IGF CultureWatch

First appeared in The Windy City Times August 27, 1998.

A study published in Pediatrics suggested that self-identified gay high school students are more likely to engage in "risk behavior" than are other students. Religious right groups claim this shows gays are "self-destructive" while the study's own author suggests that such behavior is a response to rejection by the majority culture. There are problems with both interpretations.

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A SEEMINGLY HARMLESS AND INOFFENSIVE little article about teen-age gays recently became a focus of controversy between gay-supportive researchers and the religious right.

Back in May, Dr. Robert Garofalo and colleagues published a study in Pediatrics suggesting that self-identified gay high school students are more likely to engage in a variety of "risk behaviors" than other students are.

In a survey of 4,159 Massachusetts high school students, the researchers found 104 students who said they were gay, lesbian or bisexual. The gay youths were 2-3 or even more times more likely than other students to smoke dope, use alcohol, use cocaine, inject drugs, be threatened with a weapon, miss school out of fear, attempt suicide, and so forth.

Then on July 14, a group of religious right and "ex-gay" organizations placed an advertisement in the Washington Post citing the article as evidence that gays are trapped in a self-destructive lifestyle.

"Studies also show a high degree of destructive behavior among homosexuals, including alcohol, drug abuse, and emotional or physical violence," said the ad, "it's not lack of acceptance... it's... the visible response to a broken heart."

After a distressing three-week time lag, Garofalo stated publicly that he was "horrified and angry" at how the religious right had interpreted his study.

In an Aug. 4 interview with the Boston Globe Garofalo fumed, "It's a complete misrepresentation of what the research actually says. It comes to the completely opposite conclusion of what the paper concluded."

Garofalo told the Globe that the youths' behavior was actually a result of the alienation that gay teenagers face "in a culture that is often unaccepting."

Robert Knight, point man on gay issues for the Family Research Council, fired back, saying there is no merit to the theory that alienation can produce self-destructive behavior. Rather, said Knight, "homosexual behavior is the symptom of deeper, unmet emotional needs. Everyone in their heart know the behavior is wrong. People who are caught up in it are covering their emotional distress by abusing substances."

Frankly, there are problems with both interpretations.

Go back to Garofalo's article. Although Garofalo could establish a statistical link between being self-identified as gay and a greater tendency to experience these "psychosocial and medical risk factors," the survey could not show was what was a cause and what was an effect.

Garofalo acknowledges this in the article: "There are several limitations to this study... We can only examine the association between sexual orientation and health risk behaviors and not draw conclusions about causality." If he now thinks the "risk behaviors" are a response to a hostile culture, that could be true, but nowhere in his article does he say that.

Let us start with the fact that 104 seems a surprisingly low number of gay students. Sure enough, 62 additional youths said they were "not sure" about their sexual orientation and surprisingly 387 (9.3 percent) refused to answer the question at all. No doubt too some of those who marked "heterosexual" simply lied.

So many young gays can be found in the "non-gay" group that had lower rates of all those risk behaviors.

Even among the 104 who said they were gay, fewer than half said they had engaged in most of 40 the "risk behaviors" listed. That suggests that many of the self-identified gays were handling themselves quite well even by the stringent standards of the survey.

All this scarcely supports the religious right theory that "homosexuals" engage in self-destructive behavior because of "emotional distress" over behavior they know to be wrong. But it also weakens Garofalo's broad claim about gay alienation, at least for many students.

But what about those who do engage in sex, alcohol, drug use, and so forth? The study also found high rates of missing school because of fear, having personal property damaged, being physically attacked, being threatened with a weapon, and so forth. For Robert Knight to ignore the impact of verbal and physical hostility on young gays' attitudes and sense of self seems plainly dishonest.

Is Garofalo's interpretation about "alienation" the better one? It is certainly appealing to many of us who remember an uneasy youth. But "alienation" is too vague to do much work; it obscures more than it illuminates. No doubt there is hostility toward young gays, but does the hostility produce alienation which then induces risk behaviors? Does risk behavior cause alienation? Or does behavior somehow prompt the hostile reaction? What exactly is going on?

For one thing some of the categories seem odd. it seems strange to treat smoking cigarettes as a risk behavior like cocaine use. And why is having three or more sexual partners in your life a risk behavior? Drug use might be a response to stress, but can also just be fun. And why would social hostility cause high rates of steroid use? The whole thing is a conceptual tangle.

Now think of some possible ways to link being gay, engaging in risk behaviors, experiencing hostility and alienation.

• Gay youths might feel more alienated from a hostile society and less restrained by traditional social norms and more willing to smoke, drink, do drugs, have lots of sex and antagonize their peers.
• Gay youths who are insecure might have a desire to "act out" and behave in a exaggeratedly cross-gendered fashion, take drugs and deliberately flout social convention. This may cause them to be harassed at school.
• Gay youths who are harassed at school may drink and use drugs as an escape and seek more sexual partners as a source of self-affirmation and needed pleasure.
• Gay youths who find that gay sex was not the terrible, dangerous thing they had been told might have less reason to believe societal warnings about drugs.
• Youths who realize they were gay at a young age might act cross-gendered, thinking that is how to be gay. That could induce other youths to harass them, and then they might use drugs for escape, compensatory pleasure and so forth.

There are other possible combinations. And different causal links may be true for different students. Questionnaires cannot tell us these things.

Ultimately, researchers will just have to go and talk with young gays and ask them how they feel about their lives, the reactions they get, the pressures they face, how they cope with stress, and what expectations and hopes they have for the future.

That would not be a bad idea for Robert Knight either.

Thursday, August 13, 1998

DEAR FATHER MORROW:

I have read with interest your remarks at the Family Research Council's anti-gay conference yesterday here in Washington, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

I am a graduate of the Saint Catherine Labouré Elementary School Class of 1970, where I was a straight-A student. I grew up in the parish and received my Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation there. I also attended my mother's funeral there. As you can see, I have extensive ties to your parish...

You will be less happy to learn that two days before my graduation from Villanova University twenty years ago, I came out as a gay man. Since then, in addition to my career as a computer specialist, I have cofounded the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington, written and officiated at a gay wedding ceremony, and worked for equal rights as a member of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, DC, of which I have been president since January, 1996. I am writing to you today to take strong issue with your remarks at the FRC conference.

Referring to the "not negligible" number of people with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" (which makes them sound like loose change that fell behind the sofa cushions), you state, "This inclination, which is not objectively good, constitutes for most of them a trial." This is a reference to the Church's declaration that homosexuality is an objective moral disorder; it is objective only in the sense that an authoritarian religious organization has so declared it. Since there is in fact no objective basis for such an assertion, it is no more objective than any religious dogma. Your citation of First Corinthians 6:10 that homosexual acts are intrinsically wrong is hardly persuasive, since if I took the trouble I could cite Old Testament verses in defense of slavery, among other horrors. It is amazing, and less than inspiring, how otherwise intelligent and decent people make selective use of biblical texts to justify their preexisting prejudices.

I presume that in any case you would agree with another participant in the FRC conference, who stated that of course we would not want to carry out the biblically prescribed death penalty for homosexuals today. While I appreciate such generous sentiments, they help make clear that it is not homosexuality itself which constitutes a trial for homosexual children growing up, but rather all the bigotry and intolerance disguised as religion which they face as they come to terms with their sexuality�often with a frightening degree of isolation. No child is done any favor by a ministering adult who insists that the child's most basic feelings for another person are somehow intrinsically wrong. All this does is add to the disproportionately high suicide rate among gay youth.

The bottom line, in a practical context, is that, whether you and the Roman Catholic Church Magisterium like it or not, a great many people�including self-professed Christians�disagree with your religious views on homosexual sexual acts being intrinsically wrong, and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees their right so to do.

You state that "legislation protecting homosexual persons becomes protection of behavior or a point of view. This is quite different from laws which prevent discrimination based on race, sex or age." As a matter of fact, it is rather like religion, since religion is chosen. Your reference to "a point of view" as something not deserving protected status is telling. No doubt the Church, despite the Reformation being four centuries behind us, would like to enforce its point of view on everyone. Indeed, the Archdiocese of Washington does not just defend its views at right-wing conferences, but also lobbies against the equal rights of gay citizens before the DC Council�such as when Cardinal Hickey denounced the District's Domestic Partners law in 1992 as equivalent to marriage (which, unfortunately, it is not), and denounced the District's repeal of its sodomy law in 1993.

Let me tell you something, Father Morrow. When I see my lover asleep beside me, I am as happy as a mortal can be and as sure of the rightness of my love as Monsignor Russell used to be of his reactionary approach to Church discipline [in punishing dissent on birth control]. That you can talk seriously about sharing God's love when you work for an institution that supports laws that would imprison me for my own love, is as hypocritical and perverted as anything can be.

Your remarks at the FRC conference make clear that you oppose the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state, and that you advocate the forcible imposition of your religious beliefs on the rest of the population by the state. This is the case despite your disingenuous protestation that "every sign of unjust discrimination" against us "should be avoided," since you quickly make it clear that you consider legal discrimination against us to be entirely just.

I am quite prepared to participate in a bloody war before I will allow your narrow and intolerant vision of America to prevail, before I will give up my liberty as a gay citizen. But already gay people are gradually winning the cultural war that was declared against us by the sorts of people who attended the FRC conference with you. We are also beginning to win the political war, as demonstrated by the crushing defeat in Congress last week of the attempt to overturn the President's executive order barring anti-gay discrimination in the federal workplace.

In reading about your weekly "support group" for homosexuals, I am thankful that I long ago escaped the repressive clutches of St. Catherine's. I can assure you of this: if any of my nephews or nieces should turn out to be gay, and I should learn that they are in the "loving embrace" of a "support group" that teaches them that they are intrinsically disordered, I will storm into the room and interpose myself bodily between you and them, and any sibling that supports such ministering to flesh and blood of mine will have to leave my body cold and bloody on the floor before I will allow such abuse in the name of love to continue. Not with my family, you don't.

It is appalling that a minister of Christ should fail to recognize the very real harm that your intolerance (however dressed up as pastoral care) can cause to real citizens and real families, such as the loving gay couples and their adopted children that I know�not to mention the gay child that I was when I first arrived at St. Catherine's in September 1962. I owed it to every boy I ever gave a valentine at that school not to let your remarks at the FRC hatefest go unchallenged.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Rosendall
St. Catherine Labouré Class of 1970

First appeared in the Windy City Times July 30, 1998.

DURING THE MIDDLE OF JULY, a coalition of conservative religious and political organizations mounted an assault against gays by placing ads in national newspapers claiming that gays can change and be "healed."

The three ads featured a "former lesbian" prominently displaying a wedding ring, a crowd shot of "ex-gays" who have "changed," and a football player who says his free speech rights were violated when people criticized things he said about gays.

The ads claimed gays can change their sexual desires, can become heterosexual, and that they should do so because being gay is sinful, unhealthy and destructive.

So it seems. But do the ads actually say homosexuals can become heterosexuals?

No, they do not. Nowhere do the ads say gays can become heterosexual or develop heterosexual feelings. In fact, the words "heterosexual" and "heterosexuality" do not appear anywhere in any of the three ads.

On closer examination the ads seem very cagily written, as if they were drafted by a lawyer who was acutely aware of what he could and could not get away with.

Instead, the ads say gays can "leave homosexuality," leave "this lifestyle" and "leave their homosexual identities." They can "overcome homosexuality" and become "ex-gays."

What do gays leave homosexuality for? For "sexual celibacy and even marriage," say the ads. This claim is so central that it is repeated in two of the ads. Yet celibacy is the cessation of activity, not of feelings. And although the ads suggest "even" the possibility of marriage, they do not claim that ex-gays stop having gay feelings or are heterosexual.

Clearly what becoming "ex-gay" means is ceasing homosexual behavior (referred to as the "lifestyle") and ceasing to think of oneself as homosexual (the "homosexual identity"). By doing these things, gays can "overcome" their homosexuality and be, not heterosexual, but "ex-gay."

The key to reading this language is that the religious right uses "homosexuality" not to mean homosexual feelings, but to mean engaging in homosexual activity. Otherwise the religious right could not say gays can "walk out of homosexuality . . . into sexual celibacy." For them, if you are not doing it, you are not being it.

In a similar vein, psychologist C. A. Tripp reports in his book The Homosexual Matrix that one interview subject told sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey he had once been homosexual but he had been cured by therapy. The man explained, "I have now cut out all of that and I don't even think of men -- except when I masturbate."

The same emphasis on behavior enables the evangelicals to refer to "nurture, not nature," as "the real cause of homosexual behavior." This is true enough since any particular act is chosen rather than genetically determined.

But the ads also offer a theory of how homosexual feelings arise that suggests they are "non-genetic" and therefore pathological (ignoring the possibility that they are neither genetic nor pathological). The ads assert that gays are gay because they have a defective "gender-identity," that is, a defective sense of their own gender-their own maleness or femaleness.

Anne Paulk, the "former lesbian" in the first ad, recounts how she was molested as a child and as a result felt unlovable, "rejected my own femininity" and "became drawn to other women who had what I felt was missing in me."

In other words, gays are gay because they felt rejection in childhood, failed to bond with a same-sex parent or experienced sexual violence and psychological abuse in childhood. Any of these can give children a deficient sense of their own gender identity, which leads them to try to remedy that deficiency by seeking sexual partners of the same sex. And that's how gays are made.

There are a host of inadequacies in this wacky little theory, starting with the fact that many of us had a reasonably happy childhood, good parental relationships and were not abused; some heterosexuals had far less happy childhoods than many of us did. The ex-gays ignore these contradictions.

A more basic problem is that viewing same-sex attraction as trying to make up for a deficiency in one's maleness or femaleness misses the whole point. As psychologist Tripp pointed out, most gay men are sure of their maleness, "sometimes super-sure of it." Homosexual desire, he says, is fueled not by the height of a person's self-assessment, but by the distance he feels between that assessment and his aspiration above it.

(Interestingly, the ex-gay theory also fails to account for heterosexual desire, unless heterosexuals are trying to make up for a deficiency of opposite sex qualities. Don't try to think about this.)

In the venerable religious tradition of frightening sinners by describing the wages of sin, the ads also warn of the dangers of homosexuality. But they do so somewhat dishonestly.

The ads warn that homosexual behavior accounts for a disproportionate amount of sexually transmitted disease (STD) and that gays exhibit high levels of self-destructive behavior.

There is no question STDs are common among a certain subset of sexually active gay men in urban areas, but they are not the majority of gays, however conspicuous they may be. STDs are not a problem for homosexuality per se, but for sexually very active gay men. The ads dishonestly imply that the threat is to all gay men.

No doubt too some urban gay men engage in excessive alcohol and drug use and other potentially harmful activities, but the article cited in a footnote (Pediatrics, May 1998) refers only to a subset of self-identified gay youth, not to all gay men. And the article states: "It is important to realize that the majority of [gay] youth cope with a variety of stressors to become healthy and productive adults." The ads ignore that "important" statement.

Similarly deceptive is the ads' claim that a great deal of "emotional and physical violence" is found "among homosexuals." The Pediatrics article cited for this states: "gay youth face violence and victimization" including "being threatened/injured with a weapon" by others, presumably people who do not like gays. So the physical violence is actually found "among" heterosexuals rather than gays.

In the end, the religious right has finally taken off the gloves, asserting that the cure -- the only cure -- for homosexuality is Christianity, and even it will not stop homosexual feelings, nor do evangelicals care much about that. They took their best shots, only to reveal the weakness of their claims and their arguments.

It turned out that all they had were pop-guns.

Originally appeared July 26, 1998, in the New York Times.

WHO'S AFRAID of former homosexuals?

At first blush, of course, it's easy to see why the recent newspaper advertisements promoting the "truth" about homosexuality - that it can allegedly be changed - might provoke a strong response from homosexuals and their allies.

The advertisements, sponsored by 15 religious-right organizations, featured Anne Paulk, a self-described "wife, mother, former lesbian," and were intended to advance the idea that homosexuality is a free and sinful "choice" and therefore unworthy of civil rights protections. This idea is marshaled by fundamentalists who, sadly, see nothing uncivil about describing another group of functioning, productive citizens as "diseased."

The campaign is clearly a desperate gambit to change the terms of the debate about homosexuality, a debate the religious right has been steadily, inexorably losing for two decades. The leaders of the far right realize that unless they can redefine homosexuality as a pathological illness, it is only a matter of time before the logic of civil rights protections embraces a group of people they find threatening.

But in its desperation, the right may well have overreached. A closer examination of "reparative therapy," the psychoanalytic treatment that allegedly turns homosexuals into heterosexuals, reveals it to be far less threatening to the argument for gay equality than first meets the eye. Indeed, in some ways, the arguments and ideas behind reparative therapy paradoxically strengthen, rather than weaken, the case for gay rights.

Take the notion of a "cure." Even the reparative therapists themselves believe it to be extremely difficult in most cases, requiring therapy five times a week often for years. They claim a "success" rate of about 30 percent, but their patient population is skewed to those most willing and desperate to make a change. A more realistic figure of a conversion rate for a representative population of gay men would be far lower.

As Freud himself argued, "In general, to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual is not much more promising than to do the reverse."

Freud was also ahead of the game in distinguishing between a psychoanalytic "conversion" and what most people think of as a cure.

He once wrote to a mother who was seeking his help to change her gay son: "In a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it."

Or, in the words of a contemporary reparative therapist, Steven Richfield, the most realistic goal of such therapy is "a satisfying heterosexual adaptation which is not jeopardized by the periodic intrusion of homosexual fantasies."

One of his patients puts it in more human terms: "I've come to accept that there is a part of me that I may never be able to get rid of. But maybe I can learn to live with it."

Then there's the notion that homosexuals "choose" their sexuality.

If the literature of reparative therapy teaches anything, it is how deep homosexuality runs in a person's identity, and how enormously difficult it is to alter. Most reparative therapists think sexual orientation is fixed in early development before the age of 18 months or, at the latest, three years.

The most prominent psychotherapist in the field, Charles Socarides (whose own son is gay), specifically denies that homosexuality is a choice. What he and other reparative therapists argue, in fact, is something very advantageous to the argument for gay equality: Even if homosexuality is not genetic but environmental, it is still involuntary.

In other words, homosexuals have as much choice over their sexual orientation as they do over their race or sex.

Of course, reparative therapists would be appalled at the comparison of sexual orientation with gender or race. For them, homosexuality, while unchosen and deeply ingrained, is still a pathology or psychological disorder.

But this part of their argument is increasingly unpersuasive. As more and more gay men and women live and work openly in our society, the clearer it becomes that they are not demons, disease-carriers or psychopaths. We have our problems - gay men in particular - but the problems are recognizably human problems: of love, commitment, sexuality and intimacy.

Moreover, the contribution gay people make and have always made to society and civilization is hardly the mark of psychological dysfunction. I wonder whether Trent Lott, who recently compared homosexuals to compulsive thieves, has ever read Whitman or Proust or Auden. Or listened to the music of Copland, Tchaikovsky or Britten. If he does, does he think: kleptomaniacs?

There is, however, one final glimpse of hope in the rhetoric of the religious right in this matter. In its advertisements, the right admirably insists that "ex-gays" be allowed a forum, and to be free from abuse, derision or condescension.

I couldn't agree more. The kind of struggle that these people have had in their lives is a struggle that just about every gay person recognizes. It is the struggle to become who you are. If someone genuinely feels he cannot live with himself as a gay man and decides to submit to grueling therapy and join a particular sect of American Protestantism to be able to live a heterosexual life, then who am I to stand in his way? These conflicts are so deep, these choices so personal, that only the individual can resolve them.

But by the same token, doesn't the "ex-gay" owe the same tolerance to me? Shouldn't this struggle be deemed beyond the reach of politics and coercion? If one owes it to an ex-gay not to cast aspersions on her sincerity and mental health, should one not also owe it to a lesbian?

I would not, moreover, deny someone her civil rights because she resolved this issue in a heterosexual way. I wouldn't deny her the right to marry the person she loves, nor would I deem her beneath the civic responsibility to defend her country in the military. On what principled, nonsectarian grounds, then, would she plausibly deny those same civil rights to me?

In a strange but beautiful way, then, the religious right may have finally stumbled onto the true moral ground. The more you think about it, the rights of former homosexuals are truly indistinguishable from the rights of gay men and women. Those rights include the pursuit of happiness as one sees fit, and equal protection of the laws in a republic where no single religion is privileged.

So let the leaders of the religious right continue their battle for self-determination. But let them apply that principle universally. They will discover that they have joined the gay rights movement after all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legal Regulation of Marriage

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

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

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

Privatizing Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now we can begin to talk about morality.