IGF CultureWatch

Presented at the 1997 annual meetings of the Pacific Sociological Association in San Diego, California in an "author meets critics" session on American Gay (University of Chicago Press, 1996)

FIRST, I BALK at the term "queer," which I do not think can be defanged. Moreover, I believe that those who despise differences will always be very happy to accord that label to anyone who wants it. Relatedly, I find it difficult to take seriously those who believe they can transvalue values and move away from "minoritizing" logic under an explicitly deviant label and in contrast to an explicitly normative one ("heteronormative").

Second, I find it difficult to take seriously an alternative to "binarism" built on a contrast of "normative" and amorphous contra-normativity. Rather than destroying binarism, replacing "gay" with "queer" merely further subordinates sexuality to gender - which is a more deeply entrenched dichotomy - in a continuing binary of domination.

Third, idealism and very vulgar linguistic determinism: In American Gay and elsewhere, I take the agnostic position that ideas matter, but usually not all that much. In my view, representation is not the only kind of human action, and is not the most important one. I think that the "queer" perspective - which I do not think deserves the name "theory" and certainly not that of "social theory" - romanticizes ineffective substitutes for politics. The most prominent one is subjective reactions to seemingly randomly selected high culture and popular culture texts, with no demonstration that others, let alone the masses, receive the often occult messages that analysts claim to decode. I am not convinced that subjectivity is produced by these discourses or that such texts influence more than they reflect society and subjectivities already fashioned by various prior means, not least by primary socialization. Along with this fascination with idiosyncratic readings of texts not demonstrated to have any effect on anyone is a sentimental romanticizing of what seems to be more juvenile acting out than serious attempts to change anything in the world, what I would call - with apologies to Lenin - "infantile post-leftist adventurism." Directly related to this is what I see as the apriori assumption that whatever subalterns do must be "resistance" - in particular that "playing with" or "playing at" gender erodes gendered social organization of domination. Variant performances and discursive practices do not change societies. I think that we need fewer celebrations of "transgression" and more analysis of how subalterns reproduce their own subordination, both intra-psychically (call it self-hatred, with "self" being a kind of person) and interpersonally (call it socialization). And we need especially to look at practices persisting even when linguistic patterns change, as I have done with the diffusion of the word "gay" in Latin America and Thailand, and as could be done with "queer" in Anglo North America.

Fourth, ethnocentricity and ahistoricism: For all the proclamation of difference, so-called "queer theorists" rarely look outside contemporary or very recent Northwestern Europe and Anglo North America. No more than the asocial constructionists I call "discourse creationists," do they attempt to look systematically or historically at how sex, gender, and/or sexuality are organized and conceived elsewhere and at times before World War Two. Gender-crossing performativity exists and has existed in many times and places without challenging the subordination of those gendered as kinds of "females." Those who live - or play - various transvestitic homosexual roles generally retain some male privilege, especially greater mobility or better access to the best materials for doing "women's work." In the other major pre-late-modern organization of same-sex sexual desire and behavior, the young are subordinated to their elders.

That is, being gender variant or engaging in same-sex sex has not been transgressive and has not destabilized hierarchies of domination. As I say in American Gay, I was very disappointed to realize that homosexuality is not necessarily oppositional. Indeed, rather a lot of those who engage in it are heteronormative. And by no means is it only "closeted homosexuals." There are many open lesbians and gay men who align themselves with the repression of what they regard as less respectable forms of gender and sexuality. Although we often enough fashioned new conformisms, the egalitarian theory and occasionally egalitarian practice of my generation - the "baby boom"/ gay liberation/lesbian feminist generation - was a novelty, and increasingly appears to have been a temporary fluctuation rather than the world historical trend many of us once supposed.

Sex between persons of the same natal sex has not been particularly problematic or condemned in some times and places, but almost always the sexually-penetrated biologically-male partner has been treated like a female wife, concubine, or prostitute by the older, more powerful, more conventionally masculine "partner." Within narrowly circumscribed limits, "gender" is socially constructed in differing ways, but where it is a major organizing principle - which is in most times and places - differences are ranked. The boundaries of human categories in general - not just of homosexual - are fuzzy, but playing with fuzzy boundaries of gender and sexuality categories has remarkably little demonstrated history of destabilizing enduring hierarchies.

Fifth, is the return of the repressed, that is, the revalorization of Freud's eternal and constant theory of motivation, further mystified in Lacanian rhetoric. Why so many deconstructionists are drawn to undeconstructed Freudianism is a mystery to me, one rife for sociology of knowledge analysis. Clearly, there is no place for social forces or spatial or temporal variability in this, and, of course, there is no basis for collective mobilization in Freudian or quasi-Freudian theorizing.

From Marx and Weber I learned that consciousness of kind is a prerequisite of collective organization - consciousness of kind is one idea that I think matters a great deal. Undermining it in the realm of literary criticism and other kinds of academic discourse does nothing to alter structured everyday domination of any sort in the workplace, law, education, or other public institutions.

If and when queer theorists produce a theory that seems to explain or predict something other than textual representations, I will be attentive. Until such a time, aware as I am of the quietist anti-empiricist zeitgeist, I am content to be considered a pre-postmodern, skeptical, empiricist and comparativist social scientist. As I say on the penultimate page of American Gay, "I feel that the mists of what has misappropriated the label 'theory' will at some point dissipate" and the book that I conceived as a mesage in a bottle will be found by those "somewhere or at some time who are interested in how people involved in homosexuality live their lives." I remain hopeful of that and having outlived what was my life expectancy when I wrote American Gay, I have even begun to hope I may live to see it.

Implicit references:

Murray, Stephen O.:

• 1983. Fuzzy sets and abominations. Man 19:396-399.
• 1994. Subordinating native cosmologies to the Empire of Gender. Current Anthropology 35:59-61.
• 1995. Discourse creationism. Journal of Sex Research 32:263-265.
• 1996. American Gay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• 1999. Homosexualities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

AS WE GATHER to celebrate, if not our pride, at least our enthusiasm for its possibility, it is natural for us to look back to see how far we've come. Fortunately, this retrospective reveals much to give thanks for. The public acceptance of gays and lesbians, while hardly complete, has reached levels undreamed by most of us when we were growing up. We blinked and now high school students are attending the prom with their gay lovers, and openly gay couples are moving to the suburbs to buy houses and raise children. Moreover, straight couples, their future contributions to the gay community packed in strollers, line the Gay Pride parade route to gawk and cheer on their gay friends. Frosty fraternization has given way in many urban centers to an active miscegenation of straight and gay societies.

You would think that these developments would be received with optimism by our best and brightest, would be recognized as welcome indications that our decades of activism, struggle and stairmaster have actually gotten us somewhere. You would be ever so wrong.

In fact, our community's intelligentsia (in the Starbucks sense of the word) is united in tight-lipped horror at the sight of gay people finding acceptance in the straight world. Waterman pens have been scribbling furiously these last few years, filling page after latté-stained page with jeremiads on our heedless assimilation into the faceless gray hordes of our breeder brethren. According to these theorists, what gay people should have been fighting for all these years, or in fact were fighting for until it slipped their minds sometime during the video for Justify My Love, was not admittance into the status quo, but the freedom to celebrate openly our repudiation of it without fear of retaliation . The acceptance that should have been our goal was the straight world's acceptance of our rejection of them.

Alas, instead we have become its gaudy, grasping clone. Our community has become Lolita's mother writ large, pathetically aping a culture we do not understand and that regards us with only the most thinly veiled contempt. Yet it is precisely this contempt that we embrace as approval.

This, in essence, is the party line among our pondering class, with the notable exception of Andrew Sullivan. Perhaps its most engaging popularizer is Daniel Harris, whose recently published The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture weds a catty, bitter voice to the normally puritanical dourness of the anti-assimilationists. It stands as an exemplary statement of the anti-assimilationist position. As such, I will use it and its author as my touchstones for responding to its charges.

Harris's book is both an atlas of a lost world and an elegy for its passing. Like an anthropologist observing a once isolated tribe fed into the maw of modern culture, he takes copious notes, summons to memory the glories that once were, and resigns himself to the inevitable. Whether it's camp, drag, leather, personal ads, pornography, or gay self-help manuals, he finds exactly the same pattern. A brief period of florescence in the days of oppression, followed by a swift decline once "the market" assimilated gay people to its banal calculus. As he writes:

By looking closely at the changes that have occurred in gay culture in the past few decades, I attempt to represent the process through which a culture with unique traditions and rituals is submerged into the melting pot, its distinguishing characteristics dissolving into the grey (sic), flavorless gruel as its members are accepted by society at large.

Harris's perspective here relies quite heavily on a liberal flavor of Marxism known as the Frankfurt School. One of its central tenets is that modern mass culture, perfected in America, is one of the oppressing class's greatest tools for keeping the masses down, distracted from the struggle for liberation by Pop Tarts and The Spice Girls. This mass culture effaces all regional, ethnic and class differences through the relentless leveling effect of its technology (telephone, television, Internet, etc.)

As long as gay people were isolated from this mass culture, protected by our pariah status from its blandishments, we were able to maintain our saucy singularity. Armed with feather boas and Judy Garland records, we bravely held out against the silent spring of sameness. But gay liberation ended all that, and as a result we have become absorbed into the undifferentiated mass of polyester and Kraft cheese singles that is the "mainstream."

As Harris puts the matter succinctly, "Gay liberation and the gay sensibility are staunch antagonists."

Here is the gauntlet thrown down before us by Harris and his co-religionists. Do we want to be liberated, or do we want to be human? Because apparently we can't have both. Decisions don't get much starker than that. Like all myths of fall, this argument projects an image of uncompromising clarity, of a sword rightly dividing the word of truth, that makes it attractive out of all proportion to its truth or cogency.

In the face of such unanimous and scathing opprobrium, can anything be said in defense of assimilation? I would answer with an emphatic yes. In fact, I believe that assimilation is precisely what will create a more adult, humane and multi-faceted gay community.

Perhaps the first inkling that assimilation might not be all that bad comes when you examine the Garden of Eden that supposedly preceded it: The closet. Or for those few wealthy or talented enough, a hermetic fraternity dissimulating itself to the outside world through art and culture. What claim to superiority over assimilation could these crabbed modes of existence possibly possess? In what system of values could it be superior to live in unrelenting fear and self-hatred, circumscribed without by legal discrimination and within by the internecine conflict between the need to be authentic and the desire to belong?

That, as they say, is a very interesting question, and its answer even more so. The superiority of assimilation over what preceded it is immediately apparent the minute the distinction is framed in terms of justice, politics, and individual freedom. There's no contest.

This superiority, however, disappears, or at least becomes less obvious, the minute the issue is examined in purely cultural terms. And it is in these terms that Harris et al. frame their arguments. Granted, in the old days millions of people were subjected to torment and injustice, but this system created a cultural elite of tastemakers, artists and ironic observers of the world that hated them. "Gay life" was not a given, doled out to everyone who just happened to be homosexual. On the contrary, it was a crucible of refinement that only the chosen few could endure, much less flourish in.

Paradoxically, Harris's ideal world is fundamentally an aristocratic one. This will seem surprising to those seduced by the neo-Marxist analysis that is the manifest content of his book. But Marxism has for decades been the acceptable mask worn by closet aristocrats in Western society. This is harder to see in the United States, since, lacking its own aristocratic traditions (the Old South excepted), there's really nothing to compare Marxist cultural snobbery to. However in England and France, where aristocratic class systems are still living memories, this ruse is both more widely practiced and more easily detected.

The eternal malaise of the middle class has always been its self-hatred. Middle class people can claim neither the heroic struggles of the proletariat nor the cultural hauteur and effortless savoir faire of the aristocracy. They have so completely absorbed the contempt coming from both above and below at a life lived solely for making money, that one of the main activities of middle class people now consists of trying to atone for their cultural vapidity by proving to the world that they're not middle class. This goes ten-fold for the middle class's intelligentsia.

The middle class responds to its self-hatred either with frantic efforts to imitate aristocrats (the sole reason Jaguar cars are still in production, by the way) or with uncritical idolization of blue collar authenticity (Bruce Springsteen, Harley-Davidson, etc.) If they know too much about working class life to indulge in this latter self-deception, they identify some non-Western indigenous people, preferably in the end stages of cultural or actual genocide, to hold up as an ideal of the authentic life they so sadly lack (Tibet, any American Indian tribes within driving distance of Santa Fe, etc.). It is the genius of Marxism considered as a jeu d'esprit to allow both processes to occur simultaneously. It hallows the authenticity of the proletariat , but on the basis of an aristocratic ethos.

And this creates the great unspoken dilemma that faces the middle class Marxist. The proletarian-worshipping side of her soul hates the poverty and cultural marginalization of the workers; yet her efforts to alleviate these injustices, if successful, lead directly to the embourgeoisment of her erstwhile heroes. There is no disillusionment so cruel as that experienced by the middle class Marxist intellectual when he discovers that the workers (or Tibetans?see above) he idolized as the ultimate antidote to his own middle class mediocrity, once freed of their chains, proceed immediately to the nearest mall to buy Nikes and projection TVs of their very own. They want Disney World, not the classless society.

This is a painful moment for the Marxist theoretician, for the impulse that causes him to recoil from this discovery is irreducibly aristocratic, and thus can only be acknowledged obliquely. The rage the middle class Marxist feels at being deprived of a marginalized group to provide him with vicarious authenticity can only find expression as a theoretical insight into the fiendish duplicity of the capitalist system. Concepts like "repressive desublimation" and "false consciousness" are then dutifully confected to explain the ingratitude of the masses, and to mask the narcissism of their unrequited savior.

If you replace "workers" in the paragraphs above with "homosexuals", and "capitalists" with, well, capitalists, you have reproduced almost exactly Harris's argument and have described the psychological mechanics that produce it. The proletarian/aristocratic dichotomy is in full force, and pre-Stonewall gay life is easily accommodated in either mode. Under the aspect of proletarian virtue, gay life is recast as Hogan's Homos, where a hardy band of streetwise POWs, establishing clandestine lines of communication with the outside world, "much like prisoners rapping in code on the pipes of their cells", manage to hoodwink their captors at every turn. Under the aspect of aristocratic superiority, gay life is presented as Queen Acres, where unspeakably sophisticated gays tutor their hillbilly cousins in the wilds of straight America. Different shows, same network.

Once we delve beneath all the Marxist theoretical blather, we discover that his argument boils down to the simple claim that gay liberation has been a disaster not because it is ineffective, not because it is immoral, but because it is vulgar. This is a word that appears often in The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, the bearer of a telling ubiquity.

The gay world Harris memorializes so reverently was an elitist institution that only the best could belong to. It was a bastion of discrimination in both senses of the word. But then gay liberation came along, and the cozy connoisseurs club, that tweedy home of recondite perceptions and unerring apercus, was crashed by hordes of unwashed parvenus who couldn't tell the difference between purple and aubergine. The illuminati were replaced by sans culottes in culottes, and gay life just hasn't been worth the trouble since.

One can almost see Harris's lip curl with disdain as he surveys the wreckage wrought by the democratization of gay life. Here he is, for example, fuming about the picture of gay relationships conveyed in gay self-help literature:

The propagandistic fictions surrounding the Uxorious Gay [the word means excessively deferential to one's spouse?NL] operate by reenacting the rituals of heterosexual courtship and by deliberately de-exoticizing gay relationships, turning homosexual lovers into glamorless hausfraus who wash socks, entertain in-laws, pick up laundry from dry cleaners and agonize over dish-pan hands.

It would be futile to point out to Harris that what "de-exoticizes" relationships is familiarity, not false consciousness, and that doing laundry and entertaining relatives is the everyday reality even of single people, because it is precisely the ordinariness of it all that Harris can't stand. It's just too common. He can't feel special in such a world, therefore it must be wrong.

Harris gives the game away right at the beginning of the book when he writes, "Sometime in my early adolescence, I acquired, while living in the very heart of Appalachia, a land of lazy southern drawls, a British accent... my peers were budding good old boys whose fathers drove tractors and pickup trucks and spoke in an unmusical twang that I, a pompous fop in my teens, found distinctly undignified." The only odd thing about this passage is that it is written in the past tense.

He then goes on to describe how he became utterly captivated by the Hollywood divas of the day, completely entranced by "the patrician inflections of characters who conversed in a manufactured Hollywood idiom meant to suggest refinement and good breeding."

Exactly.

One way to look at The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture is as a long, tortuous attempt to justify these aristocratic longings to their owner, without having to subscribe (overtly) to aristocratic politics. Make no mistake, Harris is still sneering at the uncouth accents of his compatriots, except now he calls them consumers instead of hicks and they live in a subdivision instead of a holler. And the esoteric world of European neo-Marxist theorizing has replaced the ballrooms and summer homes of Manhattan high society. Different shows, same network.

If that were all that was going on, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture would be at best an eccentric collection of insights into gay life, both marred and catalyzed by a central, if indispensable, self-deception. Unfortunately, there is a darker side to the phenomenon.

The attentive reader of Harris's book will be immediately struck by a curious feature of its argument. Though gay life is its putative subject, at every opportunity Harris defines it in such a way as to make homosexuality itself disappear. Whenever he analyzes a particular feature or tradition of gay life, he is immediately at great pains to point out that it has nothing whatever to do with sexuality per se, but is merely an artifact of an alienated consciousness or a marginalized social reality.

For example, when Harris discusses camp and drag, he writes, "the preciousness of the aesthete... reflects less the homosexual's innate affinity for lovely things, for beauty and sensuality, than his profound social discontent, which we attempt to overcome by creating flattering images of ourselves as connoisseurs and Epicureans." And later, "the homosexual's love of Hollywood was not an expression of flamboyant effeminacy, but, rather, in a very literal sense, of swaggering machismo."

Likewise, in his discussion of the leather and S&M subcultures, he makes the rather astounding claim that, "since the inception of the S/M movement, the cult of leather has served as a way for the gay man to identify himself to others and to engage in ostensibly illicit practices that, far from representing an epidemic of sexual pathology, have become simply a pretext for a perverse act of networking." [italics added]

Networking? Networking? The thesis is so preposterous that Harris himself has to abandon it, and scant pages later is cataloguing with disdain the acts of bootlicking, mummification, flogging, wholesale dildo invasion etc. that define S/M practice. By the end of the chapter he is even mocking the members of the leather community who have tried to portray S/M as primarily a form of self-actualization instead of the pursuit of sadistic sex, his own earlier and identical claim conveniently forgotten.

It becomes all too clear that for Harris, gay identity is completely constituted by its oppression. This in turn becomes the way Harris explains away aspects of gay life that he finds uncomfortable. If gay men idolize divas as a protest against social marginalization, then it can't be used to prove that they are effeminate. If they devote their lives to S/M out of a need to "network", then it can't be because they like to get beat up or beat someone else up. Oh no.

The attractiveness of this theoretical sleight of hand becomes clearer when we discover that Harris himself was quite the sissy in his youth, "sashaying around the house in brightly colored caftans," and giving regular drag performances in his high school gym to no doubt bewildered students and faculty. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Harris' theoretical commitments are designed to explain away a feminine side that perhaps even today troubles an unquiet virility.

Harris explicitly links the two concerns, when he writes:

I was not attracted to Hollywood stars because of their femininity, nor did my admiration of them reflect any burning desire to be a woman... as if diva worship were simply a ridiculous side effect of gender conflicts. Instead it was their world, not their femininity, that appealed to me, the irrepressibly madcap in-crowd of Auntie Mame, of high spirits and unconventional characters....

Um, sure. Saying that a diva's femininity plays no part in the world she creates for others is heartbreakingly naive, not to say sexist. And the fact that dressing up in caftans and imitating Bette Davis is a form of social protest taken up only by homosexual men, not migrant farm laborers or Native Americans?groups one would think suffer from equal amounts of alienation and cultural displacement?is a puzzle Harris still needs to resolve, at least for me if not for himself. One gets the distinct impression that much of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture is simply Harris repeating obsessively to himself "I am a man I am a man" as he changes into a clean caftan.

It would be easy to dismiss Harris's necessary illusions as yet another example of self-hating homo hokum if they did not so vividly illustrate a tendency at work in most anti-assimilationist thought. One of the submerged purposes of the often arcane political theory used to justify these positions is, simply put, to make homosexuality disappear. Homosexuality ceases to be anything in or for itself and becomes instead a style of radical will or a stray emanation from the penumbra of the class struggle or a behavioral artifact of alienated consciousness?anything, that is, except homosexuality. Anything but what it really is.

Hidden beneath the exterior of radicalized theory lies yet one more example of what I call the "homosexuality plus" method of justifying homosexuality. The method assumes that homosexuality all by itself cannot be justified; it can only be justified by drawing attention away from its horrible reality and towards something else, something supposedly good that homosexuals are as well. "Sure, they're homosexuals, but they're so refined!" or "They're not just pansies, they're great artists, too!" The goal of this method is not to have homosexuality accepted, but to have it overlooked. It is apology masquerading as affront.

This, in a nutshell, is Harris' strategy. The subtext of his argument is that homosexuality can only be acceptable if it is serving a larger, and emphatically non-sexual, end, in this case cultural authenticity understood as resistance to "the Market." Though he mocks the attempts of the Mattachine Society and modern gay-marriage advocates to sanitize homosexuality by assimilating it to some higher moral ideal, he is guilty of the same charge.

The truth of the matter is that there is no escaping assimilation. As Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody. The alternatives to "assimilation" offered by its vehement opponents are themselves merely avenues of assimilation into other parts of heterosexual culture?either assimilation into bohemianism or assimilation into the culture of left-wing activism. But neither of these alternatives are uniquely gay modes of feeling and acting. They were both created by heterosexuals, just like malls and monogamy. The perverse truth Harris points out in his book is that the only mode of existence that can truly be said to reflect a unique gay identity and culture is the closet! His reduction of moral issues to culture politics allows him to heroicize the world of homosexual men and women, cut off from one another, living lonely lives of terror in small towns all across America, because it produced exotic modes of cultural resistance.

At this point I think it is legitimate to ask Harris why gay people should feel obligated to fulfill his cultural fantasies at the expense of simple justice and freedom in their own lives. He needs to justify the pursuit of an intellectual mirage?the Garden of Eden where primitive gay culture exists untainted by money or heterosexuality?at the expense of (and as a replacement for) equality with heterosexuals in all aspects of life. He needs to explain why we need to feel guilty because we have not met his need to feel special.

The anti-assimilationists also fail to recognize that assimilation is a two-way street. It is not simply a matter of gay people surrendering their transgressive identities to the Borg collective of straight society. An obvious, but often overlooked, fact about assimilation is that it can only occur once gay people have actually come out of the closet. A married homosexual man who presents a faultless heterosexual fa?ade to the world, tells fag jokes at work and cruises forest preserves and truck stops at night is not assimilated, for he offers nothing that requires assimilation. He is making no claim for acceptance on behalf of his sexuality, because he does not believe it is acceptable in the first place. Assimilation is the antithesis of the closet.

Straight society cannot accommodate openly gay people without making radical changes to its own consciousness and values, something straight people themselves have always acknowledged. Indeed, the claim to moral equality with heterosexuals explicit in the drive to assimilate is far more disquieting to straight society than any amount of transgressive street theater taking place in a gay ghetto far, far away. If you doubt this, just ask yourself which spectacle panics and outrages the straight world more: the International Mr. Leather competition, or a gay wedding ceremony. The latter makes a claim to legitimacy wholly lacking from the former. In this matter, the Christian Coalition possesses a better understanding of the subversive implications of gay assimilation than our café intellectuals.

What Harris and his ilk fail to realize is that assimilation is the solution to many of the problems they identify in modern gay life. The gays who want to flee the ghetto for the suburbs are precisely the people who, like Harris, are sick and tired of a "community" whose sole values are a hot body, eternal youth and a fabulous wardrobe. It is their way of thumbing their noses at the Hunky Golightlies who hold sway in Boy's Town, and the mind-numbing superficiality of the culture these have created. In other words, assimilation is a sign of maturity among gay people, both individual and communal.

For the shocking truth about gay men is that they never shine more brightly than when they are in the company of heterosexuals. A gay man among heterosexuals is often witty, cultured, sensitive, engaging on all levels. But the minute gay men are alone together, the IQ suddenly plummets at least 500 points. Conversation ceases and the desperate posing and primping begins, the endless game of you're-not-hot-so-I-don't-have-to-talk-to-you. Ph.D's in art, philosophy and literature suddenly can speak of nothing beyond the gym, the bar or the bathhouse. Plato's cave becomes the Valley of the Dolls.

I'll say it loud and proud: We need assimilation to free us from slavery to our own oppressive social structures and sex roles.

Lastly, assimilation answers the original need created by growing up as gay people in a homophobic society. The pain we felt when we realized we were homosexual was the pain of separation from the culture and traditions that we were born into. We wanted to belong, not stand apart. The rage we feel at homophobia is rage at all it has kept us from, whether that is the religion of our people, the communal life of our neighborhood, or the vital traditions of our forebears. We were right to refuse the phony integration offered by the silence and shame of the closet. Our unrelenting campaign to force recognition of who we really are, without apologies, is entirely just. But it would be foolish for us to recoil from the world around us at the moment when it is finally beginning to see that we are in fact valuable members of any community. Having been involuntarily excluded by homophobia, we should not voluntarily exclude ourselves through heterophobia.

Since I do not believe that the gay sensibility is an accidental artifact of our oppression, I do not fear that assimilation will erode the sprightly spark that is our hallmark. Even in the very heart of the ghetto, where the only oppression we face comes from our friends, gay men still dress up in women's clothes and worship divas. All the "networking" opportunities in the world haven't emptied the leather bars. That won't change any time soon. But it needs to be recognized that we will have achieved true liberation only when we no longer have to justify our sexual orientation by carrying anyone else's moral baggage, whether that be Daniel Harris's aristocratic Marxist snobbery or Ralph Reed's puritanical Christian snobbery. We don't have to by gay and liberal or gay and free-market patriots in order to justify who we are.

Contrary to the fantasies of the Left and the Right, there is no necessary connection between homosexuality and morality or immorality. It is a sexual orientation, a pure capacity, nothing more. It can be deployed in the service of any lifestyle or ideology we choose. There are certainly good reasons for rejecting the materialism and banality of much of our culture, but homosexuality isn't one of them. The task of leading the examined life is a human burden, not a sexual one.

At the beginning of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Harris states that his main goal is to free gay culture from its adolescence. Yet Harris' view of gay history is the best example of the problem he is trying to solve. Adolescence is the age of heroes, of Golden Ages and secret societies, of the willful enchantment of life's banal realities. It is the flight from the responsibilities of adulthood into a cocoon of fantasy where all one's inadequacies are reborn as marks of divine favor. So it is with the gay world Harris wants to hang on to. He can't bring himself to leave the exclusive clubhouse where he and his childhood friends played at being glamorous ladies of high society, uttering secret passwords in perfect patrician dialect. The fact that his fantasy does not involve Star Trek does not make it any less adolescent.

Assimilation will cost us certain things that we now treasure. Our sense of specialness, of superiority, of safety behind the walls of the ghetto?all these will have to disappear or undergo extensive facial reconstruction. But in the end we will gain more than we lose. Becoming part of the wider community will ennoble both our humanity and that of the straight people who accept us as equals. To grasp this opportunity requires merely our willingness to leave behind the childhood of the closet and the adolescence of the ghetto to embrace the possibilities of adulthood, like a flower opening to the sun.

Copyright © 1997 by Niall Lynch. Reprinted with permission. Reproduction in whole or in part requires prior written permission.

Originally appeared Sept. 11, 1997, in the Windy City Times.

FROM SEVERAL QUARTERS within the gay community, gay men have lately been hearing the message that they should settle down and form relationships.

The rationales for this generously offered free advice range across the moral spectrum: It will result in a more emotionally satisfying life; it will promote personal maturity; it will offer a more fulfilling sex life; it will provide someone to take care of you when you are old or sick; it will keep you from getting AIDS; it will lower the rate of HIV transmission below epidemic levels; it will reduce promiscuity, which is sinful; it will promote social stability; and so forth.

Each of these deserves a thoughtful response on its own, but we can also offer some more general cautionary notes.

Contrary to their claims, these writers are hardly courageous Jeremiahs crying out an unwelcome doctrine to rootless and anomic individuals. In fact, our whole modern culture is pervaded by the assumption of coupledom and strongly biased toward rewarding it - joint tax returns, family memberships in clubs, benefits for unmarried domestic partners, media images of couples, even "double occupancy" travel packages.

In fact, the notion that one "ought" to be in a relationship scarcely needs to be promoted to gays. If anything, gays tend to form relationships too easily, too unsuspectingly. Some people seem to end one relationship and within weeks announce that they are in a new one.

The belief that one can find happiness only in a relationship is responsible for the undue haste with which people unwarily enter unsuitable relationships, and the cause of a great deal of later unhappiness. If anything, gays need to start exercising more caution, more restraint. Instead of trying to provide supports for mismatched gay couples, perhaps we ought to provide support and teach coping skills to people to live on their own.

Now no one need doubt that relationships can be a good thing and that many people find fulfillment in them. But we should also make it clear that not everyone is a good candidate for a relationship. History and literature, to say nothing of the lives of our friends, provide abundant examples of people psychologically stuck in empty, drab, stultifying, demeaning, damaging and emotionally draining, miserable relationships.

Some people are unpleasant or mean-spirited, emotionally immature or psychologically unstable, insensitive or dull, or even complete jerks. Urging a relationships on such people would be a disservice to them or their potential partner.

Other people may be pleasant and interesting enough to be decent partners, but are focused on concerns other than a relationship: a career, a personal goal, a life-project or an exploration of their own individual potential.

Relationships take a good deal of time and work to foster and to maintain, as well as a good deal of compromising. Many people may not find the rewards commensurate with the time and effort required. One may simply be a bachelor.

And then too, for all of us, it is a matter of luck, chance or grace that someone falls in love with us at the same time that we fall in love with them. The wonder is not that falling in love does not happen more, but that it happens as often as it does.

The plain truth is that people are different from one another. They grow up developing different needs for personal space, varying desires to compromise, different needs for companionship and support, different abilities to cope with solitude.

Some people may have insecurities or self-esteem needs that can be met only with or by a partner. Some people, it seems, do not even know how to conduct a life on their own. They take their bearings from interaction with other people: They want the mental or emotional "structure" that others provide. Barbra Streisand's preposterous and neurotic song "People" is their anthem.

Other people develop a greater capacity for autonomy, for acting alone, for being able to amuse themselves, to make new friends easily, for developing projects that are personally satisfying. Absent a need to be in a relationship, they choose not to enter one.

Even heterosexuals are showing greater skepticism about relationships and marriage. Until the 1950s and 1960s, even apart from love heterosexual marriage was a virtual necessity: Women married to guarantee a means of support, particularly while they reared children, while men married to have a home and access to sex.

But those necessities have been obviated by the large number of women now employed and self-supporting, the large number of labor-saving devices that enable a single male to manage his own household satisfactorily, and the availability of birth control which provided sexual opportunities without the inevitability of children.

Gays face those same social realities: employment by virtually all participants; ease of single-household management; ready access to sex without the risk of children; and the similarly reduced inducements to long-term relationships. In addition, gays as two equal employed people without the strong shared bond of children and the problems of raising them, with which heterosexuals are deeply concerned, can easily find themselves growing apart and their interests diverging.

A different sort of obstacle to male-male relationships is the tendency of males "by nature" to be promiscuous. This is one of the best attested findings cross-culturally and among virtually all species of animals. The male tendency to seek a multiplicity of sexual partners is simply built into their genes, since those men whose behavioral tendencies were most reproduced were those who most widely propagated their genes; in turn, our own genes' "desire" to reproduce themselves is best served by inducing similar behavior on our part.

This is not to argue that we should always give in to "nature" nor to justify whatever "nature" suggests. Biology need not always win out, but it is always waiting for an opportunity to assert itself. So a social prescription that ignores "nature" or thinks it can be countered with a little exhortation is likely to have only limited success. And at the individual level it will create an unrealistic expectation of what is likely - or possible - for long-term male relationships.

Given all this, gay relationships need to be advocated or discussed with a good deal less simple-mindedness, a good deal more awareness of the obstacles and difficulties, and in a full awareness of the variety of human beings and our individual needs and capacities.

First appeared June 22, 1997, in The Washington Post.

IN 1980, WORD BEGAN TO LEAK OUT that Congressman Jon Hinson (R) had been in a gay movie theater when it caught on fire and that he had later been arrested at the Iwo Jima Memorial, a well-known gay cruising spot in Washington. Once Hinson knew these incidents would be made public, he visited fundamentalist Protestant preachers in his Mississippi district and asked for their continued support. He got it, and was re-elected in a three-way contest, albeit narrowly.

Today, of course, no gay candidate could find political solace at the hands of the Christian Right, which has become the major opposition to the political and social revolution known as gay liberation.

But readers of Didi Herman's The Antigay Agenda, Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right (The University of Chicago Press) would not find Hinson's 1980 experience so surprising. Herman points out that conservative Protestant discussion of homosexuality in the 1960s and 1970s was relatively neutral. In 1970, for example, Christianity Today said of a gay Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles, "The great majority are indistinguishable in appearance from a typical WASP congregation... [who attend] in the hope that God, with a little help from his friends, will make his love known to them.î By the late 1980s, however, in response to social, political and even economic trends, the newly emergent political Christian Right had made opposition to gay and lesbian demands a centerpiece of its platform.

Herman's short 200-page book contains a wealth of information about conservative Protestantism and its battle against gay liberation. (She considers Roman Catholic views a separate topic). She discusses, for example, the Christian Right's portrayal of gay men not as stereotyped "effeminate, limp-wristed, ineffectual,î but as "masculinity out of control.î Gay male sex, in the words of Christian Right polemicists, is "raucous revelry, perverse promiscuity, orgiastic opulence, and apollyonic abandon.î Lesbians are attacked, less colorfully, as the logical extension of antifamily feminism.

Moreover, we learn of tensions within the Christian Right between the pietists, who value personal religious experience, and those -- now ascendant -- who want the church to influence the nation. We read of tensions between Christian conservatives who (secretly?) support a powerful theocratic state, and their secular economic allies, who prefer a smaller government with a live-and-let-live approach to morality.

The Antigay Agenda argues that the Christian Right's opposition to gay liberation is more than just a reaction to change. Rather, the antigay stance is part and parcel of fundamental Protestantism's core beliefs, including the infallibility of the Bible and a long-standing distaste for declining social -- and sexual -- standards, of which homosexual behavior is only one among many (abortion, divorce, pornography, promiscuity, etc.).

Ultimately, however, and even ironically, Herman exhibits the same flaws she sees -- correctly, in my view -- in the conservative Protestant operatives with whom she disagrees. She takes what Christian Right leaders consider a marginal doctrine known as postmillennialism -- that Christians must take over the world in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ -- and posits it as the prime motivation for conservative Christian political ambitions. This sounds very much like the Religious Right strategy of exhibiting examples of gay extremism -- e.g., the Lesbian Avengers wearing "We Recruitî T-shirts to a public school -- to demonstrate that homosexuals prey on children.

Moreover, such an analysis ignores other explanations for the Christian Right's foray into politics. For example, this is probably the first generation of Protestant fundamentalists in which a majority of its adherents are college educated and financially well off. As such, they want to get a place at the table once set exclusively for establishmentarian, mainline Protestants. This is similar to the kind of imprint on society and its politics, traditionally sought by ethnic, racial and other groups, including newly liberated gays and lesbians.

Herman's strategy for countering the conservative Christian antigay movement, which she makes near the end of the book, is "an invigorated, emancipatory, left-wing movement," though she offers no evidence that such a broad counter-attack would be attractive to a majority of Americans.

Despite its weaknesses, Herman's book presents considerable information not previously part of the nation's political discourse. And despite her British locale, the only miscue I noticed was her description of Phyllis Schlafly as "a longtime Christian activist." Schlafly is much better described as a political activist.

More importantly, while Herman makes clear her sympathy for gay and lesbian political goals, she dissects the Christian Right's antigay stance dispassionately, giving, as it were, the devil his due. For anyone on either side of this passionate and important conflict, that is an impressive accomplishment.

I REMEMBER THE MOMENT VERY WELL. It was a little more than a year ago, but it seems like a lifetime now. I was headed out the door of my Washington office, brief case in hand, bound for a pleasant, relaxing weekend in New York with friends. My secretary stopped me and said a reporter from The Advocate was on the phone.

I had spoken to this reporter before. So, when I picked up the phone and heard him say he needed to talk to me in person, I wasn't surprised. We agreed to meet the following Monday when I returned from New York. I hung up the phone and left the office, determined to enjoy my rare weekend "off duty." But at that moment, I sensed my life was about to change - irrevocably and fundamentally. Or was it?

The conversation on Monday confirmed what I suspected. The Advocate - in an article about DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, intended to "out" me as a gay - but not openly so - Republican Member of the House of Representatives. Armed with that knowledge, I decided to beat them to the punch by making the announcement myself.

What followed was a kaleidoscope of decisions, activities, and conversations that most gays and lesbians handle over the course of months - or years. In my case - my very public case - I only had five short days. Between Monday and Friday I had to lay out a game plan; inform my staff and colleagues in the House about my sexual orientation and why I was acknowledging it; write a press statement and letters to key supporters; and call to a seemingly endless list of friends, supporters, and, yes, family. You see, I come from a family?and I know many of you can relate to this?where we never discussed such personal things as "feelings."

No "operation" as complex as this, of course, ever comes off exactly as you plan it. Too many people had to be notified. The press got wind and Thursday evening - twelve hours ahead of schedule - the story broke on the late evening television news. That broke the dam and by the next morning every media outlet in the country had the story.

The phones rang, and they rang, and they rang - in Tucson and in Washington. Incidentally, by the time the calls and faxes tapered off and tallied the numbers, over 97 percent of everyone we heard from expressed support in one way or another.

All of this - this astonishing, compressed chain of events - occurred during the final week leading up to Congress' August recess. While I was trying to manage this life-changing event - politically and personally - Congress was considering, and voting on, Welfare Reform and the final version of illegal immigration legislation. All this, simultaneous with phone calls to my 86-year-old mother and to news outlets in Arizona. What a week!

Friday ended; Welfare Reform was on its way to the White House for Presidential signature, and Jim Kolbe had taken his place as the second openly gay Republican in the United States Congress. Saturday morning I flew home to Arizona, went to the office and did one-on-one interviews with each of the television news outlets in my community. The questions by now were boringly repetitious and predictable - but they had to be answered - patiently, honestly, candidly. I remember saying at the end of the last interview, half to myself and half to the assembled press: "That's it, folks. You've got your story. Now I am going back to being the Congressman I was before."

And I did. An hour later, I stood in front of an audience at the University of Arizona praising the Udall Foundation for its establishment of a Native American Intern Program. The next week, I conducted my usual August series of town halls, listening to voters praise or vilify Congress and me for what we had done - or not done.

Was I slipping back into denial, a habit I formed early in adult life and gradually shed as I came to terms with my own sexuality? I believe the answer is emphatically "no." I was simply reasserting myself as the Congressman from Arizona's Fifth District, the acknowledged Republican leader for free trade and open markets, the new advocate of Social Security Reform, the proponent of less government, lower taxes and more individual responsibility. These were the issues I had been advocating for twelve years in Congress and six years before that in the Arizona Senate. Oh, yes, I happened to be a gay person, too. But, being gay was not - and is not today - my defining persona.

Which leads me to the substance of my remarks tonight. Are we - Log Cabin members and friends - Republicans first, or are we gay persons who happen to think our political views incidentally make us Republicans, also?

If I focus on the need to liberalize trade, cut taxes, and balance the budget, does that mean I cannot also be recognized as a quiet voice of reason on issues of civil liberties and individual rights for homosexuals in our society? Conversely, if I become a "poster boy" and talk mostly about gay/lesbian issues, do I reduce myself to irrelevance with my Republican brethren in the House and cause Republicans?

To answer these questions, I ask you to think back to the celebration we had this Spring, marking the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut in major league baseball, the breaking down of the color barrier in America's national pastime. Can anyone here tonight doubt how Jackie Robinson paved the way for a generation of sports greats from the African-American community - from Jackie Robinson and Mohammed Ali to Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods? It wasn't because Jackie Robinson held frequent press conferences, or made speeches, or participated in boycotts. It was because he played baseball, and he played it well.

To his potential detractors, he left no room for doubt that he had been hired by Branch Rickey to do anything except play the best baseball the National League had to offer. Jackie Robinson succeeded in breaking the color barrier in baseball because he proved he was a great baseball player. He paved the way for countless other minorities in professional sports, not because he trumpeted his color but because he played baseball so well. That's what Mohammed Ali did with his right jab and that is what Michael does with his incredible slam-dunks and that is what Tiger Woods is doing for golf with an awesome, cool performance at the Masters. They hit baseballs, throw knock-out punches, shoot baskets flawlessly, and hit golf balls with deadly precision. And they just happen to be African Americans or people of color.

Do they deny their color with their acts of professionalism? Do we deny that we are gay or lesbian by being gathered here tonight as Log Cabin Republicans? Certainly not. And yet there are many in the gay community for whom "gay Republican" is a contradiction in terms.

I, for one, reject such narrow-minded thinking. Just as there are Republicans and Democrats with different points of view, African-Americans who disagree over affirmative action, veterans who differ about a flag burning amendment to the Constitution and Jews who passionately differ as to whether Israel should be supported at any political price - so, too, will there be gays who differ about DOMA and ENDA - and, yes, about immigration policies and taxation of capital gains.

We are not monolithic. We are diverse? varied? individualistic. It is this latter characteristic - our belief in individual liberty - that brings us together tonight as Log Cabin Republicans - Republicans who happen to be gay. This is a core value I dare say we share with the vast majority of fair-minded Americans. There is nothing intrinsically "gay" about it.

As I often remind my constituents in southern Arizona, our nation was founded on the proposition, stated so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, "...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." For more than two hundred years now we, the people of the United States of America, have struggled to realize the full meaning of our creed: to create an opportunity society that empowers all citizens to achieve the American Dream. And make no mistake: it has been a struggle.

I ask my constituents to consider the words of Abraham Lincoln, whom I revere as our greatest President. A century and a half ago - in 1855, when he was still a country lawyer - he dared to suggest that the nation was failing to live up to its promise that "all men are created equal." As Lincoln said,

We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Doesn't it seem strange, I ask my constituents, to think that Lincoln's words were considered radical at the time, and that such thinking would help provoke a civil war?

I remind my friends and neighbors in southern Arizona that personal liberty - the freedom to choose - is the cornerstone of our American democracy. If each of us is to fully enjoy the opportunities and blessings of liberty, then all of us must accept responsibility for our own actions, and for how our actions will affect the lives of others.

As Friedrich August von Hayek, the great Austrian economist, explained:

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions.

I believe proprietary self-interest and concern for one's fellow man are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they go hand in hand, and I believe that together they comprise the "content of our character" by which Dr. Martin Luther King said each of us should be judged.

The American ideal of limited government of the people, by the people, and for the people is also a radical concept. Our founding fathers dared to believe that government should derive its authority from the consent of the governed, and not the other way around. Thomas Jefferson elaborated on his conception of "good government" when he took the oath of office as our nation's third President in 1801. He said:

The sum of good government is to restrain men from injuring one another and leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

James Madison, who succeed Jefferson as President, clearly saw the dangers inherent in unlimited government. He warned that:

...there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

It is not that I and my fellow Republicans in Congress who seek to change the status quo believe the Federal government is some sort of malevolent agent, intentionally seeking to deprive us of our liberty. Rather, we believe the power of the federal government has grown far beyond anything our founding fathers could have imagined. More important, it has grown so large it gets in the way of citizens' ability to maximize their individual freedom and opportunities. Jefferson and Madison understood intuitively that government, in and of itself, cannot provide happiness. That is something you must pursue for yourself. What our government can ensure - and what your fellow American citizens ought to honor - is your liberty, in law, to live out your American Dream.

Ronald Reagan said it very well more than a decade ago in a speech he entitled, "A Time for Choosing." He said these words:

...for almost two centuries we have proved man's capacity for self-government, but today we are told we must choose between a left and a right or, as others suggest, a third alternative, a safe middle ground. I suggest to you there is no left or right, only an up or down. Up - to the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism...

With those words, Ronald Reagan expressed what should be the credo of all Log Cabin Republicans - "individual freedom consistent with law and order." Isn't that what we as Republicans believe in? Surely, that expresses what we as Log Cabin Republicans - concerned with government intrusion into our private lives, devoted to maximizing individual liberties and responsibilities - must believe.

I am both fascinated and amused with the convergence in views of some Republicans on the right side of our Party with the views of gay, liberal Democrats. Neither would even admit their common philosophy, but it is there, nevertheless. The so-called conservative Republican deplores big government, welfare programs, erosion of personal liberties - and then votes for constitutional amendments to ban flag burning, or to proscribe specific medical procedures for a doctor performing an abortion, or to deny gays their rights to fully participate in our society.

Liberal, gay Democrats, on the other hand, deplore the intrusion of government into the bedroom or the doctors' examining room - and then proceed to wax eloquent for programs that would nationalize the entire health care delivery system, or compel poor people to live in sub-standard housing operated by the liberal bureaucracy, or decry programs to give education vouchers to lower income parents so that they might send their children to schools of their own choosing.

We might be excused for excessive hubris for thinking Log Cabin Republicans are the only gays who really understand that individual liberties are for everyone. Why is it, then, that as gay Republicans we have allowed gay Democrats, largely committed to the collectivist state, to speak for gay and lesbian rights? Why are the ones committed to expanding government control over our lives in housing and in education, the ones who would nibble at our freedom through use and abuse of the tax code and regulatory system - why - how - are they presumed to speak for gay rights? What distortion of the definition of freedom and liberty has given them unfiltered access to the megaphone, claiming to express the views of all gays?

But, just as we must not abandon the battlefield of policy to the illiberal left, so we must not allow the religious fundamentalists to use "morality" as a cudgel against us. For many gays, the process of coming out involves shedding the guilt and shame associated with our sexuality. In that process, most of us conclude - rightly, I believe - that we are not "immoral" just because we are homosexual.

Unfortunately, many gays go a step further and reject any association of behavior and morality. A rejection of the hypocrisy of the rigid morality of the 1950s has led conservatives and liberals alike to flee from public discourse about what is right or wrong. And so, we have a society where divorce rates and illegitimate births are soaring, where teenage violence and drug use is rampant. We may invoke a moral position for ourselves, but we adopt moral neutrality for everyone else. The result is a backlash in society, for the simple fact is - people yearn for moral guidance.

As columnist Dan Perreten recently pointed out, we must not lose sight of the distinction between the words "moral" - principles of right and wrong in behavior - and "moralizing." We are, Perreten notes, so offended by the practitioners of the latter that we fail to acknowledge the importance of the former. Just as we must challenge liberal Democrats on policy issues where we know them to be wrong, so must we engage in an honest, candid debate with ourselves on moral issues that affect the gay and lesbian community.

The fact is, we belong to the party that really talks about concerns of the gay community. Ours is the party of Abraham Lincoln, of Theodore Roosevelt, of Ronald Reagan. It is the party of freedom, liberty, and individual responsibility. We are a minority within the Republican party when we think of ourselves as gays. But when we add all those Republicans, and other Americans who won't be identified with a party - all those who do not want government telling them what to do - then we are a majority. When we understand this simple fact and act like majority Republicans, we will win.

Call it "safe middle ground" if you like, but it represents the historical mainstream of Republican thinking for 150 years. Republicans will support, and elected officials will vote, "our way" if the question is framed as one of "individual rights," not of "lifestyle." Opposing discrimination on the basis of one's sexual orientation is not a matter of defending a lifestyle; it is protecting our rights as individual American citizens, just as surely as all of us would oppose discrimination against Jews or women or African-Americans because such discrimination is contrary to the fundamental principles underlying our Constitution. Discrimination should be an abomination to all Republicans - Log Cabin Republicans and moral majority Republicans. But it is equally right for Republicans to oppose special privileges for any group - quotas or special legal protection.

Sometimes we must show special courage as gay Republicans, standing up to the conventional wisdom in both the Republican party and the gay community. But with a foot in both groups, true to the principles we know to be right, we can gain the respect and acceptance of gays and Republicans alike. When you argue the case to your Congressman or state Assemblyman for school choice - when you tell them this is an exercise of individual choice in education - you show them a face of gay Republicans they may not have seen before. When you talk to them about how lower taxes can expand jobs and opportunities for Americans of all stripes, you speak a language they understand but have not heard from the gay community.

We gain acceptance and build our bridges, not by stressing that we are gay people who are Republicans, but that we are Republicans who happen to be gay or lesbian - that we are Republicans who care about families and schools, who believe in a strong national defense and laws that are tough on criminals, who worry about the environment and want to balance the budget so the next generation is not saddled with the fruits of our profligacy.

My constituents and my Republican colleagues in Congress respect me and support me because they know I am fighting for open markets, free trade and consumer choice, for a balanced budget, and for an honest overhaul of our Social Security system. To them, these issues are no less important, and I am no less qualified to make the case for them, now than before my announcement. Free trade is the engine of our economic prosperity and the ticket to future competitiveness. Balancing the budget - a feat Republicans achieved this year for the first time in 30 years - matters because it says we care about our nation's stability. And thinking honestly about transforming Social Security from a dead-end tax into a real retirement savings plan says that we care about the future for the next generation.

Log Cabin Republicans have already shown they can speak to the broad concerns of all Republicans. Four years ago, in the New York mayoral race, Log Cabin Republicans introduced an ad, the tag line for which was: "Who says crime is not a gay issue?" That simple message speaks volumes, both about ourselves as gay Republicans, and to the large majority of Republicans who have the same worries about crime and safety. "Who says crime is not a gay issue?" Of course it is. It's everybody's issue. The sooner we speak to it - and to similar issues - the sooner we speak to middle America, the sooner we enter the mainstream of American politics.

In the 1996 Republican presidential sweepstakes, Log Cabin Republicans demonstrated their moral courage and constancy, by taking on the prospective Republican nominee when a Log Cabin contribution was first accepted and then rejected. When Log Cabin stood its ground, Senator Dole's campaign changed its attitude, accepted the contribution, issued an apology, and conferred new respect to this organization. When Log Cabin Republicans endorsed Dole's Presidential bid, they demonstrated that they were an important part of the team.

The cause for all gay persons, Republicans and Democrats alike, will be advanced when we focus not on what sets us apart from our fellow Americans but on what we share in common; when we demonstrate our concern and our commitment, our expertise and our execution, on issues that matter to main street America.

Bruce Bawer, in a recent column, talks about a revolution that is taking place in America today - a revolution he says that is the worst nightmare of a far-left gay activist. It is a revolution brought about by people who work in corporations, worship in our churches, speak through our news media and teach in our schools. It is a revolution brought about by ordinary gay people who live their lives in ordinary ways on every ordinary day.

By doing so, Bawer says, other ordinary Americans "have grown from ignorance into knowledge, from lies into truth, from prejudice into love." There are still two Americas, he notes, one in which homosexuality is accepted as part of everyday life and another in which gays continue to be demonized and discriminated against. But, if we are ever to eliminate the division, it will be because of those ordinary people living their ordinary lives. It will also be because a few brave, extraordinary people, some of whom are gathered here tonight, choose to reject the politics of exclusion and group identity. You are here tonight because have chosen to pursue the politics of inclusion and mainstream values.

Last December, just a few months after my announcement made big news, I was privileged to speak at the dedication of a statue commemorating the 150th anniversary of the peaceful arrival of The Mormon Battalion in the Presidio of Tucson during the Mexican War. I shared the dais that day with my friend and colleague from the Arizona Congressional delegation, Matt Salmon, and Gordon Hinkley, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. More than 7,000 people came from throughout Southern Arizona. Most were Mormons, and maybe a third were directly descended from members of the Mormon Battalion.

In my remarks, I noted that the men of the Mormon Battalion had volunteered to serve their country in spite of the fact that the federal government had done little to protect them from religious persecution. These were men who, along with their families, had been driven from their homes in the East by angry, intolerant neighbors. In many cases their property had been stolen or confiscated. Some of their brethren - including Joseph Smith, founder of the faith - had even been murdered for their beliefs. Despite all this, 500 Mormon men faithfully answered the call to enlist and march 2,000 miles from Iowa to California. This arduous, six-month trek remains the longest infantry march in U.S. Army history. And they accomplished this remarkable feat without a shot being fired in anger.

I noted that the statue honoring the Mormon Battalion was really a monument to peace? and tolerance. This was a message this audience could understand. At least three times they interrupted my remarks with their applause. And in the months that have followed my office has received more requests for that speech than for any other I have ever given.

Last spring, in the wake of Susan Molinari's resignation announcement, I joined a small group of my Republican House colleagues to discuss the leadership races. Names were being tossed around - moderates who might run for Conference Vice-Chairman or Secretary. Finally, someone turned to me and said: "Well, Jim, why don't you run? You've got the seniority, you're a moderate, and you've shown your leadership on trade and other issues. You'd be a good candidate!"

"Oh, sure," I replied. "I'm sure our Republican caucus is ready to elect a pro-choice, gay person to the leadership."

"Oh, goodness," the first individual responded, "I had forgotten about that!"

Well, good. Perhaps, from time to time, this individual - and others - need to be gently reminded that I am gay, if only so that they remember how secondary it is in my political and everyday life.

Arizona Republic cartoonist Steve Benson got it right after my coming out when he did a cartoon - two identical drawings of Jim Kolbe, side by side. One was labeled: "Jim Kolbe, hard-working, fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republican Congressman from Arizona - before he announced he was gay." The second, same caricature, had the same label, except "After he announced he was gay." Looks like the same guy to me.

GAY RIGHTS ADVOCATES sometimes suggest that if the Bible condemns homosexuality, so much the worse for the Bible. Yet that position hardly works for everyone. Many people maintain that the Bible is the true word of God, and not all who do are die-hard homophobes. Some are social liberals who feel torn between their political and their religious convictions. Others are gay and lesbian youth who feel forced to choose between being gay and following God. To tell such people "so much the worse for the Bible" seems counterproductive, even cruel.

But what is the alternative? Is it possible to affirm the truth of the Bible yet deny the anti-gay conclusions the Church has drawn from it for centuries? To answer that question, I want to explore another case where the Church has re-interpreted Scripture: usury. For centuries the Church used the Bible to condemn the lending of money for interest - for any interest, not just excessive interest. Today it has more money in the bank than many major corporations. And its explanation for this shift - that cultural changes render the Biblical prohibitions inapplicable - works just as well for homosexuality as for interest banking.

The Bible condemns usury in no uncertain terms. In the Book of Exodus God says "if you lend money to my people, to the poor among you. you shall not exact interest from them" (22: 25). The fifteenth Psalm says that those who lend at interest may not abide in the Lord's tent or dwell on his holy hill (1-5). Ezekiel compares usury to adultery, robbery, idolatry, and bribery, and asks whether he who "takes advanced or accrued interest; shall he then live? He shall not. He. shall surely die; his blood shall be upon him." (18: 10-13; see also Deut. 23:19, Lev. 25: 35-37, Neh. 5: 7-10, Jer. 15:10, Ezek. 22: 12, and Luke 6:35)

The Biblical case against usury does not stand alone. Plato and Aristotle condemned the practice, as did Aristophanes, Cato, Seneca, and Plutarch. So did Saints Anselm, Augustine, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Jerome, and Ambrose, citing both Scripture and natural law. Numerous church councils and synods forbade usury: for instance, at the Third Council of Lateran (1179 C.E.), Pope Alexander III declared that both the Old and New Testaments condemn it and that violators should be excommunicated. Subsequent popes repeated these sanctions. In 1745, in the encyclical Vix Pervenit, Benedict XIV pronounced that "any gain which exceeds the amount the creditor gave is illicit and usurious." Protestant opponents of usury included Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and Urlich Zwingli. Nor is this condemnation unique to the Judeo-Christian tradition: the Qur'an condemns usury as well (2: 275, 3: 130). In short, the case against usury, like the case against homosexuality, appears to have strong biblical, philosophical, patristic, ecclesiastical, and theological grounds.

So what happened? Did the Church suddenly realize that it was missing out on something lucrative, and thus rescind its earlier prohibition? Not surprisingly, Church leaders offer a quite different explanation. According to them, economic conditions have changed substantially since Biblical times, such that usury no longer has the same consequences as it did when the prohibitions were issued. Therefore, those prohibitions no longer apply. As Father Richard McBrien, former chair of the University of Notre Dame theology department, writes,

The teaching on usury changed because certain theologians in the sixteenth century concluded that economic conditions had changed, making the old condemnations obsolete, and that the experience of lay Christians had to be listened to. Thus, Navarrus (d. 1586), a professor at Salamanca in Spain and author of a Manual for Confessors, argued that an "infinite number of decent Christians" were engaged in exchange-banking, and he objected to any analysis which would "damn the whole world."

McBrien's example of Navarrus is helpful here, for it shows how the Church's pastoral experience influenced its understanding of Scripture. Faced with otherwise "decent Christians" engaging in a traditionally forbidden practice, the Church re-examined the earlier prohibitions and found that they depended on conditions that no longer held.

Yet are we not today in a similar position regarding homosexuality? Even Christian traditionalists have begun to recognize that the stereotype of all gays as corrupt, hedonistic, sex-crazed heathens is unsupportable. On the contrary, many gay and lesbian relationships appear loving, nurturing, and fulfilling. As Richard B. Hays, a Methodist professor of New Testament at Duke University, points out, "There are numerous homosexual Christians whose lives show signs of the presence of God, whose work in ministry is genuine and effective. How is such experiential evidence to be assessed?"

Hays is appealing to a familiar Biblical principle here: "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matt. 7:20). Surprisingly, however, he ultimately concludes that homosexual relationships are immoral. I suggest that Hays, and countless other theologians like him, have dropped the ball. They notice that many gay and lesbian relationships manifest themselves as good, but then opt for the prohibitions of Scripture over the evidence of their own experience. What they fail to notice is that the Church's history on usury provides a way out of this apparent dilemma.

Consider the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans, perhaps the most problematic text for gay and lesbian advocates. Paul writes of Gentiles who have given themselves up to "dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons due penalty for their error" (1:26-7).

It seems fairly clear that Paul viewed such acts as a sign and consequence of the Fall. (Some, like John Boswell and William Countryman, have argued that Paul's use of "unnatural" - para physin - carries no moral force. My argument does not require this conclusion, but if it is true, so much the better.) Granting (for the sake of argument) that Paul morally condemned such relationships, must contemporary Christians condemn homosexual relationships as well? Not necessarily. Suppose that in Paul's time homosexual relationships were typically exploitative, paganistic, or pederastic - as virtually all scholars would agree. If Paul condemned homosexuality because it had such features, but such features are no longer typical, then Paul's condemnation no longer applies. Substantial changes in cultural context have altered the meaning and consequences - and thus the moral value - of homosexual relationships. Put another way, using the Bible's condemnations of homosexuality against contemporary homosexuality is like using its condemnations of usury against contemporary banking.

This context-sensitive approach preserves not only the inerrancy of the Bible but also the authenticity of experience. For the religious believer, both are important: surely the Creator of all things reveals himself in lived experience as well as ancient texts. Indeed, to accept the text at face value while ignoring the evidence of experience would be to betray a rather impoverished view of revelation - one that has been rejected by centuries of official Church teaching.

But does this approach leave any room for mystery or for faith? If we need only consult experiential evidence to determine God's will, of what use is the Bible? I have not suggested, however, that we need only consult experiential evidence; I have merely suggested that experiential evidence, like Biblical evidence, is an important source of revelation. Nor have I denied that Biblical evidence may contradict experiential evidence and thus result in mystery. In this case, however, the contradiction is merely apparent. There is still room for mysteries of faith; this just happens not to be one of them.

The usury analogy also provides a better model for re-interpretation than do the more commonly cited issues of divorce and slavery. The Biblical case against divorce is at least as strong as that against homosexuality; indeed, Jesus forcefully condemns divorce (Matt. 5: 31-32) but never mentions homosexuality. This fact is startling when one considers how many advocates of "traditional Christian values" - Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and Phil Gramm, for instance - are divorced. Perhaps they consider divorce a one-time failure as opposed to an inveterate sin (though Jesus, who likened divorce to adultery, apparently disagrees). Or perhaps they accept an argument similar in strategy to the usury argument: divorce during Jesus's time had disastrous social consequences for women that it no longer has; thus, the Biblical condemnations are obsolete. The problem with the divorce analogy is many fundamentalists maintain that those who divorce and remarry are inveterate sinners, just as Jesus's words suggest.

By contrast, virtually no one wants to maintain the Bible's approval of slavery. Nevertheless, the Bible's position appears clear: Leviticus states, "You may acquire slaves from the pagan nations that are around you" (25:44). St. Paul writes, "Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ" (Eph. 6:5). Are such pronouncements (and many more like them) context-specific in a way that renders them inapplicable today?

Many believers think so. They argue that during Biblical times slavery was significantly different from its antebellum American form; specifically, Biblical masters were much kinder to their slaves. This argument concedes that cultural context is relevant to interpretation, and thus buttresses the case in favor of homosexuality. But it also concedes that under some certain circumstances human beings may own one another - a repugnant conclusion. Some believers try to avoid this conclusion by noting that according to St. Paul, "there is no longer slave or free" (Gal. 3:28). Yet this response also buttresses the pro-gay case, for the same passage says, "there is no longer male and female." Erase that distinction, and homosexuality becomes a non-issue.

Perhaps the slavery example shows that the revisionist approach - or at least, the assumption that the Bible is inerrant - inevitably leads to absurdity. Perhaps it is time for gay rights advocates to bite the bullet and say, "Look, the Bible's just wrong sometimes." For those unprepared to make that concession, the Church's stance on usury suggests a useful and coherent alternative.

First appeared August 29, 1996, in the Windy City Times.

IN THE SEPTEMBER 1996 issue of the slick, self-consciously "hip," youth magazine Details, gay comic writer John Weir published a humorous piece disapproving of gay marriage, explaining that the whole point of being gay is to be critical of such bourgeois convention. Oh.

Now it is always risky to disagree with humor, since the author can always say he was just joking and you failed to get the joke or catch the irony.

But the notions Weir advances have some currency within the self-avowed "queer" community -- which constitutes about 2 percent of the gay population and gets about 70 percent of the media attention. And Weir is writing for a primarily heterosexual audience who, knowing little better, may take him at his word. Those facts make it worthwhile disagreeing with Weir whether he means what he says or not. Weir starts from the fact that Congress is considering a "Defense of Marriage Act," which would limit the federal definition of marriage to "one man and one woman as husband and wife."

"In other words," Weir explains, "husband and husband, or wife and wife, are out, which is fine with me. These words sound too much like master and slave." And Weir hastily segues to a description of a gay leather wedding he says he once attended.

But the segue does not work as an argument. Most gay marriages are not and would not be leather or master/slave marriages. And why should "husband and husband" sound like "master and slave"? After all, who would be master and who would be slave -- the husband or the husband? (Would they flip a coin? Choose alternate weeks? Arm wrestle for bottom?) In fact, just the opposite is true. Husband and husband sounds exactly like a joining of two parties who are equals so far as legal entitlements and gender role expectations are concerned.

(It is worth while pointing out that master/slave relationships in the context of modern sexual practice usually involve a contract voluntarily entered into: If the stated mutual obligations are not honored, the contract is void. This hardly sounds like "slavery" as we traditionally think of it. Weir probably knows this, but he would not have much of an article if he acknowledged it.)

Weir's claim is really an illogical application of the lesbian-feminist line that heterosexual marriage is a "patriarchal" institution and that gays and lesbians should eschew it to avoid supporting the "patriarchy."

That argument claimed that women were once treated as chattel slaves and were regarded as the property of their husbands. Even in modern times, the argument continued, the disproportionate legal advantages and economic power of men combine with the strong traditional gender role expectations to make women the subsidiary partner in any male/female marriage.

Alas, the argument is not historically well grounded (contrast, for example, Chaucer's Wife of Bath); and in an era of nearly equal legal rights and growing economic power for women it looks particularly unpersuasive. But even if the argument had merit, one would expect that gay or lesbian marriages, since they are between equal partners, would be free of precisely those feminist objections to marriage.

Weir's disapproval of marriage turns out not to be based on reason, but to be simply a part of his hostile view toward everything bourgeois.

"I thought the whole point of being homosexual was to poke fun at heterosexual convention," Weir says. "When you commit yourself to being gay you're supposed to take a lifelong vow of otherness. You're supposed to live on the outside, to glory in being different."

"Why be gay if . . . -- -- but stop right there. Weir writes as if being gay, or not being gay were, after all, a choice, an option, merely a "commitment." Now it may be that avowing oneself "queer" involves playing at being different and sneering at others. But being gay is simply coming to the realization that you are erotically attracted primarily to men.

There is no "whole point" of being gay any more than there is a "whole point" of being heterosexual, unless it is the effort to live a full, rich, rewarding life as far as one's talents and capacities allow. If "poking fun at heterosexual convention" and "glory[ing] in being different" is sufficient to make life full, rich, and rewarding for someone, well and good. But most of us are going to find that pretty thin gruel to live on.

Notice, however, that poking fun at heterosexuals is not what Weir is doing. Just the opposite. Weir spends most of his space making fun of gays -- the leather wedding, apolitical gays planning a party, gays who think Jeffrey Dahmer is "cute," and the like. Now Weir is welcome to make fun of and sneer at his fellow gays for the amusement and edification of the mostly heterosexual readership of Details, but let us not call that courageous, or cutting edge, or "living on the outside." Let us call it what it is.

Being different from others is hardly much of an effort or an achievement to "glory in." Most of us already have varying perceptions, tastes and values. This writer, for instance, values and enjoys Shostakovich and Carl Nielsen, Rembrandt, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Yvor Winters, Ludwig von Mises, and Leo Strauss. Few of these are widely shared tastes; they certainly provide little material for the customary cocktail party or bar chat. But far from "glorying in" these uncommon tastes, I wish more people shared them. Frankly, the world would be a better place if they did.

Weir's piece by contrast contains numerous references to what apparently are familiar elements in popular mass culture: movie stars and the like. Weir clearly expects his readers to recognize and enjoy these references. So Weir's mind turns out to be not very different from the minds of the mass-circulation readership he is writing for. Perhaps the only people who think it is nifty to "glory in being different" are the people who are really, at the most fundamental level, not very different at all.

It would be entirely possible, of course, for someone to start with the fact of a gay sexual orientation and generate an interesting sort of social criticism of any society that is unable to accommodate it. But Weir does not do that. The "queer" posture he assumes can only make fun of convention and propose an unmotivated and unspecified "otherness." It produces no insights, generates no understanding. Like the rest of popularized "queer theory," it is epistemologically barren and ontologically vacuous.

It took 32 years, but I finally have come face to face with discrimination. From Cape Cod to Capetown, from Santiago to Stockholm, my black skin never has kept me from going anywhere I have tried to go. As long as I could pay, no establishment has barred me because of my socioeconomic class. Neither Christian, Muslim, nor Jew has held a Bible, Koran, or Torah in my path. And my American national origin has been good enough for restaurant, theater, and museum owners at home and abroad.

No more. Purely out of curiosity, I strolled into a bar at the corner of Houston and Suffolk streets on Manhattan's Lower East Side on the balmy evening of June 8. With the name Meow Mix painted in festive yellow letters across the entrance, the place was too intriguing to go unexplored. But before I could take even three steps inside Meow Mix, a short, tough, drill sergeant of a bouncer blocked me like a barricade.

"Sorry," she declared. "Tonight's ladies' night."

"So I can't come in?"

"That's right," she answered, standing her ground.

Just then, a young woman tried to wheel an amplifier out the door. She had finished entertaining this small room full of women with one sort of music or another. "Would you move so she can get out of here?" the bouncer huffed. " I'll talk to you about this out-side."

She stood before me on the sidewalk beneath a street light, more clearly illuminated than before. She looked even burlier than she had seconds earlier, what with her tight, white cotton tank top and cropped blonde hair. Her biceps were bigger than mine.

"Men are allowed in during the week if they are accompanied by women. We try to keep Saturday a ladies' night," she said, using a quaint term for which she might have slapped me had I referred to her customers as "ladies." (Indeed, Pamela McKenzie of the National Organization for Women once said of ladies' night, presumably at straight bars: "It results in loss of dignity, reinforces harmful stereotypes, and pushes women as sex objects.")

"So you're saying you won't let me in just because I'm a man?"

Silently, the bouncer took a step back and pointed to a small black and white sign in the window that read, "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."

And so it goes. The First Amendment guarantees the American people the right to associate freely with, and, presumably, without, anyone we choose. On the other hand, four decades of civil rights law have so whittled and shaped the right to free association that commercial establishments rarely discriminate against potential customers on the basis of race, sex, religion, nationality, or, most recently, handicapped status.

For my part, I'm willing to accept the concept of a canteen full of lesbians too self-absorbed to permit a man to stand in their midst even long enough for his eyes to adjust to the subdued lighting. But cover your ears before pondering the shrill response that would erupt were a Gotham gay bar to announce a "gentlemen's night" where women would be intercepted at the door and told, as the bouncer breezily informed me, "There are lots of other bars for you to go to." I have yet to visit a gay bar anywhere in America where females were turned away. In fact, most places today have at least a handful of women who walk in and are welcome or, at least, tolerated. But in this era of double and triple standards, equal access flows, like Suffolk Street, one way.

As for me, I'm left with the words the bouncer uttered when I told her I was appalled to experience sexual discrimination in late-20th-century New York City: "Get yourself a lawyer."

Originally appeared June 27, 1996, in the Windy City Times.

Living in the 1990s, we tend to take the gay community for granted, much as we tend to take ourselves as gay people for granted.

And yet historically and cross-culturally gay communities such as ours do not exist. And most people with gay erotic valences do not seem to have arranged their lives as we do now.

So the questions persist: How come us? How come now? What is it that we have created? And what is the right way to think of our community and ourselves?

It takes a certain trick of mind to separate oneself from living one's life in order to figure out what the influences are that lead us to live as we do: it is something like staring at one of those 3-D posters, trying not to look at the surface but through and beyond the surface, in order to see the impressive 3-D effect.

We ask these questions when we want to see our lives in 3-D.

Enter gay sociologist Stephen O. Murray, who has just published a fascinating book on gays and the gay community called American Gay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). There are not many good books in sociology (trust me!), much less ones that could be called "fascinating," so this one immediately joins that small shelf of "Essential Gay Reading."

According to Murray, our modern understanding of ourselves has four salient features which taken together are new in the world.

1. An awareness of our distinctiveness as a group (and a willingness to assert the legitimacy of our distinctiveness).

2. De-assimilation from the general, mainstream culture and the development of separate institutions to serve the community.

3. The primacy of egalitarian same-sex relationships rather than ones that involve marked age differences (as in ancient Greece) or ones that imitate male/female roles (as in many third world cultures).

4. People engaging more or less exclusively in same-sex relationships rather than in bisexuality (as in most cultures where homosexual behavior is "tolerated" or "institutionalized").

Where did this combination come from and how did it get put together? If it is culturally shaped, what shaped it; if it is in some sense natural, what forces or factors allowed it finally to express itself now for the first time?

First then, how did gay communities come to be?

Murray points first to economic changes: "I would suggest that the long term trend from farming and manufacturing to service occupations provided slots for men and women who were relatively detached or seeking to be autonomous from their families."

In support of his hypothesis, Murray notes that the growth of San Francisco gay culture occurred simultaneously with the rapid growth of the city's downtown office space and the virtual end of manufacturing and handling of ocean freight there.

The greater geographical mobility and "car culture" that followed World War II permitted single men and women, who had previously typically lived with their families until they married, to move away from home to take advantage of those new jobs and to express their sexuality.

In addition, the rapid growth of the welfare state created a sort of social and economic "safety net" that previously only families had been able to provide, allowing would-be gays more autonomy from the monitoring eyes of their families and neighbors.

Murray is skeptical of ideological sources of change. "While ideas matter," he cautions, "they don't matter all that much." Still, he does allow a role for the groundwork for gay liberation provided by the greater openness about sex fostered by the Kinsey reports, the "do your own thing" mood and anti-orthodoxy political climate on 1960s college campuses, the remarkable popularity of "situation ethics," and the rapid loss of credibility of psychoanalysis which had been a main support for the idea that gays were mentally ill.

Once gays began a clustering effect in large cities, and once they were provided with an awareness not only of their own numbers and moral legitimacy but a publicly defensible set of arguments for that legitimacy, the gay community began to "recruit" just by existing - to grow, attracting more like minded people, coalescing and crystallizing out of its surroundings, and beginning the process of (selective) de-assimilation from the mainstream that we see continuing to this day.

Of what, then, does the gay community consist? Rather than using some sort of vague, metaphysical notion, Murray opts for the concrete criterion of "institutional completeness." By that he means a variety of institutions which allow members to obtain their basic services from within the community, ones such as gathering spaces, periodicals, religious groups, health and social services, and the like.

It is relatively easy to show that most large cities now contain an elaborate set of gay-specific institutions and that smaller cities are developing more of them, experiencing "institutional elaboration" even in the 1990s. This is in marked contrast to the situation of almost every other social or ethnic group.

In the beginning, of course, were the gathering spaces, the bars (though preceded by friendship networks and private parties). Murray cautions against regarding this as just "sociology discovering the obvious" and points to the specific social impact of the bars. Elsewhere too, gay bars were the first institution to develop in cultures where gays have only recently begun to challenge the equation of homosexuality with female gender behavior (Latin America, Polynesia). And in cultures where homosexuality is age-divergent (a younger with an older partner) gay bars and gay identity have never developed at all (Arab and Persian societies).

The reasons seems connected to the fact that drinking together seems to represent a kind of solidarity which creates a sense of social equality among the participants, undermining socially constructed roles. Drinking, in other words, is used to join something as an equal, not merely consuming alcohol for a respite from one's anxieties or from a hostile world.

The process of "de-assimilation" is an interesting puzzle in itself. One important factors was the challenge made by gay men to the (repressive) cultural stereotype of gay men as effeminate. In earlier periods many gay men apparently tended to avoid having affairs with fellow homosexuals ("sisters") with whom they may have socialized and instead sought sexual liaisons with putatively heterosexual "trade," to whom they imputed masculinity.

But with the first flush of gay liberation in the 1970s, gay men themselves conspicuously cultivated an aura of masculinity as a concomitant of gay pride. Gay gyms became a new community institution and men began working out in order to try to become the sort of man they knew they were attracted to - assuming that he, in turn, would be attracted to them. Even the "clone" look contained a stylized assertion of masculinity. A straight friend whom I took to some gay bars many years ago commented on how well-built the men were; then added, "Do you realize that every man in this bar has a mustache?"

With the continued development of the gay community, this self-presentation has been somewhat moderated by younger gays now coming out. Perhaps 25 years later the negative stereotypes are less pressing so they do not feel the need to resist them so assertively.

This change from gay "exogamy" (sexual involvement with those outside the community) to "endogamy" (sexual involvement with those within the community) seems to have been a key component of the ability to exist in some degree separately from mainstream culture and largely in the company of other gays. Once gays associated with other gays full-time and experience fewer pressures from the surrounding culture, whatever were to be the natural ways of being gay could develop and flourish.

Many young gays, taught about homosexuality in the bosom of their nuclear family (especially at the lower social levels where gender polarities are strong), are still brought up to believe gay cross-gender stereotypes, so for them joining the gay community at first involves not so much learning how to be homosexual but unlearning the false notions of how to be homosexual ("the homosexual social role") they had absorbed.

So the gay community does have an educational function: it teaches young gays how to be; it also teaches them how they do not have to be; it helps them develop an authentic sense of self; it teaches (often tacitly) "cruising etiquette"; it teaches self-esteem; it teaches safe sexual play; it can foster a kind of rough egalitarianism. In this sense, then, the gay community can be seen as a process as well as an entity.

We tend to think of the gay community as a male phenomenon, probably correctly. There is little reason to think there are as many lesbians as gay men. Using several different sources, Murray concludes that there are probably three or four self-identified gay men for every self-identified lesbian. It is worth noting that this is consistent with many gay men's experience in co-sexual gay organizations as well as with the reports of sexual behavior in the Kinsey volumes.

In his discussion of gay relationships, Murray notes that gay relationships tend toward the egalitarian far more than heterosexual relationships (at least until the recent influence of feminism on straight marriage). But he casts doubt on the frequent claim that gay relationships are "more democratic" or cross social or other boundaries to any significant extent.

There may be a slightly greater tendency to be intrigued by and to trick with people from different classes or ethnicities just to see what they are like, he admits, but there remains a tendency to settle down with people pretty much of one's own kind, ones own class, race, educational level, etc. For the same reason, most gay male couples tend toward the "butch/butch" form rather than the earlier model of "butch/femme."

What data there are suggest that partners stand a better chance of staying together if they have relatively equal success in the world. It may be the failure on this count that tends to undermine lesbian couples, whose relationships, as reported in one mammoth study of couples, were more unstable than gay male or heterosexual relationships.

Gay men and women also differ in their approach to sex outside the relationship. Gay men were relatively casual about sex outside the relationship - provided "it didn't mean anything." By contrast, lesbians tended to view sex outside the relationships as indicating a lack of commitment to the relationship or even "betrayal." The greater stability of gay male relationships may be due in part to this ability to handle outside sex, while lesbians may break up over such behavior. Although Murray does not speculate, the lesbian view of sex outside the relationship may be traced to the way all young women are brought up, a residuum of heterosexual indoctrination.

For what it is worth, he notes a finding that for both gays and lesbians (as well as straight men), the more the couples engaged in oral sex, the happier they said they were in their relationship, although the causal direction is unclear. And perhaps contrary to expectations, in the case of anal sex between gay men, it is not who penetrates whom, but getting what one wants (whichever that is) that is the most important element in satisfaction.

Despite widespread belief to the contrary, Murray says he is doubtful that AIDS has caused there to be more gay couples now than previously, at least not more durable gay couples. Even before AIDS some gay men were already losing enthusiasm for a fast-lane lifestyle, and by the early 1980s members of the first wave of gay liberation had grown older and were ready to slow down somewhat anyway.

Murray has surprising things to say about AIDS and the attempt to use it to attack gay male "promiscuity." There was never any evidence presented that going to bathhouses was a risk-factor for contracting AIDS, and some evidence to the contrary, he notes (it remains unpublished!). Most of the sexual acts at bathhouses were without significant risk.

Nor has "professional" safe-sex education had significant impact: most gay community gay men had already changed their behavior long before that professionalization, and the "professional" AIDS education has turned out to have little impact even now on preventing new cohorts of gay men from becoming infected, particularly those from minorities.

Murray says that there will be something in his book for everyone to disagree with. That may be true for academics, since Murray zestfully sets about showing what is wrong with many of the zany theories about gays and gay lives propounded by academics ("queer" theorists, social constructionists, etc.).

But the end result is remarkably close to the lived intuitions of enculturated gay men in gay enclaves. This is not to say that they will not learn something from the book. On the contrary, they may learn the most, because they will have the fewest mental obstacles to learning it. But they will have their intuitions given shape, improved, extended, given firmer foundations, and they will see unexpected implications of them drawn out.

Reading Murray is like talking with a bright, thoughtful, and extremely well read friend who is happy to pass on to us what he has figured out about how we live and why we live as we do.

Originally published April 22, 1996, in the New York Native.

WHY IS IT THAT SO MANY ACTIVISTS see the current renewed emphasis on "values" as simply a reactionary plot to oppress gays and lesbians, keep women subordinate, and preserve "white skin privilege"? True, calls for the assertion of "traditional family values" by the religious right often include a hefty dose of anti-gay venom, but the yearning for a new commitment to personal responsibility and rectitude goes far beyond the diatribes of the intolerant right. From Bill Clinton's State of the Union address to best-sellers such as Bill Bennett's The Book of Virtues and Ben Wattenberg's Values Matter Most, and from plans to "end welfare as we know it" to efforts to elevate personal merit over group-based entitlement, the call for a return to moral discipline is widespread.

While some dissident gay intellectuals - Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan, and Jonathan Rauch come to mind - have argued that traditional morality, including the commitment of marriage, can and must be expanded to encompass out-and-proud gay people, many movement activists who came of age in the post-Stonewall years reject such assimilationist pleading as a betrayal of "liberation" and a surrender to oppressive bourgeois morality. Feminists see a plot to restore "patriarchy."

Values advocates, alternatively, argue that crime, welfare dependency, and other social pathologies can be traced to the rejection since the 1960s of "shame" as a motivating concept. That's the thesis in books such as Saving Face: America and the Politics of Shame by Stuart Schneiderman, a former anti-Vietnam War activist who is now a psychoanalyst. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Ruth Benedict, he defines shame as the fear of looking bad before others, an internalized monitor that keeps bad behavior in check. "Shame cultures educate by persuasion," he says, "by showing the right things to do."

In America today, where shame has been banished as unhealthy, only the fear of punishment for major transgressions maintains what remains of civil order. Schneiderman writes that as a consequence, "Obnoxious and insulting behavior becomes acceptable" while "the idea of being a 'pillar' of the community sounds like a stale joke."

But there's a reason why we, as gays and lesbians, tend to resist the idea of a healthy sense of shame, and it's developed in another recently published book. In Coming Out of Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives, Lev Raphael argues that "most gay men and lesbians grow up learning that to be gay is to be sick, to be unnatural, to be a sinner. By adolescence such negative attitudes have produced and reinforced a single, powerful emotion: shame, the feeling that you're inferior and judged as 'bad' not for what you do, but for what you are: gay."

It's hard to argue with that perspective, as well. The trouble is that many who want to get rid of the bad shame (internalized homophobia) would throw the baby (civil behavior) out with the bath water. This is the camp that likes to argue that because some values proponents don't support gay equality, we must oppose all of the "personal responsibility" positions that it happens they do support. Moreover, this line of reasoning goes, we must make allies with all groups that continue to define themselves in revolt against bourgeois normality.

Yet welfare as a way of life is now too expensive for American taxpayers to maintain, even if the besieged middle class weren't demanding tax relief. And as the cry heats up to jettison liberal judges who think criminals are "oppressed" by police, our movement could find itself on the backward-marching side of history, even more so than today, when activists loudly defend maintaining preferences based on group membership rather than individual merit and oppose attempts to reform the very welfare system that breeds dependence and despondency.

But what about the anti-sex message in all this shame talk? One answer is to dare to make distinctions when it comes to sexual behavior. We can, for example, say forthrightly that gay men and lesbians should overcome and heal the scars produced by the negative self-images imposed on us owing to our sexuality. Like other adults, we must be free to lead healthy, hearty, but responsible and safe sex lives, whether or not we choose to form committed relationships. Moreover, gay and lesbian youth should have access to information and resources so they do not grow up mired in the self-negating belief that they are sick or "queer," so to speak.

On the other hand, teenagers unequipped emotionally to make the self-assertions and engage in the negotiations required for safe sex are better off remaining abstinent for awhile, and a heathy sense of shame regarding premature sexual behavior is not a bad thing. Despite liberal sex-ed programs and free condom distributions, rates of AIDS transmission are up among gay male teens, and teen pregnancy rates have skyrocketed (up 9 percent from 1985 to 1990). Children reared in welfare-dependent, fatherless homes have become an inner-city norm, and demograpahic experts say juvenile crime is soaring as a result. [Since '96, with welfare reform and a more 'conservative' mood in the country, some of the statistics cited above for social pathology have begun to reverse.]

For all our sakes, these teenage mothers, and the boys who notch their belts for every girl they get pregnant, could use more than a little dose of old-fashioned shame.

Still, many lesbigay activists can't see the forest for the trees. Arlene Zarembka, a lesbian-feminist writer, asserted last year that "welfare reform has become a phrase for re-asserting patriarchal control over women." It accomplished this, she claimed, by "arresting the independence" of women because they are lesbians or otherwise choose not to marry but still want children - and somebody to support them. Moreover, she even decried efforts to "penalize women for bearing an additional child" while on welfare by not increasing the welfare-recipient's taxpayer-funded benefits. Similar writings by self-styled "liberationists" celebrate teenage sexual expression and romanticize criminal behavior.

But as fears of "moral meltdown" escalate, the pendulum clearly is swinging back toward a renewed emphasis on personal shame and civility. Those who argue otherwise are woefully out of touch with the tenor of the times. Movement activists who oppose the trend toward tying individual accountability to a renewed sense of shame will only convince the bigots that they are right to see homosexuality as inherently destructive to the social order and restraint on which civil society rests.