IGF CultureWatch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So I can't come in?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First then, how did gay communities come to be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First appeared in Reason, January 1996.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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