IGF CultureWatch

Appeared June 3, 1998, in the Miami Weekly News, and other gay newspapers.

IN NEW YORK CITY, Cardinal John O'Connor was furious over a proposed law extending certain legal rights to gay and unmarried couples. Said the Cardinal, recognizing domestic partnerships is tantamount to "legislating that marriage does not matter." He added, "it is imperative, in my judgment, that no law be passed contrary to natural moral law and Western tradition." Natural morality, that is, as interpreted by Cardinal O'Connor.

The New York bill, which was passed by the City Council despite the Cardinal's objections, requires city agencies (not private businesses) to treat unmarried couples who are registered with the city clerk the same way they treat married couples. A surviving partner is allowed to live on in a rent-stabilized apartment, for example. And registered partners of city employees are eligible for family health insurance. The bill was proposed by Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican backed by the Log Cabin Club, the gay GOPers. Giuliani defended the bill as "a human rights issue" aimed at preventing discrimination.

Governments like New York City's are merely following the lead of the private sector, where one out of ten organizations now offers some kind of domestic partner benefits, according to surveys. And the majority of DP policies are written to apply to both same-sex and opposite sex couples, as in the New York proposal. Personally, I don't believe it's wrong to limit benefits to same-sex only domestic partners (as the Walt Disney Company does). Straights, after all, have the option to wed. That's why I feel little sympathy for the Bell Atlantic employee who is suing the telephone giant for denying health benefits to his live-in girlfriend (and claiming he's being discriminated against for NOT being gay!).

Of course, the argument over whether DP benefits should be granted to all unmarried couples or only those of the same sex (who would get married if they could, but legally can't) is a debatable point within the lesbian and gay community. Gay moderates (often labeled as assimilationists) tend to favor same-sex only DP because it most narrowly solves the imbalance in marriage laws, serving as a substitute until true marriage equality can be achieved. Employers are thus making amends for an unfair government dictate by creating a somewhat more equal playing field. In fact, some argue, opening domestic partnerships to heterosexuals who choose not to marry does, in fact, undermine marriage.

This view is opposed by some lesbian and gay "progressives" who regard marriage as an oppressive, patriarchal institution. Therefore, they say, benefits should be offered to both gay and hetero couples who want equal benefits but don't want to be committed to the institution of matrimony.

Interestingly, an even more expansive view is being supported by some religious conservatives. In San Francisco, the city's Catholic Charities objected to an ordinance requiring city contractors to give benefits to their employees' gay, lesbian, and straight unmarried domestic partners. Archbishop William Bevada accused the city of trying to force the Roman Catholic Church to violate its moral teachings. An agreement was hammered out in which Catholic Charities now allows any employee to designate "a legally domiciled member of the employee's household" to receive benefits formerly provided only to a spouse. Similarly, San Francisco-based BankAmerica (now merging with NationsBank) permits an employee to sign up any adult household member, including relatives -- a more encompassing definition of domestic partners, to be sure, but one in which the very nature of partners as spousal equivalents, rather than mere housemates, is jettisoned.

The Catholic bishops in California are now objecting to a bill being debated the state Assembly because it does NOT include household members who are related by blood, specifically saying they would approve of the bill if it included household relatives (such as an adult child sharing a home with an elderly parent). An argument could be made that such a DP model, entirely separate from the religious trappings of marriage, mitigates much of the religious-based criticism DP benefits face (in California at least). By including non-romantic relationships, it gives religious conservatives the option of pretending the DP relationship needn't be a sexual one, and thus they can close their eyes to the gay relationships that will be included.

Of course, all these variations on a theme wouldn't be necessary if gays could simply marry their partners, like everyone else. Either that will happen, I predict, or get ready for DP benefits so broadly defined as to include acquaintances and pets.

Originally published in The Wall Street Journal June 2, 1998.

IN 1996, NYNEX, now part of Bell Atlantic, began offering health benefits for partners of employees in long-term, committed homosexual relationships. "We wanted to be fair to our employees," says a company spokesman. "If same-sex domestic partners could get married, then there would be no need for this policy."

Paul M. Foray, a cable splicer with 28 years on the job, applied for the benefits last year but was turned down. The reason: His partner was a woman. On May 18 he sued Bell Atlantic in federal court, charging the company's policy violates U.S. laws against sex discrimination.

"Given the fact that his domestic partner is female," the complaint says, "Foray was denied benefits because he is a male." If the courts agree with himand his argument is plausibleit will become legally risky for companies to offer partner benefits to gay employees without also offering benefits to heterosexuals who are, to use a quaintly judgmental phrase, "shacking up."

Mr. Foray's suit is the first of its kind against a private employer, but state and local governments are under the gun already. In 1996 Oakland, Calif., set up a gay-only partnership program for city workers, but the state labor commissioner ruled last year that excluding heterosexual couples constituted illegal discrimination. In April, after a long battle, Oakland gave up and opened its program to unmarried heterosexuals. In February, the city attorney of Santa Barbara, Calif., likewise opined that gay-only benefits were illegal, and the city extended its program to include heterosexuals.

Why doesn't Mr. Foray marry his partner? Through his lawyer, he says, quite reasonably, that that's his own business. Unmarried cohabitation suits many peoplemore and more of them, in fact. Since 1985, the number of unmarried opposite-sex couples living together in the U. S. has doubled, while the number of married couples has risen by only 7 percent. The proportion of unwed cohabiting couples who have children under 15 (now about one third) has grown even faster.

For some people, cohabitation works; but it is not the same as marriage. Research suggests that cohabiting women are more than twice as likely as married women to be victims of domestic violence, and more than three times as likely to suffer depression; cohabiting partners tend to be less sexually faithful and less likely to invest together. "Partnership" is less durable than marriage, which shouldn't be surprising. Marriage, after all, is much more than a legal certification of a pre-existing relationship; it uses a thousand subtle social mechanisms - like rings, weddings and joint invitations - to help bind couples together.

Mr. Foray's discrimination complaint suggests that he understands this. His filing says that Bell Atlantic's policy is "imposing burdens on the employee such as the need for health tests, the need for a marriage ceremony, and the need for a divorce proceeding to terminate the relationship." What a bother. Hawaii's domestic-partner law, which applies to straight and gay couples, allows the "reciprocal beneficiary" relationship to be terminated by either partner without the other's consent or even knowledge.

The trouble is that there are a lot more heterosexuals than homosexuals. In companies where partner benefits are offered to all, two thirds of the users are typically heterosexual, according to the Spectrum Institute, a group that advocates "inclusive definitions of family." So, with or without Mr. Foray's lawsuit, the attempt to reserve "partnerships" for same-sex unions is likely to prove unsustainable. Gay activists who want partner benefits are more than happy to ally themselves with heterosexual supporters of such benefits; the "pro-family" lobby dislikes unmarried partner benefits of any sort. There is no one to lobby for the most sensible policy: restricting partner benefits to people who can't legally marry.

Thus, all three of the states and all but a handful of the municipalities that offer domestic-partner programs for their workers include opposite-sex couples; so do the large majority of corporate programs. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's new proposal to give domestic partners in New York City most of the civil benefits of marriagefrom jail visitation to joint burial in the city cemeterymakes no distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals.

The sad irony is that the option that clears up the whole mess most humanely gay marriage is also the option that social conservatives are least willing to consider. Society should send a simple message: If you want the benefits of marriage, get married. To legalize same-sex marriage and eliminate domestic partner programs would reinforce that message instead of undermining it. Instead of marriage-lite and regular marriage, there would once again be only marriage.

I don't expect that social conservatives will wake up tomorrow morning and embrace gay marriage. They will instead fight rear-guard actions against partner benefits to little avail. Marriage will be weaker as a result. Being against gay marriage and being pro-marriage are not, as it turns out, the same thing.

First published in the Windy City Times May 28, 1998.

THE MAJOR PROBLEM IN RESEARCHING gay history is the virtual absence of reliable source material. The public record usually expunged references to gays, gays themselves were largely silent or silenced, and literary sources and histories, written by our opponents, are defamatory.

In that light, fifteenth century Florence is uniquely valuable. During the Renaissance, Florence developed a reputation for being pervaded with homosexuality - "sodomy" in the language of the time. Smarting from this reputation, reeling from population loss suffered during the Black Death, and pressured by homophobic clerics, in 1432 the city government set up a judicial panel called "The Office of the Night" exclusively to solicit and investigate charges of sodomy.

Remarkably, most of the records of that body survived in the city archives and provide the basis for Michael Rocke's historical reconstruction of Florentine homosexuality, "Forbidden Friendships."

Rocke's book received excellent scholarly reviews, but little popular attention, when it was first published two years ago. Now issued in softcover (at half the hardbound price), it deserves a wider readership by gays who may find the lives of men half a millennium ago and across the seas a distant mirror of our own lives, full of fascinating similarities and disconcerting differences.

By Rocke's reckoning homosexuality really was pervasive in Florence. In the small city of just 40,000 people, he estimates that 17,000 men were incriminated on charges of "sodomy" during the 70 year existence of the Office of the Night. That amounts, he points out, to nearly half the male population of the city during two generations. Whether Rocke's population estimates are accurate or not, such a prevalence for allegations of sodomy is remarkable and would appear to implicate a substantial minority of the male population over two generations. And that estimate no doubt misses others who did not come to judicial notice.

To explain the high number of sodomy reports, Rocke points to the city's unusually late average age of marriage for men, roughly 30 to 31, and the large number of men who remained lifelong bachelors-approximately 12 percent of the male population.

These facts produced a large population of young, unrooted, sexually vigorous males in a city where many women were sheltered by their families or otherwise inaccessible. This led many men to engage in sex with other males. Unsurprisingly, most of those accused of sodomy, or who voluntarily confessed, were younger than 35 or unmarried older men.

Generally, the older partner in the sexual relationship was expected to penetrate the younger one, very much in the classical fashion; no doubt there was an expression of power or dominance in the arrangement. However, there were also reports of older men who sought to be penetrated, and some who sought reciprocal relationships.

Even more, although historians routinely claim that fellatio was widely viewed with distaste in the Mediterranean area, it was a far from a rare activity. It was specifically mentioned in 12 percent of the case reports and was likely unreported in others.

Properly wary of imposing anachronistic models on the past, Rocke repeated stresses that these men were not "homosexual" much less "gay," and that they were not involved in anything like a modern gay subculture. No doubt, as Rocke says, many men whom we would not call homosexual engaged in sodomy since it was such a pervasive part of the drinking, gambling and open sexuality of the single male culture. But despite his protests, clearly some men had a lifelong preference for homosexuality.

Some men pursued young males throughout their lives, sometimes falling in love with their partners and developing relationships lasting two, three or even four years. If they were single, that was likely their primary sexual outlet. If they were married, some still preferred their young men to their wives. One man confessed to a friend (the friend was Machiavelli) that had his father "known my natural inclinations and ways, [he] would never have tied me to a wife." That sounds like a very modern recognition of a homosexual orientation.

Some men apparently undertook homosexual "marriages" in which the men swore fidelity to each other holding hands over the bible on a church altar. Even the "Office of the Night" appeared to regard such men as married to each other.

Similarly, if there was not a discrete "subculture," there were interlinked networks of sodomites who tended to gather for drinking and gambling at certain taverns or brothels (one tavern was suggestively named "Buco"--"the hole," slang for anus), who loaned their homes to friends for assignations with other men, who worked in certain shops or clustered about them, and who tended to congregate in certain parts of town, particularly along the "Street of the Furriers."

"In addition," Rocke acknowledges, "to the copious evidence on their shared sexual experiences, glimpses of their sociable activities appear frequently in the judiciary records: dinners together in inns or homes; gatherings in workshops, homes, or taverns to drink and gamble; trips together to country houses on feast days, and so forth" (p. 189).

Many of these "sodomitical" relationships were apparently tolerated and even encouraged by parents and relatives who saw that they could gain protection and political advancement from a son's well-placed lover. In addition, since older lovers customarily gave their partners gifts or money from time to time, families often welcomed the financial gain.

Florence seems to have been fairly tolerant of youthful sodomy or contacts that did not become too open and notorious. Despite the large number of accusations, fewer than 3,000 men were convicted (less than 20 percent of those charged), many others never paid their fines, and some were let off even when they were clearly guilty. When pushed too hard to punish people severely, the "Night Office" itself engaged in kind of passive resistance, once refusing to convict anyone for 14 months.

One of the most interesting elements is the way in which "sodomites" occasionally resisted the pressures on them. In the small nearby town of Prato, the box where sodomy accusations were to be deposited was repeatedly ripped down.

During the reign of the fanatic and homophobic friar Savonarola in the 1490's, young patrician males, no doubt involved in sodomy, staged a "wild riot" inside the Cathedral during the friar's Ascension Day sermon to protest his puritan crackdown.

Just a few years later on August 31, 1512, a group of 30 young aristocrats staged history's first gay rights demonstration by charging into City Hall, forcing a senior justice official to resign and demanding that the council revoke the sentences of all those who had been exiled or deprived of office for sodomy. (Remarkably, after a palace coup by the Medici family two weeks later, those demands were actually acceded to.)

The recovery of this and much other material makes Rocke's book fascinating and occasionally startling reading, as well as a confirmation of our own continuity with the past.

A final note: The general reader may find the numbers crunching in the first chapters slow going. He may want take the numbers on faith and start reading with Chapter 4 or 5 on friendships and social relations, then go back to pick up the foundations of Rocke's analysis after seeing what interesting results they support.

WHO GETS VIAGRA? Should doctors refuse to prescribe the new virility pill to a man whose wife uses birth control? Should unmarried men be prohibited from taking the drug? What about gay men?

For decades now, gay men have been lectured to by heterosexuals that the purpose of sex is procreation. The possibility of creating life, it is said, stands as the moral foundation of sexuality. Since same-sex couples cannot hope to conceive a child, their sexuality lacks any chance of being moral. And it goes without saying that this sort of moral sexuality can only occur within a valid marriage, which, given the current rules of marriage is yet another reason same-sex couples are supposed to be excluded from having moral sexual relationships.

This tissue of an argument has been the thin flag of gay-rights opponents for a long time, but now it may stand or fall on the wild popularity of Viagra. That drug has caused a sensation across the country as men have flooded doctors and pharmacists with requests. It reportedly works for up to 70 percent of impotent men, a home run for the drug's manufacturer and a boon for the sex lives of couples across the nation.

But how many of those couples will be using Viagra with the intention of having children? From front-page stories, it appears to be very few. Common sense explains that men in their prime reproductive years tend not to be the ones who have impotence problems.

The question of reproduction, however, is all but absent from the rush of attention Viagra is getting. What heterosexuals are interested in, of course, is the drug's ability to enhance physical intimacy, not the possibility of children. And there is nothing wrong with that. Sexual intimacy is one of the most important parts of any relationship, and it is a factor independent of fertility. The importance of sexual intimacy detached from fertility was also the driving force when birth control pills for women became widely available in the 1960s.

These two pills -- one for women and one for men -- reveal the paradox that lesbians and gay men have to negotiate every day. Heterosexual couples, who can biologically have children, don't have an obligation to, while homosexual couples are criticized for not living up to the biological norm that heterosexuals don't have to live up to. More pointedly, heterosexuals are permitted to celebrate their nonprocreative sexuality on magazine covers and prime-time TV shows, while homosexuals are expected to apologize for theirs.

Viagra's popularity isn't such a long step from the tolerance that President Clinton's alleged sex life has garnered among Americans. If anything, the constant drumbeat of reporting on this story reveals how little most Americans actually think about reproduction as a moral argument. The list of moral grievances surrounding Clinton's alleged sexual escapades is a long one, but no one has yet argued that our famously heterosexual president is immoral because he lacked procreative intent.

Would heterosexuals be willing to live by the moral rules that they apply to lesbians and gay men? Should Viagra be limited to legally married couples who want to have children but cannot because of the husband's impotence? Or is sexual intimacy such an important part of an adult relationship that impotence should be viewed as a problem that should and now can be cured?

In this, as in all things, there should be one rule for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. Whichever one heterosexuals think they can live with, homosexuals will live with, too.

IN THE DEBATE over whether to legalize gay marriage, both sides are missing the point. Why should the government be in the business of decreeing who can and cannot be married? Proponents of gay marriage see it as a civil-rights issue. Opponents see it as another example of minority "rights" being imposed on the majority culture. But why should anyone have - or need to have - state sanction for a private relationship? As governments around the world contemplate the privatization of everything from electricity to Social Security, why not privatize that most personal and intimate of institutions, marriage?

"Privatizing" marriage can mean two slightly different things. One is to take the state completely out of it. If couples want to cement their relationship with a ceremony or ritual, they are free to do so. Religious institutions are free to sanction such relationships under any rules they choose. A second meaning of "privatizing" marriage is to treat it like any other contract: The state may be called upon to enforce it, but the parties define the terms. When children or large sums of money are involved, an enforceable contract spelling out the parties' respective rights and obligations is probably advisable. But the existence and details of such an agreement should be up to the parties.

And privatizing marriage would, incidentally, solve the gay-marriage problem. It would put gay relationships on the same footing as straight ones, without implying official government sanction. No one's private life would have official government sanction - which is how it should be.

Andrew Sullivan, one of the leading advocates of gay marriage, writes, "Marriage is a formal, public institution that only the government can grant." But the history of marriage and the state is more complicated than modern debaters imagine, as one of its scholars, Lawrence Stone, writes: "In the early Middle Ages all that marriage implied in the eyes of the laity seems to have been a private contract between two families. ... For those without property, it was a private contract between two individuals, enforced by the community sense of what was right." By the 16th century the formally witnessed contract, called the "spousals," was usually followed by the proclamation of the banns three times in church, but the spousals itself was a legally binding contract.

Legal Regulation of Marriage

Only with the Earl of Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1754 did marriage in England come to be regulated by law. In the New England colonies, marriages were performed by justices of the peace or other magistrates from the beginning. But even then common-law unions were valid.

In the 20th century, however, government has intruded upon the marriage contract, among many others. Each state has tended to promulgate a standard, one-size-fits-all formula. Then, in the past generation, legislatures and courts have started unilaterally changing the terms of the marriage contract. Between 1969 and 1985 all the states provided for no-fault divorce. The new arrangements applied not just to couples embarking on matrimony but also to couples who had married under an earlier set of rules. Many people felt a sense of liberation; the changes allowed them to get out of unpleasant marriages without the often contrived allegations of fault previously required for divorce. But some people were hurt by the new rules, especially women who had understood marriage as a partnership in which one partner would earn money and the other would forsake a career in order to specialize in homemaking.

Privatization of religion - better known as the separation of church and state - was our founders' prescription for avoiding Europe's religious wars. Americans may think each other headed for hell, but we keep our religious views at the level of private proselytizing and don't fight to impose one religion by force of law. Other social conflicts can likewise be depoliticized and somewhat defused if we keep them out of the realm of government. If all arts funding were private (as 99 percent of it already is), for instance, we wouldn't have members of Congress debating Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs or the film The Watermelon Woman.

Privatizing Marriage

So why not privatize marriage? Make it a private contract between two individuals. If they wanted to contract for a traditional breadwinner/homemaker setup, with specified rules for property and alimony in the event of divorce, they could do so. Less traditional couples could keep their assets separate and agree to share specified expenses. Those with assets to protect could sign prenuptial agreements that courts would respect. Marriage contracts could be as individually tailored as other contracts are in our diverse capitalist world. For those who wanted a standard one-size-fits-all contract, that would still be easy to obtain. Wal-Mart could sell books of marriage forms next to the standard rental forms. Couples would then be spared the surprise discovery that outsiders had changed their contract without warning. Individual churches, synagogues, and temples could make their own rules about which marriages they would bless.

And what of gay marriage? Privatization of the institution would allow gay people to marry the way other people do: individually, privately, contractually, with whatever ceremony they might choose in the presence of family, friends, or God. Gay people are already holding such ceremonies, of course, but their contracts are not always recognized by the courts and do not qualify them for the 1049 federal laws that the General Accounting Office says recognize marital status. Under a privatized system of marriage, courts and government agencies would recognize any couple's contract - or, better yet, eliminate whatever government-created distinction turned on whether a person was married or not.

Marriage is an important institution. The modern mistake is to think that important things must be planned, sponsored, reviewed, or licensed by the government. The two sides in the debate over gay marriage share an assumption that is essentially collectivist. Instead of accepting either view, let's get the government out of marriage and allow individuals to make their own marriage contracts, as befits a secular, individualist republic at the dawn of the information age.

First published in the Windy City Times on April 23, 1998.

MORALITY, especially the morality of sexual behavior, has become a topic of late in the gay press and in some recently published books.

Although a few of the discussions have addressed variant sexual practices such as S/M or the propriety of where one engages in sex, most discussions I have seen focused primarily on people who have sex with lots of different people.

The concerns seem to be, variously, that such behavior facilitates transmission of HIV, or inhibits a more fulfilling life within a relationship, or constitutes as an impediment to the social acceptance of gays, or is intrinsically wrong in some unspecified way.

This discussion is all to the good: It is important to keep before us the notion that there are, after all, better and worse ways of conducting ourselves, better and worse ways of living our lives.

One of the most irritating things people sometimes say is "Now, don't be judgmental." I always want to snap back, "Of course you should be judgmental, you jerk. That's what you have a brain for."

We are not machines made to run on a preset program. We have to size things up, weigh them, consider, assess and choose as we go along. Judgments are what enable us to live our lives more satisfyingly, to determine what we want, or what is best for us and to pursue it.

At the same time, however, it is not always clear which are the better or worse ways to act. Not only do we disagree about the best ways to live, but we disagree about what principles apply to our behavior and how to resolve conflicts among them. Then too, people's basic psychological constitutions seem to vary considerably, so moral principles might not apply in the same way to all people.

And there is the basic problem of what justifies moral positions. What is their ultimate aim or purpose or justification? In short, what are morals for? Is it personal human happiness or simple self-preservation? Or is it the well-being of society as a whole, or maybe some Platonic intuitions of The Good? Or is it even the arbitrary edicts of some gods or prophets? You see the problem.

As an apt epigraph to his seldom-read essay "On the Basis of Morality" (1841) the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer used a quotation from one of his own earlier works: "To preach morality is easy, to give it a foundation is difficult."

The issue is particularly difficult for gays for at least two different sorts of reasons.

One is, of course, that gays have long been criticized as immoral for acting on sexual and emotional desires that seemed entirely normal and authentic for them. That led many gays to dismiss all talk of sexual morality as just so much hot air: we know that much such talk is nonsense -- homophobia on stilts, so to speak -- so we assume all of it probably is.

Second, much traditional talk about sexual morality was developed and articulated with specific reference to heterosexuals, for whom sexual morality was more obviously self-enforcing and violations carried their own consequences. But it is not clear how relevant heterosexual morality is to our own lives.

It is useful in this connection to recall the pointed limerick that British novelist Norman Douglas included in his ribald collection "Some Limericks:"

There was a young lady named Wilde
Who kept herself quite undefiled
By thinking of Jesus,
Contagious diseases,
And the bother of having a child.

Although Jesus probably had little impact on the exemplary Ms. Wilde (and no doubt that was Douglas's point), promiscuous or careless heterosexual behavior could have the woeful consequence of unwanted children, possibly a burden to the parents, possibly an unwelcome burden to the taxpayers, which no one desired. Not so for gays.

Similarly, much traditional sexual restraint stemmed from women's physical vulnerability and social inequality. Women, unable to support themselves, guarded themselves from larger predatory males, and limited sexual access to the man who would promise lifelong support. But again that does not apply to gays.

"Contagious diseases" does have continuing relevance for us. Although during the 1970s many of us assumed that sexually transmitted diseases were, at worst, mild inconveniences and of little moral significance, AIDS has reminded us of what everyone knew before antibiotics: Sexually transmitted diseases can be crippling, lifelong and fatal for gays as well as heterosexuals, hence their renewed moral significance for both the HIV-infected and in the uninfected.

The example of disease, however, only serves to remind us how much of traditional sexual morality seems rooted in simple prudence, that is, a rational concern for self-preservation, self-protection, self-regard.

It seems, at first glance, oddly ignoble to have something as important as ethics and morals reduced to mere prudence. But to say "reduced" and "mere" is hardly fair. After all, Aristotle places prudence -- the right exercise of judgment in particular contexts -- high on his list of virtues or excellences. Nor, he makes clear, is it an easy virtue to develop. Certain other-worldly religions and philosophies disparage "prudence" along with its exercise and careful development, but they have little to put in its place.

People who have a firm sense of what they want to do with their life, the kind of person they want to be, and who have a sense of what is likely to bring them happiness and a sense of fulfillment will have a better notion of why prudence is a major virtue and what role it plays in their lives.

What seems to be usually lacking, though, in the current discussions is any very clear acknowledgment that a person might have reason to want to develop one sort of character rather than another, or how some sorts of happiness might be more satisfying or fulfilling than others.

It seems likely that only after that claim is made explicit that we can begin to talk in a coherent way about what role -- if any -- a wide variety or large quantity of sexual experience, sexual knowledge, and sexual pleasure can or should play in contributing to or inhibiting someone's overall goal. Without that issue being addressed, how could there be any grounds for judgment at all?

And it should go without saying that knowledge and experience is going to have a different effect or impact on people depending on the way they incorporate it into their overall lives. If the same experience is going to have different effects, then its moral significance will differ from person to person.

Now we can begin to talk about morality.

Originally published in the Windy City Times on March 12, 1998.

IT IS LIKE WAITING FOR THE OTHER SHOE to drop. At some point in the near future, either the Hawaii Supreme Court or some other court is almost surely going to rule that the state must recognize same-sex marriages.

The effect is going to be remarkable.

For one thing, conservative religious and political groups are going to go absolutely berserk. You cannot imagine how much you are going to hear about how the United States has turned into Sodom, how Satan has seized control of the country, how that makes the second coming of Christ imminent, and how all this proves that the world is going to end at the turn of the Millennium.

Evangelical Protestants, the Catholic hierarchy, and their conservative political allies are going to put almost irresistible pressure on state legislatures to bar recognition of gay marriages performed in other states. Roughly half the states (26) have already enacted such prohibitions, but pressure will now mount in the other states since the issue will no longer be merely theoretical. Few of our state advocacy groups have the resources to resist this pressure, so we will probably lose in more than half those states.

But put aside the legal and political issues. How is gay marriage going to affect us? The two most important results will be how it affects heterosexuals' view of us and how it affects our view of ourselves.

For one thing, it is going to feel very strange. For the first time in your life you are going to actually be able to consider marrying someone you love, with all the attendant duties, obligations, and considerable cultural freight that the institution of marriage brings with it. We have had no practice in thinking about that even as a possibility.

Gays and lesbians who are already coupled will have to think through whether their commitment to each other extends as far as the more complicated and difficult-to-disentangle structure of marriage.

Some couples will hasten to marry immediately, eager to take advantage of the new opportunity and sure that their commitment to each other can optimally be expressed within the legal and cultural structure of marriage. Very likely you know at least one gay couple who is making plans to fly to Hawaii to marry within a month of the decision. Even if they live in a state that bars gay marriage they will do it to "make it legal" as much as possible.

Other couples may choose to marry hoping that legal structure will solidify an unstable or uncertain relationship. But many of those will find, as heterosexual couples have found for centuries, that marriage is not a panacea, that it does not improve the other person (in fact, often the opposite), and that you get out of marriage just about what you put into it.

Yet other couples may feel that their relationship is fine the way it is and decide not to marry. But that in itself will look like a statement about the relationship since they are not taking the newly available further step. That is, relationships that previously looked and felt fully "committed" now if not legalized may seem "not fully committed," even "keeping our options open" without any inherent change in the relationship. Family and friends will wonder if the couple really is committed -- even if the couple really is. That may be disconcerting for some couples.

Those who are single will likely begin to notice mild, subtle encouragement by friends, relatives and other gay couples to "settle down," "tie the knot" and so forth, when marriage becomes available, just as single heterosexuals feel those pressures. On the whole they are harmless and well-meaning. Every culture or society, after all, tends to develop favored forms of behavior, certain ways they expect most people to behave, forms that are believed to conduce to the social benefit.

No doubt, partnerships stabilize gay people's lives somewhat and gay marriage probably will solidify gay partnerships somewhat more, even for those that are not monogamous-perhaps especially those that are not monogamous. The legal bond may help them over rough spots in the relationship and guarantee a kind of rootedness no matter their occasional deviations. So there is a kind of tacit rationale for the social pressures, although it is prudent to remember that such pressures usually aim at social stability and predictability rather than individual happiness.

It will certainly be easy enough to resist that mild pressure. But even so, for single gays, the fact that you will be able to marry will now linger in the back of your mind when you go home with someone for sex, when you go on a date, when you start "seeing" someone. The fact that you could actually marry this person means you will be asking yourself if you really would want to, and that may subtly encourage many of us to take our casual relationships with other gays a little more seriously. That realization will take a while to develop, though, as gays learn to think and talk about marriage and the role they want it to play in their lives.

In any case, however, I suspect that our new ability to marry, even if in just a few states, will inevitably encourage most heterosexual people to take us, our lives, and our partnerships more seriously. If the law stipulates that our partnerships are the legal equivalent of theirs, that will be considerable encouragement for them to begin thinking of us and our lives as equal to them and their lives. Far more than non-discrimination laws, that is pretty much exactly what our long-sought goal of social equality consists of.

But there is more to it than that. Many heterosexuals have in the back of their minds, and some are still brought up to believe, the notion that a marriage certificate basically says, "Sex is OK now." So when gay men start getting marriage certificates, people are going to see the law as asserting not only the equality of our relationships, but an equal status and dignity for our sexual behavior. And that, for many people will be a remarkable and startling thought.

Religious conservatives, of course, will loathe it, because they have known all along that the bottom line of their hostility to gays is our sexual behavior. They feel that if you cannot maintain that homosexual acts are wrong, then you cannot claim that anything at all is wrong, "everything is permitted," and moral chaos will reign. That is why gay marriage upsets them so, why they will fight it with every resource they have.

They are wrong, of course, but we must win to show them that.

FOR ALL OUR TALK about breaking down societal taboos and giving voice to unpopular points of view, we homosexuals have a verboten topic all our own. We have an awfully difficult time talking about moral values.

It's easy enough to understand why. All our lives, lesbians and gay men have been hammered into submission by "family values" rhetoric and the social and legal condemnation that has come along with it. Understandably, we are wary of the coercive power of public morality and the relative ease with which media-hungry politicians and religious leaders use talk about "values" as a wedge to divide folks into convenient camps: American vs. un-American, the saved vs. the damned, us vs. them.

Our collective take on the historical role of public "values" in this country is not an attractive one. Judeo-Christian moral values have been used, many would say warped, to subdue ethnic minorities (particularly blacks) and women into second-class citizenship, while reserving full participation in American society for the archetypal "straight white male," especially those of the WASP variety.

One by one, each of these oppressed groups has thrown off the yoke of value-laden discrimination, and has won civil rights, cultural acceptance, and greater involvement in the life of the nation.

Now that it looks to be our turn (finally) to live our lives without moral condemnation from the outside, we gays seem loath to open up Pandora's box and allow a free-flowing dialogue of our own about the "lifestyle choices" we make as gay men and lesbians.

And woe to those who dare try to broach that forbidden subject matter. We eat these heretics for lunch - pasting them with vicious personal attacks, impugning their motives, overstating their positions and, most discouraging of all, tarring them as "self-righteous" and accusing them of acting like the Queer Moral Majority.

The ones on the cultural right take the most heat. Gabriel Rotello, Michelangelo Signorile, Andrew Sullivan, Camille Paglia, even Larry Kramer - all caricatured as hypocritical, bitchy moralizing airbags in something of a hysterical (panicked!?) over-reaction to their very passionate arguments about the kind of world we homosexuals should be working toward.

Drug use, unsafe sex, public sex, religion, sexism - each of us makes choices in these areas that affect our lives and the culture and society we share. Why shouldn't these issues be open to vigorous, respectful and civil debate?

To be sure, none of these cultural critics is beyond personal criticism. And some sling mud at their intellectual rivals with at least as much vigor as do their critics.

But is that the point? Should personal attacks pass muster as social criticism? Is it all about engaging in a contest for whose private life best reflects her moral philosophy?

We need to find a language with which we can talk about values without difference of opinion being mistaken for condemnation. Otherwise, we have managed to take live-and-let-live moral relativism to an all new level: Not only is your morality your own business, but when someone else shares her ideas about values and life choices, she's somehow violating your "moral space."

Why be offended when someone else questions your ethical choices? Because it might make you second-guess your own value system? Because you're sick and tired of having to defend your life to someone else, thank you very much? To bow out of that conversation is to check out of life, or at least a thoughtful, examined life.

We'll never win the hearts and minds of Judeo-Christian middle Americans if they adopt the same head-in-the-sand intransigence to our view of how the world should be.

Let's set an example, as a community, of how folks can thoughtfully and respectfully examine their individual value systems without condemnation, recrimination or involving governmental coercion.

First appeared in the New Republic January 5 and 12, 1998.

WASHINGTON IS THE CAPITAL of awkward alliances, but few are more revealing than Bill Bennett's recent espousal of the work of one Paul Cameron. In an appearance on ABC's "This Week," and then in the pages of The Weekly Standard, Bennett has openly declared that research shows that the average life span for a male homosexual in America is 43 years. In the Standard, Bennett was so thrilled and shocked by this discovery that he repeated it in italics: "Forty-three."

The source for this information, as Bennett subsequently revealed, is a researcher named Paul Cameron. Loyal TNR readers will fondly remember this curious character. (See "Queer Science," by Mark Pietrzyk, The New Republic, October 3, 1994.) As Pietrzyk reported, Cameron was expelled by the American Psychological Association in 1983 for misrepresenting the findings of others and engaging in dubious research techniques. Among Cameron's "findings" are that 52 percent of male heterosexuals have shoplifted and that twelve percent have either attempted or committed murder.

Over the years he has also argued that gay men are responsible for up to one half of all child abuse cases (despite making up maybe two percent of the population), that they are ten to 20 times more likely to molest children than heterosexuals, and that fully half of all sex murderers are homosexuals. One of Cameron's "studies" included 41 gay men out of a total sample of 4,340 adults. Another was based on interviews with 34 serial killers. One of his "pamphlets" is illustrated by a photograph of an adult male arm dragging a small boy into a public restroom. This is what the former secretary of education thinks is social science.

Bennett's favorite Cameron statistic -- the average life span of 43 for all gay men -- is based on obituaries from gay newspapers during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Useful for some things, that plague! But even then, the statistic is misleading. As any student of these papers knows, the obit sections -- which scarcely existed before AIDS -- are primarily ways to commemorate openly gay people who have died early deaths. (An indication of this is that the same study found that the average age of gay men who died of causes other than AIDS was 42.) These neighborhood papers -- with very limited pages -- in no way attempt to record all homosexual deaths, and rarely do so. In fact, there's no database, in a still closeted world, that could. The statistic, in other words, is based on a skewed sample of a subset of homosexuals in a grotesquely atypical period. It's about as reliable as basing a statistical survey of death rates in the general population from people admitted to emergency rooms.

But this, in some respects, is hardly revealing. There have always been hate-filled cranks out there. What's revealing is that Bennett clearly couldn't care less about the source of his data. It's a great sound bite, the kind of thing that sticks in the mind, something that, even when it's exposed, carries a useful political punch. In the letters section of the Standard, Bennett cites not only Cameron for his early death point, but another man, this time with a medical degree: Jeffrey Satinover. Satinover has argued in print that all gay men are pathological and compulsive; that the most effective policy for them is a fundamentalist religious conversion; and that the Renaissance "could have just as easily been called 'The Great Death,'" since it killed off the anti-pagan hegemony of "Judeo-Christianity" in favor of modern science.

I have no idea whether Bill Bennett regrets the Renaissance, but there is little doubt about his facile use of "facts." Just as typical was Bennett's casual reference on "This Week" to "the great continuing interest of the homosexual male community into [sic] recruiting children into its ranks." Note the generalization. Bennett blithely accuses a whole group of people of wanting to commit the most heinous crime against innocents, with no evidence whatsoever. It was the device once used by anti-Semites. Why should it not now be used by a leading conservative intellectual? And among his "plain evidence" for this in the Standard were remarks by gay leaders condemning pedophilia! Go figure.

No, what's truly revealing is what he infers from his recitation of a gay male life span of 43 years. Does he argue that this shocking "statistic" makes it more essential for gay men to practice safe sex? No: Bennett seems uninterested in that debate insofar as it pertains to gay men (and he has opposed safe-sex education for gay teens). Does he argue that gay men should be monogamous to cut down HIV transmission? Well, not if it means implementing any measures to foster gay monogamy, such as the right to marry or even domestic partnership. Does he argue that the social costs of AIDS make it even more vital to finance HIV research? Funny, Bennett hasn't exactly made a cause of that.

No, the only use Bennett makes of this statistic is that it helps prove that homosexuality is bad and should therefore be discouraged, or, rather that, "if you're a homosexual male in this country, it takes 30 years off your life." And what does he mean by this formulation? Does he believe that gay men choose their orientation and therefore need to be encouraged to make a heterosexual choice? No, he doesn't. On "This Week," he said: "I think the best state-of-the-art science right now is the belief that some people are hard-wired this way." His argument, rather, is that if we don't continue to marginalize homosexuals, then a few "wavering" bisexual men might be tempted to "choose" homosexuality and therefore be more likely to die off at the tender age of "forty-three." Or, in his words: "Some people make the choice, and there are a lot of people in the middle. If there are a lot of people in the middle, if there are a lot of waverers, we should be sending signals ... of what society needs to prefer. And it needs to prefer heterosexuality."

So let's get this straight (so to speak). What Bennett is really saying is that one group of citizens should be publicly stigmatized, denied the right to marry, legally fired at will from their jobs, expelled from the military despite exemplary service, and thrown to the dogs of an epidemic without any social incentives to help rescue them, merely pour decourager les autres. Has Bennett thought for a moment, I wonder, about the morality of this little piece of social engineering? Has his conscience even twitched a little at the thought of using some people's lives (and with AIDS, this is not a metaphor) to adjust the social signals sent to others? One is led to wonder, in fact, if Bennett isn't actually in favor of gay promiscuity, because it's a far more useful didactic tool for him than the discomfiting vision of stable, responsible, homosexual couples.

Imagine if Bennett had made the same argument about African Americans. In that case, there are, in fact, reliable statistics that show that the life span for blacks is significantly lower than that of whites. Imagine if Bennett got on television and declared this to be a scandal, but subsequently opposed any measures to alleviate it. Imagine, indeed, if he used that statistic to defend the right of someone not to hire a black person because one could reasonably infer that a black person would be more likely to get sick. Imagine, in the most apposite case, if he declared that, because of this statistic, black people should not be allowed to marry whites because they would import into white society patterns of life-threatening behavior which need to be discouraged.

Well, the truth is: you can't imagine. Because all of those statements would be regarded as prima facie evidence of racism, and Bennett would instantly lose any credibility he once had. But with gay men and women, such statements are regarded as completely banal, and Bennett actually gains points among some conservatives for voicing them. He will argue -- with a straight face -- that he is not against civil rights for homosexuals, he just wants to tell them what is good for them. He believes, as he wrote in the Standard, that gay men and lesbians are entitled to rights "owed all Americans as Americans."

But that does not, apparently, include the right to serve one's country, a right granted to African Americans as a symbolic mark of their citizenship during the Revolutionary War and to heterosexual women and blacks equally this century. And it does not include the right not to be fired from one's job merely because one is gay, regardless of one's abilities. And it does not include the right not to be imprisoned because of private, consensual sex. And it does not include the right of mothers to the custody of their own children. And it does not include the right to visit a spouse of many years who is dying in an intensive care room. And it does not, critically, include the right to marry, a right declared by our Supreme Court to be one of the "basic civil rights of man," vested, again according to the Court, in the Declaration of Independence, prior to the Bill of Rights, and more fundamental even than the right to vote, a right guaranteed to murderers and prisoners and rapists and deadbeat dads and noncitizens, but not to gay and lesbian Americans for something that even Bennett concedes is "hard-wired" into their identity.

"Rights owed all Americans as Americans"? The truth is, Bennett, consciously or unconsciously, believes the word "Americans" does not include gay men and women. It's clarifying to hear him say it.

He will also argue that he is not demonizing people, he is demonizing behavior. But if he means by that behavior promiscuity, does he not have a moral and intellectual obligation to propose something to tackle it? Would he think, for example, that mere lecturing would be enough for heterosexual men if they too had no right to marry their loved one? What, I wonder, would he think would happen among straights if marriage didn't exist, if, indeed, domestic partnership didn't exist, if their relationships were accorded no public recognition and acknowledgment, their children no legal rights to their parents, their commitment to each other no moral or social support? From Bennett's writings, I have no doubt what he thinks would happen: social chaos. But the incentives Bennett believes are essential for one segment of the society are to be ruled out of bounds for another.

There is only one possible explanation for this. It is that Bennett considers gay men and women so beneath and beyond the concern of real society that it is incumbent upon him merely to echo the stigmas that perpetuate their exclusion. And if that isn't close to a definition of bigotry, then I don't know what is.

First appeared December 18, 1997, in Slate.

"THIS IS TOUGH NEWS. It's not pleasant to hear," said former Education Secretary William Bennett on ABC's This Week Nov. 9. "But it's very important, and it's part of telling the truth." The occasion for tough-but-needed truth telling: Bill Clinton's first-ever presidential speech to an organized gay-rights group, the Human Rights Campaign. Clinton had conferred respectability -- wrongly -- on the gay quest for approval when in fact, said Bennett, he "should tell the truth on this one": Homosexuality "takes 30 years off your life." The average life expectancy for gay men, Bennett declared, was just 43.

Many a mother's heart around the country must have sunk at that moment amid premonitions that she would outlive her son. A well-known public figure would think twice before delivering tidings that grim, right? And Bennett's statistic was no slip. Only days later, in the Nov. 24 Weekly Standard, he repeated the assertion phrased for maximum emphasis:

"The best available research suggests that the average life span of male homosexuals is around 43 years of age. Forty-three." (Italics his.)

Yes, it's a sensational, arresting number, which may soon pass into general circulation. Already, for example, the National Review has repeated it unskeptically in an editorial. Where did the figure come from, and how plausible is it?

Bennett got the number from Paul Cameron, a researcher well known to followers of gay controversies. Cameron, a former assistant professor at the University of Nebraska who has consulted for such gay-rights opponents as former Rep. William Dannemeyer, R-Calif., heads a group called the Family Research Institute. Cameron resigned under fire from the American Psychological Association and was later formally terminated from membership following complaints about his research methods. He has had run-ins with other professional groups, including the Nebraska Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association. According to Mark Pietrzyk's exposé in the Oct. 3, 1994, New Republic, the state of Colorado initially hired Cameron as an expert witness to defend its statute restricting gay-rights ordinances, then elected not to use his testimony after it got a closer look. His life-span figures have circulated for years in religious-right circles, but Bennett's comments appear to represent their first real breakout into wider public discussion.

Cameron's method had the virtue of simplicity, at least. He and two co-authors read through back numbers of various urban gay community papers, mostly of the giveaway sort that are laden with bar ads and personals. They counted up obituaries and news stories about deaths, noted the ages of the deceased, computed the average, and published the resulting numbers as estimates of gay life expectancy.

What do vital-statistics buffs think of this technique? Nick Eberstadt at the American Enterprise Institute sums up the reactions of several of his fellow demographers: "The method as you describe it is just ridiculous." But you don't have to be a trained statistician to spot the fallacy at its heart, which is, to quote Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistician John Karon, that "you're only getting the ages of those who die." Gay men of the same generation destined to live to old age, even if more numerous, won't turn up in the sample.

Other critics rattle off further objections. The deaths reported in these papers, mostly AIDS deaths, will tend to represent the community defined by such papers or directly known to their editors. It will include relatively more subjects who live in town and are overtly gay and relatively few who blend into the suburbs and seldom set foot in bars. It will overrepresent those whose passing strikes others as newsworthy and underrepresent those who end their days in retired obscurity in some sunny clime.

Bennett is a busy man, but even he has access to the back of an envelope. A moment's thought might have suggested a few simple test calculations. Suppose he assumes�wildly pessimistically, given current incidence data�that half the gay male population is destined to catch the AIDS virus and die of it. The actual average age of AIDS patients at death has been about 40. (Presumably protease inhibitors will extend average longevity, but that will only increase Bennett's difficulty.) For the number 43 to be the true average death age for the entire population of gay males, HIV-negative gay men would, on average, have to keel into their graves at 46. Looked at another way, if even half the gay male population stays HIV-negative and lives to an average age of 75, an average overall life span of 43 implies that gay males with AIDS die at an implausibly early average age (11, actually).

Against this, Cameron and his supporters argue that, according to their survey of obits, even if they don't have AIDS, homosexual males tend to die by their mid-40s (and lesbians by their late 40s). Some downright peculiar results followed from this inference. One is that -- contrary to the opinion of virtually everyone else in the world -- AIDS in fact hasn't reduced gay males' life expectancy by that much -- a few years, at most. Moreover, the obits also recorded lots of violent and accidental deaths. From this Cameron and company concluded not that newsworthy deaths tend to get into newspapers, but that gays must experience shockingly high rates of violent death. With a perfectly straight face they report, for example, that lesbians are at least 300 times more likely to die in car crashes than females of similar ages in general.

Unfortunately there really is no satisfactory measure of actual life expectancy among gay men. However, Harry Rosenberg, the mortality-statistics chief at the National Center for Health Statistics, says he's unaware of evidence that HIV-negative gays have a lower life expectancy than other males. Rosenberg also points to one reason to think the HIV-negative gay male may actually live longer on average than the straight male: Gays may have higher incomes and more education on average than straights -- two factors powerfully correlated with longer life spans. (Bennett himself appears to share this view, terming gays, "as a group, wealthy and well educated.")

Challenged by the Human Rights Campaign's Elizabeth Birch in the letters column of the Dec. 8 Standard, Bennett, remarkably, dug in to defend the Cameron numbers, which he said coincided with the views of other authorities such as psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover. Satinover's 1996 book, Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, does discuss gay life spans, but cites as its authority� Cameron's study. In other words, Bennett is not adducing a second authority for his assertions but merely falling back on the first via its recycling by another writer.

Throughout the controversy, Bennett has made much of the cause of "truth" with a capital T. His Standard article, portentously titled "Clinton, Gays, and the Truth," accused the Clintonites of scanting that important commodity. Bennett is right to the extent that there's no excuse for telling falsehoods in the course of raising otherwise legitimate issues. He should mind his own lesson.