IGF CultureWatch

First appeared in Reason, November 1998.

FOR CONNOISSEURS OF SURREALISM on the American Right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary." Among Reconstructionism's highlights, the article cited support for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards". The Rev. Rushdoony fired off a letter to the editor complaining that the article had got his followers' views all wrong: They didn't intend to put drunkards to death.

Ah, yes, accuracy does count. In a world run by Rushdoony followers, sots would escape capital punishment�which would make them happy exceptions indeed. Those who would face execution would include not only gays but a very long list of others: blasphemers, heretics, apostate Christians, people who cursed or struck their parents, females guilty of "unchastity before marriage," "incorrigible" juvenile delinquents, adulterers, and (probably) telephone psychics. And that's to say nothing of murderers and those guilty of raping married women or "betrothed virgins." Adulterers, among others, might meet their doom by being publicly stoned�a rather abrupt way for the Clinton presidency to end.

Mainstream outlets like the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post are finally starting to take note of the influence Rushdoony and his followers have exerted for years in American conservative circles. But a second part of the story, of particular interest to readers of this magazine, is the degree to which Reconstructionists have gained prominence in libertarian causes, ranging from hard-money economics to the defense of home schooling. "Christian economist" Gary North, Rushdoony's son-in-law and star polemicist of the Reconstructionist movement, is widely cited as a spokesman for free markets, if not exactly free minds; he even served for a brief time on the House staff of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 1988, when Paul was a member of Congress in the '70s. For his part, Rushdoony has blandly described himself to the press as a critic of "statism" and even as a "Christian libertarian." Say what?

An outgrowth of Calvinism, modern Reconstructionism can be traced to Rushdoony's 1973 magnum opus, Institutes of Biblical Law. (Many leading Reconstructionists emerged from conservative Presbyterianism, but as with so much of today's religious ferment, the movement cuts across denominational lines.) Not one to pursue a high public profile, Rushdoony has set up his Chalcedon Institute in off-the-beaten-path Vallecito, California, while North runs his Institute for Christian Economics out of Tyler, Texas.

As a "post-millennialist" school of thought, Reconstructionism holds that believers should work toward achieving God's kingdom on earth in the here and now, rather than expect its advent only after a Second Coming of Christ. Some are in a bit of a hurry about it, too. "World conquest," proclaims George Grant, in what by Reconstructionist standards is not an especially breathless formulation. "It is dominion we are after. Not just a voice not just influence not just equal time. It is dominion we are after."

Well, OK, it's easy to laugh. Yet grandiosity does sometimes gets results, especially when combined with an all-out conviction that one is historically predestined to win (the Communist Party in the '30s comes to mind). Reconstructionism has a record of turning out hugely prolific writers, tireless organizers who stay at meetings until the last chair is folded up, and driven activists willing to undergo arrest (Reconstructionist Randall Terry founded Operation Rescue, the lawbreaking anti-abortion campaign) to make their point.

Politically, Reconstructionists have been active both in the GOP and in the splinter U.S. Taxpayers Party; but their greater influence, as they themselves would doubtless agree, has been felt in the sphere of ideas, in helping change the terms of discourse on the traditionalist right. One of their services right off the bat has been to allow everyone else to feel moderate. To wit: almost any anti-abortion stance seems nuanced compared with Gary North's advocacy of public execution not just for women who undergo abortions but for those who advised them to do so. And with the Rushdoony faction proposing the actual judicial murder of gays, fewer blink at the position of a Gary Bauer or a Janet Folger, who support laws exposing them to mere imprisonment.

Among other ideas Reconstructionists have helped popularize is that state neutrality on the subject of religion is meaningless. Any legal order is bound to "establish" one religious order or another, the argument runs, and the only question is whose. Put the question that way, and watch your polemical troubles disappear: if we're getting a theocracy anyway, why not mine?

"The Christian goal for the world," Recon theologian David Chilton has explained, is "the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics". Scripturally based law would be enforced by the state with a stern rod in these republics. And not just any scriptural law, either, but a hardline-originalist version of Old Testament law -- the point at which even most fundamentalists agree things start to get "scary". American evangelicals have tended to hold that the bloodthirsty pre-Talmudic Mosaic code, with its quick resort to capital punishment, its flogging and stoning and countenancing of slavery, was mostly if not entirely superseded by the milder precepts of the New Testament (the "dispensationalist" view, as it's called). Not so, say the Reconstructionists. They reckon only a relative few dietary and ritualistic observances were overthrown.

So when Exodus 21:15-17 prescribes that cursing or striking a parent is to be punished by execution, that's fine with Gary North. "When people curse their parents, it unquestionably is a capital crime," he writes. "The integrity of the family must be maintained by the threat of death." Likewise with blasphemy, dealt with summarily in Leviticus 24:16: "And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him."

Reconstructionists provide the most enthusiastic constituency for stoning since the Taliban seized Kabul. "Why stoning?" asks North. "There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." Thrift and ubiquity aside, "[e]xecutions are community projects�not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do 'his' duty, but rather with actual participants". You might even say that like square dances or quilting bees, they represent the kind of hands-on neighborliness so often missed in this impersonal era. "That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes," North continues, "indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians." And he may be right about that last point, you know.

The Recons are keenly aware of the p.r. difficulties such views pose as they become more widely known. Brian Abshire writes in the January Chalcedon Report, the official magazine of Rushdoony's institute, that the "judicial sanctions" are "at the root" of the antipathy most evangelicals still show towards Reconstruction. Indeed, as the press spotlight has intensified, prominent religious conservatives have edged away. For a while, the Coalition on Revival (COR), an umbrella group set up to "bring America back to its biblical foundations" by identifying common ground among Christian right activists of differing theological backgrounds, allowed leading Reconstructionists to chum around with such figures as televangelist D. James Kennedy (whose Coral Ridge Ministries also employed militant Reconstructionist George Grant as a vice president) and National Association of Evangelicals lobbyist Robert Dugan.

In recent years, however, the COR has lost many of its best-known members; former Virginia lieutenant governor candidate Mike Farris, for example, told The Washington Post that he left the group because "it started heading to a theocracy...and I don't believe in a theocracy". John Whitehead, a Rushdoony protégé who, with Chalcedon assistance, launched the Rutherford Institute to pursue religious litigation, has moved with some vigor to disavow his old mentor's views.

Prominent California philanthopist Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., who has given Rushdoony's operations more than $700,000 over the years, may also be loosening his ties. According to the June 30, 1996 Orange County Register, Ahmanson has departed the Chalcedon board and says he "does not embrace all of Rushdoony's teachings". An heir of the Home Savings bank fortune, Ahmanson has also been an important donor to numerous other groups including the Claremont Institute, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and�just to show how complicated life gets�the Reason Foundation, the publisher of this magazine (for projects not associated with its publication).

The continuing, extensive Reconstructionist presence in fields like the home schooling movement poses for libertarians an obvious question: How serious do differences have to become before it becomes inappropriate to overlook them in an otherwise good cause? The printed program of last year's Separation of School & State Alliance convention constituted an odd ideological mix in which certified good guys such as Sheldon Richman, Jim Bovard and Don Boudreaux alternated with Chalcedon stalwarts like Samuel Blumenfeld, Howard Phillips, and Rushdoony himself.

Lest such relations become unduly frictionless, here's a clip-and-save sampler of Reconstructionist quotes to keep on hand:

• On the link between reason and liberty: "Reason itself is not an objective 'given' but is itself a divinely created instrument employed by the unregenerate to further their attack on God." The "appeal to reason as final arbiter" must be rejected; "if man is permitted autonomy in one sphere he will soon claim autonomy in all spheres. We therefore deny every expression of human autonomy�liberal, conservative or libertarian." Thus affirmed Andrew Sandlin, in the January Chalcedon Report.
• Intellectual liberty (other religions dept.): Hindus, Muslims and the like would still be free to practice their rites "in the privacy of your own home. But you would not be allowed to proselytize and undermine the order of the state. Every civil order protects its foundations," wrote the late Recon theologian Greg Bahnsen. Bahnsen adds that the interdiction applies to "someone [who] comes and proselytizes for another god or another final authority (and by the way, that god may be man)."
• Intellectual liberty (where secularists fit in dept.): "All sides of the humanistic spectrum are now, in principle, demonic; communists and conservatives, anarchists and socialists, fascists and republicans," explains Rushdoony. "When someone tries to undermine the commitment to Jehovah which is fundamental to the civil order of a godly state�then that person needs to be restrained by the magistrate. Those who will not acknowledge Jehovah as the ultimate authority behind the civil law code which the magistrate is enforcing would be punished and repressed," wrote Bahnsen.
• On ultimate goals: "So let us be blunt about it." says Gary North. "We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."

First appeared October 14, 1998, in the Houston Chronicle; has been read into the Congressional Record.

THE WICKED MURDER OF MATTHEW SHEPARD by two thugs, assisted by two equally contemptible accomplices, has resurrected a debate about the need for hate-crime laws.

Shepard, an openly gay University of Wyoming student who had been widely praised for his talents, ambitions and personality, last week was beaten senseless and left for dead, tied up like a scarecrow along a fence on a little-traveled country road. Miraculously, he was found by passers-by many hours after the attack, still struggling for life when he was rushed to a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died Monday while on life support.

Local law enforcement officials in Laramie, Wyoming, where the crime took place, quickly arrested the alleged perpetrators�two men who performed the assault and two women who helped them hide their deed�and it looks like they will be punished to the full extent the law allows if they are convicted. With Shepard's death, they face a possible death sentence.

Laramie, a university community of 27,000 people, is feeling both shame and outrage, a sentiment shared by all right-minded people throughout the country, indeed around the world. News of this brutal assault has appeared everywhere in print and broadcast media.

The crime against Shepard has renewed calls for passing hate-crime legislation, both in Wyoming and nationwide. Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer and President Bill Clinton have said that this attack shows the need for such laws.

This would be a mistake. It would be a mistake because hate-crime laws, however well intentioned, are feel-good laws whose primary result is thought control, violating our constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and of conscience. It would be a mistake because it suggests that crimes against some people are worse than crimes against others. And it would be a mistake because it uses a personal tragedy, deeply felt by Shepard's family and friends, to advance a political agenda.

Hunter College Professor Wayne Dynes, editor of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, notes that hate-crime laws, if they are to be applied in a constitutional manner, must be content-neutral. He notes this example: "Countless numbers of people, aware of the unspeakable atrocities under his leadership, hated Pol Pot. This hate was surely well warranted. If one of the Pol Pot haters had killed him, would this be a hate crime? Why not?"

Dynes adds: "In seeking to exculpate the killer, we would get into the question of whether some hate is 'justified' and some is not." He concludes that hate-crime prosecutions "will be used to sanction certain belief systems�systems which the enforcer would like, in some Orwellian fashion, to make unthinkable. This is not a proper use of law."

Under our system of justice, everyone is equal before the law. Those accused of crimes are entitled to certain constitutional protection, which we must cherish, and the victims of a crime�whether a Bill Gates or the poorest street-sweeper in a slum�are entitled to the same respect. (In the Middle Ages, the law required a greater punishment for killing a rich man or noble than it did for killing a peasant or a laborer. Our law recognizes no such distinctions.)

So, too, with class- or group-based distinctions. Is it worse to kill a man because he is foreign-born than it is to kill him to steal his car? Is it worse to kill a woman because she is black than because she cut you off in traffic? Is it worse to beat up a fat sissy boy if the bullies think their victim is gay, or if they dislike him because he is fat? Crime is crime; assault is assault. All deserve punishment.

Hateful thoughts may be disagreeable, but they are not crimes in themselves. The crimes that result from hateful thoughts�whether vandalism, assault or murder�are already punishable by existing statutes.

In a speech at the University of Texas last year, libertarian activist Gene Cisewski said: "We should be anti-violence, period. Any act of violence has to be punished swiftly and severely and it shouldn't matter who the victim is. The initiation of force is wrong and it doesn't matter why the mere fact you had a motive is enough."

Cisewski acknowledged the good intentions of those who propose hate-crime laws. He noted that "the reason for the call for (such laws) comes from bad enforcement of the laws." Police and prosecutors have been willing to look the other way when victims came from unfavored groups. Luckily, in the Shepard case, the authorities seem unwavering in their prosecution. This is, unfortunately, not always the case.

The answer, Cisewski suggested, and I agree, is that "we hold every law enforcement official and every court official who administers justice to the standard that every American is guaranteed equal protection under the law."

Hate-crime laws set up certain privileged categories of people, defined by the groups to which they belong, and offer them unequal protection under the law. This is wrong. It is sad to see a young man's personal misfortune used by various special-interest groups to advance such an agenda.

We are all shocked and dismayed by the assault on Shepard. Such brutality cannot, should not be countenanced. Let us not multiply the crimes of his attackers by writing bad law in response.

THE DUST JACKET PROMISES: "Finally, there's proof that homosexuals can change." Says D. James Kennedy, whose ministry launched a national "ex-gay" ad campaign: "John Paulk has the most hopeful and promising message for gay men that I have ever read." How could he say this if he'd read the book? Here's columnist Cal Thomas' blurb: "The greatest cover-up in America has nothing to do with party politics, but with the politics of sex. The myth that many are forced to accept is that homosexuals can't change their orientation, and God help the person who says they can." Did he read the book or is he just recommending it? If he read it he didn't understand it or his own politics of sex is mounting a cover-up. But then, can right-wing religionists afford to plow through page after page of gay Harlequin sex and camp merely to endorse what their market savvy says must be true at any rate? Can heterosexual advocates stand to read Paulk's graphic reminiscences of "cutoff blue jeans with bleached-out holes ... providing glimpses of pale flesh ... pelvises unabashedly writh[ing] together ... my eyes danc[ing] along with the hundreds of writhing male bodies?"

Catholic psychologist Joesph Nicolosi, known for so-called reparative therapy for homosexuality, supplies a "clinical" foreword. "The homosexual condition," he posits against scientific consensus, "is not really about sexual preference; it's about gender-identity confusion." This itself is confusing for in his own book he writes of homosexuals who "are inappropriate for reparative therapy because they show no signs of gender identity deficit." He asserts that Paulk's homosexuality was about "his alter ego, Candi" (Paulk's drag queen persona) and that "Christ and Candi could not coexist within the same soul. When Christ came in, Candi went out. It had to be, simple as that." He applauds Paulk's "shift in self-concept from 'gay' to the new understanding, 'I am a (still unactualized) heterosexual man.'" Accordingly, Paulk "overcame his homosexuality" by changing his identity. Nicolosi allows for "years of sublime and seemingly random occurrences [or] 'little miracles' [that] can cure." Yet in his own book, he says that instead of a "cure" as such, it's about an "improve[ment in] a man's way of relating to other men." Indeed, Paulk's book reveals no cure. But it's not as Nicolosi has it: Candi or Christ. It's Candi and Paulk's other masks (drugs, alcohol, prostitution, promiscuity, poor choices in boyfriends, or marriage to an "ex-lesbian") over against Paulk's inability to accept his homosexual orientation and achieve a mature homosexual relationship as a Christian.

Paulk doesn't get into the "ex-gay" program until late in the book - and his homosexuality continues there. One day, house leader John Smid comes to Paulk and tells him: "Something very significant has just happened, and I feel I need to tell you: ... You were healed [past tense] from homosexuality." It's news to Paulk. But he takes it as "hope ... that God was actually going to change me" - future expectation. Meanwhile the residents are still having sex on the sly and Paulk's in love with one of them. But that guy's in love with another guy and Paulk's furious. He hides his hurt and anger by testifying at churches that he is "changed."

He poses in a group photo for an Exodus "ex-gay" ad captioned: "Can Homosexuals Change? WE DID!" But he writes that he and the others were "disappointed ... that our homosexual struggles were still so strong and frequent. Shouldn't we have been at least half-way healed by now? And what about heterosexuality? That seemed distant, unattainable." Claiming to be "ex-gay," he wasn't, "no matter how hard I tried." Smid's solution: "The label of ex-gay is still connected with your past. ... So from now on ... you're not an ex-gay; you're a man. And not just a man, but a heterosexual. That's how everyone sees you." So Paulk decides to gain so much weight that "I was looking less and less gay." He throws away all his designer clothes and "felt an incredible new sense of freedom."

While giving his "change" testimony on a Christian talk-radio show, "I found myself attracted to the man who was screening the incoming calls." After the show Paulk tries to engage him in conversation. Noticing the man's wedding ring, he thinks to himself: "This man is heterosexual and married. He doesn't want sex with you. And would you want to tempt him into something that might destroy his marriage?" Paulk backs off.

Thinking that he needs to get married, Paulk begins "going out" in mixed-gender "ex-gay" groups: "We could relate to each other as if we were brothers and sisters." And so it goes.

In his chapter on this wedding with an "ex-lesbian" - and it's the next to the last chapter of the book - he still worried he's not "sufficiently changed ... I questioned whether I would be sexually compatible in a heterosexual relationship." So a mentor gives him "some details about female anatomy." At the wedding, during the vows, he finds himself day-dreaming about sex with men. As his "past [boyfriends, prostitution, drag shows, etc.] careened through my mind ... I heard myself say, 'I John, take you, Anne....'" At the wedding reception, he resists leaving until it's so late "I was out of excuses." Finally getting to the bridal suite, he carries his wife "over the threshold (how light she felt!) and into the room. Lush, wood trim stretched everywhere."

After two miscarriages they have a baby boy. Paulk fantasizes his son as "a tall, thin young man ... a younger version of Billy Graham ... travel[ing] the country someday" telling thousands he's "living proof [that] sexual orientation can change." He'll be "a living defense for us." That vision, he says, reminds him "of other spotlights I myself once basked in" on the drag queen circuit. Thus ends "the remarkable story of how one man overcame homosexuality." For now.

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.

---

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.