IGF CultureWatch

First appeared Nov. 17, 1999, in the Chicago Free Press.

ON NOV. 9, THE U.S. SUPREME COURT heard oral arguments on University of Wisconsin vs. Southworth, a case brought by a group of university students who object to the use of mandatory student fees to subsidize some campus organizations.

Specifically, the students are evangelical Christians who object to the use of their money to support 18 student groups, including Campus Women's Center, the University of Wisconsin Greens, the International Socialist Organization, the Militant Students Union and a Native American advocacy group.

The case is interesting to us because the students also object to their money going to the Madison AIDS Support Group, the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Campus Center, and the 10 Percent Society, a gay group.

The students say they are being deprived of their free speech rights. The university, they claim, compels them to "speak" against their own views by using their money to support advocacy groups whose opinions and goals they disagree with.

It is natural for gays and lesbians to want to support the targeted gay student groups. But you do not need to be, as I am not, either Christian, or conservative, or religious at all to think the students have a pretty good argument. Sometimes when unappealing people defend their own freedom they end up defending freedom for all of us.

No one, of course, seriously believes the protesting students are being deprived of free speech. No one, certainly not the university, has prevented the students from expressing their views.

But the university did use the students' money to support speech and advocacy efforts the students disagreed with. That seems wrong. To see why, consider a hypothetical fact situation.

Imagine you as a gay person go off to Old Sarsaparilla University where you discover to your dismay that part of your student fees support the Pro-Family League, Ex-Gay Student Union, Friends of the Nuclear Family, Student Promise Keepers, the Creationist Society and the Fundamentalist Journal.

These groups use your money to make posters they place around campus, to bring speakers to the school, to print anti-gay pamphlets they pass out at the student center, to distribute "free" magazines your money helped print and buy ads promoting their views in the student newspaper.

If you do nothing and say nothing, you are de facto helping the other side. This does look like "forced speech." If you decide to express your own view, you find you are arguing against speech your own money is paying for. Let them use their own damn money, you might think.

The University of Wisconsin did a good deal of huffing and puffing about how free speech and open debate are part of university life and how the mandatory subsidy system encourages the expression of unfamiliar or unpopular views. But this argument has several serious infirmities.

No one is trying to hamper or chill free debate. If subsidies to student groups are terminated, every student and teacher remains free to speak his mind and advocate whatever he wants.

Wisconsin assistant Attorney General Susan Ullman told the court the university wants to promote an open forum and further the First Amendment rights of all students by encouraging groups to express their views.

But first off, someone needs to remind Ullman that if exposing students to diverse viewpoints is the goal, that is the reason universities have professors and classes. Professors are supposed to know more about all those various ideas, their origin, history, development-and defects. In fact, most professors can provide better arguments for positions they do not believe than most student activists can for what they do believe. It is called being educated.

In any case, the "open forum" the university seeks to promote will happen of its own accord. It is worth remembering that the First Amendment is purely negative. It is predicated on the idea that people will spontaneously express their views if they are not blocked by government. The First Amendment subsidizes no one.

Nor would the absence of subsidies prevent students from forming clubs to advocate their views: Students do it now without subsidies. The majority (70 percent) of student groups at the University of receive no school subsidy. They manage to support themselves with dues and other sources of income.

The university claims that decisions about what groups to support are made "by the students themselves" - i.e., by a committee elected by students. But that means that some students decide what other students are going to hear and pay for.

And if a committee elected by a majority disburses money by a majority vote, that system seems likely to promote views that are fashionable or popular, rather than ones that are unfashionable or unpopular. But popular viewpoints hardly need subsidizing.

If the goal truly is to let students determine where their money goes, why does a committee have to make one decision for everybody? Why not let students decide individually on their own? Let them keep their money and contribute to any organization they want. Or join a club and pay its dues. Or do something entirely different with the money. A few might even buy a book.

Nor can the university defend its system on the basis of encouraging all viewpoints. Subsidies to partisan political groups are forbidden. Yet as Justice David Souter pointed out during oral argument, protecting overtly political speech is the "core value" of the First Amendment. So in the paradigm case, the university fails to achieve its ostensible goal. In fact, it explicitly rejects it.

So it appears that the protesting students have a fairly good case, and the University of Wisconsin offers a remarkably poor defense of its policy, riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions.

First appeared Nov. 10, 1999, in the Chicago Free Press.

THE LARAMIE, WYO., TRIAL of Aaron McKinney for the murder of Matthew Shepard came to a rapid conclusion when Wyoming District Judge Barton Voigt ruled that the defense could not introduce testimony to support a "gay panic" defense.

The "gay panic" defense, Voigt said, amounted to saying that because of an (alleged) sexual approach by Shepard, McKinney either became temporarily insane and unable to control his behavior, or that the approach at least caused McKinney to have a "diminished capacity" for controlling his behavior.

Neither of those defenses has standing in Wyoming law, the judge pointed out.

Having little or nothing else to offer, the defense quickly rested its case and McKinney was found guilty of felony murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery.

Voigt's decision to disallow a "gay panic" defense applies only in Wyoming, but it provides an important statement of what is wrong with that defense. We can hope that Voigt's reasoning will help kill off the defense elsewhere as well.

For eons heterosexual males have been able to get away with beating up, even killing gay men (and often robbing them) by offering the excuse that the gay man "came on to me," relying on courts to believe them (You know how predatory those homosexuals are!) and to think that violence is a plausible response.

But the gay panic defense is a conceptual tangle just beneath the surface. We can distinguish at least four different versions of what is better called the "homosexual advance defense."

The general idea is that when a gay man expresses sexual interest in a man who is not gay, the advance can be so offensive or threatening that the person lashes out at the gay man. The versions differ in their explanation for why the person lashes out rather than simply saying no, or why the person feels uncontrollable revulsion rather than a mere lack of interest.

In McKinney's case, the defense tried to argue that McKinney had been subject to sexual assault when he was 7 years old by being forced to fellate an older boy and that Shepard's alleged sexual approach brought back angry recollections of that incident.

The defense also claimed that at age 15 McKinney had a consensual homosexual contact that he found "confusing." But if McKinney's earlier forced homosexual experience was so offensive and traumatizing, why did he agree to a consensual gay experience eight years later? Why did he not become engaged and lash out at his partner then?

As for feeling "five minutes of rage" after Shepard's alleged advance, as McKinney's attorneys claimed, that seems unlikely. McKinney had the time and the self-control to drive his vehicle to a remote location and tie Shepard securely to a fence before continuing to beat him. That does not sound "out of control." It sounds like a plan of action.

Associated Press reporter Robert Black tried to explain the "gay panic" defense in a slightly different way as the theory that "a person with latent homosexual tendencies will have an uncontrollable, violent reaction when propositioned by a homosexual."

But the whole notion of "latent homosexuality" has pretty much been tossed on the slag heap as an invalid concept. As sex researcher C. A. Tripp pointed out in The Homosexual Matrix:

"The term (latent homosexual) is virtually undefinable unless one assumes that the individual has in some sense already eroticized at least a few attributes found in same-sex partners - and in that case, the person firmly meets either the homosexual or bisexual definition," whether they act on those desires or not.

Certainly in McKinney's case having "consensual" homosexual sex at 15 does not sound very latent by anyone's standard.

There is another version of the homosexual advance defense - but stripped of all its ponderous psychiatric baggage - which asserts that if a gay man expresses interest in another man, that means the gay man thinks the other man might also be gay.

This is alleged to be so upsetting and offensive to the straight man, such a threat to his self-image, honor and self-esteem that he may feel it is necessary to attack the gay man to avenge the insult and restore his honor.

It seems likely that some heterosexual men (and many closeted gay men) do in fact have this response, particularly in the South and in some rural areas where reputation is so vitally important and the so-called "culture of honor" prevails.

But, of course, McKinney could not appeal to this defense since he acknowledged a "consensual" homosexual experience and, more important, had allegedly already told Shepard that he and Henderson were also gay. So the alleged approach could have come as no surprise.

Still, other defendants do try to make this claim. All they need is one or two men on a jury to share their reaction. But however much it may reflect prevailing cultural mores, it is important not to honor this defense in the law.

Finally, there is a version of the homosexual advance defense in which defendants simply try to imply that any invitation to homosexual activity, any contact with homosexuals or homosexuality, is so offensive, so disgusting to any heterosexual man that he naturally feels offended and angry.

This defense too, is probably still hinted at in some areas of the United States, especially when no other defense seems available. But the notion is clearly false and will become more obviously false as the acceptance of gays continues to spread. Most heterosexual men, even now, are able to say, "No thanks, I'm not interested" and that can be all there is to it.

The reason for refusing to accept any of these defenses is the same: One important way to discourage men from beating up gays is to stop accepting the excuses they offer after they have done so.

Originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1999.

Review: Children, commitment and consequences are among the forces that press straights to shoulder the full responsibilities of adulthood. Being a parent may not be an obligatory part of the formula, but it's still time gay male culture got in touch with its inner grown-up. [Books reviewed: Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, "Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America"; John-Manuel Andriote, "Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America"; Daniel Mendelsohn, "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity"; and Robin Hardy and David Groff, "The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood".]

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TO BE A HOMOSEXUAL in 1999 is to stand on the curb during the New York gay pride parade and feel your eyes water, faster than you can stop them, as row after row of openly homosexual police officers march by, in full uniform. Behind them, supporting them, the NYPD marching band:this from a police force whose members, some of them, had been known to turn their backs on their homosexual colleagues in earlier marches. To be a homosexual in 1999 is also to watch as, later in the same parade, a flatbed truck rolls past bearing a banner proclaiming WWW.RENTBOY.COM. On the platform, a dozen or more dancing hustlers wear only biker shorts or briefs. In due course they liberate themselves from their clothing altogether. They cover their crotches with their hands but offer generous glimpses of the goods. Later, some of them are told by on-duty police officers to leave or face arrest.

It was odd to see these two species, the men (and women) in their NYPD blues and the boys in their birthday suits, marching in the same parade, as though they had anything to do with one another. Odder still was that they had a great deal to do with one another. Some of these homosexual men become gay boys when they take off the blue uniforms after work and go down to the bars in Chelsea. Some of these gay boys become homosexual men when they put on creased trousers and report for their day jobs.

In individual gay men, the tension between the competing identities of ordinary adult citizen and "boy" - as in, "He's one cute boy, for 35" - can be energizing and endlessly amusing. Individual people, after all, can have it both ways, up to a point. In the struggle to define the public image of homosexuality in America, however, the two make war. The gay establishment tells heterosexual America: "We are just like you." And the boys, grinning, say just as loudly: "Like you? The last thing in the world we want is to be like you!" For 30 years, the identity paradox - the uneasy coexistence and sometimes open warfare of the adult culture with the "boy" culture - has turned the gay rights movement into a battle with itself.

"No book before has attempted to follow the germ of rebellion which began with Stonewall, as it blossomed in other cities into a national political movement," write Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, both of the New York Times, in their introduction to "Out for Good." Having conducted about 700 interviews with 330 people over seven years, they intend, they say, to record "a definitive history of the movement," beginning with New York's landmark Stonewall riots of 1969 and ending in 1987, when the AIDS crisis was in its ghastly full bloom. No book as ambitious as this one can be perfect. On the whole, however, the authors have succeeded in what they set out to do. The story - and it is a big, dense, messy, colorful, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, depressing story - is told with political acumen, reportorial vividness and narrative flair. The book is a remarkable accomplishment. Not least remarkable is its demonstration that the gay rights movement has been at least as decisively shaped by its internal struggles over identity as by its struggles with its opponents on the outside.

Though some black civil rights leaders huff and puff to repudiate any resemblance between their struggle and the gay-rights movement, the similarities seem hard to deny. Homosexuals faced legal discrimination and Jim Crow-style laws: As recently as 1967, the New York State Liquor Authority forbade bars to serve homosexuals, and one of the first activist campaigns in 1969 sought to "integrate" a Los Angeles restaurant (Barney's Beanery) that displayed a "Fagots [sic] Stay Out" sign. Police harassment was a constant feature of gay life, and a sex arrest often meant the end of a job or a career. (This problem is not yet solved. In Texas a year ago, two men were arrested for having sex at home.) In 1977, citing Leviticus, the Ku Klux Klan called for the execution of all homosexuals.

Particularly in the 1970s, gay churches were burned by arsonists, rebuilt, burned again. In 1973, 32 people died when an arsonist torched the UpStairs bar in New Orleans; one man who survived was notified on his hospital bed that he had been fired from his job as a schoolteacher. There was, and is, a drumbeat of violence, which is a sort of terrorism. Although it is true that homosexuality is not a race and, unlike ethnicity, has behavioral components, it is also true that, since the 1970s, racial discrimination and anti-black sentiment have been driven not by skin color racism, as such, but by fears of a stereotyped "black lifestyle." The supposed "black lifestyle" centers on crime, drugs and idleness, whereas the supposed "gay lifestyle" centers on promiscuity, disease and political extremism; but the aversions engendered by the two clusters of anti-social stereotypes are not so very different.

Why, then, has the gay movement so utterly failed to attain the gravitas and moral traction of black civil rights? A lot of reasons; and boys prancing around in the altogether must be prominent among them. To the consternation of many straight people - and many lesbians - gay men were doing everything in their power to be seen as sex-obsessed party animals. "Gay liberation," say the authors, "had somehow evolved into the right to have a good time - the right to enjoy bars, discos, drugs and frequent impersonal sex." One gay leader is quoted as saying, "Never forget one thing: What this movement is about is f-ing."

The party ended in July 1981, only 12 years after it began. "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals," said a New York Times headline on July 3. Even before AIDS, as John-Manuel Andriote, a Washington-based journalist, notes in "Victory Deferred," urban gay men were infected with diseases - gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis - at rates otherwise seen only in Third World countries. By the late 1970s, even before AIDS emerged, one doctor with the San Francisco public health department was warning, "Too much is being transmitted here."

"Victory Deferred" does not deliver quite what its subtitle ("How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America") promises; its real concern is how AIDS changed gay activism in America. About "gay life in America" - about the sick and the dying, and about the hearts and lives and tears of homosexual men and women - Andriote says little. Rather, his book is a comprehensive survey of institutional responses: how care-giving organizations, arising overnight, strained to the breaking point and beyond; how a few hardscrabble AIDS groups became, after the government started spending big money, 18,000 organizations, many of them run by expense account professionals; how, with astonishing success, desperate and outraged homosexuals created what amounted to their own Food and Drug Administration. Andriote is more diligent than literary, and he has a weakness for bureaucratic sentences like, "AID Atlanta was the only gay community-based ASO among the eleven RWJ sites to be selected as the program's coordinating agency." Still, he is encyclopedic and knowledgeable. People who want to know how a community mobilized in the face of an unprecedented crisis will want to start here.

In recent years, as the epidemic has receded toward survivability, homosexual thinkers and activists began to rise from the bedsides of the ill and consider the questions that AIDS had only temporarily suppressed. The boy culture seemed deeply implicated in the health crisis. But was it really to blame? In 1997, a group of activists and academics, calling themselves Sex Panic!, argued that AIDS hysteria and conservative backlash, among gays as well as straights, were reviving sex phobia and repression. Robin Hardy, writing with David Groff in "The Crisis of Desire," takes this view. Hardy was a writer and activist who was HIV-positive but died, still healthy, in a hiking accident in 1995. He left behind an unfinished book, which his friend Groff, a writer and editor, has completed with skill. Sometimes the book rages, sometimes it ponders; to Groff's credit, however, its moods seem to belong to one author, not two, and the writing is never less than accomplished. For Hardy, gay identity and gay promiscuity are more or less the same thing. The unfettered exploration of sexual pleasure is liberating not just for homosexuals but for everybody, representing "progress toward a society that values pleasure." Before AIDS, he says, "We believed we were at the beginning of a new age in human relations - and we were." Even today, promiscuous but safe sex is "far more effective - not to mention affirming - than strategies of closure, repression, penalization of promiscuity and enforced monogamy put forward by the state and by some of our big-time thinkers." Hardy regrets having HIV, but he does not regret the sex that gave it to him. "Communal sex," he writes, "is to gay men what golf is to, well, other kinds of men: they find beauty and bonding in it."

It must be said that Hardy is, for the most part, more thoughtful than that. But it must also be said that Hardy's vision seems strange to those of us who lead a different sort of life, who put commitment ahead of sex and who consider ourselves no less authentically gay for doing so. One wonders, too, if it isn't childish to condemn medicine, government and society for their indifferent and moralistic responses to AIDS while complaining about the loss of the sex.

To Daniel Mendelsohn, a classicist and a writer of distinction, falls the task of confronting the paradox that Hardy pushes to one side. "The Elusive Embrace" is that rare thing, a genuinely beautiful essay: a musing meditation on gay culture, on Greek language and myth, on his own family and life, that is not so much written as braided. The voice is intimate, probing, often of a loveliness that brings you up short: "His nostrils were delicate, like snail shells; they trembled when he spoke, if you got that close. I asked him out. His dark hair, when I finally kissed him, was glossy and smelled sweet, like a child's."

Mendelsohn writes: "For a long time I have lived in two places." One place is at the edge of New York's Chelsea, the Mecca of the gay boy culture; the other is in a town an hour away, where Mendelsohn and his friend Rose are raising her young son Nicholas. In the city he is a cosmopolitan who can melt into the anonymous adventurism of the streets; in the town his intimate encounters are with spittle and pediatricians. Why, he wonders, does he never think of straight men as "boys," which is the way he would think of them if they were gay? The answer, in a word: Nicholas. "Children are the secret weapon of straight culture: they have the potential to rescue men from inconsequentiality. Fatherhood has the power to confer authenticity on men; it can be what saves them from eternally being boys themselves."

Playfulness, says Mendelsohn, is what distinguishes gay style from straight style. "Desire and sex are just an expression of an almost willful insistence on constant play," he writes. "Without anyone but yourself to be responsible for - to wait for - there is no reason, really, not to play." Yet he is glad to have Chelsea, the playground, to return to between long visits with Nicholas. "You move between two places," he says. "Gay identity hovers between strange extremes."

This will always be true. The boy culture will never vanish, nor should it. Straight men have poker nights and football outings; gay men have dance clubs and the Halloween high heel drag race. But the balance will shift and is shifting already. Any culture is infantilized, necessarily, when its members are denied the power to enter into adult commitments - to own, to vote, to defend one's country, to marry. Black men, recall, were once "boys," when they were denied the full prerogatives of citizenship and of adulthood. For gay life in America, the epochal change going on just now is the emergence of an agenda advancing not the right to have fun but the right to assume responsibility; to serve in the military, to mentor and rear the young and to marry.

Of those, marriage is the most important. One day America may allow homosexuals to enter into the single most important commitment that adults make, the formal bond to another human being for (one hopes) life. When that happens, gay culture's long adolescence ends. Mendelsohn is right: Children make men out of boys. But so does the bond of marriage. So, for that matter, does feeding your wasted partner, carrying him up the stairs, wiping the vomit from his mouth and embracing him in the darkness. "In sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part": These are words spoken by grown-ups.

First appeared October 27, 1999, in the Chicago Free Press.

A large number of current controversies hinge on whether public funds should be used to display or promote symbols or materials that offend some persons but which others support as promoting tolerance or virtue, or recognizing the contributions or heritage of their groups. One way of defusing this culture war might be to reduce the government's role in the support of advocacy, art, and public symbol-mongering generally.

LIKE MANY PEOPLE who regularly write on public issues, I have developed an interest in examining how people argue about these issues. Not just the arguments one way or the other about specific topics or the merits of specific positions, but the types of arguments people make, the general principles they appeal to, the background assumptions that never actually get stated or argued.

Take a couple of examples. In Plymouth, Mich., recently, high school teachers set up showcase displays about gay history for Gay History Month (October).

The local school superintendent ordered the displays taken down because they were not part of the curriculum and were offensive ("promoting a lifestyle" was his boilerplate language).

The Brooklyn Museum of Art recently mounted an exhibition of supposedly shocking "art" including a bland picture of a black woman with scattered brown blobs (alleged to be elephant dung), titled "The Holy Virgin Mary."

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called the exhibition offensive and threatened to cancel the city's subsidy of the museum, arguing that the city should only be supporting real art.

It is easy to get caught up in the heat of these controversies. Should a gay history display be considered offensive? Does it promote a lifestyle? Does it help promote tolerance and understanding? Is the controversial art any good? Is it sacrilegious? Is Giuliani just playing politics?

But it seems to me that people who argue on different sides of issues like these are tacitly appealing to different models of what the "public" (that is, the government - that is, people's tax money) should be supporting.

One model assumes without argument that since government ("public" entities) embraces all the various views and groups of people in society, it should be using tax money to support and promote the widest possible cultural diversity, points of view and expressive representations (e.g., art, group symbols, etc.).

The alternative model assumes, again without argument, that the government which-in a democracy, at least-represents the whole people, should subsidize and promote traditions and viewpoints that "the people" have in common, that are part of our common cultural heritage, provide undeniable public benefit and have strong popular support.

Thus, for example, the teachers in Michigan could argue that gays are one of American's diverse social groups, that they have made unique if previously unacknowledged contributions to the society, that schools should teach unbiased truth, that knowledge promotes understanding which helps promote social tolerance, that it promotes self-esteem among gay students, and that any objections are based on ignorance, fear, hate and prejudice.

Parents and school administrators can argue that gays are a small minority, that the displays offend most people in the area, that they just create divisiveness and disruption, that they are mere group advocacy, and scarce teaching time and resources should promote things all of us-including gay-have in common.

You can easily imagine the parallel arguments regarding the controversial art in New York. In fact, you can now probably generate new arguments yourself.

Once you begin looking around, examples spring into view: Should the National Endowment for the Arts subsidize controversial performance artists? Should Christmas displays be on "public" (government) land? Should the Confederate flag fly atop South Carolina's capitol building? What about the rainbow flag at the Ohio state capitol?

Should Kwanzaa be treated as a "real" holiday in public schools? Should government employees get Good Friday off from work? Should Robert Mapplethorpe photographs be exhibited at government-subsidized art galleries?

The two sides are fundamentally at odds over how they view society - as a people or as a collectivity of groups - so they diverge over their views of what the government should support and represent. There seems no way for them to compromise or reach an accommodation: The two positions and their partisans will remain in a fundamental strife for all eternity, one gaining a little here now, the other gaining a little over there later.

Considerations such as these might lead someone to a more libertarian approach, attempting to minimize the areas of social conflict as much as possible by reducing the amount of "public" (government) subsidizing, promotion and sponsorship, and leaving social, cultural, and ideological advocacy of any sort to individuals and civic groups.

We might leave the promotion of art, for instance, to the vast army of private collectors, art dealers, art critics, private museums and perhaps even the artists themselves.

In the area of viewpoint promotion, we could leave that to the wide array of think tanks, public policy institutes, philanthropists, advocacy groups, editorial writers and public polemicists.

Instead of having the government take people's money and spend it according to one or the other model of the "public interest," it might be preferable and more peaceful to let people keep their own money and spend it to support the ideas and buy the cultural products they actually want.

But this libertarian view antagonizes both the diversitarians and the majoritarians more than anything, more even than they antagonize each other. Both want to seize control of the public treasury and the government megaphone in order to promote the art, viewpoints, and ideologies they approve of. Both are afraid that if things are left up to individuals and civic associations, they will not get the results they want.

Both may be right.

First appeared Oct. 20, 1999 in the Chicago Free Press.

AS I WRITE, the Boy Scouts of America is considering a proposal to set up a panel to study the current ban on gay Scouts and adult leaders. They may as well do it: It commits them to nothing. When you want to stall, appoint a panel to study something.

Do the Boy Scouts have good reasons for their gay ban? Of course they do. They are concerned that parents will withdraw their boys from Scouting if the Scouts allow gays. They worry that conservative churches that sponsor Scout troops will stop participating (Two-thirds of Scout troops are sponsored by churches.) They are terrified that a horde of parents will sue them over charges of sexual behavior if the Scouts can be construed as enabling them by allowing gays.

But these are not the reasons they discuss in public. Instead, they fall back on more principled-sounding arguments. Are those arguments any good? Most are not.

The Scouts say they are a private, quasi-religious organization and not "a public accommodation." But they also say they are "open to all boys," which sounds very public. Further, the Boy Scouts are chartered by Congress, and numerous government agencies from police and fire departments to school districts sponsor Scout troops. They could not do that for a religious organization.

Further, the Scouts and some individual troops solicit and receive funding, equipment and meeting space from all levels of government. They clearly compromise their private status by taking benefits that are paid for with tax money extracted from all of us, gays included.

The Scouts claim that they have always banned gays, citing the Scout oath to be "morally straight." But it is easy to find in the huge Oxford English Dictionary that in the early years of this century when the Scout oath was written "straight" meant "honest, upright, candid." (It is still used that way sometimes.) One looks in vain for any recorded use of "straight" at that time to mean "heterosexual." That usage was not generally adopted until the 1960s and 1970s.

Should gays then want courts (the government) to force the Scouts to change their policy? I am inclined to think not.

The Scouts also claim freedom of association for their organization. However much we may not like this particular invocation of it, freedom of association is an important principle for gays, as for any minority, and one we should not want to see compromised, even for a short term gain. We relied heavily on arguments for freedom of association during the early years of the gay movement when we had to defend our right to form gay clubs, gay political groups and gay student groups. It is no less important a principle now that our right to form gay groups is no longer generally contested. It might be contested again sometime.

Freedom of association also plays a role in supporting everything from women's coffee houses and gay male bathhouses to gay-specific parades and perhaps even whom we live with.

It may be useful to think of associational freedom as an extension of our vitally important right to privacy. Freedom of association simply extends the boundaries of your privacy to include your ability to determine who you share your life with and interact with in pursuing shared goals. This includes everything from whom you invite into your home -- and whom you exclude -- to whom you want to include in your club, religious group or civic organization.

So I end up concluding that, however much I dislike it, the Scouts should be allowed to keep their ban on gays -- but only if they give up every single government charter and sponsorship, their free meeting space, funding, equipment and other benefits. No gay tax money for anti-gay discriminators.

Are we then stuck with tolerating an anti-gay Boy Scouts. Not for long I think. Businesses in the free market and broad changes in civil society will induce the Scouts to change their policy without government coercion. Here is why:

The social action/social policy arm of the United Methodist Church issued a statement on Oct. 10 calling on the Scouts to abandon their anti-gay policy. The statement read:

"While the General Board of Church and Society would like to enthusiastically affirm and encourage this continuing partnership of the church and scouting, we cannot due to the Boy Scouts of America's discrimination against gays. This discrimination conflicts with our Social Principles."

The statement is particularly important because the United Methodist Church, the nation's second largest Protestant denomination, is one of the largest sponsors of Boy Scout troops -- nearly 12,000 troops that include more than 420,000 boys. A policy statement by so important a supporter can have a powerful persuasive effect. And it will not be the last.

A bellwether of another major source of pressure came to light at a September awards ceremony for business supporters of the Boy Scouts in Providence, R.I.

After receiving an award for his company's support of Scouting, one corporate executive told the Scout group that he disagreed with the policy of banning gays. Another pointedly informed the Scouts that the gay ban violated his company's "commitment to diversity." Yet another executive who won an award two years ago said he did not attend this year's ceremony because the gay ban was contrary to his company's policy.

The extremely popular mayor of Providence said that the city would be forced to "reexamine" its financial support for the Scouts. And a representative of Southeastern New England United Way noted that the giant charity "disapproved" of the gay ban.

The Boy Scouts of America will change on its own when it can assure worried parents that it was encouraged to change by its own supporters.

Originally appeared Oct. 20, 1999, in the Chicago Free Press.

NOW THAT THE LAST National Coming Out Day of the 1990s has come and gone, let us reflect for a moment on a phenomenon that happens twice a year-on October 11 and every Pride.

I will call it Queer Dominance Syndrome (QDS).

During the rest of the year, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders live our common lives. We come out in large and small ways - yes, we are constantly coming out - but we come out and we fall in love and we basically continue on being a lot like people everywhere. Being lesbian, gay, transgender or bisexual might be a central part of our existence, but it is only one part. We are also musicians, academics, ball players, janitors, students, housewives, store clerks. We are ordinary.

QDS changes all that, especially on college campuses.

On QDS days, everyone who is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender is instantaneously queer. We are invited to become radicals. Suddenly, those of us who aren't shy about our sexuality, but who don't advertise it, either, are exhorted to march, wear ribbons, kiss a same-sex person in a high-traffic public area. That is, be someone who you aren't usually. Just to make a point.

(And what that point may be is not clear. GLBTs are more sexual than straight people? We create more explicit signs? We party harder? That we exist is certainly no longer up for debate.)

Unfortunately, those who are more comfortable with these ways of expressing sexual orientation often receive more attention (notoriety?) than those who don't.

Which makes sense, since those who possess a queer sensibility tend to co-opt the movement on QDS days. They prance naked through city streets. They deface property. They are outrageous, rebellious and insensitive. They decide that coming out is ultimately a political act, not a personal one.

Take, for example, what happened on Harvard University's campus this past National Coming Out Day.

Students in Harvard's Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporter's Alliance wallpapered Harvard Yard with signs saying things like, "I praise the good Lord with my wet, quivering clitoris" and "Have more sex. Join BGLTSA." There were signs portraying lesbian sex that read, "We don't enjoy cock at all."

Offended members of BGLTSA responded by posting flyers advocating for a new gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender group. These read: "I don't like the BGLTSA posters. Is there a group I can join with different values?"

Hooray.

The response, I believe, was exactly right.

Those of us who are anti-QDS are not necessarily assimilationist, conservative, or interested in renouncing GLBT identities or freedoms. I stand with columnist Amy Pagnozzi when she says, "Gay rights, civil rights, women's rights, it doesn't matter what issue you pick, the truth is, movements don't get very far if there aren't a fair number of hotheads to goose them along."

But at this point in our movement - and especially on college campuses - we need to ask ourselves: What does it accomplish when we are offensive? Whom are we winning?

More importantly - whom are we losing?

Recently, a new friend told me about the one time those in our community had made her uncomfortable. She was in college and, on National Coming Out Day, needed to go by the kiss-in gauntlet to get to class.

We all have a different tolerance level for public displays of affection, but this wasn't just kissing. It was groping, making out, practically having sex on the sidewalk. It made her angry, she said. She didn't know what this was proving.

It would have made me angry, too, and it does make me angry when I come across it. Kiss-ins aren't expressing love for a partner - they're expressing anger at society for not accepting all sexual orientations. But all that energy could be put to better use by lobbying for employment rights for GLBTs, or asking an employer to supply domestic partnership benefits.

Yet I've found that the people who make the most noise on QDS days are often the least likely to commit to making a real difference. Do I think we should silence those who want to be in our faces about their sexuality? No, of course not. But we can't let the straight world - or our closeted friends - -think that you have to be out there to be out.

There are other ways. Support groups for less outrageous members of the GLBT community is one solution, especially on college campuses, when the choice is often, "Be radical, or be closeted."

"Be-ins" is another answer. Some colleges have started replacing kiss-ins by these "homosexual acts," which often include such radical activity as reading a book, typing a paper, playing with a dog, etc.

The majority of GLBTs aren't queer. We are people who happen to be gay or lesbian, bisexual or transgender. But we have been lax about making our presence felt. We allow those with more radical sensibilities to take center stage.

We need to go back and mentor college students, helping them to understand that the GLBT universe is a much more diverse place than they know. We need to show up at rallies and put a rainbow sticker on our computer if we're not comfortable wearing one on our person. We must speak up on our issues, we must vote, we must write letters and make phone calls. We must remember to never, ever deny our sexual orientations unless we are in physical danger.

So, yes, if you didn't come out on National Coming Out Day, come out now. But do it in a way you're comfortable with, a way that deepens an understanding of who you are. In the end, that is the most radical act.

Originally appeared in National Journal, October 16, 1999.

ON AUG. 30, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the results of the first study of HIV infection rates among young urban men, ages 15 to 22, who have sex with men. The news was not good. In the seven major cities studied, 7 percent of young men were infected - and, bear in mind, these are young young men, still at the beginning of their sexual lives. Ten percent of the 22-year-olds were infected. Among African-Americans, the numbers were higher still. "We're not back to the mid-1980s," when the virus was spreading rapidly, says Dr. Linda A. Valleroy, a CDC epidemiologist who worked on the study. "But it continues."

It is hard to know for sure, but new infections of HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) appear to have stabilized at about 40,000 cases a year, according to the CDC. The vast majority of those cases were avoidable. HIV, after all, is not easy to catch. So why have infection rates stopped declining? What is going on out there?

Jim is 23. He is a man of medium height and light build, with wavy auburn hair and an agreeable face that is lent a triangular shape by his prominent cheekbones. His mother and father became acquainted while using and, for a time, dealing drugs. Later, after his mother was clean, she warned Jim ceaselessly about the dangers of drugs, warnings that he heeded. After her marriage to Jim's often jobless father ended, she raised Jim and his five siblings. His father got involved with crystal meth, borrowed money from Jim, did jail time for shoplifting, and then disappeared. Jim thinks his father may be living in Tijuana, Mexico.

His mother was happy for the first year or so after the divorce but then became manic-depressive and, at times, abusive. She would rage and throw things and hit; she would curse men and predict that Jim would turn out as bad as the rest of them, just wanting sex. For stability, Jim turned to school and church. But he told some church people that he saw nothing wrong with two men marrying each other; by then he was having homosexual fantasies. The pastors barred him from participating in church services and skits for younger children. Jim gave up on religion.

School, however, went well. He was admitted to the University of California (Berkeley). Freshman year, at a gay and lesbian community center, he told a coming-out session that he was unsure of his sexuality. A 28-year-old man offered him a ride home and expressed attraction. They had sex without a condom. "I was in denial about the fact that maybe there were bad people in the world," Jim says. "I wanted to believe that everyone was good. That's what kept me going - thinking that good things were going to happen, and people were essentially good."

Afterward, Jim rushed to have an HIV test and to receive counseling: "All of the education you could imagine," he says. "They really tried to help me make a better decision." An anxious week later, the result came back. Negative.

Jim next fell for a straight man in his dorm, to no avail. He imagined a relationship with an ideal man, but did not know where to find such a man or how to pass from sex to a relationship. He would meet men in sex clubs and exchange phone numbers (after exchanging glances, and more), but nothing ever seemed to come of it. "I would try to date them, but it would always wind up not working."

As the months passed, he despaired of finding a partner, grew depressed. He saw no hope for combining passion with intimacy and began to rely on sex for a sense of human contact. In the fall of 1997, he took to frequenting parks and the booths in porn shops. "Afterward, I felt guilty and kind of dirty, but at the same time it didn't last, so I had to go back. I started to get addicted, basically, to anonymous sex with lots of people."

By the time he was 21, the sex clubs were a fixture in his life. He used protection, but condoms broke. They broke more and more often, so that he sometimes wondered what was the point. "In terms of unsafe sex," he says, "there was a progression."

In November 1997, he entered a period of numb despair. "Since I'd had so much failure with all these different relationships, I just lost hope at that point. It was like I didn't care any more. I was giving up, a little bit." That month, he probably had 100 unprotected encounters.

Every so often, alarms rang and red lights flashed. On five occasions during the past few years, broken condoms or absent condoms would send him, panicked, to clinics, where he received counseling and medication to reduce the odds that the virus would take hold. Each time he would shudder with fear and with sickness from the drugs, and he would swear to change. Each time, the results brought a reprieve. Negative - negative - negative.

But, as he danced on the tightrope, he began to feel giddy. "Part of me felt that if I was having so much unprotected sex and I hadn't contracted HIV, I thought maybe I had a natural immunity to it." In 1998, he tried to be more careful about protecting himself, but he spent the summer hustling for money to pay for his apartment and for school. (All this time he was a successful undergraduate at Berkeley.) Meanwhile, the unpaid sex with strangers continued.

More warnings: In the spring of last year, he was raped in a sex club and bled for a week. Two months later, after a porn-shop encounter, the bleeding resumed. He was in the hospital for three days before it stopped.

Part of him was rational and tried to take control. He would swear abstinence but break down after a month. He was often moving between apartments and felt rootless, isolated. His gym workouts were increasingly making him an object of pursuit. This year, in the spring, he says, "I kind of went a little bit haywire." He would visit the sex clubs three times a week, having multiple encounters, many of them unprotected. "When I got in a certain mood, it triggered me to want to have sex, and I didn't want condoms to get in the way."

In June, yet another warning: The health department called. One of his recent sex partners had contracted HIV; the department suggested that Jim get tested. He did. Still negative.

"I felt good about that," he says. "I started to realize it was an addiction. I had to have sex every day in order to feel good about myself." At last, urged by counselors, he began attending Sex-Addicts Anonymous. A week into the program, however, he slipped, and failed to use protection. On July 1, as he swore "never again" yet again, he came down with a bad case of something like the flu. Once more, he went to be tested. This time, he was full of dread.

"I had this feeling it was going to be positive," he says. In mid-July, the results came back. He had HIV.

The weeks since the virus invaded him have brought despondency, regret, guilt, "a lot of fear and anxiety." To talk to him now is to hear him look back on his own recent life as though across a gulf. Three combatants now struggle to control him. One is the earnest and chastened young man who is going on to graduate school in psychology, and who says: "I guess I'm just wishing that I'll be able to find some kind of peace and happiness before I die. And contentment of some sort."

Another is lust, a demon that still roars and rages and breaks its bonds. Thirty-seven days after his positive diagnosis, Jim lost his self-control and had another unsafe encounter with the man who he thinks may have given him the virus. And 37 days after that, he went to a park for sex, and a condom broke. "I haven't been able to get past this barrier of 37 days," he says, sheepishly.

The third combatant is the human immunodeficiency virus. Jim is obtaining treatment through a clinical trial. The enemy is brutally stupid and brutally cunning. HIV is, yes, easy to avoid. But viruses are ingenious exploiters of vulnerabilities. One sort of vulnerability is an open sore or a compromised immune system; another sort is neurosis, folly, or the intoxicant of lust.

At the margins of neurosis, folly, and lust, human self-destruction is restrained not by self-control but by the embrace of institutions: the stabilizing influence of family, the calming influence of church, the settling influence of a sexual culture in which marriage is legal and expected. To Jim, those institutions all seemed, or were, vanishingly remote. They failed him and he failed them. Because his story is not so very rare, the virus will survive and even thrive. So, I hope, will Jim.

At one point in a long telephone interview, Jim asked leave to wash his face. Later I asked: Were you crying? No, he replied. "I feel like I've already cried a lot." One scarcely knows whether to hold Jim or to hit him. In the end, one simply cries, and hopes.

First appeared on October 13, 1999 in the Chicago Free Press.

SINCE OCTOBER IS GAY HISTORY MONTH, it seems an apt time to correct one of the persistent errors about gay history - the notion that support for gays came only from the political left. In truth, there was a certain amount of support for gays from libertarians and libertarian-leaning conservatives throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps the best place to start is 1960-1961 when two libertarian academics published books that helped set the agenda for future discussion.

In 1960, Friedrich Hayek, an economist and social philosopher at the University of Chicago, and later a winner of the Nobel prize, published "The Constitution of Liberty." Hayek's chief aim was to set out arguments for personal liberty and explain why government coercion was harmful both to the individual and to society.

One of Hayek's key points was that just because a majority does not like something, it does not have the right to forbid it. "The most conspicuous instance of this in our society," Hayek wrote, "is that of the treatment of homosexuality." After noting that men once believed that tolerating gays would expose them to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, Hayek added, "Where such factual beliefs do not prevail, private practice among adults, however abhorrent it may be to the majority, is not a proper subject for coercive action for a state."

Just two years later one of Hayek's students wrote a long article, "Sin and the Criminal Law," for the libertarian quarterly "New Individualist Review." Using Hayek's framework, the article attacked all so-called "morals" legislation - e.g., laws against gambling, drug use, suicide, prostitution, voluntary euthanasia, obscenity and homosexuality.

The article dismissed all these as "imaginary offenses" and developed Hayek's argument that such laws should be repealed because the personal freedom of individuals is what creates the conditions for social progress.

Hayek's influence was pervasive among libertarians. To take just one example, in 1976, one of Hayek's students wrote a 12-page pamphlet, "Gay Rights: A Libertarian Approach," for the fledgling Libertarian Party and its presidential candidate Roger Lea McBride.

The pamphlet, one of the major outreach tools of the campaign, outlined the libertarian approach of repealing bad laws instead of passing new ones. It urged the repeal of all laws that prohibited gay sex, gay marriage, gay participation in the military, gay adoption and child custody, cross-dressing and laws that permitted police entrapment. Many of these have become more pressing issues 25 years later.

The other early libertarian book was Thomas Szasz' 1961 "The Myth of Mental Illness," in which Szasz, a professor of psychiatry at Syracuse University, argued that psychiatry was simply a system of social control, that "mental illness" was just a label for socially disapproved behavior and the goal of all therapy should be individual autonomy and self-understanding for the person seeking therapy.

Just as Hayek provided a powerful theoretical structure for opposing sodomy laws and other government controls, so Szasz provided a powerful general argument against the notions that gays are sick and could or should be "cured."

Szasz' argument was quickly adopted by early gay activists and other advocates for gays. In a pioneering essay in Hendrik Ruitenbeek's 1963 anthology, "The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society," the independent-minded conservative psychoanalyst Ernest van den Haag reinforced Szasz' approach by arguing vigorously against every possible reason that could be offered for describing homosexuality as sick or immoral or unnatural.

"I do not believe that homosexuality as such can or need be treated," van den Haag wrote, and added that when one psychiatrist said all his gay patents were sick, van den Haag replied that so were all his heterosexual patients.

Van den Haag also mischievously turned traditional neo-Freudian theories about homosexuality upside down by arguing that powerful American mothers and passive fathers probably caused most fear and hostility to homosexuality. Because of this family structure, van den Haag explained, boys have a more precarious identification with their fathers. Their resulting fear of feminine identification leads to an exaggerated insistence on masculinity manifested in part by hostility to homosexuality.

Szasz himself applied his general argument to gays in "Legal and Moral Aspects of Homosexuality" in a 1965 anthology "Sexual Inversion," edited by psychiatrist Judd Marmor.

Szasz repeated his arguments that psychiatric diagnoses were merely labels used for social control. Accordingly, attempts to change homosexuals to heterosexual were simply attempts to change their values. Szasz added that there was no basis for saying that homosexuality was unnatural unless one's standard was universal procreation - hardly a modern necessity.

And Szasz pointed out that homophobia arises because homosexual acts seem to devalue the privileged status of heterosexual acts for heterosexuals. If anyone doubts the cogency of that argument, they need only remember that the most common argument the religious right offers against gay marriage is that it will cheapen or undermine heterosexual marriage.

Szasz returned to the mistreatment of gays in 1970 in "The Manufacture of Madness," where he argued with numerous historical examples that modern psychiatry is best understood as a continuation of the Catholic Inquisition but using pseudo-scientific language.

He described the legend of Sodom and Gomorrah as the first recorded instance of police entrapment of gays, noted that the Catholic church opposed homosexuality primarily because it gave pleasure and urged that the proper goal of psychiatry should be to help people value their own selfhood more than society's judgment about them.

There are other pro-gay libertarians and conservatives, but Hayek and Szasz are particularly important for their broad theoretical frameworks.

A COMMON CHARGE against gay conservatives is that we are narrow and selfish, ignoring the needs of the disadvantaged. A typical example of this criticism is a recent article by Richard Goldstein in New York's Village Voice. Goldstein dismisses gay conservatives as "a recent arrival in the movement," then chides the Log Cabin Republicans for including too few poor, black, and female members. Finally, he upbraids Andrew Sullivan, the most prominent gay conservative in America, for focusing on gay marriage instead of things like "justice" and economic "security" for oppressed people.

Among progressives, words like "justice" and "security" are placeholders for a broad range of policy choices. As one recent and especially articulate letter to San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter put it, "our struggle for equality should include the struggle for universal access to health care, a guaranteed living wage, affordable and adequate housing for all," and so on. The writer reasons that these are "gay rights issues" because "we are everywhere." Gay conservatives, whom he disparages as out-of-touch, upper-class white males, are then faulted for not backing his policy preferences.

These critics are dead wrong about the gay right. As a matter of fact, gay conservatives are not "new arrivals" to the movement. Contrary to the widespread pop-history about the Stonewall riot, the American gay civil rights movement did not begin in any radical upheaval of the late 1960s. Embarrassing as this may be to some, many of the organizers of the movement in the 1950s were middle-class, white, male, and distinctly "assimilationist" (read: conservative) in their approach to gay civil rights. While it's true that there were also dedicated communists among these pre-Stonewall organizers, some, like Dorr Legg, were lifelong Republicans. They risked losing their freedom, jobs, families, and homes to a far greater degree than we do now.

Further, the undeniable demographic imbalance in the movement has not been limited to gay Republicans. As Stephen Murray notes in American Gay, even radical "queer" and AIDS street-theater groups have been mostly white and middle-class. Of course, there is no reason to conclude from this history that only conservative, wealthy, white males should lead the movement today.

Aside from its errors of history and fact, the left's critique of gay conservatives suffers more serious theoretical weaknesses.

First, it operates from an unworkably expansive definition of what constitutes a gay issue. If, as some would have it, anything that affects the life of any gay person anywhere is a gay issue, then there are no issues that aren't gay issues. It may make strategic sense occasionally to take sides on other issues in order to form political alliances (and the ideological tilt of those alliances will vary). An all-encompassing conception of gay civil rights, however, would make it illegitimate to focus on narrowly defined gay concerns.

That has profound consequences. Any organization that took this definition seriously would get little done for gay civil rights since it would constantly be distracted and divided by important peripheral questions. To avoid being unduly narrow, we become impossibly wide.

Even granting this limitless conception of gay civil rights, why are gays more qualified to hold forth on race and class issues than, say, a union of bricklayers? Sure, we're not incompetent to talk about them; but we're not more competent by virtue of being gay, either. To avoid being selfish, then, we become arrogant.

Second, accepting the notion that every conscientious citizen (gay or not) should be concerned about the problems of beleaguered groups, the next question is how to deal with those problems. Bromides about justice cannot mask how complicated the inquiry now becomes.

Consider the above-mentioned proposals, for example. There's a good argument that state-controlled "universal access to health care" would mean rationed and inefficient health care, with less incentive for entrepreneurial investment in lifesaving treatments and drugs for diseases like AIDS. A government-mandated "guaranteed living wage" - essentially a dramatically higher minimum wage - would be inflationary and would depress employment, hurting the lower classes most of all. "Affordable and adequate housing for all" is pleasant-sounding code language for things like rent control. Yet rent control discourages private investment in low-cost housing, hardly a boon to the poor. It goes on and on like that.

Third, even on strictly gay issues, the critique of gay conservatives' priorities badly misfires. Same-sex marriage, for example, offers more to Goldstein's disenfranchised constituencies than he imagines.

Allowed to wed, poverty-stricken gays will have an opening to the array of advantages marriage provides, including health care, tax breaks, testimonial privileges, and Social Security benefits. The generally higher physical, emotional, and financial health enjoyed by married couples will finally be available to disadvantaged gays - people that are in far greater need of those benefits than rich white boys are.

Women, whose desire for variety in sexual partners is on average lower than men's, are disproportionately more likely to access the benefits of same-sex marriage. Why belittle this simple measure of justice and security for gay women?

What we have is not a debate between a generous group of people who care about the downtrodden and a stingy group of people who don't. What we have, among other things, is a complicated debate between distinct visions of how to help them. That's a serious discussion, unlike the polemical one Goldstein and friends want.

The Religious Right theocrats may win an occasional skirmish, but by all accounts they've been losing the "culture wars" for some time. The public has reached consensus on abortion (leave it legal, except for viable fetuses about to be born), pre-marital sex (go for it, as long as the partners are of legal age), extra-marital sex (not good, but nothing to impeach a president over), and homosexuality ("They're Here, They're Queer, We're Used to It," to quote a recent cover of the conservative National Review).

These positions can change, of course, and on the gay issue attitudes are still evolving from mere toleration to full recognition of legal equality. But these are battles being waged in a fight that is clearly being won by the hundreds of thousands of gay men and lesbians who are not cowering in their closets. In short, the religious right is on the ropes.

Evidence of this can be found in the response received by a coalition of religious-right groups, including the American Family Association, the Christian Family Network, and Concerned Women For America, which asked the declared presidential candidates to sign an anti-gay "pledge." The statement included the candidate's promise to "uphold the sacred institution of marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman," to "vigilantly defend this age-old institution against any effort -- judicial or legislative -- to redefine it to include same-sex relationships," to "resist all attempts to provide the benefits and privileges traditionally accorded married couples to unmarried 'domestic partners'," to "oppose all judicial and legislative efforts to place children in homosexual households," to "oppose the promotion of homosexuality as normative in America's public schools," and to oppose "special legal protections based on sexual behavior or preference." That's a lot of "opposes"!

The "pledge" departs from sound conservatism -- the belief in limited government and individual liberty -- in a number of ways, especially by demanding intrusion by the federal government into areas typically left to the states (marriage), to local governments (public education), and to private agencies (adoption). And it even appears to urge measures to restrict private companies from offering domestic partnership benefits to their own employees.

Predictably, the GOP candidates who've positioned themselves on the "cultural right" compliantly signed on the dotted line, including Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan, and Gary Bauer. What's news, however, is that all three of the GOP's national frontrunners -- George W. Bush, Liddy Dole, and John McCain -- refused to take the pledge. That, in itself, is a sign of the times.

Perhaps because the hard right is losing, it's interesting to watch some of its theorists revealing their true beliefs. The Sept.-Oct. issue of Family Policy, a publication of the Family Research Council, contains several articles blasting the widespread use of contraception. Yes, contraception! I suppose these ideologues feel that if they're going to lose the culture war, they might as well be honest about what their real aims have always been -- to control and regulate all aspects of private, personal, sexual behavior.

One of the articles is "The Deconstruction of Perversion: Paraphilias Come Out of the Closet," by Patrick F. Fagan, a fellow in family issues at the Heritage Foundation. He blames the easy availability of contraception for the rise and increasing openness of "paraphilias" (i.e., "perversions"), including homosexuality, pedophilia, sado-masochism, and voyeurism.

Writes Fagan, "The 'coming out' of paraphilias would never have occurred without the aid of contraception." Legal and accessible birth control, he laments, has led to "infertile sexual pleasure [becoming] an end in itself," which in turn has undermined traditional taboos. He concludes that only an understanding of "the role of contraception in the advance of sexual perversions" will provide "the substantive moral alternative to the distortion of sexuality needed in late twentieth-century America."

The funny thing about this argument is that, leaving aside the reactionary political program, it contains more than a kernel of truth. After "the pill" became widespread during the early '60s, human sexuality was freed as never before from being necessarily tied to procreation. Heterosexuals who value sex as much for emotional intimacy (or even, post-Playboy, physical recreation) as for reproduction can more easily make the leap into seeing "non-procreative" homosexuality as an acceptable variant of sexual expression.

More fundamentally, the idea that the widespread acceptance and use of contraception could be rolled back is about as likely as the horse-and-buggy replacing the car. If this is the position that the anti-gay right finds itself advocating, than we can rest assured that their jeremiads represent the dying embers of yesterday's fires.