IGF CultureWatch

First published in the Windy City Times April 4, 1996.

• The Japanese car manufacturer Subaru recently began a national advertising campaign to reach the gay and lesbian market, placing full page ads in national and local gay publications. The ads depicted two men or two women with copy that read, "It loves camping, the beach, and long-term commitment. Too bad it's only a car."
• Just a few months ago, Aetna insurance company decided to offer automobile and homeowners insurance coverage to "domestic partners," candidly defined as "two adults of the same or opposite sex engaged in a spouse-like relationship..."
• A nationwide bedding distributor called "Dial-a-Mattress" last year specifically targeted the gay market with advertisements showing a nude, sleeping man with copy that read, "Who you sleep with is your business. How you sleep is ours."
• Last year as well the furniture company IKEA ran a television advertising campaign in selected markets depicting a male couple picking out IKEA furniture for their home.

For many years gay publications have promoted the gay and lesbian community as an ideal economic market, one with favorable demographics in such areas of education, urban concentration, and disposable income.

It appears that major national corporations are beginning to suspect that those claims may be correct and are willing to promote products and services specifically to the gay market.

That we are a substantial "niche market" now seems a fairly well attested fact.

In a useful recent book, Untold Millions, marketing consultant Grant Lukenbill pointed out that a recent random survey of consumers by Yankelovich Partners found that six percent of its 2500 member panel were willing to identify themselves as "gay," lesbian," or "homosexual."

That amounts to 15 million consumers nationwide, a number we may reasonably expect to grow somewhat as more people feel comfortable identifying themselves as gay.

In addition, gays were more numerous or more willing to identify themselves in large cities: Yankelovich found that eight percent of its respondents in metropolitan areas of more than 3,000,000 described themselves as gay.

While those percentages may not seem overwhelming, they mean that in a multi- brand field, a solid gay constituency could constitute 15, 20, even 25 percent of the total purchases of any one brand of product.

Each company that promotes to the gay market reduces the psychological obstacles other companies face in doing the same. And each company that promotes to us to increase its market share pressures places pressure on its competition to do the same, if only to maintain theirs. Lukenbill calls this snowball effect the "gay and lesbian consumer revolution."

Granted the likelihood that this "revolution" is likely to continue, it seems useful to try to determine what it can do for us.

First of all, it is important to point out that there is little or nothing in this change that is motivated by benevolence or a concern for gay rights; it is founded on the desire for profits. This is good, not bad.

There is a famous quotation by Adam Smith to the effect that "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest."

When Aetna Insurance announced its willingness to offer insurance to gay couples, their spokesman said the same thing in modern "corporate-speak": "We need to recognized changing demographic situations and pursue those segments that we feel offer the best profit opportunities."

What the economic bottom-line argument does is insulate Aetna against any flamboyant rhetoric from the Religious Right that Aetna is "pandering to the homosexual community." By pleading economic necessity, the company tacitly rules out of court all arguments based on morality or claims that they are supporting deviance.

And the argument serves to solidify stockholder support for the new package by reminding them what is at stake.

At the same time, however, the very flatness of the language tacitly sends the message, "We do not regard gay couples as any different from anyone else."

Even more so, in a climate of lingering social disapproval, the assertively laissez-faire language of the "Dial-a-Mattress advertisement ("Who you sleep with is your business") constitutes positive support.

Like the Aetna initiative, the Subaru promotion was based on simple economics. According to Advertising Age, market research found that lesbians were four times as likely as members of the general public to buy a Subaru, so the campaign seems designed to solidify brand loyalty and build on that existing market advantage.

The campaign does at least two useful things besides getting gays together with a decent product. Most obviously, by advertising in the gay press, Subaru provides gay publishers with income to grow in size and hire more writers to research and produce more interesting news and feature articles.

But by their inclusion of two men and two women, the ads also provide implicit visibility for gays and gay couples, a visibility that has been absent when gays peered into the mirror offered by the general culture to see their existence acknowledged.

The Ikea ad using the male couple did the same, but had an additional impact because not just gays but the general public saw the image of a wholesome male couple establishing a cozy domesticity. The ad must have prompted a shock of recognition among young and closeted gay who may have never considered such a thing possible.

It must have come as a considerable surprise to members of the general public as well, for whom it served as a virtual Public Service Announcement to undermining notions that gays are socially harmful or a threat to the family.

In an interview with author Lukenbill, the vice president of Young and Rubicam's direct marketing division frankly acknowledged, "I was shocked at the IKEA ad. They spent money [targeting] the community and it got out in the world-at-large in a way that had a political effect that all my years of political activism never had."

In that light, it may be that the next significant jump in gay influence will take place through the economic sphere rather than in the currently stalled political arena. It is hard to disagree with Lukenbill's assessment that "[the] fight for human rights is now becoming an economic process as much as it has been a political process-a new cultural dynamism of identity."

Originally published Feb. 15, 1996, in the Windy City Times.

ONE MIGHT REASONABLY CONCLUDE that the State has always been the great enemy of gays and lesbians.

Governments once executed gays for simply having sex lives. In some places they still imprison people for homosexual behavior. Governments empowered psychiatrists to confine gays in institutions to be drugged and electroshocked as "therapy." The United States government refuses gays the right to jobs in its largest industry - the military.

Governments refuse to recognize the marriage contracts of gays and lesbians. Governments in most places refuse to promise not to discriminate against gays. And it is governments that by all these policies set the moral tone for a society that, as a result, devalues gays and gay lives.

Yet gay activists spend much of their efforts on trying to get governments to use their power on our behalf.

Clearly, we need to make some distinctions between liberty from government, equal treatment by the government, and government-enforced behavior.

Start with sodomy laws. For eons governments have tried their best to enforce laws that prohibit our sexual activities. Even when such laws are not often enforced, they remain - as religious conservatives want them to remain - as an assertion of state-approved moral values: a statement that our lives are of secondary importance and our sexuality is viewed with distaste and disapproval.

Governments are loath to give up the power to make this statement, as witness legislatures (e.g., Massachusetts and Minnesota) that have passed gay civil rights laws but retain criminal penalties for sodomy.

But it is consistent with the most vigorous assertion of our privacy, personal autonomy and liberty against government for us to say, "This is none of your business. Your job is to protect our zone of privacy, not invade it."

As libertarian political philosopher Friedrich Hayek pointed out in "Law, Legislation and Liberty," "What a person does when within his four walls, or even the voluntary collaboration of several persons, in a manner which clearly cannot affect or harm others, [should] never become the subject of rules of conduct that will concern a judge" (Vol. 1, p. 101).

The argument changes somewhat when we turn to gay marriage. With marriage, governments currently legitimize and grant favors to the relationships of one class of people (heterosexuals) but not to others (homosexuals).

There are two solutions. The one more commonly proposed is for the government to recognize the marriage contracts of gays just as it does of heterosexuals.

The other solution, as proposed earlier this year [1996] by Hawaii's governor Ben Cayetano, is that the government should not be involved in marriages at all; rather, it should simply adopt laws to specify the reciprocal rights and duties of domestic partners, both gay and heterosexuals.

A consistent concern for liberty and autonomy from government gives clear preference to Cayetano's proposal, but the root argument for both is the same: Gays equally with heterosexuals are tax-paying citizens the government exists to benefit, so it should provide equal access to services including the registering of contracts.

The same argument is at the core of our claim to serve in the military. We are citizens who pay taxes for the upkeep of the military. You personally may not wish to join the military, as I do not, but other gays and lesbians might. By excluding us, the military deprives gays of access to the career training and steady employment the military offers to heterosexuals.

In addition, being able to join the military has always served as recognition of civic legitimacy. Denying that opportunity to a class of people demeans their value both as people and as citizens. Even when African-Americans served in segregated units, they were still treated as citizens equally capable of serving responsibly in the military.

It is similar with gay marriage, of course. The significance of our relationships is demeaned by being ignored by the agency that grants legitimacy to "real" marriages.

When we turn to non-discrimination laws, we have to distinguish between two types and the radically different arguments for them.

Let us call Type A laws that prevent government itself from discriminating against gays and lesbians in employment, provision of services, etc. Such a law requires the government itself to treat gays the same as heterosexuals. Several cities have this kind of law.

The argument for such a law is the same as for gay marriage and gay access to the military: We are equally citizens and should receive the same access to opportunities the government provides to others.

The other type of non-discrimination law, call it Type B, requires not only that governments treat us equally but that the government force all private businesses, landlords, and "public accommodations" to treat us the same as heterosexuals.

It is not clear what the argument could be for this sort of law. We are not citizens of private establishments and we are not forced to support them by paying taxes. So what could be the origin of this right? And since there are usually a variety of potential employers and places to live, the basis of a right to any particular job or housing unit seems unclear.

The availability of other options becomes evident from realizing that by the time there is enough public support for a non-discrimination bill to be passed, there is already considerable social tolerance for gays and lesbians. In other words, by the time general (type B) non-discrimination laws are politically feasible, they are less "necessary" - on their proponents' own grounds.

It is also worth pointing out that the same laws also coercively prevent gays and lesbians who are business owners and landlords from showing any preference to us as gays over heterosexuals. Nor is it clear where the right of heterosexuals to work for a gay employer or rent from a gay landlord could come from.

Someone might say that we should want this kind of law to enforce morally virtuous behavior by people who are doing things we do not approve of. But this is exactly the same argument that anti-gay forces used against us in the past. So all we are really saying is that although they had power before, now we are gaining power and are going to use it against them.

It seems odd that gays and lesbians, with their harrowing historical experience of harm from government power, would turn right around and try to use that power to control others, and even be willing to increase government power over ourselves.

One might reasonably think that using governments to enforce morally virtuous behavior has all along been the problem, not its solution. The solution might well seem to be reducing the scope and power of governments by getting them out of the business of enforcing "virtuous" behavior altogether.

Originally appeared Feb. 1, 1996, in the Windy City Times.

We do not currently have an adequate theory of why gay progress is happening Our spokespeople are obscure, our organizations are small, and the opportunities for making our arguments are few.

Yet we know from a variety of surveys that homophobia is declining among high school graduates, college students and the general public. We do not know why. It is happening at different rates in each group. But we do not know why that is, either.

It is almost as if progress gets made without any effort on our part. But some theory would be valuable, if only to satisfy our natural human desire to make sense of the world.

I offer the following experimental explanation, oversimplified, no doubt, for the purposes of clarity.

I used to think that gays needed to persuade people of our value and moral legitimacy. Now, I have come to suspect that our task might better be to help foster conditions where people do not care about homosexuality one way or the other because they come to hold a hierarchy of values in which sexual orientation is of little or no significance.

The rate of pro-gay change among each of these populations-high school and college students and adult-is best understood as a function of the hierarchy of values each tacitly holds about what it means to be successful as a person, as that implicit value system presses against traditional social/religious homophobia.

1. For instance, high school students are strongly impressed by biology, by their intense realization of gender polarities. To a high degree, success as a person tends to be defined as success in embodying one of those polarities This is particularly true among males, for whom, as Camille Paglia usefully points out, masculinity is not a given but a hard-won achievement.

That achievement is fostered, certified, by athletic prowess and success with the opposite sex. Such a value system has little place for gays who are, at best viewed as non-participants, much less participants on the wrong side.

These values ought to reinforce social homophobia, but they are apparently countered to some degree, by the extraordinary attention young people pay to popular culture: film, MTV, television, popular, rock and "alternative" music.

Popular culture seems to be the chief way many young people learn about the world out there and-the conservatives are correct-they absorb its images and values. That homophobia is declining among teenagers is almost surely due to the growing presence of amiable, talented gays and gay characters: from "Roseanne" and "Friends" to "To Wong Fu," the Pet Shop Boys and Melissa Etheridge.

2. Among college students surveys show that homophobia drops as much as 50 percent between the freshman and senior years. The explanation may be that students who go to college are exposed to a new way of understanding what constitutes success as a person.

In college, if anywhere in our culture, success as a person is defined by intellectual capacity-learning new facts, learning to think about old facts in new ways. In such an evaluational scheme, gays and lesbians have an even, perhaps better than even, chance at doing well and being thought of well.

In addition, college students tend to absorb a new way of thinking about themselves. The constant emphasis on learning new things tacitly teaches the virtue of openness to new ideas and the concept of living as a process, a perpetually unfinished personal project. That too undermines prejudice.

Further, education leads to a kind of individualism. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out in "The Road to Serfdom," "The more intelligent people are, the more they are likely to have an individual scale of values." And we could add, have grown accustomed to the idea that other people have different values, desires and plans.

3. Opinion surveys of the general public show a gradual shift in a pro-gay direction despite the contrary efforts of religious fundamentalists and cultural conservatives.

The main new pressure against homophobia is the way in which the culture once again redefines for people the notion of what it means to excel as a person. To a large degree, this is understood as excellence in a skill or craft or function for which there is a market. The more exclusively this criterion is used to evaluate people, the less room there is for homophobia to play a significant role.

It is odd that the political left ever thought capitalism was anti-gay. To the contrary, it would seem to be the free market, with its ceaseless flux and stress on creative efforts to remain competitive, that generates the environment in which people assess one another more or their knowledge and skills than on other "personal" qualities.

In a way, that market dynamic reproduces the college-environment learning dynamic in that it stresses alertness to new information, skill in finding that information, and creativity in using it. Only now the information has a direct practical purpose rather than that of just passing an examination.

To all this sexual orientation is irrelevant. That David Geffen is a multi-millionaire entrepreneur is significant; that he is gay is merely interesting.

4. Such reflections as these, if they are correct, are not without practical vale. They can suggest what to encourage in society that will foster open, flexible attitudes.

Since the more educated and affluent people are the most pro-gay, we might want to support adult education programs and public awareness of scientific and technological change. We might want to support attitudes and institutions that promote the idea of life as an unfinished project, such as modern psychology with its emphasis on personal growth.

We might want to encourage interest in and education about music, art and literature, where gays are clearly plentiful, where excellence is judged by aesthetic standards.

In social dynamics, we might want to foster competition and the reduction of government decision-making. The more we can remove decision-making from the collective (or political) arena, the more we can tacitly teach people that they should have greater respect for other people's autonomy and that their own views should have no coercive role in deciding how others pursue personal fulfillment.

And we might be wise to focus our organizational attention on promoting gay presence in the mass media and popular culture, the most effective means of countering or preventing homophobia.

First appeared January 8-15, 1996, in The New Republic.

"CRATE AND BARREL," I said, "That sounds like a lesbian store, doesn't it."

"Sounds like what a lesbian would wear," said Susan.

Susan and I are best friends, and both lesbians. We joke this way often. We are incessant watchers, curious about other lesbians, and whether we can literally tease them out of the crowd. But aside from the teasing, there is much serious conversation between us about what it means to be a lesbian, and what the external cues are telling us it is supposed to mean.

So, what does it mean to be a lesbian in 1995? We're calling it "The Gay Nineties." We're given symbols: rainbow flag, pink triangle, pink ribbon. We're given behavioral cues: "Pride" and "Act Up." Dogma is irresistible, it seems, and most real thinking is replaced by the rote slogans of a causeÑ"The Lesbian Avengers. We Recruit." Hence the jokes, a kind of bitter relief from orthodoxy.

But, for me, there is an urgent question under the jokes, a question the so-called "lesbian community" does not ask. Who am I?

If the straight world (and even the gay male world) has defined lesbians falsely, even maliciously, then lesbians have, to some degree, acquiesced, by forgetting the I and playing themselves into stereotypes. Lesbians have labels for everyone, it seems: bull dyke, granola dyke, baby dyke, power dyke, butch, soft butch, femme, lipstick lesbian. It goes on and on, and these are the same labels that make it easy for straight people, and gay men, to misrepresent lesbians. If we want the truth about lesbians, labels will not lead us to it, or at least not to an answer that will make any human difference. We, as lesbians, have amassed names, symbols, and behaviors, and they are designed to tell us and the rest of the world who we are. But this is not an answer.

If the question is, "What does it mean to be a lesbian?" then the answer is semantic, and the same for everyoneÑa primary sexual and emotional attraction to women. Sounds laughably clinical, doesn't it! You knew the answer when you looked it up in the dictionary at age eight. Reductive as it sounds, it is the only answer that will give lesbians the equality they demand.

Only the simplicity of what the word "lesbian" means can make being a lesbian a neutral fact of life to which all other traits, lifestyles, professions, proclivities are incidental and beside the point. Only this literal definition will make the word "lesbian" a nonissue in public life, because being an I first frustrates persecution by threading lesbianism so completely through the fabric of "the norm" that it cannot be separated from it. Being a lesbian first, however, sets you apart by your own definition, making you vulnerable as an other. The "lesbian community" defines itself by one quality, and thereby argues against its own claims for living a "normal" life. By their own design, many lesbians are living a lesbian life instead.

Perhaps such policies are inevitable. Heterosexual Americans increasingly recognize that marrying someone of the opposite sex is not a serious option if one happens to be gay. They also increasingly realize that helping homosexuals settle down into stable, committed relationships is better than pushing them into bushes and bathhouses. So the public is eager to bless stable gay relationshipsÑso long as those relationships are not called "marriage."

The straight world has taken lesbians, a numerical minority, and made them, by false argument, a moral, social, and political minority; and in retreating to the entrenched haven of groupthink, the "lesbian community" has colluded in this sophistry. But if I am an individual, if "lesbian" is reduced to what it is, one among many words that describe me, it ceases to so effectively define and marginalize me.

No doubt, my critics will label this a "back to the closet" argumentÑi.e., if you want straight rights, then act straightÑbut heterocloning is not my answer to the problems lesbians face, individualism is. Lesbianism may never be as innocuous as left-handedness, but angry ghettoization will merely aggravate prejudice.

Defining oneself beyond lesbianism, however, is anathema to the group. Behaviors not sanctioned by lesbian codes of conduct are suspect in the "lesbian community," because they smack of conformity to straight life, and so called patriarchal (an absurdly over-used word) notions of womanhood. Lesbianism, for many, has become a lifestyle, complete with its own vocabulary, food, clothing, politics, medicine, and psychology. Dissent is no laughing matter. The cause is paramount, goodspeak the lingua franca.

Nearly a year ago, a woman bought me a beer in a lesbian bar, and taught me quickly this cool lesson of conformity. After setting the beer in front of me, she seemed suddenly distraught. She asked me if my jacket was made of leather. I said it wasn't. She then looked down at my shoes and asked if they were made of leather. I said they were. She asked me about my belt, and I agreed. It was also leather. She then took back my beer, saying that she couldn't buy a beer for someone who was wearing animal hide. She then pinned to my shirt a button bearing a save-the-animals slogan whose precise wording I've forgotten. She then approached the woman next to me and gave her the beer instead. (The satisfying coda to the story is that the woman next to me returned the beer, saying that she couldn't accept it in good conscience, since her parents were furriers.)

I had failed the lesbian test, and approval was rescinded, because in the "lesbian community," political loyalty is a badge of courage and a mandate for inclusion. The veterans of everything from butch/femme in the 1950s to radical feminism in the 1970s are its esteemed matriarchs, older, seasoned women, disrespectful of the young and uninitiated. While in the gay male culture, youth and beauty are apotheosized (granted, to an extreme), in the "lesbian community" they are often resented and denigrated. How many times have these "older" women said to me, "Yeah, well God knows where you were in the seventies," or leaked into the conversation a degrading reference to youth and its assumed concomitants, social and political ignorance!

Recently, I attended a fundraising event for a lesbian foundation. They were giving a staged reading of a new lesbian screenplay. The story, touted as a lesbian Big Chill, took place at a house in the Berkshires where a group of old friends were gathering to celebrate the birth of a child to one of the couples. The script was filled with lesbian cliches. Half the women had been lovers with each other at some time or another and were still working through old resentments. Most of them were political refugees of the 1970s. Several of them were either alcoholics or proselytizing twelve-steppers. In one scene they sat around the porch with a guitar, singing Holly Near songs and recounting their coming out stories.

The comic centerpiece was a twenty-three-year-old corporate bimbo type in a glen plaid suit with miniskirt and high heels, page-boy hair, and Estee Lauder face. She was the much younger lover of one of the reunionees, and many other things she wasn't supposed to be: well groomed, attractive, and straight-seeming in voice and demeanor. She was also many of the things the writer believed must naturally follow from all the above: vapid, spoiled, rich, uninformed, rootless, and complacent.

Many of the story's biggest jokes were at this character's expense, the most pointed being the one in which she takes her turn in the Holly Nearfest and tells her coming out story. The rest of the coming out stories, as you might expect, were bathetic and trite. In contrast, the ditz character simply giggles ungratefully and says, "I don't know. I just came out"Ñthereby indicating that coming out these days is an unpremeditated nonevent, thanks to the old war-horses for whom it was, no doubt, an art form.

Recently, many poorly made lesbian films have embarrassed me, but this script was conspicuous because it embodied so much of what is wrong with the "lesbian community." The bimbo character was a caricature of lesbian youth as seen through the eyes of the ossified gerontocracy. The writer's message was clear: Don't be young, don't accept beauty, don't trespass, don't be yourself; instead, be disgruntled and carping, self-deprecating in your dress and demeanor, avoid anything that passes for accomplishment or assimilation in the mainstream, be a real lesbian and sing along.

As a young lesbian, my answer is this: be original, and write something that is a profound, intelligent depiction of the human spirit in a lesbian milieu (à la Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues), or if you prefer comedy, at least produce something that is clever enough not to become a parody of itself.

If lesbians truly want equal rights and equal treatment, they should step into the real world, make a case for their humanity first, and, above all, learn to take a joke.

First appeared in Reason, January 1996.

THE OLD NEWS about Andrew Sullivan is his supposed bundle-of-contrasts persona: young British conservative who edits the venerable American liberal New Republic; Catholic but gay; fan of stuffy Michael Oakeshott but P.I.B. (Person In Black) of Gap-ad fame. The new news is that in Virtually Normal he emerges much more clearly as a partisan of classical-liberal, if not quite libertarian, views.

Perhaps the most remarkable element of this book is the way Sullivan sets himself squarely against the main demand of what passes for liberal, moderate, and even conservative gay politics these days: laws banning private bias against homosexuals in jobs, housing, and the like. In doing so, he helps revive a powerful yet half-forgotten rationale for classical liberalism: Even if you don't see the issue of politics as one of respecting individual rights, even if you set aside any love of liberty as such or the prosperity it engenders, it's still worth limiting the power of government because that's the only true route to social unity and peace, the only real alternative to "terminal wrangling" and the war of all against all.

The proper wonk approach to this kind of book is to skip past the sex stuff to get to the policy discussion, but a few words about the former are to the point. Appearances notwithstanding, discussion of this issue is not entirely resistant to factual findings. Sober gay advocates have receded from earlier wild guesses of 10 percent prevalence to a more plausible estimate of perhaps 2 or 3 percent of the male population.

For their part, religious traditionalists and kindred opponents have gradually become aware of current scientific views as summarized by Judge Richard Posner in Sex and Reason: "Homosexual preference, especially male homosexual preference, appears to be widespread; perhaps to be innate; to exist in most, perhaps all, societies, whether they are tolerant of homosexuality or repressive of it; to be almost completely�perhaps completely�resistant to treatment; and to be no more common in tolerant than in repressive societies." As a result, many of these traditionalists have refocused their efforts away from trying to convert gays to straighthood�the very high rate of smashup in marriages contracted under these circumstances may have influenced them�and now try to talk them into lifelong celibacy instead.

Sullivan expends a fair bit of effort respectfully taking issue both with religious doctrine, especially that of the Catholic Church, and with the kind of Foucault-style social constructionism that views homosexuality as "transgressive" and means that as high praise. Readers who never felt tempted by either set of doctrines should remain patient, because brevity is a Sullivan virtue, and he is soon off to other matters.

He chides many mainstreamers who are happy to tolerate all sorts of self-destructive shenanigans out of public view but worry that any public Gertrude-and-Alice visibility, however sedate and domestic, will tempt the "waverers" said to be perched on the sexuality fence. Gays, meanwhile, says Sullivan, would do well to learn the bourgeois virtues, lest they be caught up in the "hedonism, loneliness and deceit" that critics only too accurately perceive in much of their subculture. Much of Sullivan's thunder on these issues has been stolen by his own earlier writings, and by those of Bruce Bawer, Jonathan Rauch, and others over the past few years (much in his own New Republic). But this will stand as a major account by any reckoning.

Now back to policy. Even in our tolerant society and even aside from AIDS, gays face a long list of problems, but it's almost insane to imagine that systematic denial of jobs or housing could rank among the top 10. Yet in an extraordinary triumph of ideology over constituent interest, organized gaydom has concentrated on passing anti-bias laws even though this has meant neglecting the cause of repealing laws against homosexual relations themselves, which remain on the books in many states.

Much of this emphasis can surely be attributed to the spirit of the times. For years "discrimination" has served in liberal reform circles pretty much the same conceptual function as "sin" in a Bible Belt seminary: It's been the central organizing principle of disapproval, and in practice the idea to pick up and run with when some new push to correct human nature is contemplated.

Also at fault are the bogus analogies that couple the cars on the Freedom Train. Because housing bias has been a problem for, say, blacks and Jews, it follows that gays should also beware real estate agents. (More likely, they are the real estate agents.) Then there's the legacy of the left, which presumes that the oppression nexus for any newly discovered minority group will be employment.

The anti-bias model has led gay advocates into increasingly untenable positions, such as the claim in the pending Supreme Court case that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the voters of Colorado from ruling out anti-bias laws based on homosexual orientation (though they're not obliged to pass them in the first place). And all for what? In the years such laws have been on the books, as Sullivan points out, very little seems to have changed in the relative local climate for gays in the covered places. Wisconsin's first-in-the-nation law is "almost never used"; sexual preference cases make up only 1 percent of its bias caseload. In The Corporate Closet: The Professional Lives of Gay Men in America (1993), James D. Woods and Jay H. Lucas found that few of their interview subjects expected to enlist the aid of such laws if their relations with their bosses took a dive. Very sensibly, they were "reluctant to seek legal solutions to what they perceive are interpersonal problems"�especially, one presumes, where going to court would invite public scrutiny of their private lives.

So the great rationale for these laws instead turns out to be reassurance that society really, genuinely does care about its target group. Using a similar sort of logic, a 33-year-old paraplegic told the Chicago Tribune when Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, "Now able-bodied people won't look down on us as individuals." But unlike the engraved testimonial that the Wizard of Oz gave the Tin Man to buck up his self-esteem, the bias-law variety of assurance that you're an OK Person Too comes with real costs to others.

As Sullivan stresses, it adds to "the now elaborate rules governing how individuals can associate with and employ people," rules which cumulatively "inhibit freedom of choice," notably "one person's liberty to hire the kind of people he or she want[s]." Controls on the "fundamental" liberty of contract, coupled with hate-speech rules which curtail each person's "right to say what he or she fe[els] about others," add up to "clear and real limitations on what were once regarded as inviolable liberties."

Sullivan cites few cases, but they're not hard to find in news reports and litigation records. A municipal ordinance in Madison, Wisconsin, got two young women in trouble for preferring straight to lesbian roommates. Minnesota officials successfully pressed charges against a health club run by born-again Christians who were hiring only their co-believers as managers; although Minneapolis musclemen and their trainers surely had plenty of other options, the cause of "diversity" required the suppression of this odd little institution, even as the famed Vietnamese hamlet had to be destroyed in order to be saved.

Other employment lawsuits have been at least as troubling. The biggest court award came in Collins v. Shell Oil, a case so embarrassing that gay activists seldom cite it. It involved a man who was fired after he left on an office printer the sort of blush-to-relate material about his private life that could easily have gotten a straight man fired mutatis mutandis under current sexual harassment rules curbing the circulation of lewd matter in the workplace. Instead a court handed him $5.3 million.

Then there was John Dill's complaint that former employer Bryan Griggs had harassed him at the office by 1) playing conservative talk radio shows; and 2) posting a letter from a local Congresswoman skeptical of gay service in the military. (Dill hadn't objected to either the radio or the letter posting at the time.) A spokeswoman for the Seattle human rights commission said the claims might well fly under the city law. After Griggs�who said he didn't know Dill was gay at all�had spent $5,000 on legal defense, Dill dropped the charges, explaining that his point had been made.

The Seattle Times called Dill's complaint a "scary assault on the First Amendment," which did not prevent Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) from telling The Advocate that "you see a record of zero horror stories" under these laws. This may be the sort of thing Florence King had in mind when she wrote: "I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat."

It's not that Sullivan opposes ambitious gay rights measures. In particular, he's become famous for arguing the case for same-sex marriage and acceptance in military service (and does so again in Virtually Normal). Both, he believes, would help assimilate homosexuals into the matrix of society. Moreover, both would move the government itself toward a position of neutrality between gay and straight citizens, and neutrality is a suitable demand for classical liberals to place on their government.

But most bias fights are over the application of laws to private actors, not the government. And even a cursory look at recent controversies�over the Boston Irish parade and the Boy Scouts, for instance � suggests that, as Sullivan observes, anti-bias measures have "seemed to intensify the hostility shown toward homosexuals rather than mollify it." And no wonder: Their aim is to "educate a backward majority in the errors of its ways" at the cost of some of its liberty. Observing the complex range of not always rational emotions in gay-straight relations, they seek to "reduce all these emotions to a binary bigoted-tolerant axis, and legislate in favor of the tolerant."

Yet, Sullivan argues, using the government to enforce some citizens' views of virtue and the good life over others' is what liberalism was "invented specifically to oppose." Having reversed its policy, its modern successor "has now come to seem a fomenter of social division," "deeply implicated" in growing societal warfare. "It has come, in other words, to resemble the problem it was originally designed to fix."

Hence what Sullivan aptly calls his "peace proposal." He suggests "disentangling from each other legally, by avoiding any actual interaction in which citizens seek legal redress from other citizens about homosexuality." There'd be "[n]o cures or re-educations, no wrenching private litigation, no political imposition of tolerance." Instead there'd be liberty, amid purely formal legal equality.

Sullivan does not always seem to realize that when it comes to the government's own operations�whom to employ, how to tax, what methods to recognize for the legitimation of children�fixing on a goal of formal neutrality is only the first, not the last, step in analysis. Anti-bias norms enforced by litigation carry major costs even when applied to public employment; most citizens will feel that efficacy rather than neutrality should rule in the military if the two happen to clash. Indeed, announcing a goal of neutrality merely purchases a ticket to a maze of practical considerations that in a fair-minded system will not always be resolved in the direction of gay equivalency, in family law or anything else.

Though short on research and on consideration of practical details, an essay like Sullivan's can hardly be every sort of book at once. Enough that it raises at long last the right sorts of questions about its subject. Its author can bask in the compliment paid him by London's Independent: "Sullivan is a political thinker and yet every sentence is imbued with a sense of the limitations of politics."

Appeared December 1, 1995, in Philadelphia Gay News and other gay papers.

SURPRISINGLY, and blind-sightedly, leading lesbigay activists applauded the news that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was taking legal action against Hooters, the restaurant-lounge chain renowned for its sexy waitresses.

But letting the state dictate that straight men cannot enjoy an eroticized ambience at a private establishment isn't good news for gay folks, or at any rate those of us who don't subscribe to the unisex view that gender is nothing but an unfortunate social construction.

Let's take a look at the government's war against Hooters, often described as Playboy Clubs for working-class men. As James Bovard recounted in the Wall Street Journal, the anti-Hooters vendetta was not initiated in response to a complaint from disgruntled male job applicants but solely at the behest of the EEOC. Hooters tried to explain that only women were hired as "Hooters Girls" because their primary function is not serving food, but "providing vicarious sexual recreation." Their "uniforms are designed to tempt and titillate, consisting of short shorts, and either low-cut tank tops or half shirts, which are to be worn as form fitting as possible, and the Girls are expected to enhance the titillation by their interaction with customers. They are to flirt, cajole and tease the patrons."

In short, said the company, "The business of Hooters is predominantly the provision of entertainment, diversion, and amusement based on the sex appeal of the Hooters Girls."

Like Orwell's Big Brother enforcing an anti-sex campaign -- but this time doing so in the name of perfect gender equality - the EEOC dismissed these arguments and decreed that "no physical trait unique to women is required to serve food and drink to customers in a restaurant." In other words, the bureaucrats just don't get it.

The government is demanding that Hooters abandon its trademark concept of Hooters Girls and adopt a quota (what a surprise!) for male waiters. Bovard quotes a former EEOC official who observed, "The women attorneys [at the EEOC] are hot to do this case because they want to bust up a sexist restaurant chain. They want to get at this wicked institution."

So why should gay men - and lesbians - be concerned? For starters, many of our establishments and clubs also intentionally provide an eroticized ambience, the difference being that in this case staff and customer are the same sex. As for gay male bars and private clubs, including gyms, their all-male atmosphere is already under siege by those who consider "homo-sociality" more of an offense than homosexuality.

In one well-publicized case, a lounge in New Port Richey, Florida, which became a gay bar and announced it would no longer employ female bartenders, came under fire. Although the bar's manager insisted his patrons preferred being served by other gay men, a statewide lesbigay rights group took up the barmaids' cause, arguing the women were victims of sexual discrimination.

Although Hooters aims to provide soft-core erotic pleasures to straight men after a hard day's work, the case could create a precedent that allows the government to outlaw exclusively gay male or lesbian commercial establishments by insisting, say, that gay clubs hire a customer service staff that is divided equally between the genders.

While I don't treat the issue of employment discrimination lightly, I wonder what the politically correct response would have been if men (especially straight men) demanded the right to serve drinks at a lesbian bar. In fact, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that lesbian clubs - prized because they provide the safety of "women's space" - could also be required to hire male waiters in this brave new world, freedom of association and the rights of private business owners be damned. Carry the principle of government-determined gender-mixing to its natural conclusion and all eroticized commercial spaces - gay and straight - become verboten under the dictates of a politically correct puritanism.

In the pursuit of absolute gender equality and sameness, as scouted out by government lawyers, liberty for gay and straight alike becomes a casualty.

First appeared in The Windy City Times July 20, 1995.

IN THE WAKE OF THE APRIL 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing, it was sometimes pointed out that a very similar ammonium nitrite bomb is used to destroy the FBI Washington headquarters in an obscure novel called The Turner Diaries by William Pierce.

By July 5, New York Times correspondent John Kifner had tracked down people who said chief suspect Timothy McVeigh was a fan of the book.

"He carried the book all the time," one gun collector told Kifner. "He sold it at [gun] shows. He'd have a few copies in the pockets of his cammies... They were supposed to be $10, but he'd sell them for $5. It was like he was looking for converts."

The Turner Diaries(1978) is an authoritarian, white supremacist, anti-Semitic novel in which Earl Turner, through a series of diary entries, records his work in helping the "Organization" --essentially a Nazi underground group. By bombing government buildings, and sabotaging businesses and utilities, the Organization foments civil disorder, seizes a stronghold in California and eventually takes over the country, exterminates minorities, and provides "wise and benevolent rule."

Almost lost among the denunciations of blacks and Jews are references to "gay bars, massage parlors, porn stalls, liquor stores, and similar capitalist ventures." In the same vein, Turner notes a rise in "sexual debauchery:" "the queers, the fetishists, the mixed-race couples, the sadists... are parading their perversions in public and the public is joining them."

It has generally gone unremarked that The Turner Diaries is Pierce's first novel. There is a second: Hunter, published in 1989. Hunter is a kind of preliminary or "prequel" to the first book showing how actions here and now could plausibly lead to the creation of the "Organization" and its revolution.

In Hunter, Oscar Yeager ("Yeager" is German for "hunter" or "rifleman"), a former combat pilot in Vietnam with a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado (Pierce himself has a Ph.D. from Colorado) finds himself revolted by the decay of modern society as exemplified by drug use, race mixing, and open homosexuality, and decides to become a vigilante, shooting interracial couples.

Eventually Yeager meets members of a group called the "National League" (Pierce's organization, which publishes his books, is called National Alliance) who educate him about the key role of Jews in the decay of civilization and destruction of the white race. At the end, the League goes underground and Yeager recommends destroying the economic infrastructure to foment civil disorder.

In a way, Hunter constitutes a kind of Old Testament to the Turner Diaries' New Testament. The OT is a history of the ancient Jews; Hunter is the history of a man being taught how Jews destroy civilization. The NT is about the founding of a new religion replacing Judaism; Turner Diaries is about the founding of a new regime with a literally religious attitude toward racial purity that overcomes both Judaism and Christianity.

The notion is not entirely fanciful. The OT has 39 books: Hunter has 39 chapters. The NT has 27 books. The Turner Diaries has 28 chapters, thus going one step beyond, or overcoming, Christianity.

However that may be, Hunter, published 11 years after The Turner Diaries, contains Pierce's updated thoughts and his response to recent social change. It is far more anti-gay than The Turner Diaries. Along with denunciations of Jews, blacks, "race traitors," and man-hating feminists, there are more than 20 hostile references to homosexuals, queers, fairies, fags, faggots, and sodomites.

Yeager is disgusted by "the open displays of homosexual behavior by an increasing number" of young people. "Queers" are said to have a "general antipathy toward the heterosexual world." Yeager's girlfriend shows a "natural revulsion" when "two obviously 'gay' men had swished into a restaurant where they were eating... and held hands as the perused the menus."

Yeager asks, "don't these fags realize all the hatred they're causing... Do they really think they can keep rubbing the average guy's nose in their filth indefinitely and there'll never be any payback?" Comes the reply from his mentor, "Gays are really not rational. They're a lot like Jews in some ways. They don't know when to stop pushing."

In one episode Yeager cheerfully agrees to kill Sen. Howard Carter, a powerful New England Republican who is a closet "homosexual and pederast."

Gaining entrance to the office, Yeager first kills the senator's Jewish legislative aide: "The knife slipped easily into Sheldon Schwartz' belly and Oscar ripped savagely upward with it, spilling the man's entrails on the carpet. The eviscerated Schwartz could utter no more than a long wheezing gasp as his knees buckled and he fell forward."

Coming to investigate, Carter sees Yeager with the knife, freezes with horror and exclaims, "Oh Shit!"

"'Yes, and that's all she wrote, faggot,' was Oscar's reply as he plunged the ten-inch blade into the center of Carter's chest."

In a later incident gay activists picket the publishers of a book called The Growing Threat of AIDS in America that urges universal HIV testing and quarantining of those infected. One day two demonstrators slosh allegedly infected blood on a female employee.

The next day the woman's husband drives up, shoots and kills some of the demonstrators while 30 New York policemen assigned to keep order do nothing to stop him. The police even order the demonstrators not to run away while the man stops to reload his gun.

Originally published July 11, 1995, in The Advocate.

Another Sunday in June, another bonanza for the religious right. To the gentle whir of Christian Broadcasting Network cameras, gay people in cities across America hold their annual Mardi Gras. In the middle of Main Street, men frolic in Speedos. Bare-chested women wave their fists. Activist leaders give speeches praising their audience's dedication, victimhood, and all-around fabulousness. Thousands dance from dusk till dawn. Then exhausted by having made such a strenuous contribution to the cause, the participants go their separate ways. And in the ensuing weeks and months, while they're absorbed in their lives and careers, money from underpaid Iowa farmhands and dirt-poor Arkansas pensioners helps finance the conversion of raw parade footage into slick videotapes efficiently designed to prop up the misperceptions that undergird continued inequality.

More than anything else, Gay Pride Month symbolizes for me the ineffectuality of our movement in comparison with the religious right. A few years ago that movement's leaders decided they didn't want to remain a marginal subculture but wished instead to become a respected part of the political mainstream and to wield real secular power. They've succeeded - in fact, they've convinced a lot of moderate Christians that extreme reactionary fundamentalists speak for them and are socially and culturally closer to them than are most gays.

How have they managed this? By talking to Americans consistently about shared ideals and values, while gay leaders have too often focused on differences. By identifying themselves with God, America, and family, while gay leaders have too often derided all three. Perhaps most ironically, these people who have little interest in or knowledge of Western Civilization have presented themselves as defenders thereof and have depicted gays as the greatest threat to it, while gay leaders - instead of reminding the world that homosexuals, of all groups, have made the most disproportionately large contributions to the great Western heritage of thought, art, literature - have too often responded by attacking Western civilization as being homophobic.

Although its power base is rural, the Christian Coalition has learned how to exploit modern media with remarkable sophistication. Meanwhile, although creative gay people crowd the fields of publicity, advertising, and every branch of showbiz, our big annual media moment is always a public-relations nightmare, reinforcing the deplorable notion that gay people, as a group, represent some kind of bizarre revolt against nature. This is, of course, the entire thrust of queer ideology; we call ourselves "queer," then wonder why the world continues to think of us as, well, queer - and why parents of gay kids can't deal with the idea of their kids' being (to borrow from the Microsoft World thesaurus) "odd, quaint, curious, eccentric, extraordinary, fantastic, freakish, peculiar, singular." Far from lending support to this damaging view, we should be helping heterosexuals to understand that what's natural to one individual isn't necessarily natural to another and that to affirm one's homosexual identity is not to defy nature but to embrace one's own true nature.

While we've got truth on our side - the truth that accepting one's emotional orientation is a socially positive act of honesty, wholeness and self-respect - the Christian Coalition has lies: the lie of "choice," of "recruitment," of homosexuality as an undisciplined, carnally obsessive rebellion against all good things and an emblem of cultural collapse. The success of Pat Robertson's supposedly scripture-based arguments against gay rights rests entirely on his constituents' ignorance about homosexuality and their crude understanding of biblical interpretation; the more Christians can be educated about both, the more they'll recognize the mendacity of Robertson's anti-gay assertions.

Yet even as Robertson and company spread their lies expertly through such vehicles as "The 700 Club," many of us maintain, perversely, that it's not worth the effort to confront those lies and to set plainly before straight America the truth about who we are. To the extent that we take this view, our society will remain one that defines gay men and lesbians largely in the terms of religious right propaganda and one that accordingly denies us equal rights and respect. Granted, there's a minority of pathological bigots whose hate will never be vanquished. But most of those who might well be written off as intractably rigid or zealous homophobes are in fact quite willing to hear what we have to say and are quite capable of changing their views once they've walked, as it were, in our shoes. I've met too many former homophobes who have become gay-rights supporters to reject the possibility of wide-scale social change on this front.

The more of this kind of activism we can accomplish, the more we'll deserve our annual party. Celebrations are great, you know, once you have won the war; our problem is that we're still in the thick of battle - a battle that will be won only through a disciplined, determined effort to counter the Christian Coalition's falsehoods with the truth about who we are. When that victory's achieved, I'll enjoy a gay-pride event as much as anybody.

Originally appeared June 15, 1995, in the Windy City Times.

We need constantly to remind ourselves that the chief opposition to gay equality is religious. In the here and now, that means primarily fundamentalist Protestantism and the Catholic hierarchy.

We may conduct much of our liberation efforts in the political sphere or even the "cultural" sphere, but always undergirding those and slowing our progress is the moral/religious sphere. If we could hasten the pace of change there, our overall progress would accelerate, in fact, would be assured.

In that light, it is fascinating to catch the Catholic church in mid-transition on an important moral issue that has some historical and doctrinal parallels to our own: anti-semitism.

No one can doubt that the New Testament contains anti-semitic passages and explicit condemnations of "the Jews." There are far more, and more specific, anti-Jewish references in the New Testament than there are anti-gay texts in the Old and New Testaments combined.

Perhaps the best known and most bizarre is in the gospel named for Matthew which says that when a crowd of Jews shouted to Pilate that he should crucify Jesus, they added gratuitously, "His blood be on us and on our children." Historically this is preposterous, but there it is "holy writ."

The gospel named for John is even more insistently and vehemently anti-semitic. A few examples: "And this was why the Jews persecuted Jesus." "This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him." "I know that you (Jews) are of your father the devil." "The Jews took up stones again to stone him." "The Jews assured him (Pilate), 'We have a law and by the law he ought to die.'" "They (Jews) cried out 'away with him, away with him, crucify him.'"

Other writings of the early church fathers are littered with condemnations of Jews, Jewish customs, Jewish beliefs. And the Christian hierarchy and its flock acted on that hostility for centuries through inquisitions, expropriations, displacements, slaughters, and pogroms, all coming to an appalling height in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

Hitler himself allegedly told a delegation of church leaders that he was merely putting into practice what the Christian churches had preached for nearly two thousand years.

Malcolm Hay's pioneering book, "The Foot of Pride: Europe and the Jews" is still a useful place to start in learning the full story.

But the moral revulsion against the Holocaust was so strong that many decent people felt a need to rethink the texts that appeared to lead to such a result. Watching them do so can help provide a model for how similar changes will come about on gay issues.

Last March 23 [1995], the Catholic archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, delivered a remarkable lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem called "Antisemism: the Historical Legacy and the Continuing Challenge for Christians."

The speech is a fascinating attempt to cope with and evade the fact of Christian anti-semitism and its roots in ancient Christian writings. Bernardin draws on historical research, modern Catholic teaching, and current Biblical interpretation, emphasizing the original contexts of the texts, all to de-emphasize their significance.

To begin with, Bernardin drives a wedge between the texts and their plain, literal meaning by asserting that "There are texts that remain open to anti-Judaic interpretation." He refers to "what many consider to be problematic New Testament texts," and he notes that "John" is "the most problematic of all New Testament books in its outlook toward the Jews and Judaism."

Later he goes further, saying that "it is not certain that any of these texts themselves can be legitimately termed antisemitic or even anti-Judaic...." Note the words that produce wriggle room: certain, themselves, legitimately.

Second, carefully citing church documents, he usually refers to "forms of racism, including anti-semitism" and calls anti-semitism "the most tragic form that racist ideology has assumed in our century."

But those documents are an attempt to exonerate the church for its religious persecution by pretending that the motivation was something other than the unwillingness of Jews to accept the central Christian doctrine-that Jesus was the messiah. Bernardin does go a bit further, acknowledging a theological element, but he cautiously downplays what he is doing. And he avoids writing of "Christian anti-semitism," preferring to speak of "antisemitism in a Christian context."

Third, Bernardin frankly says, "Retranslation ... and reinterpretation certainly are to be included among the goals we pursue in the effort at eradicating antisemitism."

We could call this the "Where there's a will, there's a way" school of Biblical interpretation. Nowhere else does Bernardin quite so openly acknowledge the moral impetus behind the effort to find other, more innocuous meanings for these texts.

Among the techniques of reinterpretation he suggests are emphasizing the limited original context and denying the general application of the texts. Another is attributing their form to "polemical" aims, that is, deliberate exaggeration or distortion. Elsewhere he flatly if tacitly denies that Jesus ever said that the Jews are "children of the devil." He does this by approvingly quoting a scholar who says the words are "an affirmation which is placed on the lips of Jesus." That is, "placed" illegitimately, by someone else.

Bernardin also argues that anti-semitism does not begin with Christianity. Since there were pre-existing anti-semitic influences, then anti-semitism was no necessary part of church doctrine, he asserts. So if anti-semitism became part of Christianity, then Christianity was also a victim rather than a perpetrator.

Bernardin comes close to saying just this when he quotes the Pope speaking of Catholic "acquiescence ... to intolerance and the weakness of so many of [the church's] sons and daughters who sullied her face." In other words, Catholicism was not guilty, only Catholics.

Two years ago, writing in "Theological Studies," John Noonan traced earlier Catholic doctrinal changes on marriage, slavery, religious freedom, and lending money at interest. Clearly the Catholic church is now changing on anti-semitism even as we watch.

So we know the Catholic church will find a way to change its position on homosexuality when it finally feels morally compelled to do so. Our task is to seize the moral high ground and press our moral case with gentle but relentless pressure.

Originally appeared June 11, 1995, in The Washington Post.

I AM GAY AND have been in the gay rights movement since I came out in 1981. I am also a conservative, a libertarian.

Sad to say, the gay rights movement has always been seen as being on the political left, as one more whining interest group claiming entitlement to all sorts of special treatment from the government. Or we are seen as having a simply fabulous time cavorting at Gay Pride parades and throwing condoms at Catholic services. Whether as crybabies or as Dionysian celebrants, we always appear outside the mainstream.

I cringe at both images. Most gay men and women do not go around demanding government favors or living a hedonistic "gay lifestyle." But just enough of us act out these images, or tolerate them, that they become real in the public mind. Middle America feels uncomfortable about this, at the very least. Our right-wing enemies love it, because it gives them someone to hate and someone to use as a foil for attracting mainstream support to their own causes. By accepting, and in some cases cultivating, these images, we lose friends and help our enemies.

As a conservative, I wish such images would evaporate. If there was ever a time when they made sense, on grounds of either truthfulness or usefulness, it ended when the Republicans took control of Congress. The waiting line for government benefits now leads nowhere, and public frolics now gain nothing but disapproval.

What can government give gays? Merely the form, not the substance, of what we need and want. What we are really after is not merely legal rights but acceptance into the mainstream of American life - and acceptance is granted or withheld by the mainstream majority at its pleasure. If we want to be accepted, we must be welcomed. Lord knows it's easier to change the votes of a few legislators than the hearts and minds of millions of our fellow citizens. But politicians are weathervanes, they are not the wind.

So we should end some of our present practices:

We should loudly reject all "compensatory" agendas: hiring quotas, affirmative action and group reparations - all of which I've heard advocated for "when we get our rights." The people who benefit most from such programs are the bureaucrats who administer them and the members of the "victim" groups with the best political connections.

We should stop pressing for "domestic partners" legislation. It creates a special class of rights for a small class of people. The real beneficiaries would be the lawyers who would litigate the differences and similarities between domestic partnership and marriage.

We should not hate Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and their allies. Leave the hating to them. They will eventually destroy themselves, as Joe McCarthy and other haters did.

We should stop feeling sorry for ourselves. We may be victims, but frankly no one cares. This country's wellsprings of liberal guilt began running dry about 20 years ago, and by now they are flat empty.

Finally, we should stop seeing AIDS as anybody else's problem. The sad fact is that every gay man who got AIDS by sex got it from another gay man, and by doing something he chose to do. People with AIDS deserve sympathy, but it is the sympathy one extends to a chain smoker who comes down with lung cancer. It is not the same kind of sympathy one feels for someone who was struck by lightning or run down by a drunk driver.

But that's enough on the negative side. What positive actions can we take?

For starters, each of us should come out whenever it is reasonably safe. The best way to explode the myths about us is for each of us to become known as just another human being with the same needs, goals and drives as other human beings - except in a single respect that poses no threat to anyone else.

Our legislative goal should be for civil rights legislation with disclaimers of any quotas, guidelines, reparations or government-imposed and group-based remedies. It should emphasize private lawsuits for damages rather than enforcement by a bureaucracy.

In the legislatures, we should also lobby for the right to marry. Domestic-partners legislation makes us an officially sanctioned class of oddities and freaks. By seeking marriage, we demonstrate our wish to be part of the great American middle-class way of life.

Among ourselves, we must be willing to talk about morals, to impose them on ourselves and to do so conspicuously. As long as our primary image is one of gleeful promiscuity - an image promoted not only by our enemies but also by our own magazines and our own bars - we will be ostracized. Until we start imposing honesty, fidelity and emotion on our lives - in other words, until we are willing to talk about moral standards - we will make little real progress in social acceptance.

In a curious way, AIDS itself may be helping us find social acceptance. This terrible disease has brought to a screeching halt - at least in my generation of gay men - the manic boozing, drugging and screwing of the '70s and '80s. It has forced us to attend more to friendships, stability and the consequences of our actions. It has opened us to human suffering; one friend told me that caring for someone with AIDS was the first unselfish thing he had done in his adult life. AIDS has enabled us to show, to ourselves and to the mainstream, that we too are capable of great suffering, compassion, work and sacrifice. By our work with each other, we have shown mainstream society what we have to offer it, and how much it loses and wastes by excluding us.

The common theme of all this is simply facing the facts, working to bring out the best in ourselves and offering something admirable to the mainstream. All these views put me in odd company politically. But if you had to agree about everything with everyone else in an organization before you could join it, we'd have 260 million political parties in this country.

Conservatives are the people I happen to agree with most of the time. At least they are attempting to deal with the moral issues of our time (such as welfare dependency and violence) on a moral plane, and not as something for which the only remedy is another government program and more spending.

After I come out to them, I find that most conservatives are perfectly tolerant (and not as cloyingly condescending as my liberal straight friends). The Helmses and Robertsons are in the minority. And it eventually dawns on the conservatives that if they want to keep the support of gays like me, they had better keep at least a distance between themselves and the haters.

Finally, moving in conservative circles permits me to ask my conservative friends where this country would be without those great gays - Whittaker Chambers, J. Edgar Hoover, Walt Whitman and Cardinal Spellman. It's a polite way to remind them that we have been in their midst and doing good deeds from the beginning.

My liberal friends tend to employ three styles of attack on my views. The first is ad hominem: How can you talk about morality when we all know that once you did this or that randy deed? My answer is that a) the fact that your first response is to attack the messenger (me) shows that you can't repel the message; and b) I had my adolescence like everyone else, and it's over.

My liberal friends' second attack is some variation on "Do you mean that you're against all attempts to right the wrongs that have been done to us?" My answer is that I am as much in favor of basic civil rights for gays as they are. Where we differ is in the need for group-based remedies and in perceiving ourselves as victims whose main recourse should be coercion by the government.

The third attack from my liberal friends is usually some form of "Well, you have a good point, but..." At that, I know I've made some progress.

I have a feeling there are many more conservative gays than there seem to be. The time is ripe for us to leave the plantation of liberal government and start acting like what we are - a group of adults who want to live lives as normal and as healthy as everyone else in the mainstream. If we do, I think we will be on the path to my dream - an America in which being gay is no more remarkable than being left-handed.