000 by 1962.
• Frank Kameny organized the first ever picket demonstration for gay rights in America in April 1965 at the White House. Six more pickets followed that year in Washington or Philadelphia, including a second White House picket in October that drew 65 people.
• A national gay association, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, began holding meetings and coordinating local activist efforts in 1966.
• Gays in San Francisco opened a community center in 1966. It was supported, of course, by a thrift shop.
• A Los Angeles rally to protest gay bar raids in which patrons were injured drew several hundred gays early in 1967.
• Craig Rodwell opened the first gay bookstore, Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, in New York in 1967.
• The first campus gay organization, the Student Homophile League, was founded at Columbia University by Robert Martin in 1967. It was quickly followed by gay groups at Cornell and two or three other schools.
• Dick Michaels and Bill Rand founded the biweekly national gay newspaper The Advocate in 1968.
• The Rev. Troy Perry founded the Metropolitan Community Church in 1968.
• There were 15 gay organizations in the United States in 1966. By the spring of 1969, just before Stonewall, there were nearly 50.

I offer this dozen or so examples to make clear that during the 1960s there was a small but rapidly growing gay movement that helped ensure the continued growth of activism in the 1970s even had Stonewall not happened.

But to a certain extent people live by symbols, find meaning and structure for their lives in symbols, and Stonewall has become our symbol. Think of a symbol as a kind of mental shorthand -- a conceptual device we use to coalesce a large number of facts, beliefs and feelings into a single manageable package which comes to have some sort of meaning for us, apart from and greater than its constitutive elements.

Stonewall (the event) was an odd combination of guerrilla warfare, camp street theater, and New Age "happening." Noting the growth of avant-garde and experimental theater in New York during the 1960s, historian Wayne Dynes described Stonewall as "simply the most spectacular manifestation of the new funky theater, produced in improvisational style with unpaid actors, and the police playing themselves."

"Stonewall" (the symbol), however, now has come to stand for -- "to mean" -- the aggressive expression of gay moral legitimacy, gay self-determination, and gay assertiveness in the face of institutional (especially governmental) hostility. As a symbol it includes all the earlier activist claims and adds a kind of intransigent and militant posture, "Not with my life, you don't."

After the hostile response to the bar raid, in which a gay crowd kept police trapped inside the bar until reinforcements arrived, the slogans chalked graffiti-like on the sides of buildings included "Gay Power." No matter how imitative of "Black Power" that phrase may have been, for most gays it was a new and startling thought even as braggadocio.

Walking through the Greenwich Village neighborhood after the second night of the disruptions, gay poet and counter-culture icon Allen Ginsberg commented to a reporter, "You know, the guys there were so beautiful. They've lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago."

But "Stonewall" was not automatically a symbol. People chose to make it one because they wanted a symbol. Clearly many people were close enough to being ready to agitate openly for gay equality that it took only the small added impetus of Stonewall to make them take that further step.

It seems almost as if the gay movement was building up so it could take advantage of some event that could sell the gay liberation message of gay equality, gay openness, gay assertiveness to larger numbers of people in an imaginative way.

The Stonewall Inn was an unlicensed bar. It was seedy. The glasses were dirty. The drinks were weak. It charged exorbitant prices.

Seldom has such a sow's ear been made into such a silk purse.

First appeared June 3, 1999, in the Windy City Times.

Along about this time o' year,
My po'r ol' heart fills up with fear.
Examinations 'r comin' roun'-
Like to drive a fella right to the groun'.
- From "The Talking Examination Blues" (circa 1955)

ALONG ABOUT THIS TIME OF YEAR my own poor old heart fills up with fear mainly because editors start making aggressive noises about Stonewall Anniversaries and Gay Pride columns.

Gay Pride is coming up again," they chirp. "You know what that means."

It means I have to think of something new to say about gay pride. This year is even worse.

"And it's the 30th anniversary of Stonewall," they inform me, as if I could escape this fact. "Isn't that exciting?" they burble. But that's ancient history, for goodness sake. In 1969 most young gays weren't even born. Especially most gays under thirty. We might as well celebrate the Battle of Tours, whenever that was.

What is there to say about gay pride? Worse yet, what is there new to say about gay pride? Not much. Nevertheless, yielding to editorial persuasion, and the fact that I would like to keep my job, I have come up with the definitive schema on gay pride. Feel free to take notes.

Thesis one: Being gay is wonderful and we all should feel proud that we are gay.

Put this way the idea of gay pride seems pretty silly. You can really only feel proud about the things you accomplish. But being gay is not something you accomplish; it is something you discover about yourself. You do not choose to be gay any more than you choose your race or height or your eye color.

This is a definitive argument against the whole notion of gay pride. There is no possible rebuttal. Which accounts for the fact that no one bothers to rebut it. But oddly, it makes almost no impression on anyone at all.

People go right ahead talking about gay pride, saying they feel gay pride, claiming they are glad to be gay, and all the rest. So we must try to make sense of what seems on the surface to be nonsensical. This leads to:

Thesis two: True, you don't choose to be gay, but you can choose to come out and you can take pride in coming out, in having the courage to overcome social stigma and affirm your own character.

This thesis at least has the advantage of being defensible. But coming out is getting easier and easier, at least in most places, so coming out is not such a big deal any more. Fifteen year old tots are coming out these days, so doing it in your 20s or 30s does not seem like much of an achievement, much less a source of pride.

Then too, I have known people who are out of the closet but who conduct their lives badly. They may be rude and insensitive. They may act foolishly and even destructively. They can cause pain to others and themselves. Maybe they thought that after they came out, they had no further obligations--as if that were all. Are they examples of gay pride? Not that I would want to introduce to anyone. Sometimes I wish they would just go back into the closet. (I have a list.) These plain facts lead us to:

Thesis three: "Being gay" is, in an important sense, more than just being openly homosexual. It seems to require that you develop the strength of character, the emotional stability, and social equipoise to live openly and function well in a primarily heterosexual society that still offers many opportunities for missteps and miscalculations.

Flourishing in this milieu necessarily involves rolling with some punches, evading others, blocking some karate chops, and occasionally using jujitsu to throw an adversary off-balance. (These are metaphors, please note.) It can also include firm resistance and a calm assertion of one's own dignity. The trick is to understand these techniques and to know which is appropriate under what circumstances. Some gays, alas, do not manage their lives well under these intermittently adverse circumstances. if you can, that is something to take pride in.

Still, the Gay Pride parades and events as we see them today do not seem so individualistic as all this. They do not seem to be involve a collection of people expressing pride about achieving social adeptness. So what is going on? This leads us to:

Thesis four: A gay person might say he was proud of our community and the institutions that we have created over the last thirty or forty years. We created social service, health care institutions and advocacy groups. We created clubs, sports leagues and business groups. We increased our political presence in both parties and in large corporations. Of all these accomplishments we can be proud.

But there is a problem here. The "we" that did the work to create "our" community is some of us "we" but not others of us "we." Some of us "we" (and you know who you are) did absolutely nothing to help. In order to be justifiable, pride in anything should probably be proportional to the contribution a person made to it. Just being around while other people did some work does not seem like much of an achievement.

A person could reply, maybe somewhat testily, "Well, those things show what gays can achieve." So they do. And that is excellent. And people who created those things deserve the credit and deserve to feel a sense of pride. But what about the others? It seems a little odd to say you are proud of someone else's hard work. That sort of collective thinking ultimately seems parasitic; it seems strange to be proud of being a parasite. So we wind up at our final rationale for gay pride:

Thesis five: "gay pride" may lack a firm basis in careful thinking, but it is an entirely understandable and reasonable reaction to past persecution and stigmatization. It represents a kind of over-compensation. Proclaiming "Gay Pride" is something like an archer who aims above the target in order to hit the target. We tell people to be proud in order to overcome the negative messages the culture sends.

Well and good, but since our goal is a society in which gay is viewed as no different from heterosexual, "gay pride" is at best a temporary response in our current transitional era. As acceptance of gays grows over time, it will become less significant, and will finally be irrelevant.

If this is true, then "Gay Pride" is mainly a form of PR propaganda aimed both at the large number of gays who have yet to fully accept themselves, and at those heterosexuals who still find themselves able to feel a smug, disdainful superiority to gays.

This rationale for "Gay Pride" has the most merit, chiefly because it is the most honest.

See you at the parade.

First appeared in early May 1999 in Bay Windows (Boston) and other gay newspapers.

ANTI-GAY ACTIVISTS have had great success milking the claim that laws prohibiting discrimination against gay people serve to create "special rights." In fact, lately they've made the same charge about granting us the right to marry, to serve in the military, and to adopt children. They even go so far as to claim that repealing the so-called sodomy laws that turn gay lovers into criminals is tantamount to granting us those self-same "special rights."

It seems that, in the lexicon of the bigots, mere equality under the law for lesbians and gays becomes equivalent to granting us an unfair and undeserved privilege (i.e., who do those perverts think they are, expecting to be treated the same as you and me?). Or perhaps it's just that they know if they repeat the "special rights" charge ad nauseam, then like any big lie it will eventually come to be perceived as true.

In fairness, there is a distinction that ought to be recognized between ensuring the government's non-discrimination against gays and lesbians (that is, prohibiting the state from treating sexual orientation as a reason to diminish the legal rights of citizenship), and limiting discrimination in the private sector. Some impressive gay intellects, including writer Andrew Sullivan, believe that the gay/lesbian political movement has put far too much emphasis on passing laws that limit the discretion of private employers and landlords to choose whom they hire or rent to, and not enough on prohibiting discrimination by the state itself. Gay libertarians argue that allowing the government to intrude into private decisions for any reason only serves to diminish everyone's liberty and freedom to associate with whomever they choose, whereas discrimination by the state against a class of citizens is never acceptable, since the government represents all of us, and all of us are taxed to support it. That's a debate that probably should be given more attention, but it's not my focus here.

Instead, I think it's worth noting the specious logic of those conservatives who support the principle that it's okay to prohibit private-sector discrimination against some groups, including those defined by race, nationality, or religious belief, but that extending this protection on the basis of sexual orientation is to uniquely afford us, again, "special rights." The argument usually goes that the reason sexual orientation is different is because it's a "lifestyle choice." As the anti-gay Family Research Council put it in a recent policy statement, "Unlike race, homosexuality is not a manifest characteristic, but a behavior."

Hmmm. Leaving aside the body of evidence indicating, at the very least, some genetic predisposition for being gay, there's a clear logical flaw in this right-wing rhetoric. For while race and nationality are indeed a matter of birth, one's religion needn't be.

David Boaz, author of the book "Libertarianism: A Primer" and a contributor to the Independent Gay Forum, has highlighted the issue of consistency about different protected classes. "Conservatives say gays shouldn't be protected, but blacks should, because being gay is something you choose, unlike your race," he writes. "But their reasoning is doubly wrong in that case: Most of us believe you DON'T choose your sexual orientation; but you DO choose your religion, which category conservatives want to protect." In fact, religious rightists, especially those who are "born again," stress that their brand of faith is something freely chosen. And, of course, many choose to adopt a faith different from their upbringing, while others abandon faith entirely.

Some conservative African-Americans, most notably General Colin Powell, claim that gays don't deserve protections because you can hide your sexual orientation, but not your race. While that's true enough, you can also hide your religious beliefs, yet no "anti gay rights" conservative to date has been willing to abandon hypocrisy and say that civil rights protections also should not extend to religion.

In fact, a growing number of civil rights cases before the federal courts focus on claims of workplace discrimination against fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews. Many of these involve the plaintiffs' claim that requiring them to work on certain religious holidays amounts to discrimination, even though all employees are expected to work on those days (talk about demanding special rights!).

Leaving aside the die-hard "born agains," some who believe that religious belief should be a protected category, but that sexual orientation shouldn't, might argue that you don't really "choose" religious belief, it chooses you. That is, you either are drawn to the doctrines and ritual expressions of a particular sect, or you aren't. But then again, even if you believe that being gay is also a choice (as, in fact, some gay and lesbian radicals proclaim), then how much "choice" do we really have about what we choose? Like religious belief, it either strikes one as right on a deep, subjective level, or it doesn't.

The point of all this is to expose just how idiotic the argument that "gay rights" are somehow of a "special" nature, at least when juxtaposed to civil rights protections based on religion.

Looking back on it, I'm amazed that lesbian and gay activists have spent so much energy trying to convince people that sexual orientation is akin to race, when the religious belief analogy seems so much easier to justify. If the right wing is against "lifestyle choices" receiving anti-discrimination protection, then they should be forced to be consistent, and to surrender the "special rights" granted on the basis of religion.

After all, fair is fair.

WHAT DO GAY CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE IN? Can one support equality for gays and at the same time remain faithful to conservatism? Or does embracing one mean abandoning the other?

What follows is an incomplete and simplified attempt to respond to these questions. Religious issues, for example, are omitted, though for many people they are an important part of conservative philosophy. The conservatism described is my own, but it leans much on classic conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke, T.S. Eliot, and Russell Kirk.

First and foremost, conservatism respects tradition and history. It prefers stability to change, continuity to experiment, the tried to the untried. Conservatives recognize the occasional need for reform, of course, for that is one means of a society's preservation. But we approach change with pessimism, caution, and a great deal of humility.

We see society more as a tree than as a machine. It is organic, developing slowly over centuries. The generation that thinks it can wholly remake society according to some preconceived design soon adorns the Hotel de Ville with human heads on pikes, or dots the land with gulags, or encircles the concentration camp with barbed wire.

How does a commitment to tradition square with a belief in gay equality? America's political tradition is centered on the protection of individual liberty and autonomy. This country, at its best, has welcomed those who do not conform to others' judgments about what they should be. The political and religious misfits, the poor, the unwelcome, came here because America promised they would be judged on their own merits.

Yet despite the nation's principled stand on liberty and equality, it also has a legacy of homophobia, just as it once enshrined racism and sexism in its laws. Gay conservatives are dissatisfied with present practices regarding homosexuals - on everything from marriage to the military - precisely because, laid beside the nation's higher tradition of respect for individuality, these anti-gay practices are found wanting.

When principle and higher traditions collide with particular practices, the latter must give way. In his "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" and other writings and speeches, Martin Luther King, Jr. appealed not to fashionable third-world nostrums, but to distinctly American notions concerning liberty and equality under law. His rhetoric drew from Jefferson and Lincoln, not Marx or Castro. We see America as he saw it: a great nation that has fallen short of its own noble promise.

Second, conservatives cultivate a profound distrust of government, both because of the encroachments it makes on liberty and because of the unintended mischief it can do. Limited government is our constitutional design. The state's first and primary obligation is to preserve order and protect the physical security and property of the citizenry. Beyond these tasks, conservatives are wary of government involvement.

Government has been no friend of gays, intruding on gay lives with its sodomy laws and so much more. Among other things, it reinforces prejudice through its refusal to recognize gay relationships. It has often done a poor job of protecting our physical security from gay-bashers, either because it did not care or because it implicitly endorsed the beatings.

Crime, as a threat to physical security and property, must be unsentimentally suppressed. According to a recent study, gays live disproportionately in large cities. That's also where crime is most prevalent. Crime is therefore of particular concern to gays. Put more police in the streets, more criminals in jail for a longer time, make punishment surer and swifter, and - gasp - crime goes down.

Third, property rights are at the core of the conservative's vision of a just society. Private property provides a haven into which the citizen can retreat from the coercive and expropriative hand of government, as well as from the irrational prejudices and actions of other citizens. Property rights are therefore both a bulwark against despotism and a haven of privacy.

Gays are well served by a strong system of property rights. Camp Sister Spirit, a privately owned gay women's retreat in Ovett, Miss., was threatened a few years ago by the breakdown of respect for property rights and the reluctance of local authorities to preserve those rights in the face of anti-gay prejudice. The retreat's owners would have fared much better much sooner if the citizens of Ovett had known their property laws from their burning crosses.

Finally, gay conservatives do not recoil from "values" or morality, as the gay left so often seems to do. The learned wisdom of human experience as reflected by widely held moral principles is not lightly to be discarded. Love, courage, thrift, honesty, respect for life, generosity, duty, and many other virtues our parents taught us are powerful instruments for good.

But we gay conservatives have set ourselves on a course to strike intolerance of gays from any respectable enumeration of values worth preserving. Like other generations before us, we have discovered how far removed hatred is from the core of our heritage.

So there it is: respect for the nation's highest traditions, distrust of government encroachments and power, high regard for private property, and adherence to the moral values that make a society good as well as wealthy. All of these broad principles of conservatism are entirely consistent with - and, indeed, should result in - an unapologetic commitment to full civil rights for gay Americans.

IN THE WAKE of the brutal October 1998 murder-robbery of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, the news media, liberal gay rights groups, politicians, and others engaged in a national outcry for swift enactment of hate crime legislation. A hate crime law would, as Joan M. Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, put it, "protect Wyoming gays from the kind of horrors which Matthew Shepard and his family have had to endure." The Wyoming legislature responded in February by voting on several hate crime bills - including one that even included protection of particular occupations, such as ranching, mining, and logging, from "ecoterrorists." A House version of the bill was defeated in committee with a 30-30 tie. Two Senate versions were defeated in committee by wider margins.

National proponents of hate crime laws were quick to pass judgment: Wyoming, rather than being "The Equality State" - Wyoming's official motto, adopted after it became the first state in the nation to grant women the right to vote - was really the "Hate State." Even as Shepard's grieving parents reaffirmed on NBC's Dateline and in Vanity Fair that they did not want their son's death used in a campaign for hate crime legislation or any other political cause, groups such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) inferred that the legislature had not merely declined to fight intolerance but itself embodied intolerance for failing to pass the bill. "If not now, when?" demanded NGLTF Executive Director Kerry Lobel. "We are extremely disappointed that Wyoming refused to take real leadership on this issue."

Such reactions fit into the "hate crime news formula" that has become increasingly popular since the early 1980s with the media, advocacy groups, academics, and liberal politicians - all of whom have vested interests in fomenting a sense of continuous social crisis. A product of the identity politics mind-set that has come to dominate American society over the past two decades, the hate crime news formula uses widely recognizable and understood images - burning crosses and churches, neo-Nazi goosesteppers, and, most recently, the burned corpse of Billy Jack Gaither in Coosa County, Alabama; James Byrd, chained and dragged behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas; and Shepard's silhouetted body lashed to a Laramie, Wyoming, buck fence - to suggest that the United States is a seething cauldron of hate directed at members of unpopular groups. Although demonstrably false (even the statistics gathered by the advocates of hate crime legislation demonstrate there is thankfully no "epidemic" of such heinous acts), the formula remains popular, partly because it provides the media with a ready-made angle by elevating "ordinary" crimes to matters of urgent, national concern involving sexism, racism, and homophobia. Indeed, the formula provides big ratings and material benefits both to advocates and to their academic allies. And it provides politicians with the opportunity to engage in cost-free, camera-friendly symbolic activity.

With the Shepard case, the Wild West setting of the murder augmented the standard media narrative: Of course, the coverage implied, Wyoming's macho, frontier culture is closed-minded, bigoted, and homophobic - what else could it be? As an NBC reporter put it while standing outside a Laramie drinking joint, "At Wild Willie's Cowboy Bar today, patrons said hate is easy to find here."

Never mind that Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right not only to vote but to own property and to hold office; that it elected the nation's first female governor in 1924; that it ratified the Equal Rights Amendment in 1973; that it was at the forefront of a trend in the 1970s to repeal sodomy laws; and that in the 1990s, more than 70 percent of its voters rejected anti-abortion initiatives. For the media, Wyoming was a natural setting for such a bestial crime. As The New York Times editorial page intoned the day following Shepard's death: "Laramie, the home seat of [Wyoming's] university, is a small town with a masculine culture... [Shepard] died in a coma yesterday, in a state without a hate-crimes law."

Local Outrage

As a Wyoming native (now living in Texas) and a gay man, I find such geographical stereotyping to be more than simply inaccurate and irresponsible. The coverage of the Shepard case delivers a damning lesson about the gross inability of the hate crime news formula to explain complex social situations - and it demonstrates that when the media and advocacy groups are faced with the choice of responding to reality or simply sticking with their scripts, they almost invariably choose the latter. Indeed, had they bothered to get beyond superficial pronouncements, they might have crafted a very different - and much more accurate - tale, one that reflected the outrage and sadness of area residents and put their rejection of hate crime legislation in its proper context. Far from symbolizing the last frontier of intolerance, Wyoming instead has said no to identity politics and the divisive, separatist group consciousness that hate crime legislation both reflects and perpetuates. While it is surely misguided to hope that anything decent will come from a tragic and horrible death, drawing such a lesson might at least salvage some small scrap of good from Shepard's murder.

In December, I traveled to Laramie to cover the arraignment of Matthew Shepard's accused killers for The Triangle, a Texas-based gay newspaper. I was particularly curious to learn how the horrible crime and subsequent media frenzy affected Wyoming residents, including former classmates and lifelong friends The lonely epicenter of the nation's Empty Quarter, Wyoming is seldom, if ever, on the national media's radar screen. There are exceptions - for example, when the president or another celebrity visits Jackson Hole or when Yellowstone National Park threatens to burn - but no one I talked to in Laramie could recall any event that generated anything close to the coverage of Shepard's homicide. As a local physician wrote in a column for a medical journal, "It was strange and disorienting for those of us in Laramie to be the focus of intense national publicity. For a while, we eclipsed the president and Kosovo as the top news story. News trucks were rolling down the streets, looking for people to interview. A friend from New York called to say that my wife was on national television; a crew had recorded the church service where she had sung. Tom Brokaw in the [hospital] emergency department, reporters in Burger King."

By the time I arrived, members of the national "media circus," as bemused and annoyed locals were calling it, had only recently folded up their tents and returned to their bicoastal media centers. Friends in Laramie expressed nothing but outrage over the Shepard murder. They said everyone in the local community and the whole state had been devastated by the killing. They were also outraged by other, equally savage murders that had shocked the community in the past year. In November 1997, the nude body of a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found in the foothills east of Laramie with 17 stab wounds; her 38-year-old lover, apparently angered by her refusal to seek an abortion, had left her to bleed to death. In the summer, an 8-year-old Laramie girl, visiting family in northern Wyoming, was abducted, raped, and murdered, her body later found in a garbage dump. A man with a history of heterosexual pedophilia was arrested and pleaded guilty. Though widely publicized within the state, these crimes garnered little to no coverage elsewhere, leaving my friends puzzled and disturbed. Why was the Shepard murder alone given such widespread, sensational coverage? Was it only because he was gay and, as a result, fit into a larger news narrative?

Those concerns were echoed by everyone I talked with on the subject, from the staff of the Laramie Daily Boomerang to Albany County law enforcement officials, from University of Wyoming faculty and students to waiters and other service workers. The Boomerang allotted considerable space to long letters to the editor expressing various degrees of disappointment and outrage at the national coverage of the Shepard murder. Many were bothered by the implication that the murder of a gay man was more horrific than other recent local homicides.

"Please," one representative letter from a woman in Douglas began, "the murder or death of anyone is tragic, but listening to all the media coverage of Matthew and then [to] have [other local murders] go virtually unmentioned, I felt a taste of bitterness and anger over this whole situation. Now I am hearing all the rhetoric for legislation to make penalties for hate crimes [harsher] than others are. I have difficulty understanding this mentality. Aren't all murders born of hate?" The Boomerang also ran stories on local critiques of national news coverage, including a public forum called "Hostility Bites" sponsored by the University of Wyoming Housing and Residential Life Office 11 days after Shepard's death.

Four major points emerged from the community-wide debate and discussion: The media were intrusive; they projected an unsubstantiated and unfair portrait of Wyoming as a "hate state"; they relentlessly linked Shepard's murder to the fact that Wyoming had no hate crime law; and they overtly promoted hate crime legislation as a necessary response to the death.

The "Hate State" Story

The national media's "hate state" narrative began in earnest three days after the attack on Shepard and two days before his death, with an October 10 dispatch by the Associated Press' E.M. Smith: "Alicia Alexander thinks she knows why a gay classmate at the University of Wyoming who begged for his life was savagely beaten and left tied to a wooden ranch fence to die in the cold. 'That has to do with the fact that this is a cowboy place. People aren't exposed to it [homosexuality]. They're too close-minded.'"

That same day, the NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw ran its segment outside Wild Willie's Cowboy Bar complete with a patron saying, "Gays get what they deserve".

According to Tiffany Edwards, the Boomerang reporter who wrote a detailed report of local residents' reactions to national media coverage of the Shepard homicide, NBC's Roger O'Neil interviewed a variety of bar employees and patrons but selected only the "negative" comments. Such pointed use of interviews and quotes by the television networks was a common complaint at the "Hostility Bites" forum. Matt Galloway, a student who spoke at the forum, had been interviewed by ABC's 20/20 because he had attended high school with Shepard and was a bartender at The Fireside Lounge when Shepard met his alleged murderers there. "The national media," Galloway explained, "will get 100 interviews and, if they get one like 'gays get what they deserve', they will use it."

The "gays get what they deserve" quote caused a local uproar, thoroughly covered by reporter Edwards and discussed in letters to the editor. Witnesses to the NBC interview in Wild Willies dispute its interpretation of the bar patron's somewhat inarticulate and rambling comments. "Honestly," one witness, a bar employee, said, "the customer, although not eloquently stated, was taken out of context. His opinion was that in any state, any town...open gayness is a very touchy subject."

A co-manager of the bar even confronted O'Neil while he was still on assignment in Laramie. As reported in the Boomerang, O'Neil explained that not only had he not conducted the interview himself, he had not actually seen or heard the footage. Instead, he was "briefed" on it by his producers who had already transmitted the video segment to NBC's studio in Burbank, California, for editing. According to the co-manager's account, O'Neil admitted that he based his lead-in to the story on what he had been told at the briefing.

Faced with a possible misinterpretation, the newsman allegedly became defensive. According to the co-manager, O'Neil "said 'I won't waste my time trying to clean up this town's mess ... for five years in a row hate crime legislation has been declined by the state. I don't think Wyoming deserves a positive picture.'" In an interview for this story, O'Neil did not deny making those statements, but explained that the controversial comment by the bar patron was selected over the other interviews because it was "higher quality" on technical grounds (i.e., had better sound, lighting, and the like) than the other interviews.

Media Trend-Spotting

Reporters' explicit linkage between the killing and the need for legislation immediately transformed Shepard's murder from a routine crime rarely reported beyond a particular community to an emblem of a national trend. The hate crime news formula turns a murder into a marker - and a market - for a broader, more important, and more dramatic issue that is typically cast in the most black-and-white moral terms possible. Hence, the day after Shepard's death James Brooke reported in The New York Times that it had "fanned outrage and debate" throughout the nation. "Gay leaders hope Mr. Shepard's death will galvanize Congress and state legislatures to pass hate-crime legislation to broaden existing laws," continued the piece, which included a supporting quote from Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington-based gay lobby organization. "There is incredible symbolism about being tied to a fence," said the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Rebecca Isaacs, referring to the details of Shepard's murder. "People have likened it to a scarecrow. But it sounded more like a crucifixion."

Brooke's front-page story included a reference to conservatives, "particularly Christian conservatives" who "generally oppose such [hate crime] laws, saying they extend to minorities special rights." Steven Schwalm of the right-wing Family Research Council said hate crimes laws have nothing to do with perpetrators of violent crime and "everything to do with silencing political opposition" and that such laws "would criminalize pro-family beliefs."

Rigidly dualistic, the hate crime news formula simply does not accommodate less polarized or more moderate views, such as those from openly gay authors and activists such as Richard E. Sincere Jr., Paul Varnell, Jonathan Rauch, Andrew Sullivan, and others associated with the Independent Gay Forum, which advocates elimination of government-sponsored discrimination against gays while opposing "liberationist" political strategies rooted in identity politics. In the hate crime formula, you are on one side or the other of all the issues. There is no sense, for instance, that a person might be gay, oppose the Christian right, and criticize preferential legal treatment for homosexuals.

The media's methods both reflect and reinforce those of advocacy groups, who similarly cast certain crimes as broadly representative. Less than a month after Shepard's death, for instance, the NGLTF mailed at least two appeals for money drawing heavily on his memory. One appeal sought money for a group in Fort Collins, Colorado, that was promoting a city anti-discrimination measure that would include sexual orientation. A second mailing sought money for the NGLTF itself.

Other gay groups, in places such as Los Angeles and Michigan, followed suit. Like the mainstream national media, they implicitly linked the murder both to a lack of hate crime laws and to a Neanderthal Wyoming culture. "Your donation becomes our tool, our weapon," one appeal read, "against ignorance and intolerance, the forces which killed Matthew Shepard." In an interview with The Advocate, the nation's biggest gay newsmagazine, Dianne Hardy-Garcia of the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas approved of these efforts, particularly if the money is earmarked for the passage of hate crime legislation. She said there is "nothing more basic" than the need to pass hate crime bills. "We need to be frank with the [gay] community that we need more resources."

At least one aspect of the gay community's "outrage and debate" failed to interest the national media: The same Advocate story that quoted Hardy-Garcia cited a number of activists, most speaking anonymously, who condemned the use of Shepard's name so soon after his death. Some did go on the record: Terri Ford, a member of a Los Angeles-based political action group formed in reaction to Shepard's murder, said the NGLTF money raising efforts were "disgusting." A spokesperson for the NGLTF defended the fund raising efforts by saying, "We have often used tragedy to teach, and we will continue to do so."

A Socially Constructed "Epidemic"

The lessons that the NGLTF, along with other advocacy groups and national media sources, want the Shepard case to teach are clearly drawn: There is an "epidemic" of anti-gay crime in America, particularly in unsophisticated backwaters such as Wyoming; hate crime legislation is the only remedy; opponents of such laws are themselves allied with the forces of darkness.

Those are, at best, debatable notions; at worst, clear misrepresentations. In Hate Crimes: Criminal Law & Identity Politics (1998), legal scholars James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter analyze what they call the "social construction of a national hate crimes epidemic." Contrary to media and advocacy-group pronouncements, Jacobs and Potter found no substantiation of a hate crime "epidemic" against gays or any other group, "despite a consensus to the contrary among journalists, politicians, and academics." Their own analysis concluded that "in contemporary American society there is less prejudice-motivated violence against minority groups than in many earlier periods of American history." Violence against minorities "is not new and is not on the rise." They point to other "epidemics inflated by those committed to mobilizing public reaction," such as child kidnapping, drunk driving, and homelessness. The "uncritical acceptance" of the "socially constructed epidemic" is potentially damaging, argue Jacobs and Potter. "This pessimistic and alarmist portrayal of a fractured warring community is likely to exacerbate societal divisions and contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy. It distorts the discourse about crime in America, turning a social problem that used to unite Americans into one that divides us."

While one would expect this relatively good news to be heralded as evidence of social gains and a greater tolerance for alternative lifestyles, the authors uncovered a very different dynamic at work. Lack of evidence hardly deters promoters of hate crime legislation. Indeed, even when the NGLTF's own 1993 survey reflected a 14 percent decrease in hate crimes against gays and lesbians from previous surveys in six major cities, a spokesperson announced, "All the anecdotal evidence tells us this is still an out-of-control problem." Using the survey as her supporting evidence, an NGLTF representative told a congressional committee that "anti-gay violence clearly remains at epidemic proportions." Another NGLTF spokesperson characterized the study as proving that the gay community was "under siege -- fighting an epidemic of violence."

Jacobs and Potter contend that in a political environment dominated by identity politics, advocacy groups seek "to call attention to their members' victimization, subordinate status, and need for special governmental assistance...[They] have good reasons for claiming that we are in the throes of an epidemic...[Such] demands [require] attention, remedial actions, resources, and reparations. The ... media also have an incentive. ... Crime sells; so does racism, sexism, and homophobia. Garden variety crime has become mundane. The law and order drama has to be revitalized if it is to command attention."

Given these forces, the "epidemic" theory has been widely accepted, even with no solid evidence or, indeed, evidence to the contrary. The formula is designed so that it can only be verified, never refuted. Such predispositions made it almost inevitable that the murder of Matthew Shepard - who was, by all accounts, singled out partly because of his sexual orientation - would be discussed in terms of the "hate crime epidemic" and the "urgent" need for hate crime laws. (That Shepard died just as pre-planned National Coming Out Day activities were beginning provided another ready news hook.)

Political Placebos

In addition to the question of whether a hate crime epidemic actually exists is the issue of whether hate crime legislation would do anything about the situation. While the media uncritically articulated such an assumption, it's no more proven than the existence of the epidemic in the first place. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Jacobs said he was certain that the alleged perpetrators in Wyoming, like those who a few months before had murdered James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, were not "invited to their crimes" because of their states' criminal codes. In fact, all face capital murder charges and the death penalty (which has already been ordered against the first defendant in the Byrd case). "Yet well-meaning and misguided politicians and gay activists say the tragedy demonstrates a need for more state and federal `hate crime' laws," he wrote. "It is hard to see the current outcry as anything more than another chance for politicians to go out on a limb and declare themselves against hate and prejudice."

One could argue that hate crime laws have far more pernicious effects than simply allowing politicians to display false courage. Andrew Sullivan in Virtually Normal (1995) contends that hate crime laws are not only generally ineffective, they function as political decoys or placebos, actually maintaining the status quo of gay inequality. Fundamental, government-enforced discrimination against gays - including prohibitions against military service and same-sex marriage - is obscured by such laws, he argues.

Drawing a page from some death penalty advocates, supporters of hate crime laws typically contend that such legislation, whether or not it affects crime, sends the "message" that society won't stand for certain types of behavior. But individuals interpret messages differently; often they do so in ways unintended by the sender. While to some a hate crime law is a marker of a tolerant, enlightened community, to others it establishes grotesque hierarchies of victims. Such a move is inherently divisive, as it implicitly places more value on some lives; it also provides ammunition to anti-gay activists who accuse gays of seeking "special rights."

Such concerns were clearly at work in Wyoming residents' outrage regarding the disparity between the coverage of Matthew Shepard's murders and similarly ugly crimes. They were in no way rationalizing or minimizing Shepard's murder. Rather, they were expressing discomfort with the idea that one life is inherently more valuable than another. In fact, after Shepard's death, when the Laramie City Council was considering a hate crime ordinance, the mother of the 8-year-old girl who had been murdered earlier in the year opposed it, claiming it would create an "emotional split" among relatives of crime victims.

What? No Gay Bars?

With its lack of interest in local knowledge, the national media misinterpreted such reactions as further evidence of regional homophobia, a conclusion perhaps buttressed by the superficial sameness of Wyoming's population: According to official census numbers, it's 92 percent white, 5.7 percent Hispanic, less than 1 percent each African American, Asian American, and Native American. Journalists ominously reported that "Wyoming has no gay bars," a fact that becomes less compelling when one realizes that the state has no decent shopping malls, either: The paucity of both reflects economic realities, not political or cultural judgments.

If anything, a live-and-let-live culture has emerged from "high altitudes and low multitudes," to quote Wyoming politicians' favorite cliché. For instance, gays and straights alike frequent The Fireside Inn, the bar at which Shepard met his alleged killers. For a small population (453,388 in 1990, lower than any other state's) that occupies a space larger than the United Kingdom and averages fewer than five persons per square mile, the distances are too great, the people too few and interdependent, the economy too underdeveloped, and the sense of community too strong to accommodate the separatism that identity politics demands. In such a land of pragmatic tolerance, distinctions like that always will be unpopular.

That is particularly true when such distinctions are created and enforced by the government. Skepticism and resentment about government is widespread in a state in which 45 percent of open space is still owned by the feds and managed - arbitrarily, it is frequently charged - by bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. Dissatisfaction with land use policies is one reason why Wyoming has for years been an enthusiastic participant in the "sagebrush rebellion," the populist intermountain state initiative to curb the Bureau of Land Management's power over public lands within their states.

But skepticism about government does not equal intolerance, as Wyoming's trail-blazing history on women's rights and other social issues suggests. If anything, it equals an embrace of quirky individualism. Wyoming's quintessential and highly popular politician is former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, who wrote in his 1997 autobiography, Right in the Old Gazoo, "I have flunked damn near every litmus test that was ever administered in politics. I am a conservative -- but not as far as the Christian Coalition is concerned, because I am pro-choice [and gay friendly]. I think of myself as an environmentalist, because I worked hard on conservation issues. And yet I am a true believer in the multiple use of the public lands, something the real tree huggers will never support."

In 1998, the Wyoming Republican Party--which dominates the state politically--put out a 50-point platform that contained none of the usual Christian Coalition boilerplate anti-gay initiatives inserted in many state GOP platforms. In fact, only one of the party's 79 less-important resolutions commented on homosexuality, affirming that gays, lesbians, "and those engaged in alternate lifestyles have the basic rights and protections of American citizens...but...no special rights or privileges [should] be granted to them."

While the rhetoric about "special rights" is vintage Christian Coalition, it is buried in a cluttered menu of mostly trivial resolutions, a faint echo of the usual fire-and-brimstone fare. That is as about intolerant as even Republicans get in Wyoming.

The Road from Laramie

So what does Wyoming's live-and-let-live culture actually look like? On the last day of my December visit, I drove 40 miles east to Cheyenne to meet and interview Joe Corrigan, an officer of the United Gays and Lesbians of Wyoming. According to its Web site, the group formed in 1987 because gays "were sick of having nothing to do other than go down to Colorado for a little fun." It now hosts an annual August "rendezvous" in the Laramie Mountain range that attracts more than 300 mostly gay campers from throughout the region. It also has a Thanksgiving pot-luck dinner and a major winter casino event called "Lovers and Gamblers."

I arrived early at Corrigan's house in a pleasant northwest Cheyenne neighborhood, across the street from an elementary school where my mother had taught in the 1950s. Jeff Lowe, Corrigan's lover, greeted me at the door. He apologized on behalf of Corrigan, who was working late. Jeff said he would try to answer my questions.

As he played a video game with one of his three children, we traded coming-out stories that reflected similar complex experiences of denial, marriage, children, "coming to terms," and divorce. He told me the divorce court granted him custody of his children. After he met Corrigan, Jeff said, they bought the house to settle down and raise the children in Cheyenne. I asked him how neighbors, school officials, and people in general were treating him and his family.

"I love this town and this state and I'm happy being openly gay," he said. "I wouldn't live anywhere else. It's my home. I went to school here. The neighbor kids sleep over here and our kids sleep over there. There are no problems."

I asked him if Wyoming needed a hate crime law. He said the whole world knew the answer to that question, because reporters "from New York to New Zealand" had interviewed him and Corrigan. Corrigan's quotes on the topic had been widely circulated. Later, in a telephone conversation, Corrigan told me that he strongly advocated a hate crime law "because every nation writes laws to reflect their values and Wyoming needs to have the value of tolerance written into law." Jeff is less enthusiastic about that solution; his quotes on the subject didn't seem to make it into the papers.

"Did the reporters ask you about your neighbors and how life is in Wyoming?" I asked.

"Yes, they did. As far as we can tell, the press didn't use any of that. You never know what they'll use." Jeff shrugged.

When I asked Corrigan the same question, he agreed and added: "We resent the way the reporters came into this state with their minds already made up. If we didn't give them the right answers, they just ignored us. Their questions were always like, 'Don't you feel unsafe here?' and we'd tell them no, that we were very happy here."

One might have thought that such reactions would have made it into stories about what it means to be gay in Wyoming. But of course, given the hate crime news formula, those comments can only be found buried in reporters' notebooks and on cutting room floors in Burbank and Manhattan.

First appeared in April 1999 in Miami's Weekly News and other publications.

SHOULD GAY MEN AND LESBIANS arm themselves for self-preservation? The question itself comes across as incendiary. Most gay folks, after all, abhor violence. Firearms are a part of the world of criminals, thugs, and bigoted rednecks. Guns are the weapons of patriarchy. We seek to live in peace and want to end, not instigate, human brutality.

But the world doesn't seem so simple anymore. Gay people constantly face the threat of violence. Every day we are attacked, beaten and, yes, even killed. The media seem only recently to have discovered this, with the high-powered coverage of the sensational murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, followed by the brutal killing of Billy Jack Gaither in Alabama. But scan any gay paper and it's hard to avoid stories of gay people badly beaten and bashed in what are termed "unprovoked attacks."

I've been thinking about the issue lately, after reading a column by Jonathan Rauch in the March 20, 1999 issue of National Journal, a Washington-based policy weekly. Rauch is also a contributor to the Independent Gay Forum -- a group of gay writers exploring new approaches to old problems. He begins his column, titled "And Don't Forget Your Gun," with an anecdote about Tom, who found himself "running, possibly for his life," one summer evening in San Jose, as he and a friend were walking through "a dicey neighborhood." They caught the eye of a group of urban youth, one of whom yelled, "Hey, you faggots!" The gang then rose "like a flock of gulls...shouting taunts and threats: When we're done with you, they'll find your bodies!"

As Rauch tells it, what happened next stopped the attackers in their tracks. "Tom suddenly stops, turns, and levels a semiautomatic handgun" that he pulled out of his backpack. The gang turns tail and runs.

The moral: protect thyself. Being in shape and knowing some jujitsu isn't enough. Buy a handgun and learn how to use it.

But, you say, putting more guns on the street is nothing but an invitation to urban mayhem. If everyone carried a concealed weapon, our cities would all become Dodge City. Arming the citizenry is no way to stop crime. Being pro-gun is a surrender to violence.

The pro-gun lobby points out that violent crimes, including street attacks, actually decrease in jurisdictions that have okayed carrying concealed weapons. But having just said this, I can hear the gasps among some readers. The fact that gay people could possibly be on the same side of an issue as the National Rifle Association -- the very personification of a "conservative" lobby -- is enough to provoke some activists to come "gunning" for me, if only metaphorically. We all know that Charlton Heston and his friends are the enemy, right?

Now I know this issue is complex. I suspect that I could never bring myself to own -- or especially use -- a gun. Apart from the danger of self-injury, I don't think I would ever risk taking someone else's life, even in an attack situation. I know many other gay men and women feel the same.

But I also believe we should at least think about guns more than we have. Gay people are a minority, and minorities make easy targets. Look at Kosovo. At the risk of reaching too far to make a point, it's worth noting that the Nazis strengthened gun control laws after taking power in 1933, and began house-to-house searches to discover firearms in the homes of suspected opponents. Soon after, Jews were barred from businesses involving firearms, and on November 11, 1938, Hitler issued a decree forbidding Jews from possessing firearms, knives, or truncheons under any circumstances and to surrender them immediately, thus ensuring that no effective defense could be waged against his genocide (which began in earnest in 1941).

Gays in America aren't in that situation, but we confront "little Hitlers" every day, and some of us don't survive. What if a gun defense were common enough that would-be attackers couldn't be sure of what they were in for if they decided on a fun night of fag bashing? It's not an unreasonable query. Almost half of all Americans live in the 31 states with so-called "shall issue" laws, which require the authorities to approve a permit for anyone over 21 who is mentally sound, has no criminal record, pays a fee, and takes a gun safety course. Should gay people be encouraged to take advantage of the right to bear arms?

There's another reason I've been thinking about how complicated and confused the whole "gun issue" is. I just saw Bernadette Peters in the Broadway revival of "Annie Get Your Gun." My fellow gays in the audience went wild over the show, which tells the story of sharp-shooter Annie Oakley (who discovers, to her chagrin, that "you can't get a man with a gun"). The real Annie Oakley was arguably the first great female professional athlete in America, and spent her life breaking down barriers against women. But she generally isn't lionized by contemporary feminists, according to a recent biography. Why? One reason is that she advocated that women learn how to use guns and arm themselves. During her life, she encouraged the formation of Annie Oakley gun clubs for women, which sprouted across the country. That legacy leaves many modern feminists and liberals uneasy.

I suspect most gay people will never agree to carrying lethal weapons. But rigorous debate on the pros and cons of arming ourselves for self-defense, rather than a simplistic rejection, just might lead some to consider the option, which could mean more lives saved, rather than lost, due to guns.

First appeared March 20, 1999, in the National Journal; slightly revised.

MY FRIEND TOM is running, possibly for his life. It is a sweet summer evening in San Jose, and he and a colleague have just left work and are walking through a dicey neighborhood when they catch the eye of some young men, as many as 20 of them, sitting around an old car in a driveway. "Hey, you fucking faggots!'' one of the young men shouts. Tom and his colleague walk past, quickly, but their persecutors rise like a flock of gulls and follow, shouting taunts and threats: "When we're done with you, they'll find your fucking bodies!'' The two pick up the pace and the men come after them. ``Run,'' says Tom, but the gang breaks into pursuit while Tom, trying to hold the pace, gropes in his backpack. The two reach a streetlight and there, where everybody can see, Tom suddenly stops, turns, and levels a semiautomatic handgun.

Oh.

At that point, the young men chasing my friend lost their enthusiasm for blood sport. Tom and his colleague left the neighborhood as fast as they could. And if there had been no gun? "There's no question in my mind,'' says Tom, "that my friend and I would have been at least very seriously beaten, and maybe killed.'' I asked how the gang reacted to the gun. Tom says their leader demanded officiously: "Have you got a permit for that?''

Tom didn't have a permit, which is bad -- but then he probably couldn't have gotten one if he had tried, which is also bad. California is among the states where, if you want permission to carry a concealed weapon, you have to prove that you are of ``good moral character'' and that you have some special reason to carry. Tom could have shown that he was of good character, but he had no special reason. Until, of course, the reason arose one summer night.

As recently as a dozen years ago, almost every state was like California. Today, by contrast, almost half of all Americans live in the 31 states with so-called ``shall issue'' laws, which require the authorities to approve a permit for (typically) anyone over 21 who is mentally sound, has no criminal record, pays a fee, and takes a gun-safety course. Florida began the stampede in 1987. Before then, about 17,000 people in the state had concealed-weapon permits; today, about 250,000 do. The Daytona Beach News-Journal notes that a number of local judges have permits. ``I became convinced that some of these people might become dangerous,'' one judge told the paper. ``So I took a firearms course, got the permit, and kept a weapon handy in the courthouse.''

Any time now, a national majority will live in ``shall issue'' states. Colorado, Missouri (with a referendum in April), Nebraska, and Ohio (with a new Republican governor) are all candidates to switch to ``shall issue'' this year, with the noisy support of the National Rifle Association. Grover G. Norquist, a conservative activist who expects to join the NRA board later this year, busies himself lobbying for concealed-carry when he is not busy lobbying for lower taxes--both issues, he says, being sides of the same conservative coin. "The more people who view themselves as independent of the state,'' he says, "the more people who are available to the center-right coalition.''

In effect, and to the horror of many liberals and gun- control groups, America is now running an uncontrolled national experiment in self-policing. There are something like 70 million handguns in the country, and the odds have increased dramatically that today you passed one of them in the street.

So what do we know about the results of the experiment? First, that about 1 percent to 5 percent of a state's population typically take out concealed-gun permits. Second, we know what does not happen: America does not turn into the Dodge City of myth, with fender-benders becoming hailstorms of lead. (Actually, Dodge City, Kan., wasn't the Dodge City of myth. It was much safer than today's Washington, D.C., with homicides running to one or two per cattle-trading season and marshals mostly concerned, writes the historian Roger Lane, ``with arresting drunks and other misdemeanants.'') People who are willing to register with the sheriff, pay a fee, and take a gun-safety course turn out to be unusually law-abiding, safer even than off-duty cops. In Florida, only 0.13 percent of concealed-carry licenses were revoked from 1987-97 for criminal activity of any sort. No murders seem to have been committed by people carrying licensed guns in public. The ``shall issue'' law may actually deter bad behavior, since if you get into any sort of trouble you can lose your license.

What is harder to say is what we all want to know. Do concealed weapons, lawfully carried, reduce crime, or increase it?

The most comprehensive study of the subject is also the most controversial. John R. Lott Jr., an economist at the University of Chicago Law School, assembled data for all 3,054 U.S. counties over 18 years (1977 through 1994) and controlled for all sorts of variables. ``This study uses the most comprehensive set of control variables yet used in a study of crime, let alone any previous study on gun control,'' he writes in his book More Guns, Less Crime, published last year by the University of Chicago Press.

The title gives away the punchline. ``When state concealed-handgun laws went into effect in a county, murders fell by about 8 percent, rapes fell by 5 percent, and aggravated assaults fell by 7 percent.'' (Note: This is after controlling for other variables.) ``On the other hand, property-crime rates increased after nondiscretionary laws were implemented. . . . Criminals respond to the threat of being shot while committing such crimes as robbery by choosing to commit less risky crimes that involve minimal contact with the victim.''

Moreover, and maybe more surprising, Lott also finds that women and blacks -- who are, for different reasons, disproportionately vulnerable to violence -- benefit disproportionately from ``shall issue'' laws. Thus, for example, each new concealed-gun permit issued to a woman increases women's overall safety three to four times as much as a new permit to a man increases men's safety.

In 1997, two economists, Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt, found that people who install LoJack radio-tracing systems in their cars pay about $600 each for devices that, by deterring auto theft, save society more than 10 times that amount. The trick is that LoJack is hidden; the thief doesn't know which car has it (steering-wheel clubs, by contrast, just displace theft to unprotected cars). If Lott is right, concealed guns have the same sort of effect. In Oregon, he finds, each new concealed-carry permit saves the state $3,500; in Pennsylvania, $5,000. So law- abiding people who pack heat are doing the rest of us a favor.

If Lott is right. Predictably, other scholars have found all sorts of things wrong with his work. ``Lott's research is so fundamentally flawed in a number of different ways that his research really can't tell us anything about what the effects of these laws are,'' says Jon Vernick, of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. Also predictably, and somewhat annoyingly, the results of concealed-gun studies tend to coincide with the authors' predisposition toward gun control generally. Gun nuts love ``shall issue.'' Gun-control nuts hate it.

This is annoying because it is so obtuse. The question of whether guns should be available readily is completely distinct, logically and empirically, from the question of who should be carrying guns around. As it happens, I've lived in two countries with strict gun laws, Japan and Great Britain, and if I could press a button and make America's guns vanish, I would do so in a blink (and I'd repeal the Second Amendment while I was at it). It turns out that a country with few guns is a better place to live than a country with, say, a fifth of a billion guns.

But the fact is that America is awash with guns, and this fact is not going to change in my lifetime, and criminals carry guns already. A rational country would make guns harder for criminals to get (that's gun control) but easier for lawful citizens to carry (that's "shall issue''). By contrast, the current policy in states such as California--easy to get, hard to carry--is perversity incarnate.

In 1999, the debate is not about whether ``shall issue'' causes much harm -- by now we would have heard of any mayhem -- but whether it does much good. So why in the world are liberals clinging to opposition to concealed-carry? No doubt because the gun debate has been infected by the culture wars, and people have taken up sides, and liberals feel obliged to revile any proposal supported by the likes of the NRA and Grover Norquist. This is a pity, as thinking with one's knees usually is. Liberals should be on Tom's side.

WE ARE ALL Tinky-Winky now.

And I mean that in the scariest sense.

Jerry Falwell has expressed deep concern that a children's TV character named Tinky-Winky on the popular show, Teletubbies, is homosexual. The evidence is quite convincing to Falwell, who lays out his case in the February edition of the National Liberty Journal. Tinky-Winky has the voice of a boy but he carries a purse. Further, according to Falwell, "He is purple -- the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle -- the gay-pride symbol."

It's been a long time since a prominent real American has denounced a television character, so there's certainly reason to have a little fun with this. And at least when Dan Quayle went after Murphy Brown, the discussion could sound serious. This time around, it's tough to get too high-minded when you're castigating someone named Tinky-Winky, and explications are coming from a production company called Itsy Bitsy Entertainment.

But there are two reasons to take this story very seriously.

First, it gives the lie to one of the religious right's most frequent arguments about why they are not being mean-spirited and bigoted about homosexuality?hating the sin, but loving the sinner. This argument is often stated another way. The objection to homosexuality, it is claimed, does not have to do with sexual orientation, but with sexual conduct.

Lesbians and gay men have long known that was simply disingenuous, and Falwell now shows that it is. I doubt that, even taking his fevered imaginings to their most absurd lengths, Falwell believes Tinky-Winky was having sex with anyone. In short, this case is not about Tinky-Winky's sexual conduct, it is about Tinky-Winky's sexual orientation. Falwell's condemnation of Tinky-Winky is based only on factors he believes suggest Tinky-Winky could be identified publicly as gay --use of a color associated with gay rights, the triangle that gays adopted from their Nazi persecutors, and use of a "purse" by a "boy," neither of which can reliably be determined in the fanciful world of the Teletubbies.

In all of this, sexual conduct is entirely absent, and, given the character, is nearly unthinkable. How could this case, then, be about anything other than sexual orientation entirely independent of sexual conduct? And if that's true, then how is Falwell's objection to homosexuality not simply prejudice against people who do no more than identify themselves publicly as homosexual, without taking anything else about that person into consideration? Does Falwell believe, could Falwell believe that Tinky-Winky is a sinner without having had sex? And if he's not a sinner, why is he a bad role model for children?

That leads to the far more important reason this story is worth consideration. Falwell is not alone in spending an awful lot of his free time worrying about who is and who is not homosexual. Since he cannot look at sexual conduct to "prove" his case, he has to look for other evidence. But that search for evidence, the very need to search for evidence, should be troubling, and not just for lesbians and gay men.

When the desire to root out homosexuality becomes so relentless that even whimsical TV characters are under suspicion and investigation, how can heterosexuals escape the frenzy? The stigma about homosexuality has long been the chief problem in closed environments like the military, where heterosexual women in particular have been suspected of being lesbian. This places on them a burden of "proving" their heterosexuality. But how does a heterosexual prove heterosexuality? That question continues to plague the American military.

But Falwell helps us understand that this isn't just a problem in the military. Against a prejudice this dogmatic and about a factor that is so deeply personal and subjective, every heterosexual is vulnerable. On the day the Tinky-Winky story broke, the popular television series, "Dawson's Creek" aired an episode in which a high school boy is suspected of being gay -- for reading a poem he wrote that could be interpreted to mean that. Or it could have had the meaning he thought it had when he wrote it, which was not at all about secret homosexual desire. Similarly, shows like "The Simpsons," "Seinfeld," "Friends" and many others have explored, in comedic ways, how heterosexuals react when suspected of being gay. In Falwell's world, homosexuality is something everybody has to worry about.

This is one of the ways prejudice about homosexuality is different from prejudice about race or gender. Few white people are suspected of being black or Asian, and very few who do not intentionally want to do so are mistaken for a member of the opposite sex. Yet anyone can be suspected of being homosexual. Anyone.

And once suspected, the entire array of discriminatory behaviors -- from discomfort in the workplace to firing, from rude comments to physical violence -- are available. Lesbians and gay men know this from long experience. I'm sure many other lesbians and gay men are having the same mixed feelings I am seeing how the prejudice can run out of control. Heterosexuals shouldn't have to prove to anyone their sexual orientation in order to escape prejudice. But neither should homosexuals, or television characters or anyone.

Tinky-Winky is probably going to be fine, as will the children who watch him or her or it. But as long as the Falwells of the world continue to obsess about sexual orientation, Tinky-Winky's plight illustrates how our basic humanity is under attack as morality itself is being reduced to cartoon size.

SHOULD THE GAY CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT rename itself "The Transgender Rights Movement?" You'd think so, if you believe the recent comments of some of our leaders. For example, openly gay Houston City Councilwoman Annise Parker recently wrote, "Transgender is a much broader term than gay, and encompasses the entire group of gays and lesbians" who by their choice of same-sex mates "transgress" gender boundaries.

Georgia gay leader Cindy Abel also calls gays "gender transgressors." In a recent column she proclaimed, "We're not so different from those whose internal identity doesn't match their exterior bodies."

Since when?

This whole business about gays as "gender transgressors" and not matching our "exterior bodies" calls to mind the long-discredited theories of the early German gay civil rights advocate, Karl Ulrichs. In a well-intentioned effort to help gays in his time, Ulrichs concocted a theory that homosexuals constitute an "intermediate" or "third" sex - not really male or female. He even invented a special name for us: urnings. "That an actual man would feel sexual love for a man is impossible," Ulrichs wrote in 1870. "The urning is not a true man. He is a mixture of man and woman. He is man only in terms of body build." Ulrichs's theory was, of course, completely wrong.

Parker, Abel, and other gender rebels (some of them transgender but most not) often cast their theories as a plea for the "inclusion" of transgender issues in the gay civil rights struggle. However, they are nothing more than the modern-day inheritors of the embarrassing legacy of Ulrichs and his hypothesis about gays as some kind of third sex. Some people must have not been to school in the last century. They are trying to resuscitate the urning.

Our new gender rebels argue that gays transgress at least one boundary expected of them, whether male or female: they have sex with people of the same sex. This one fact, we are told, makes gays natural upstarts against the very idea of defined gender roles. At heart, like Ulrichs, they really don't believe that an "actual man" can love another man. If a man loves another man it must be because he challenges the very concept of manhood itself.

The evidence concerning how we gays see ourselves suggests otherwise. A recent study by psychologist Michael Bailey concluded that gays see themselves in gender-conforming terms and seek gender-conforming traits in prospective mates. Bailey studied the personal ads in gay magazines. Out of 673 personal ads placed by gay men, 98 percent described themselves as masculine or in similar terms. Of 210 ads placed by gay women, 59 percent described themselves as feminine or in similar terms. If Bailey had not counted athletic activities as masculine, an even larger percentage of the gay women's ads described themselves in feminine terms.

Equally frustrating for our gender rebels, Bailey found that 96 percent of gay men and 80 percent of gay women sought partners with gender-conforming traits. Bailey also studied gays who never placed such ads and came to the same conclusions.

None of this is very shocking to those of us who live in the real world, as opposed to the fantasy-land of the gender rebels and their urnings. All of us, gay and straight, exhibit gender-nonconforming behavior at some times and to varying degrees. Are we all gender transgressors by that logic? A single riotous act is not exactly a revolution.

Among gays, moreover, gender nonconformance has historically served the function of signaling to other gays who we are. Gender nonconformance is an observable trait, after all; homosexuality is not. And we have needed to conceal ourselves because of anti-gay prejudice. Gender nonconforming behavior among gays may often be, in that sense, a vestige of the need to "hide" produced by the very homophobia we are supposed to be fighting.

And the fact that some of us occasionally exhibit gender nonconformance no more makes the gay civil rights struggle a "transgender movement" than the fact that some of us have good taste in design makes it an "interior-decorating movement." All such reductionist theories, whether invented by our enemies or by our supposed friends, confine gay life to a particular pattern and thus do us a great disservice. They fuel stereotypes that hurt us - not because being an effeminate man or a butch woman is bad - but because they are stereotypes.

Our gender rebels may retort: "Fine. Gays may not be fighting oppressive patriarchal gender roles, but we ought to start fighting them." That's an interesting but much more radical argument, because it shifts the debate from focusing on what gays are to what gays should be.

Poor souls, our rebels must try to enlist us in a war against gender that few of us believe in, and indeed, one in which most of us appear to be fierce partisans for the other side. It seems that someone, whether from the far right or the far left, is always trying to tell us how to live.

But the gender rebels are entitled to their idiosyncratic strategy for achieving equality. I will leave them to the care of Karl Ulrichs, the "third sex" theory, the mythical urnings, and the other anti-gay stereotypes they hold so dear. We gender patriots have work to do.

"Oh God, our maker, we gladly proclaim to the world that Jeanne and Ellie are loving partners together for life. Amen."

By saying those words to bless the relationship of two women, Reverend Don Fado and 94 other United Methodist pastors (as well as 71 other clergy members who lent their names in absentia) could lose their clerical jobs. Fado acknowledged this at the holy union ceremony they all jointly presided over on January 16. "If anybody wants to file charges against us, this is what the charges are for; for praying this prayer."

The ministers did not marry Jeanne Barnett, 68 and her partner of 15 years, Ellie Charlton, 63. They simply proclaimed, as a body, that Jeanne and Ellie have committed themselves to one another for life. More important, it seems, they "gladly" did so. If they had scornfully done so, or had done so filled with bitterness, hostility, grievance or alarm, well, that might have been all right.

There are many issues at work in this ceremony: questions about morality and love, religion and politics, equality and "special rights." But one fact may say more about this event than any other?it took place in Sacramento.

Historically in this country, the movement for gay rights has come from big cities like Los Angeles and New York -- and, of course, San Francisco, not a big city in numbers, but the cosmopolitan equal of any city in the world. The concentration of gay men living in such cities helped drive the movement for gay equality. There was a certain spirit, if not necessarily safety, in numbers. This fact, however, often put cities at odds with more rural areas, as gay rights laws were introduced in state capitals.

But now the questions about justice and fairness first raised in the cities are coming up everywhere. Lesbians and gay men in Bakersfield and Victorville may have had more to risk by coming out than their counterparts in West Hollywood and the Castro, but the compromises of the closet are tedious no matter where you live. It's something like a full-time job to keep track of all the fabrications and half-truths, and that's wearying, whether you work on a stock exchange or a dairy farm.

So it should be less surprising than some might expect to know that the holy union ceremony did not come from the organized gay rights establishment in San Francisco or Los Angeles. In fact, it did not originate with anyone who is actually homosexual. In St. Mark's church in Sacramento, Rev. Fado heard his church leadership's command that no Methodist minister could bless a same-sex relationship. The patent unfairness was too obvious for him to ignore. How could he have permission to bless a house, a car, a pet, but not the relationships of some of his own parishioners, children of God who had made a lifetime commitment based in love and faith?

It was only when Rev. Fado asked his congregation if any same-sex couple would step forward that Jeanne and Ellie came into the public eye. Neither woman views herself as a gay rights activist. When asked the question, both laughed timidly. The best they could say, Ellie confessed, was that they identify themselves as "quiet advocates for change."

It is those quiet advocates who demonstrate how profoundly the successes of the gay rights movement have changed the movement. Anti-gay leaders like Gary Bauer and James Dobson may rail against homosexual "extremists" and "radicals," but they have little to say about homosexual moderates and conservatives. People like Jeanne and Ellie wanted only to live their lives decently and honestly, and endured furious and unwanted publicity to demonstrate how hard it is for a same-sex couple to achieve the modest respectability every married heterosexual couple takes for granted.

They are not alone. Across the nation, millions of same-sex couples, every day, quietly negotiate the preposterous half-rules and unspoken protocols they are expected to live by. And they are joined by millions of heterosexuals like Rev. Fado, who are finding it harder and harder to maintain a separate set of rules for lesbians and gay men.

That is why the scene for these new gay rights battles will increasingly be places like Sacramento, or Laramie, Wyoming, or Hawaii or Vermont. A decade ago, author Neil Miller published In Search of Gay America, and found people across the country willing to talk about being gay in every corner of the country, and in every walk of life. Those people are still there, and by the simple example of their lives, their friends and co-workers, relatives and ministers may be more ready than ever to support them.

In other words, the gay rights movement isn't just for activists any more. No one was ever excluded from the movement, but in the early days a lot of people passed. Political activism isn't in everyone's blood.

But justice is. That's what drove Rev. Fado to issue his challenge, and it's what drove Jeanne and Ellie to accept. But it's also what made buses and carloads of people come from Modesto and Fresno, Yreka and Oregon to show their support. The hundreds of people who surrounded the Convention Center in a "Circle of Love," as well as the thousand or so who attended the ceremony, probably couldn't name a gay radical. But by just being present in Sacramento, their quiet advocacy was moving the mountains radicals have been talking about for decades.