IGF CultureWatch

Saw one of your writers on C-Span last night and loved it! I think your writings are great. Please keep up the important work.
- Rochester, Minn.

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...I was very impressed with his proposals and ideas and am anxious to hear more... I have always considered myself a partisan when it comes to politics but your representative made a lot of sense in suggesting that in the new millennium we progay voters more rightly belong in the independent centrist position. He articulated well many of my own thoughts in recent years since I left the closet and have become more open about promoting my thoughts in public.....Thanks for the good work that you are doing.
- Alexandria, Va.

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I just saw Mr. Rauch on C-Span. As a gay woman (41) I really related with his ideas....Thank you very much.
- Cincinnati, Ohio.

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Appreciate hearing a diversity of views. Keep up the good work.
- Seattle P-FLAG newsletter editor

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Please let your associates know how valuable your program and outlook of true diversity is for the greater culture and for those of us as self identified gays.
- California

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Great talk by Jonathan Rauch
- Duluth, Minn.

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How refreshing, a gay site that is not porno!
- Seal Beach, Calif.

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Caught your C-Span seminar today. Was impressed by your non-threatening demeanor, intelligence and political acumen.
- San Diego

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I had no idea that this organization even existed! I almost fell out of my chair when I realized that there are other gays out there that share my political views. I mean I truly couldn't believe it. Gays have been for so long associated with left wing views that I thought I was all alone out there. I used to voice my political stance to my peers and they thought I was speaking in some foreign language. I began not to even share my political views when the subject came up, because there was never any support. It's like being torn between what you believe in, and what you are! Never having any support even for yourself to take a stance because neither political party seems to want you. Then when I saw these gay and lesbian speakers last night, sharing most of my views and issues, I can't describe to you what I felt. I literally was cheering them on over the television set with no one in the room but my partner whom also shares my stance. I guess what I'm trying to say in a lot of words is to keep on getting out there! I truly believe that there are more of us out there and that the only way to reach them is to get more and more into view! For now I just wanted to express my enthusiasm for what you've all done for me personally. I am truly excited - thank you so much!
- Las Vegas, Nev.

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I'm an old "liberal" from way back, but after hearing Mr. Rauch speak on C-Span at the LCR convention, I felt that the independent party had something to say that spoke to my heart. I am socially progressive, yet fiscally conservative, & feel betrayed by the Democrats, whom I have supported a great deal (although not exclusively) in the past. Thank you very much! Good luck!
- Atlanta

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Saw your rep at the C-Span. WOW. May I get involved, especially as a former Minister (guess why) who wants to continue to use his gifts, education, and experience.
- Ohio

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Thanks for the great web site. Maybe I've found a home finally. I've always been more libertarian than anything, but given a choice between the dems and the party of Bauer and Buchanan, I'd have to vote Democratic. Maybe there's an alternative - Thanks!!!
- no location listed

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I wanted to let you know Jonathan Rauch's speech was awesome. Actually, everyone was great, but I forgot the other names.
- Santa Cruz, Calif.

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...always thought of myself as a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat but I've now having second thoughts. I'll be interested to read the views of your contributors. In addition, I'm always on the look out for good commentary.
- Connecticut

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Was impressed by Jonathan Rauch.
- Indianapolis, Ind.

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Happened to watch CSPAN this evening and was very appreciative of the forum, its content, its participants and most of all, the effect it had on cementing a somewhat slowly drying foundation of thought.... The pendulum has swung from left to right and is finally, coming to rest in the middle. I think that the gentleman from CSPAN is correct. The radical center is where the truth is going to be found. The radical independents, the free thinkers, the Reformists and the Libertarians are going to be coming into their own very quickly. All of us have found ourselves pushed and shoved by the rancor of our legislators, the expediency of our activists and the violent hateful rhetoric of the far right. Our sensibilities have been assaulted and insulted and we want peace, tolerance and respect. The greater portion of society is moderately oriented, but many do not realize it. If you ask one hundred people what political affiliation they belong to, I bet more than 40 percent of them will identify as independent if you give them three options to choose from. Ask around and you will see. Now is the time for the moderates and the reformists to emerge. Opportunity is knocking. The question is who will answer the door and when?
- Omaha, Neb.

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I myself am not gay, but I hold very strong feelings about the unfair treatment of a minority. I come from Green Bay, WI where the only racial diversity is our football team, and open homosexuality seems to not be an option at this time....good luck with this site and everything you have to say. I know I will listen carefully.
- Green Bay, Wis.

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I heard Mr. Rauch at the annual Log Cabin meeting in N.Y.C. I was so excited by his ideas. I have been thinking like this for years with absolutely no one who agrees to even discuss this stimulating topic. Thank you so much.
- New York City

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Well said.
- St. Paul, Minn.

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I am joining this list because of Jonathan Rauch's brilliant speech at the convention for Log Cabin Republicans - finally a gay man speaking a language I can understand!
- Carbondale, Ill.

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It was a pleasure hearing what Mr. Rauch had to say
- Austin, Tex.

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Thank you C-SPAN. I just caught J. Rauch speaking at the Log Cabin event in N.Y. Now I know something like this group exists. Registered non-partisan, former Republican, but can't embrace Clinton/Gorism. His analogy of Reagan/Christian Right vis-a-vis Clinton/Gay Rights I've often used myself.
- Los Angeles

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I was watching C-SPAN recently, and I was impressed.... Thanks for doing this service to our community!
- Wisconsin

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Greatly appreciate the good work you do!
- co-President, Chautauqua, N.Y. P-FLAG

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What a fabulous site! I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to finally hear other gays express the ideas I've kept inside these last twenty years or so. At last, we are becoming as pluralistic as the society at whole...a true ten percent! Keep up the great work.
- Georgia

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Was thrilled to hear about this website. I actually had been searching the web earlier in the day looking for articles and sites dedicated to queer thought and politics. Even at 26, I've tired of the proliferation of "sex sites" and have become frustrated by the lack of gay websites pertaining to arguing social and governmental progression for the G/L/B/T community. I would like to extend a "Thank You" to you and your colleagues for creating this site filled with interesting and provoking articles. Again, thank you for this site. I feel as though I finally have a place to vent my feelings about current issues that face the gay community.
- Brooklyn, N.Y.

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Mr. Rauch was a breath of very fresh air. Finally!
- Houston, Tex.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: In deference to writers' privacy we've generally removed identifying details from the letters.

Originally appeared in "TRB From Washington," The New Republic, Nov. 22, 1999.

WHY DOES MATTHEW SHEPARD still figure so prominently in the national psyche? More than a year after his murder, the interest has not subsided. The trials of his killers have received hefty media attention; his name is ritually invoked in the debate over hate-crime laws; long articles have appeared in publications as diverse as Harper's and Vanity Fair. He's made the cover of Time. Gay rights groups have been particularly intent on making Shepard a symbol of homosexuality in our time, sending out countless direct-mail pitches featuring him (my mailbox is full of them) and using his story in multiple press releases and TV ads. Last month, the largest gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), raised more than half a million dollars at a gala black-tie dinner in his honor. His parents made distraught appeals for HRC's legislative agenda from the podium.

If the Shepard case proved the need for hate-crime laws, this emphasis might make sense. But the case is a somewhat spectacular example of their superfluity. Shepard's murderers were swiftly caught and brought to justice without any such laws. The first is behind bars for life. The second, denied a "gay panic" defense, may get the death penalty. Even advocates of hate-crime legislation concede this point. They know that such laws would primarily affect much less grave misdemeanors.

Similarly, if Shepard's fate proved the ubiquity of anti-gay murders, then his elevation to totemic status might also make sense. But, again, the evidence shows that Shepard is representative of very few gay Americans. According to the FBI, in 1997, the year before Shepard was killed, a total of three hate-crime murders of homosexuals were recorded in the entire United States. This number is not a fiction. Murders are the least underreported of crimes, because bodies have to be accounted for, and the FBI's number is the total reported by some 10,000 reporting agencies across the country. But let's assume that the FBI understates gay hate-crime murders by a factor of five. That makes 15 anti-gay murders a year. Further assume that around five percent of the population is gay. That means that the chance of a gay American meeting the same fate as Matthew Shepard is about one in a million. Or about the same as being hit by a railroad train.

No, the resilience of the Shepard case is about political and cultural symbolism. It is about the need for a victim so blameless and a crime so heinous that a story about the relationship between gay Americans and straight Americans can be told in which there are no complexities and no doubts. So Shepard becomes a martyr, even though, unlike martyrs, he did not choose to die. Shepard is "crucified," even though, in reality, he was tied to a post, his body and head slumped on the ground. After a while, as in the case of the religious right's Columbine "martyr," Cassie Bernall, the facts cease to matter. What matters is the message. And the message is that homosexuals are innocent victims and heterosexuals are either saviors or menaces. You are either enlightened or a bigot � on the side of the victims or on the side of the murderers.

The political use of Shepard began early. Just after his death, there were appropriate outpourings of grief and shock. But then the organized memorials became political rallies in which any opposition to various legislative initiatives was deemed equivalent to complicity in Shepard's murder. The result was a kind of political blackmail--and it continues to this day. Any qualms, for example, about hate-crime laws, and you are deemed a heartless hater. When the Hate Crimes Prevention Act failed in a House-Senate conference last month, HRC's executive director, Elizabeth Birch, declared that the decision "showed a callous disregard for hate-crime victims and their families." As simple as that. Are you a bad person or a good one?

The marketing of Shepard is also a damaging symbolic statement about who gay men still are in this culture. Other recently murdered homosexuals have not achieved anywhere near the same level of attention. Billy Jack Gaither was killed shortly after Shepard, in Alabama, by two men who bludgeoned him to death and then burned his body on a stack of rubber tires. Unlike Shepard, Gaither had reason to trust his attackers - one of them was a drinking buddy. But, unlike Shepard, Gaither is barely remembered. Or take Private Barry Winchell, a gay soldier stationed in Kentucky, murdered at the same age as Shepard. In a barracks fight, Winchell had bested a soldier who gay-baited him. In retaliation, the straight soldier and a gang of other soldiers allegedly dragged Winchell from his bed and beat him to death with a baseball bat. This crime was committed by U.S. soldiers against someone serving his country and supposedly under the protection of the government. The military is still investigating, but a court-martial of the suspected murderer has been scheduled. Barely heard of the incident? It occurred four months ago, but it has none of Shepard's staying power.

The reason, I suspect, is that Shepard's image serves certain political purposes. Winchell and Gaither were clearly men, not boys. One was a soldier; the other was a middle-aged, burly, working-class figure with only average looks. They weren't upper-middle-class; they weren't well-educated; they weren't waifs. They provoke far more mixed reactions. They threaten the weak, effeminate stereotypes of gay men that the victimologists require and that many heterosexuals are more comfortable with. They were more prudent than Shepard was. Confronted with violence, they were more likely to fight, as Winchell did, than to retreat. They suggest a gay world that is strong and grown-up and mainstream--exactly the kind of world that has no need for pity. They suggest the kind of homosexual world that needs protection from crime - as we all do - but has no need for special sympathy or treatment; a world in which a man might want to serve his country or marry another man, but in which the desire for special state protection is less pressing than the desire to be left alone.

Such a world does not exist in the iconography of Shepard or the politics he has inspired. The way he is discussed suggests a child rather than an adult. The name of his memorial website, www.matthewsplace.com, summons up the idea of a child's safe space. The website depicts him crouched sparrow-like on a waterfall, gazing cherubically into the distance while music plays. The point of this iconography is to divest Shepard of any maturity, any manhood, any adult sexuality - for that matter, any true humanity. It is literally to infantilize him, to turn him into a symbol that is at once pitiful and utterly unthreatening to the stereotypes that still burden most homosexual men, stereotypes that continue to weaken our self-confidence and self-respect.

There was a time when African American men were also routinely referred to as "boys," but I don't think civil rights groups ever emphasized this image in order to gain equality. They realized instead that it was only when black Americans stopped being viewed as children that equality was conceivable. The marketing of Matthew Shepard in death is nowhere near as horrifying as what was done to him in life. But that doesn't make it any more palatable. Or any less detrimental to the cause of homosexual equality as a whole.

Originally appeared in the Times of London, November 20, 1999.

Peter Wildeblood, diplomatic correspondent for a British newspaper, was convicted and imprisoned in 1954 for homosexual relations, his case a cause c?l?bre in the United Kingdom. His real crime was that he refused to be ashamed.

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"I DID NOT BELIEVE such things could happen in England, until they happened to me." Thus wrote Peter Wildeblood 44 years ago, his name then a household word. He died last week in Vancouver, aged 76, forgotten. Today I doubt whether one Briton in a thousand would know a thing about him.

Our obituary page this Tuesday summed up accurately if bleakly: "In March 1954 Peter Wildeblood, then diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail, was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment for homosexual offences, together with Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Major Michael Pitt-Rivers. The Montagu case, as it came to be known, was a cause c?l?bre. It had a direct influence on the Wolfenden Committee, whose report in 1957 recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private be legalised, proposals which were finally passed into law in 1967."

I learnt the name of the man who had exercised so profound an influence on my own and others' lives three years ago, when asked to review for The Times a somewhat luridly entitled book, Heterosexual Dictatorship. The book, a study of male homosexuality in postwar Britain, by Patrick Higgins, proved careful and scholarly - and gripping. Wildeblood irritates Dr Higgins, as he irritated many of his contemporaries, but his story is recounted fairly.

He did not irritate me. So when, earlier this year, the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson asked me to write a new preface to Wildeblood's book, I was eager to read it.

Against the Law, first published by Weidenfeld in 1955, had long fallen out of print. It caused a sensation in its time. Even The Daily Telegraph of the day thought it "a very courageous, honest book which can do a great deal of good," though public libraries declined to stock the book, while many bookshops kept it out of sight.

Weidenfeld has republished now as part of its 50th anniversary - as it turned out, almost on the day the author died.

Though undoubtedly a partial account (and though, like Higgins, I doubt Wildeblood's conspiracy theories) the story is remarkable. Remarkable, of course, for the tale it tells of arrests, harassments and police persecution; of the trial and of the imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs which followed. But more remarkable for the snapshot it gives us of attitudes to homosexuality in 1950s Britain, a world in which the judge in the trial, summing up to the jury, could call Wildeblood's (seized) correspondence "nauseating" and imply that anyone who admitted to being homosexual was so vile that the chances were that he was a criminal as well.

The case involved consensual behaviour of an unexceptional kind between adults, all over 21, in private, at Beaulieu. That one of the accused, Wildeblood, was not prepared to slink off into the release of the shadows afterwards but determined to tell his story in an unashamed way, was considered incredible. This book made publishing history - and as late as 1955, when half my readers today will have been alive. It was not long ago, yet almost another world. That is what is most remarkable of all.

"That night, a woman spat at me," Wildeblood wrote. "She was a respectable looking, middle-aged, tweedy person wearing a sensible felt hat. She was standing on the pavement as the car went by. I saw her suck in her cheeks, and the next moment a big blob of spit was running down the windscreen.

"This shocked me very much. The woman did not look eccentric or evil; in fact she looked very much like the country gentlewomen with whom my mother used to take coffee when she has finished her shopping on Saturday mornings. She looked thoroughly ordinary, to me. But what did I look like to her? Evidently, I was a monster."

Around this time, the Daily Mirror printed a photograph of Wildeblood, his lips touched up by the newspaper to make him appear to be wearing lipstick. What so troubled the Establishment of the day was not that homosexual practices went on - everybody knew they always had and always would - but that anybody would openly declare himself to be "a homosexual." At the time (Patrick Higgins explains) the ruling wisdom on these matters was a kind of pseudo-science. Once discredited, science is always renamed "pseudo-science," but it seemed as solid then as our science on social questions - such as drugs - may be today.

According to that science, a homosexual act was something into which almost any man might fall if exposed to what experts believed could become an epidemic unless suppressed. Those who did sometimes fall were called "perverts." A smaller group (it was held) were born homosexuals with no potential to be heterosexual, and were the victims of a sort of medical misfortune. Such unfortunates were classified as "inverts." There was some sympathy for inverts, none for perverts, these latter being in some sense the spreaders of the rot.

To such a view, outgoing Peter Wildeblood, willing to trumpet his sexuality and (worse) to claim that there were many like him, and to speak the language of rights, was an infuriating phenomenon.

Sir John Wolfenden did not care for him at all. The name Wolfenden has become associated with liberal reform but from Higgins's scrupulous account of the Wolfenden Committee's work, Sir John emerges as a cold and ambitious man with an eye to the main chance. He and his committee, charged with reviewing the law on homosexuality and prostitution, found it distasteful to name either, so, taking their cue from a biscuit of the same name, dubbed the objects of their inquiry "Huntleys" and "Palmers."

"What about our Huntleys," Wolfenden wrote to the secretary of his committee, "...they are not likely to come as official witnesses and if they did they would hardly be at their best when cross-examined by a committee." But he did want some of his committee to talk to some Huntleys, off the record, about their lives.

Wildeblood (now out of prison, his book published) wanted to talk on the record. A reluctant Wolfenden conceded. Nobody knows (though I doubt it) whether Wildeblood's evidence itself influenced the final report as much as his earlier trial and book had, by troubling public opinion, influenced the climate which triggered the whole inquiry.

Wolfenden's son, Jeremy, admired Wildeblood and it is said they later became friends. Before winning a scholarship to Oxford, Jeremy had told his father he was gay. John Wolfenden was horrified, writing to suggest "we stay out of each other's way for the time being." Jeremy died, probably of alcoholism, about twelve years later.

These are strange tales. Wildeblood and Wolfenden are gone. Other figures - Kenneth Tynan, who acted as surety for the arrested Wildeblood; Peter Rawlinson, his defence counsel; John Gielgud, whose own trial in 1953 stirred public anxiety alongside Wildeblood's; Lord Longford, who greeted him from prison; Lord Montagu himself - flourished into a new age.

For a while Wildeblood enjoyed something of a second career as a scriptwriter, but never shook off the suspicion that he had been a bit of an attention-seeker. His last years were spent, after a stroke, quadriplegic and speechless. The modern gay establishment has been no kinder to him than the 1950s, regarding his plea for tolerance for "good" homosexuals as Uncle Tomism. Like so many human bridges between eras, he is charged with insurrection by the old, dismissed as a compromiser by the new.

And attention-seeking? The same words were chosen by Alastair Campbell to describe me last year when I mentioned something known but for some stupid reason not acknowledged about Peter Mandelson.

Attention-seeking is what irritates us about Peter Tatchell. It is an often unlikeable quality, but I wonder where many just causes would be without it?

In saluting Peter Wildeblood I prefer to remember the courage which accompanied the self-advertisement. Everyone counselled silence, and he chose noise. He did not choose to be exposed but, placed at the mercy of events, he chose to become their master.

His book was a voluntary act. "Very faintly," he wrote, "as though at the end of a tunnel, I could see what I must do. I would make a statement ... I would simply tell the truth about myself ... I would be the first homosexual to tell what it felt like to be an exile in one's own country. I might destroy myself, but perhaps I could help others."

Peter Wildeblood had a difficult life. I would like to think I might have spoken in his cause even at the risk of being called an attention-seeker. From one attention-seeker to another, Peter, rest in peace.

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.