IGF CultureWatch

First appeared September 10, 1994, in the New York Times.

AS CONSERVATIVES GEAR UP for the fall elections, many are pinning their hopes on attacking gay rights. Self-styled "pro-family" groups, seeking to build on the success of five local and state anti-gay initiatives in 1993, have been working to get similar measures on the November ballots in several states.

These organizations are correct in saying that America faces some real social problems, and that many can be attributed to the deterioration of families. What is upsetting, however, is the extent to which they focus on gay issues almost to the exclusion of the real problems.

Children need two parents, for financial and emotional reasons. Children in fatherless homes are five times as likely to be poor as those in two-parent families. Single mothers also find it difficult to control teenage boys, and such boys have made our inner cities a crime-ridden nightmare. Conservatives have taken note of this problem, and many of them have correctly indicted the welfare state. But with a few exceptions - notably Dan Quayle - they seldom put a high enough priority on condemning single parenthood.

And they pay almost no attention to the effects of divorce; every year more children experience divorce or separation than are born out of wedlock. These children are nearly twice as likely as those from intact families to drop out of high school or to receive psychological help.

Conservatives overlook this because they are too busy attacking gay men and lesbians. Consider the leading conservative journals. The American Spectator has run ten articles on homosexuality in the past three years, compared with two on parenthood, one on teen-age pregnancy, and none on divorce. National Review has printed thirty-two articles on homosexuality, five on fatherhood and parenting, three on teenage pregnancy, and just one on divorce.

The Family Research Council, the leading "family values" group, is similarly obsessed. In the most recent index of its publications, the two categories with the most listings are "Homosexual" and "Homosexuals in the Military" - a total of thirty-four items (plus four on AIDS). The organization has shown some interest in parenthood - nine items on family structure, thirteen on fatherhood, and six on teen pregnancy - yet there are more items on homosexuality than on all of those issues combined. There was no listing for divorce. (Would it be unfair to point out that there are two items on "Parents' Rights" and none on "Parents' Responsibilities"?)

As for the Christian Coalition, despite Executive Director Ralph Reed's vow not to "concentrate disproportionately on abortion and homosexuality," its current Religious Rights Watch newsletter contains six items, three of them on gay issues. The July issue of the American Family Association's newsletter, Christians & Society Today, contains nine articles, five of them on homosexuality.

Cobb County, Ga., a major battleground in the conservatives' culture war, is a microcosm of this distorted focus. In 1993 the county commission passed a resolution declaring "gay lifestyles" incompatible with community standards. Cobb County is a suburb of Atlanta; its residents, eighty-eight percent white, are richer and better educated than the national average. Yet it had a twenty percent illegitimacy rate in 1993, and there were two thirds as many divorces as marriages. Surely the 1,545 unwed mothers and the 2,739 divorcing couples created more social problems in the county than the 300 gay men and women who showed up at a picnic to protest the county commission's assault on their rights.

When teen-age girls wear sexually explicit T-shirts, when teenage boys form gangs to tally their sexual conquests, when eighth graders watch twice as much television as their European counterparts, when ten-year-olds on bicycles dart in front of my car at 1 A.M., when students take guns to class, where are the "family values" conservatives, and why aren't they calling on parents to take their responsibilities more seriously!

Perhaps they fear that making an issue of divorce would alienate middle-class supporters-including divorced conservatives. Perhaps they fear that putting welfare at the top of their agenda would seem racist, or worry that calling for parental responsibility would be a hard sell politically. They may be right, but thats no excuse for ducking crucial family issues. Their scapegoating of gay men and lesbians may get them some votes and contributions, but it's not going to solve any of American families' real problems.

Originally published in the New York Native, August 1994.

ONE OF THE MOST interesting revelations in George Chauncey's seminal book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 is the depiction of a society in which men were not rigidly polarized into "homosexual" versus "heterosexual" identities. Instead, men-who-loved-men could be found in a range of groupings such as "fairies," "queers," "trade," and "gays." "Each," Chauncey notes, "had a specific connotation and signified specific subjectivities." And for the most part, as used within the emerging gay world, these identifications lacked the pejorative connotations they would later acquire.

While such "subjectivities" still exist today, the topic is nearly taboo. For although politically correct lesbigay activists make a lot of noise about "inclusion" within the "lesbian, gay, bisexual, drag and transgender community," the "diversity" they have in mind is extraordinarily homogenized. Not only are lesbians and gay men expected to merge into a more or less single cultural continuity (unisex yet ideologically feminist), but variations among male homosexuals are likewise amalgamated. One people, one culture, one "queer" nation.

Moreover, the lesbian and gay hierarchy's embrace of feminism's war against all-male institutions often manifests itself in a drive to obliterate whatever remains of pre-lesbigay gay male subcultures.

In previous columns, I've pointed to some of the resulting absurdities: gay men and lesbian S/M folk expected to "play together" in mixed-gender, "pansexual" spaces, or combined Mr.-and-Ms. Leather contests, sometimes with a drag queen moderating. Murmurs of discontent from the male masses (expressed in letters-to-the-editor in Drummer and other publications) are met with lectures about the need to destroy barriers within the lesbigay community (even if unique - and distinctly masculine - subcultural worlds are thereby lost).

One of the last true holdouts against the lesbigay tide is the "bear" phenomenon, probably because gay leftist PCers and lesbian feminists just don't understand what's afoot.

Gay men of a bearish persuasion tend to be big, masculine males - usually hairy, often hulking, wanting to socialize within a community of like-minded males without necessarily the kinks of SM or the 'uniform'-ity of leather (although there certainly are leather and S/M bears). Many of the letters to Bear magazine read like they're from desert wanderers who've stumbled upon an oasis - or like earlier coming-out pieces. The "I didn't know there were other men like me" sort of thing.

One of the better explanations of beardom I've come across is a document posted on the GayCom computer bulletin board's "Hirsute Pursuit" conference, accessible on many gay-oriented Bulletin Board Services. The article is by John Topping, who just completed a documentary about his seven-week, cross-country "Bear Journey." His film includes interviews with bear club members and footage of bear gatherings.

When Topping talks about his own early self-discovery, it sounds almost shamanistic - as in the selection of an animal spirit guide. "I thought I looked like a bear," he writes. "I thought I moved and picked things up like a bear ... I began to meditate on the thought that I really was a bear, or that I had bear spirit ... I felt better about myself. I felt more confident. I felt more powerful."

Topping describes a visit to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, "a celebration of alternative sexual lifestyle" in which he met "a lot of bears, not just people who looked like them and acted like them, but people who actually identified themselves as bears as well." During that city's annual Bear Expo, he remembers, "I would see a hot man and say, 'Wow, he's hot.' And instead of getting the incredulous You've Gotta Be Kidding stare, I got enthusiastic agreement. ... That was something I'd never had in my life, and it was no small thing for me to have it now."

During a Bear Hug Party, Topping looked around at all the men he had met that weekend, and all the men he had seen but not met, and remembered thinking, literally, "These are my people. I had found them at last. And they were bears."

Spontaneous, grass-roots, sexually-charged yet atavistically spiritual, the Bear Movement is unique - and, as I said, a holdout against lesbigay homogenization and one of the last preserves of a masculine-affirmative, self-avowedly gay male community. But not all gay men are bears, and those who aren't attuned to its particular "subjectivities" might ponder the value of reinvigorating fraternal male culture within the larger gay community.

Originally appeared June 2, 1994, in the Windy City Times.

There was a note in my office mailbox from The Editor saying he wanted to see me. I walked down the long corridor past the offices of all the Assistant Editors until I got to The Editor's door. I knocked with what I hoped was the right mixture of assertiveness and respect.

"Enter," came the familiar stern voice. I entered.

The Editor was seated at his desk behind a tall stack of half-edited manuscripts, wearing a "Just Be You" T-shirt with a little yellow button that said, "Have a Nice Whenever." Pushed up on his forehead was his ever-present green eyeshade. Vivaldi was playing on the portable CD player.

"Good morning, Sir. You wanted to see me?"

"Where is your Pride Issue column, Varnell?

"Pride column?" I asked, all innocence and wonderment.

"Pride column," he repeated. "The Pride Issue is at hand. I sent a memo to all staff about this more than a month ago. We need an appropriate column."

I smiled a thin, cool smile, reached into my back pocket, and. ...

"Ta-dah!" I said as I handed him my column with a flourish.

He stared at it as if I were offering him a live snake.

"What does it say?" he asked suspiciously.

"It's about how proud we should all be to be gay," I replied. "How it makes us the truly wonderful, self-actualizing people we are. How it sensitizes us to the joy and beauty in the universe, gives meaning to our lives, and elevates our existence far beyond that of ordinary mortals."

"Oh, cut it out, Varnell," he said with a grimace. "You don't believe any of that. You've always made fun of gay pride. You always said being gay was a neutral quality, like having blue eyes and that it was only how people handled it, what they did with it, how they lived their lives, that could be a source of pride. Do I not recall correctly?"

"Well, I'm selling out," I said grandly. "I've decided to tell people what they want to hear. They want to hear that life can be simple and uncomplicated; that life presents few demand and that it is enough just to 'be.' They want to hear that the universe is benevolent, that they can be wonderful without effort, and that living involves no pains, no trade-offs, no compromises, no agonizing dilemmas.

"I am telling people it is enough to be proud and everything else will just fall into place. I reassure them that being gay involves no moral or intellectual obligations, that they can keep on being however they are, that wherever they are is the final stage of personal development."

"Oh, for pity's sake, Varnell," he burst out. "Can't you do anything right? When you sell out you're supposed to do it for money or for power or something. But here you are selling out - as you call it - but you aren't getting anything for it at all."

"Oh, I am, I am," I insisted. "I'm gaining popularity, regard, affection. People want to read things they already agree with, that reassure them about themselves, however they are. People love this sort of thing and they love the people who tell it to them - ministers, politicians, therapists, even writers.

"And people will love me. They will write me fan letters, speak of me in reverential tones, buy me drinks at bars. I will be famous and esteemed."

"No doubt!" he said. "But this is all irrelevant. This year's Pride topic has nothing to do with Pride."

"It doesn't?" I gasped, taken aback. "How is that possible?"

"If you'd paid attention to my memo" - he pulled a piece of paper out from the middle of a pile and waved it at me - you'd have known that this year's theme is 'Stonewall 25.' I don't know why I even bother to write these things if no one reads them. ..."

His voice trailed off. Then he looked at me sternly.

"Your deadline is 4 o'clock. Dismissed!"

I made an "about-face" I learned in Boy Scouts and marched out, wondering what I could say about diversity that was not already cliche'd, hackneyed, tired.

On the way out, I stopped by the office of Aspasia, one of our young Assistant Editors.

"You'll never guess...," I began glumly.

"I know!" she said. "You need a new column." She grinned guiltily. "The intercom was on - just a teensy bit."

"Well, what are you writing about?" I asked.

"I'm writing about the most important events since Stonewall," she said. "You know, Bowers v Hardwick, Anita Bryant, the psychiatrists voting that we're mentally healthy - that kind of stuff. I'm learning a lot," she added.

"What do you think was the most important event of all? I asked.

"Most important event?" She looked off into space for a moment. "You know. I really think the most important event was when I came out."

I must have looked startled.

"Oh, I don't mean that my coming out was the most important event for everyone else, just for me. What I mean is that for each of us the most important event since Stonewall is that we ourselves came out.

"Think about it," she went on. "That means that each of us at some point summoned up the courage to be honest with ourselves about ourselves. And we managed to do that even knowing there would be some risks and losses if we did it. But we valued truth and integrity enough to face those risks. It's kind of an achievement."

She smiled brightly.

"I don't mean it's a stopping point," she added. "And that doesn't mean it's easy from then on. But it does mean that each of us was willing to throw ourselves into that existential void and take on the burden of beginning to work out life's same old problems from a new and uncertain starting point. It's an achievement that gets us up to square one, but somehow it gives us some momentum as we pass through that point on into the rest of our lives. And I suppose it gives us the experience of knowing that honesty and courage and self-knowledge have some cash value in our mental economy."

"But that's just my opinion. I suppose other people would think differently."

A glimmer of an idea stole into my mind.

"Are you writing about this?" I asked as casually as I could.

"Oh, no," she said. "It's not my topic. Besides, people would just laugh at me if I tried to explain it."

"Well, it's been good talking with you," I said. "But I've gotta go work."

And I rushed off to my word processor.

Originally appeared March 31, 1994, in the Windy City Times.

ON FEBRUARY 24, the Wall Street Journal ran a curious ramble on homosexuality ("Morality and Homosexuality"). The twenty-one theologians and scholars* who wrote it purported to "articulate some of the reasons for the largely intuitive and pre-articulate anxiety of most Americans regarding homosexuality." They then presented an article that demonstrated no reasons at all. It was, in fact, one of the better demonstrations to date of the poverty of the emerging "thoughtful" anti-gay position.

The authors take the view that homosexuality is sinful, unnatural, "contrary to God�s purpose." This is, of course, a flat moral claim, which one simply takes or leaves. But taking it leads them to a cruel and untenable position. Gay people should be expected to exercise "discipline of restraint" by not engaging in "homogenital behavior." In other words, homosexuals should be celibate or should fool heterosexuals into marrying them.

This is an astonishing demand. Homosexuality is not about what you do in bed, it is about whom you fall in love with. The authors assert that issues of human sexuality should not be viewed as mere "matters of recreation or taste," and of course they are right. I know of no homosexual who regards his love as a "matter of recreation or taste," any more than heterosexuals do. Human beings need food, they need shelter, they need love; love is a constitutive human need. That is why homosexuals view the social repression of their love not as the discouragement of a whimsical vice but as an act of scalding inhumanity.

To prescribe such repression without impeccable reasons is at best obtuse, at worst savage. "Morality and Homosexuality" tries to find reasons. It conspicuously fails.

The article deplores homosexuality as a form of license, bracketing it with "permissive abortion, widespread adultery, easy divorce." This is not, of course, an argument against homosexuality; it is an argument against license. Between homosexuals, legal marriage is forbidden and open commitment is stigmatized. No wonder, then, that license flourishes among gay people. If the authors of "Morality and Homosexuality" want to ask gay people to live responsibly in committed, stable relationships, then that is reasonable. But they oppose all gay relationships as immoral, and they loathe gay marriage. It is not wantonness which offends them; it is homosexuality.

They affirm the importance of marriage and family. So do I; so do most gay people, some radical activists notwithstanding. But again, the defense of family implies no coherent argument of any kind about homosexuality. How, precisely, is homosexuality a threat to "husband, wife and children, joined by public recognition and legal bond"? If some small percentage of the population forms same-sex relationships, how is that the downfall of the family? Divorce, illegitimacy and adultery are enemies of family. Homosexuality is not. It is a rare human trait of no great importance except to those who possess it.

Then come vague and muttered intimations that "civilization itself depends on the making" of "certain distinctions." One assumes that these intimations are vague and muttered because the presumed argument ? that acceptance of a few homosexuals will ruin civilization ? is implausible on its face. Now, it is possible that acceptance of homosexuality, like any other social change, may have some ill effects on society. So did the adoption of the automobile. But if the authors believe that the social damage done in accepting homosexuals will be so great as to outweigh any benefits to gay people and to society, it behooves them to show why. They do not.

Unable to point to any plausible mechanism by which homosexuals will destroy society or the family, the authors mumble about "seduction and solicitation" of the young, "predatory behavior," and so on. If the insinuation is that homosexuals are likelier than heterosexuals to molest or seduce children, that charge is a libel which, even if true, would argue only for the current policy of punishing sex offenders. If the insinuation is that some more people may turn out to be gay in a society where homosexuality is accepted, that claim is both speculative and inconsequential. We do not torment left-handed people even if doing so would make a few more of them right-handed. We let people be as they are, provided they do no harm.

"Morality and Homosexuality" shows no harm. It merely assumes harm. By gliding unctuously from praise of cherished norms ? family, civilization, self-control ? to vague insinuations against an enemy group, it recalls a standard technique of anti-Semites, who praise patriotism, community and national security, and then proceed as if it were obvious that Jews threaten those things.

It is good that the writers of "Morality and Homosexuality" feel the need to find reasons for their dislike of homosexuality. From the point of view of sensible gay people, the substitution of anti-gay arguments for anti-gay sneers is one hopeful sign. Another is the sight of twenty-one theologians and scholars reaching for reasons to dislike homosexuality but grasping only straws.

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* The signers of the original Wall Street Journal piece, styled as the "Ramsey Colloquium," include: Hadley Arkes, Amherst College; Matthew Berke, First Things; Gerard Bradley, Notre Dame Law School; Rabbi David Danin, University of Hartford; Ernest Fortin, Boston College; Jorge Garcia, Rutgers University; Rabbi Marc Gillman, Hebrew Union College; Robert George, Princeton University; The Rev. Hugh Haffenreffer, Emanuel Lutheran Church, Hartford, Connecticut; John Hittinger, College of Saint Francis; Russell Hittinger, Catholic University of America; Robert Jenson, St. Olaf College; Gilbert Meilaender, Oberlin College; Jerry Muller, Catholic University of America; Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Institute on Religion and Public Life; Rabbi David Novak, University of Virginia; James Nuechterlein, First Things; Max Stackhouse, Princeton Theological Seminary; Phillip Turner, Berkeley Divinity School (Yale University); George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Robert Wilken, University of Virginia. The group was organized by Neuhaus's Institute on Religion and Public Life.

Originally appeared in the Windy City Times on March 24, 1994.

Rather than concentrating single-mindedly on politics, activists would be wise to turn some of their energies to educational initiatives such as Gay and Lesbian History Month, "a painless, non-threatening way of disseminating information - and therefore familiarity, and therefore comfort, and therefore tolerance - among a larger number of people than we have thus far been able to reach."

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AS YOU PROBABLY ARE AWARE, America has just recently (in February) observed Black History month. The designation is an occasion for the major media and many of our public institutions to do some special features on the topic. Some newspapers even do daily short columns or articles on events in black history or the lives of prominent African-Americans.

Radio and television talk shows - especially those ubiquitous local radio call-in programs - often do something on the topic. Many schools regularly do units on black history. And the classical music stations to which I am usually tuned play more music by black composers or performed by black artists.

Libraries shows special displays of books on black history or by black authors. Book publishers make sure they release new books on the African-American experience to be promoted during February. In cities with large black populations, public officials often attend events to kick off Black History Month or end it with some special celebrations.

Most Americans, like myself, probably make little effort to seek out material on black history. But just as I do, they probably absorb a certain amount of new information just in the normal course of things.

So why, I ask, is there no Gay and Lesbian History Month?

More often than not, our existence is publicized when we are the villains or the victims of some crime; or when we as a group are seen as an aggrieved minority or a social threat (as in the recent antigay ballot initiatives) or when there is news about AIDS, in which we are simultaneously villain and victim.

Seldom except during rare major events such as last year's March on Washington is there much coverage of us as a people, a community growing into self- consciousness, developing our own institutions and making a contribution to the common culture.

Discussion of gay and lesbian history, which is safely in the past, could be an excellent way of talking about gay lives in a context free from controversy and rancor, without having to argue or be partisan. And it is a way of talking about gays without directly talking about sexual behavior, which still makes many people uncomfortable.

Gay and Lesbian History Month could provide a painless, non-threatening way of disseminating information-and therefore familiarity, and therefore comfort, and therefore tolerance-among a larger number of people than we have thus far been able to reach.

Perhaps most Americans are not even aware that there is any gay history. Most Americans do not know much history at all, but particularly they do not know that gays have a history. They must think homosexuality was invented some time in the last couple of decades in a big city far away. They may still think being gay consists primarily of the mindless repetition of sexual acts, and be totally unaware of our social history, literary history, even economic history.

Gay history could help explain much about our lives from a community-development standpoint: where we have been, what we have overcome, and what we - individually and cooperatively - have achieved, often against daunting odds and with frequent examples of great individual courage.

What would it take to get Gay and Lesbian History Month off the ground? To start with, merely an "official" designation by some "official" body that some month is now "officially" Gay and Lesbian History Month. It should not be difficult to persuade the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign Fund, along with the gay caucuses of the American Historical Association and the American Library Association, to make such a pronouncement.

And it should be easy to set up. Two people working in a small office could get it started. They could draw up several thematic topics and choose several significant individuals, then make a short list of available books, articles and films on the topic. They could even provide article outlines, biographical sketches and photographs of the people involved. (The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality is a useful tool here.)

Gay and Lesbian History Month staff would then package this material attractively and send it to city editors, features editors and gay-friendly reporters at local newspapers, to the assignment editors at radio and television stations, to local and network talk-show producers, to library directors, to magazine editors. They could send the same material to special events people in city governments and the human resources departments of large corporations.

They could follow up with telephone inquiries ("Did you receive our kits?" "How can we help?") and regular faxed updates and supplements to keep nudging people along.

They could identify experts, local and national, who could give lectures or be available for interviews and talk show appearances. Gay and lesbian historians such as Martin Duberman, John D'Emilio, Lillian Faderman, Warren Johansson, John Boswell, Elizabeth Kennedy, William Percy and Eugene Rice could become media stars.

And those classical music radio stations I listen to might even be persuaded - if only for one month - to actually identify as gay those innumerable gay composers they already play without identifying them as such.

I spell all this out not to show how complicated it is, but to show how many opportunities are going untapped. In fact, it is not complicated at all; it is very simple and straightforward - very much like a standard public relations campaign.

In fact, that is exactly what it is - that is what the whole gay movement is about. Some people (some activists) mistakenly believe that PR campaigns such as this might be at best a useful tool in helping to obtain gay rights laws. The truth is the exact reverse: Gay rights laws are a useful tool in the broader gay PR campaign.

Our goal, remember, is a society in which there is no hostility or discrimination against gays. A positive and affirmative public attitude can bring that about - with or without laws. In fact, a positive and affirming public attitude is exactly our end point.

Accordingly, we must devote far more tactical thinking to non-political (non-electoral) ways to advance our goals. (National Coming Out Day is one such.) The obsession with politics by some activists amounts to a kind of tunnel vision bordering on pathology.

The current fixation with state antigay ballot initiatives may be understandable, but the point should be to have prevented their occurrence in the first place. That should have been our goal five or ten years ago, and preventing ones in the future should be our goal now.

EVERY TIME I hear that line about "no special rights for gays," I'd like to know just what special rights they are talking about. But let's let that pass for the moment.

On the other hand, let's not. Because defining our terms may enable us to find the creative solution that we need.

As anyone who has been gay for more than ten minutes is aware, the notion that gay people have, or want, special rights is ludicrous. Just a cursory glance at our legal system compels the conclusion that it is heterosexuals who have a whole plethora of special rights: the right to legal recognition for their relationships, the right to serve in the military without lying about who they are, the right to raise their own children without fear that somebody will take their children because of who they are, the right to not have employers and landlords poke around in their private business. Gay people have none of these rights in most places, and in many places still have the legal status of criminal.

In fact, the worst example of this inequality is in the area of relationships: when straight people marry, they automatically get a long list of rights that include the right to be consulted and informed about their partner's policies, the right to inherit if the partner should die without a will, the right to be considered a social unit, the right to death benefits and social security benefits, etc. Not only do gay people not get these things automatically as a matter of right, some of them are not available at all and others only by jumping through lots of legal hoops.

Thus, the idea that gay people somehow seek special rights is more than ludicrous: it is an utterly breathtaking example of hypocrisy.

There is a solution, and it has been staring me in the face for so long that I'm dumbstruck that I have missed it for so long. It will shut our opponents' mouths and remove their foundation from beneath them. It will be the end of probably three-quarters of their blather. And it may even work.

What we have done to this point is seek passage of laws adding sexual orientation to the list of categories protected by antidiscrimination laws. (Except for domestic partnership laws in some places, we haven't even started the task of equalizing governmental recognition of our relationships.) The problem with this approach is that middle America has always been suspicious that all of these civil rights laws are simply special rights for people who fit the categories on the list. And in fact, most people do support equality but when they see a list of groups protected from discrimination - by race, sex, or sexual orientation - it is easy for heterosexual white males, still the most powerful voting bloc, to view it as a quota system that gives special treatment to minorities.

In fact, I suspect that professional racists could probably argue with equal plausibility that laws which protect blacks from discrimination are "special rights" rather than equal rights.

The solution? Forget all about amending existing civil rights laws. Don't even bother with them; they are a waste of time. Instead, let us concentrate on passing a law that says the following: "Before the law, heterosexuals and homosexuals are equal. Neither heterosexuals nor homosexuals shall be entitled to special rights or treatment because of their sexual orientation. The law shall treat them both the same."

First, that would be the end of right-wing raving about special rights. How could any fundamentalist, who has insisted up until now that all he opposes are special rights, possibly oppose such a law without admitting to being a hypocrite!

Second, in one fell swoop we would have pure equality before the law. The state would have to recognize our relationships; it would have to stay out of our private affairs, and the law would probably cover employment and housing discrimination, although that would require some litigation. Thus we quickly and relatively painlessly obtain the entire "homosexual agenda" rather than doing it piecemeal.

Third, it would appeal to the masses of fair-minded people who really do not oppose equality; they have simply been sold a bill of goods that special rights is what we are after. For quite some time now the only way the right wing has been able to win popular elections against us is by claiming we are after special rights; most people don't have a problem with equal treatment.

We even have a ready-made campaign slogan: "No special rights for heterosexuals."

One of our major premises, after all, is that the law should not be treating anybody more favorably than anyone else. As a gay person, I don't seek special rights before the law; I would be perfectly happy with equality.

In fact, what the gay liberation movement seeks is not to be treated more favorably than straight people, but that straight people not be treated more favorably than us.

We do not seek to be considered superior to heterosexuals and lord it over them. Nor are we willing to have them be considered superior to us. What we seek -- and are increasingly unwilling to forgo -- is equal footing.

After all, I am more than willing to give up any bid for special rights if straight people will do the same.

First appeared in National Review, January 24, 1994.

If, like Tony Kushner, you plan to write a second play wringing another three and a half hours of drama out of the same small set of characters, it is perhaps tempting fate to let one of your players in Part I toss off a quip about "the limitations of the imagination. It's something you learn after your first theme party it's all been done before."

But Angels in America, reviewers seem to agree, is no ordinary stage work subject to ordinary rules. It is an event: a theatrical event, of course, playing to full houses, with a sackful of Tony and Drama Desk prizes, as well as a Pulitzer; but also a literary, artistic, and moral event: a "masterpiece" (The New Yorker), "the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of our time" (Newsweek). Here, one might hope, is a long-awaited revival of the theater of ideas. As a "Gay Fantasia on National Themes" that crossed over to charm many straight suburbanites, it might also be expected to contribute to mutual understanding on that vexed current issue.

Now, after much anticipation, the second half of Angels has been installed alongside the first at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York. The two productions share the same fine director (George C. Wolfe) and often-virtuosic cast, permitting a sort of double-blind comparison between the sugar-coated "Millennium Approaches" (Part I) and the more medicinal "Perestroika" (Part II).

The virtues of Part I, it turns out, are those of traditional entertainment: a steady flow of funny lines and clever observations, defying the gravity of its subject, AIDS, like a masonry bridge, by a sustained use of the arch. The pacing is sharp enough to keep you from caring that the poetic flights and recycled religious imagery don't really make much sense, or that little is happening by way of plot. ("Nobody even died yet," grumbled one patron on his way out.) Even less happens in Part II. In the central dramatic situation of Part I, Louis Ironson (Joe Mantello), overcome by nursing his AIDS-stricken lover, has abandoned him. Now, not very surprisingly, he is failing either to find a new love or be taken back by the old. The traditional playwright's answer would be to send him off to perform some great moral gesture, probably by stopping a bullet, but instead he's left to welter in guilt.

Being Mr. Kushner's alter ego, he at least gets an allotment of choice lines. The cast-off Prior Walter (Stephen Spinella), endearingly ditsy in Part I (as when, in diva drag, he pronounced himself an impending "corpsette"), is now well on his way to crankhood, groaning under tablets of prophecy and robed with heavy ideas. Worse dramatic fates await Louis's admirer, the gay Republican lawyer Joe Pitt (David Marshall Grant), and Joe's wife, Harper (Marcia Gay Harden), whose mental derangement is (excuse the solecism) insufficiently motivated, unless you believe that being married to a Republican will do the trick. About the only improvement in characterization is the closer look we get at Hannah Pitt (Kathleen Chalfant), Joe's mother, a stern woman with a talent for knocking the self-indulgence out of characters like Harper.

On the other hand, the character of Roy Cohn, which gave Ron Leibman a justly celebrated star turn in Part 1, now lies abed with little to do while other characters rant on about how awful he is (the "pole star of human evil the worst person who ever lived," etc.). In Part 1, when the ghost of convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg (the fine Kathleen Chalfant again) arrived to haunt him for his role in her execution, she was coolly detached, operating mostly through pauses (as Shakespeare knew, ghosts thrive on silence). Now, to vastly less effect, she tells the dying Cohn that she hates him and laughs at his pain. I have no use for Cohn either, but this is high-school revenge-fantasy stuff.

The funny lines are fewer this time, as are the wry currents of self-deprecation that are needed amid material like this if anger, portentousness, and self-pity are not to intrude like salt into a water table. A chief casualty is Belize, the wisecracking black nurse (Jeffrey Wright), now dismally swollen into a Conscience, the only character the others aren't allowed to score points off, even when he announces, "I hate America." The Angel (Ellen McLaughlin), who descended at the close of Part 1, is also now much in evidence, a beautiful bore. She turns a somersault in the air, a pretty exercise, so she repeats it at intervals through the evening, suggesting first a celestial gymnast and finally Cal Worthington, the Los Angeles car dealer who used to stand on his head on TV ads. In another classic instance of more-is-less, Prior, who was jolted by a sudden vision of a neon aleph in Part I, is now shown the better part of the Hebrew alphabet.

Far more moving is the final scene, where Mr. Kushner gathers his favorite characters in front of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. The sacred waters of the original Bethesda were believed to work miraculous cures, and Prior invites us to imagine a future day when humanity will have passed through the healing flood to emerge whole on the other side. Atop the fountain we see the statue of an angel. "They commemorate death, but they symbolize a world without dying. ...They are made of stone, the heaviest thing on earth, but they symbolize the power of flight."

At moments like this, Mr. Kushner strives for universality and reconciliation. In a nice exchange, Prior, on learning that Mother Pitt is fairly serious about her Mormonism, declares her views "repellent" to him. "How do you know what's going on in my head?" she shoots back. "You don't make assumptions about me, I won't make them about you." She soon shows herself rather more sophisticated than he is.

"I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile," he says, wittily chastened.

Sad to say, that passage is atypical: the crowd-pleasing swipes at conservatives, Republicans, and Mormons, an occasional irritant in Part I, have multiplied this time to fill the dramatic vacuum. They even undermine the play structurally. At the start, Mr. Kushner committed himself to making one of his principal characters, Joe Pitt, both a gay man and an idealistic Reaganite who ghostwrites opinions for a conservative appellate judge. The resulting portrait was uneasy in Part 1, but by now Mr. Kushner is simply fed up with this character and assigns him unbelievable lines and motivations.

In a climactic spat, Louis, who has secretly dug up and read a stack of the opinions his boyfriend has written for the judge, confronts him with his complicity in (we are meant to believe) the ultimate, apocalyptic evil.

It's too bad. A playwright widely lauded for his imagination, one that ranges from Antarctic ice floes to manhole covers in heaven, can't imagine what it's like to be a conservative. And the resulting harangues will seem as unpleasant and off-putting to intelligent conservative playgoers as well, as many of the contents of conservative magazines these days will seem to intelligent gay readers.

We need not demand new ideas in a stage work, and we don't get them in Angels in America. But we might hope for a bit more of the advertised insight into the common humanity of both sides, rather than yet another shove toward the polarization and politicization of this subject.

Meanwhile, those false friends, the overpraising reviewers, do their best to turn Tony Kushner into a monument. For the moment, all it looks as if they've succeeded in doing is taking away his power to fly.

A note on terminology: Halacha (Hebrew for "law") refers to the legal portion of the Talmud and of post-Talmudic literature, a halachist being a student and interpreter of that law. Hesed, often translated as ?steadfast love,? is used in the scriptures to denote the perfect devotedness that can exist between husband and wife as well as the love of God for his people.

I AM AN ORTHODOX RABBI, and I am gay. For a long while I denied, rejected, railed against this truth. The life story that I had wanted - wife, kids, and a family that modeled Torah and hesed - turned out to be an impossible fantasy. I have begun to shape a new life story. This essay is part of that life story and thus remains unfinished, part of a stream of consciousness rather than a systematic treatise.

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It is hard to say how or when I came to know myself as a gay man. In the beginning, it was just an array of bodily sensations; sweaty palms and that excited sort of nervousness you feel around certain people occurred without awareness. The arrival of the hormonal hurricane left me completely dumbfounded. Just when my body should have fulfilled social expectations, it began to transgress them. I had no physical response to girls. But I was physically pulled, eyes and body, toward guys. I remember my head turning sharply once in the locker room for an athletic boy whom I admired. At the time, I must have noticed my body's involuntary movement, but it meant nothing to me. I understood nothing. How could I? I had no idea what it meant to be homosexual. Faggot or homo were words reserved for the boys hounded for being passive, or unathletic. None of this said anything about sexual attraction. There were no categories for this experience, no way to explain the strange muscle spasms, the warm sensation on my face, or the flutter in my chest. Not until years later, after countless repetitions of such events, did it slowly, terrifyingly, break through to my consciousness.

When other boys were becoming enraptured by girls, I found my rapture in learning Torah. I was thrilled by the sprawling rabbinic arguments, the imaginative plays on words, and the demand for meaning everywhere. Negiah, the prohibition to embrace, kiss, or even touch girls until marriage, was my saving grace. The premarital sexual restraint of the Halacha was a perfect mask, not only to the world but to myself.

My years in yeshiva were spectacular, in some measure because they were so intensely fueled by a totally denied sexuality. There were many bachurim (students) in the yeshiva whose intense and passionate learning was energized with repressed sexual energy. For me, the environment deflected sexual energy and generated it as well. The male spirit and energy I felt in yeshiva was both nourishing and frustrating. I do not know if I was alone among my companions or not. From those early years, I remember no signs by which I could have clearly read my gayness or anyone else's. I only know that I was plagued with stomachaches almost every morning.

Later, on one desperate occasion, beset with an increased awareness of my attraction to a fellow yeshiva student, I visited a sage, Rav Eliashuv, who lives in one of the most secluded right-wing Orthodox communities in Jerusalem. He was old and in failing health, but still taking visitors who daily waited in an anteroom for hours for the privilege of speaking with him for a few minutes.

Speaking in Hebrew, I told him what, at the time, I felt was the truth. "Master, I am attracted to both men and women. What shall I do!" He responded, "My dear one, then you have twice the power of love. Use it carefully." I was stunned. I sat in silence for a moment, waiting for more. "Is that all!" I asked. He smiled and said, "That is all. There is nothing more to say."

Rav Eliashuv's words calmed me, permitting me to forget temporarily the awful tensions that would eventually overtake me. His trust and support buoyed me above my fears. I thought that as a bisexual I could have a wider and richer emotional life and perhaps even a deeper spiritual life than is common - and still marry and have a family. For a long while I felt a self-acceptance that carried me confidently into rabbinical school. I began rabbinical training with great excitement and a sense of promise. At the center of my motivations were those powerful rabbinic traditions that had bowled me over in my early adolescence. I wanted more than anything else to learn and to teach Torah in its full depth and breadth. I finished rabbinical school, still dating and carefully avoiding any physical expression, and took my first jobs as a rabbi. There were many failed relationships with wonderful women who could not understand why things just didn't work out. Only after knocking my shins countless times into the hard wood of this truth was I able fully to acknowledge that I am gay.

It has taken a number of years to sift through the wreckage of "my life as I wanted it" to discover "my life as it is." It has taken more time to exorcise the self-hatred that feeds on shattered hopes and ugly stereotypes. I am still engaged in that struggle. I have yet to receive the new tablets, the whole ones, that will take their place in the Ark beside the broken ones. Rav Nachman of Bratzlav teaches that there is nothing so whole as a broken heart. It is in his spirit that I continue to try to make sense of my life.

Although much has changed in the past few years as I have accepted my gayness, much remains the same. I am still a rabbi, and I am still deeply committed to God, Torah, and Israel. My religious life had always been directed by the desire to be a servant of the Lord. None of that has changed. The question is an old one, merely posed anew as I strive to integrate being gay into my life. Given that I am gay, what is it that the God of Israel wants of me!

Of course, many will hear this as an illegitimate question - fallacious in thinking that the God of Israel can somehow accept and move beyond my gayness. Leviticus 18:23 instructs: "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman, it is an abhorrence." I do not propose to reject this or any text. For the present, I have no plausible halachic method of interpreting this text in a manner that permits homosexual sex.

As a traditionalist, I hesitate to overturn cultural norms in a flurry of revolutionary zeal. I am committed to a slower and more cautious process of change, which must always begin internally. Halacha, as an activity, is not designed to effect social revolution. It is a society-building enterprIse that maintains internal balance by reorganizing itself in response to changing social realities. When social conditions shift, we experience the halachic reapplication as the proper commitment to the Torah's original purposes. That shift in social consciousness in regard to homosexuality is a long way off.

If I have any argument, it is not to press for a resolution, but for a deeper understanding of homosexuality. Within the living Halacha are voices in tension, divergent strands in an imaginative legal tradition that are brought to bear on the real lives of Jews. In order to know how to shape a halachic response to any living question, what is most demanded of us is a deep understanding of the Torah and an attentive ear to the people who struggle with the living question. Confronting new questions can often tease out of the tradition a hiddush, a new balancing of the voices and values that have always been there. There is no conclusive psak halacha (halachic ruling) without the hearing of personal testimonies, and so far gay people have not been asked to testify to their experience.

How can halachists possibly rule responsibly on a matter so complex and so deeply foreign, without a sustained effort at understanding? Whatever the halachic argument will be, we will need to know much more about homosexuality to ensure that people are treated not merely as alien objects of a system but as persons within it. Halachists will need to include in their deliberations the testimony of gay people who wish to remain faithful to the Torah. Unimagined halachic strategies, I believe, will appear under difierent conditions We cannot know in advance the outcome of such an investigation. Still, one wonders what the impact might be if Orthodox rabbis had to face the questions posed by traditional Jews, persons they respect and to whom they feel responsible, who are gay.

There is one quasi-halachic issue I must address - that of choice. One of the mitigating factors in halachic discourse is the presence of free will in matters of law. A command is only meaningful in the context of our freedom to obey or disobey. Thus the degree of choice involved in homosexuality is central to the shaping of a halachic response. There is indeed a certain percentage of gay people who claim to exercise some volition in their sexual choices. But for the vast majority of gay people, there is no "choice" in the ordinary sense of the word. Gay feelings are hardwired into our bodies, minds, and hearts. The strangeness and mystery of sexuality is universal. What we share, gay or straight, is the surprising "queerness" of all sexual desire. The experience of heterosexuals may seem less outlandish for its being more common, but all sexual feeling is deeply mysterious, beyond explanation or a simple notion of choice.

The Halacha addresses activities, however, not sexual identities; thus, in halachic Judaism there is no such thing as a gay identity - there are only sexual impulses to control. The tradition describes all sexual desire as yetzer ha'ra (evil impulse), rife with chaotic and destructive possibilities. Heterosexual desire is redeemed and integrated back into the system through a series of prescriptions and prohibitions that channel sexuality and limit its range of expression. Confined within marriage, giving and receiving sexual pleasure, even in nonprocreative ways, is raised to the level of mitzvah.

Homosexual desire, in contrast, is not seen as redeemable and thus remains an implacable yetzer ha'ra that needs to be defeated rather than channeled. In this argument, gay people are treated as people with a dangerous and destructive sexual desire which must be repressed. The spiritual task of a gay person is to overcome the yetzer ha'ra that prods one to have erotic relations with members of the same sex.

The unfairness of this argument begins with the recasting of homosexuals as heterosexuals with perverse desires. The Torah is employed to support the idea that there is only one sexuality, heterosexuality. God confirms heterosexual desire, giving heterosexuals the opportunity to enjoy love and companionship. With the impossibility of another sexuality comes the implicit assumption that gay people can "become" straight and marry and, indeed, should do so.

This has in fact been the ordinary state of affairs for many, if not most, gay men and women throughout history. I know a number of gay (or bisexual) men who have married and sustain relationships with their wives. Of those, most have had an affair at some point that did not end their marriage. Two gay rabbis I know were married and are now divorced, and a third remains happily married, surviving recurrent bouts of depression and emotional exhaustion. What disturbs me most in this sometimes heroic attempt at approximating the traditional ideal is the cost to the heterosexual spouse.

While in my first rabbinical post, I decided to come out to an older rabbi and seek his advice. He counseled me to find a woman and marry. I asked him if I was duty-bound to tell her about my attractions to men and my general sexual uninterest in women. He said no. I was shocked to hear that it was all right to deceive a woman who could very easily be damaged by such a marriage. It made no sense to me.

Surely some heterosexual women might be willing to marry a gay friend who could provide children and be a wonderful father.

There have been rare instances of gay women and men who have worked out marriages where the "uninterest" was mutual. I struggled for a number of years to find such a woman, gay or straight, with whom to begin a family. Sometimes I still torment myself to think that this is all possible, when it is not. I still feel ripped apart by these feelings - wanting a woman at the Shabbat table and a man in my bed. If I am judged for some failure, perhaps it will be that I could not choose the Shabbat table over the bed, either for myself or for the forlorn woman who, after dinner, wants the comfort of a man who wants her back.

Having rejected this option, the standard Orthodox position is to require celibacy. Many recent articles and responsa regard gay sex as indistinguishable from adultery, incest, or bestiality. The heterosexual is asked to limit sexuality to the marital bed, to nonrelatives, to human beings; the homosexual is asked to live a loveless life. I have lived portions of my adult life as a celibate clergyman. While it can have spiritual potency for a Moses or a Ben Azzai, who abandoned sexual life for God or Torah, it is not a Jewish way to live. Always sleeping alone, in a cold bed, without touch, without the daily physical interplay of lives morning and night - this celibate scenario is life-denying and, for me, has always led to a shrinking of spirit. What sort of Torah, what voice of God would demand celibacy from all gay people? Such a reading of divine intent is nothing short of cruel.

Many gay people now and in the past have been forced to purchase social acceptance and God's love through a denial of affection and comfort and, worse, a denial of self. Today many simply leave Judaism behind in order to salvage a sense of dignity and to build a life. This understanding of homosexuality leaves no sanctified option for gay people, no possibility of keddusha or keddushin.

I have come to understand my gayness as akin to my Jewishness: it is integral to my sense of self. I did not choose it, but it is mine. To try to escape it would be self-defeating. There is nothing left to do but celebrate it. Whether in or out of the given halachic rubric, I affirm my desire for a full life, for love, and for sexual expression. Given that I am gay and cannot be otherwise, and given that I do not believe that God would demand that I remain loveless and celibate, I have chosen to seek a committed love, a man with whom to share my life.

But so little of life is carried on in the bedroom. When I indeed find a partner, what sort of life do we build together? What is it that the God of Israel wants of me in regard to family and community!

Struggling with God and with Torah as a gay person was just the beginning. To be Jewish is to be grounded in the continuity of the Jewish people as a witness - a holy people, a light among the nations - a blessing to all the families of the earth. How does a gay person help to shape the continuity of the Jewish people? The carrying forth of the Jewish people I accomplished by marriage and procreation. It is both a tool of the Abrahamic covenant and its most profound meaning statement.

We are a people on the side of life - new life, more life, fuller life. The creation story invited the rabbis to read God's blessing of "be fruitful and multiply" as a command to have two children, a male and a female. Every Jewish child makes the possibility of the Torah's promise of a perfected world more real, more attainable. Abraham and Sarah transmit this vision by having children. Often the portrayal of blessing includes being surrounded with many children. Childlessness is a punishment and curse in the tradition, barrenness a calamity.

Gay life does not prevent the possibility of producing or raising Jewish children, but it makes those options very complicated. Being gay means that the ordinary relationship between making love and having children is severed. This is a deep challenge to the structure of Judaism, since its very transmission is dependent on both relationship and reproduction. For Jews who feel bound by mitzvot, bound by the duty to ensure that life conquers death, the infertility of our loving is at the core of our struggle to understand ourselves in light of the Torah.

This problem, among others, lies at the root of much of the Jewish community's discomfort with gay people. To a people that was nearly destroyed fifty years ago, gay love seems irresponsible. Jews see the work of their lives in light of the shaping of a world for their children. By contrast, gay people appear narcissistic and self-indulgent. Gay people's sexuality is thus a diversion from the tasks of Jewish family and the survival that it symbolizes, and is perceived as marginal to the Jewish community because we are shirkers of this most central and sacred of communal tasks.

This challenge also has a moral chord that strikes deep into the problems of gay subculture. The tradition understood parenting as one of the major moral crucibles for human development. No judge could serve without first being a parent for fear that without the experience of parenting, one could grasp neither human vulnerability nor responsibility. Being heterosexual carries one down a path that demands years of selfless loving in the rearing of children. While not all straight couples have children, and some gay couples adopt them, the norm is shaped less by choice and more by biology. Yet if gay people do not ordinarily fall into monogamous coupling and childbearing, how do we find our place in the covenant? And what of the moral training that caring for children provides; how do we make up for that? Is there another job to be done that requires our service to God and to the Jewish people? Of all the problems entailed in gay sexuality, this one looms for me, both spiritually and emotionally.

Although there is no obvious biblical resource for this dilemma, there are biblical writers who struggled to address God's will in very new social circumstances. Isaiah was one such writer who bridged the worlds before and after the Exile. Some familiar passages have become charged for me with new meaning. In these verses Isaiah is speaking to his ancient Israelite community and trying to convince them that God's covenantal plan for Israel is larger than they think. The covenant begins with Abraham and Sarah but has become much more than a family affair. He speaks to two obvious outsider groups in chapter 56, the b'nai ha'nechar, the foreigners of non-Israelite birth, and the sarisim, the eunuchs:

Let not the foreigner say,
Who has attached himself to the Lord,
"The Lord will keep me separate from His people"
And let not the eunuch say,
"I am a withered tree."

In the Talmud, a eunuch is not necessarily a castrated male, but a male who is not going to reproduce for various reasons (Yevamot 80b). Why does Isaiah turn his attention here to the foreigners and the eunuchs? In the chain of the covenantal family, the foreigner has no past and the eunuch no future. They both seem excluded from the covenantal frame of reference. It is this "exclusion" that the prophet addresses:

For thus said the Lord:
"As for the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
Who have chosen what I desire
And hold fast to My covenant -
I will give them, in My House
And within my walls,
A monument and a name
Better than sons or daughters.
I will give them an everlasting name
Which shall not perish."

The prophet comforts the pain of eunuchs with the claim that there are other ways in which to observe, fulfill, and sustain the covenant. There is something more permanent than the continuity of children provides. In God's House, the achievement of each individual soul has account. A name in the Bible is the path toward the essence, the heart of being. It is passed on to progeny. But there is another sort of a name, a name better than the one sons or daughters provide. The covenant is carried forward by those who live it out, in the present. Loyalty to the covenant is measured in God's House in such a way that even if one's name is not passed on through children an eternal name will nonetheless be etched into the walls. Isaiah offers a place to the placeless, an alternative service to the person who cannot be part of the family in other ways:

As for the foreigners
Who attach themselves to the Lord,
to be His servants -
All who keep the sabbath and do not profane it,
And who hold fast to my covenant -
I will bring them to my sacred mount
And let them rejoice in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
Shall be welcome on My altar;
For My House shall be called
A House of prayer for all peoples."
Thus declares the Lord God,
Who gathers the dispersed of Israel:
"I will gather still more to those already gathered."

So inclusive is God's plan for the Israel in the world that any foreigner can join. The notion of conversion, so obvious to us now, was a striking innovation for the generation of Isaiah. Conversion is about rewriting the past. Like adoption, conversion redefines the meaning of parents and family. Birth and lineage are not discarded. The central metaphor for Israel is still family, but Isaiah and later tradition open up another avenue into the covenant. Those with no future are promised a future in the House of the Lord; those with no past are nevertheless included in Irael's destiny. God can only require the doable. A foreigner cannot choose a different birth, or the eunuch a different procreative possibility. Gay people cannot be asked to be straight, but they can be asked to "hold fast to the covenant." God will work the story out and link the loose ends as long as we hold fast to the covenant. Holding fast to the covenant demands that I fulfill the mitzvot that are in my power to fulfill. I cannot marry and bear children, but there are other ways to build a family. Adoption and surrogacy are options. If these prove infeasible, the tradition considers a teacher similar to a parent in life-giving and thus frames a way that the mitzvah of procreation can be symbolically fulfilled.

Holding fast to the covenant demands that I seek a path toward sanctity in gay sexual life. The Torah has much to say about the way people create keddusha in their sexual relationships. The values of marriage, monogamy, modesty, and faithfulness that are central to the tradition's view of holiness need to be applied in ways that shape choices and life styles.

Holding fast to the covenant means that being gay does not free one from the fulfillment of mitzvot. The complexities generated by a verse in Leviticus need not unravel my commitment to the whole of the Torah. There are myriad Jewish concerns, moral, social, intellectual, and spiritual, that I cannot abandon. Being gay need not overwhelm the rest of Jewish life. Single-issue communities are political rather than religious; religious communities tend to be comprehensive of the human condition. The richness of Jewish living derives in part from its diversity of attention, its fullness.

For gay Orthodox Jews, this imagination of engagement between ourselves and the tradition is both terribly exciting and depressing. Regretfully, the communities that embrace us, both gay and Jewish, also reject us. The Jewish community wishes that we remain invisible. The gay community is largely unsympathetic and often hostile to Judaism. There are some in the gay community who portray Judaism as the original cultural source of homophobia. More often, the lack of sympathy toward Jewish observance derives from the singlemindedness of gay activism. Liberation communities rarely have room for competing loyalties.

Gay synagogues have filled a void for many, providing a place of dignity in a Jewish community. This work is part of a movement toward a fuller integration in the larger Jewish community for which most gay Jews long. Gay-friendly synagogues may well point the way, modeling a community of families and singles, young and old, straight and gay that is in spirit much closer to my hopeful future imagination than anything yet.

Gay Jews who wish to be part of an Orthodox community will find very few synagogues in which there is some level of understanding and tolerance. Some gay Jews attend Orthodox services and remain closeted in their communities. It is crucial that Orthodox rabbis express a loving acceptance for known gays in their synagogues even if public legitimation is now impossible. Attacks on homosexuality from the pulpit are particularly painful to those who have remained connected to the traditional synagogue, despite the hardships.

I have hesitated until now to address the central halachic concerns of homosexuality. Real dialogue is necessary before such a process of responsa writing can begin. Still, it appears to many Orthodox Jews that in the case of homosexuality there is little use for dialogue in the face of such a clear biblical prohibition. A number of my colleagues and friends want very much to respond compassionately to gay people, but feel compelled to remain loyal to what they see as the unambiguous word of the Torah. Let me offer the possibility of an intermediate position to demonstrate that real listening may indeed give birth to new halachic strategies.

The Torah very specifically forbids anal intercourse between two men. If the Torah expressly forbids only this one form of sexual fulfillment, could we articulate a possible "halachic" form of gay loving that excludes anal intercourse but permits a loving physical and emotional relationship between two men or two women? After all, heterosexuality is not a free zone of activity for halachically committed Jews. For the sake of holiness, the Torah requires heterosexual couples to refrain from intercourse during menstruation. Why not offer such a sanctified option to gay men who wish to find acceptance in the halachic community?

For many gay men, this will not be a realItic choice. But until it becomes a real possibility, who knows who will agree to commit? Of course, this challenge to gay Jewish men will be sincere only if the halachic community then takes a lead in accepting the couples who commit in this covenantal fashion. (Lesbian women would be accepted without condition, because there is no Torah text that specifically prohibits their relationships.)

I offer this framework knowing that Orthodox Jews will protest that there are rabbinic prohibitions that invalidate it, and that many gay Jews will feel that it too severely limits the essence of gay lovemaking. Let it then simply demonstrate at least the beginnings of a language of discourse between the tradition as it now stands and the lives of gay people.

For the present, in regard to sexual behavior, I personally have chosen to accept a certain risk and violate the Halacha as it is presently articulated, in the hope of a subsequent, more accepting halachic expression. I realize that this is "civil disobedience." It is not the system itself which I challenge but its application to an issue that has particular meaning for me and for those like me. There is always the possibility that I am wrong. Ultimately, the halachic risks that I take are rooted in my personal relationship with God, Who I will face in the end. It is this faith that makes me both confident and suspicious of myself.

I have, admittedly, a rather privatized form of community. I am closeted and have chosen to write this essay in anonymity to preserve what is still most precious to me: the teaching of Torah and caring for my community of Jews. What concerns me most is neither rejection by the Orthodox community, nor the loss of my particular pulpit. Were I to come out, the controversy would collapse my life, my commitments, my identity as a teacher of Torah, into my gayness. Still, the secrecy and the shadowy exItence of the closet are morally repugnant and emotionally draining. I cannot remain forever in darkness. I thank God that for the time being, the Torah still sheds ample light.

I have a small circle of friends, gay and straight, men and women with whom I share a sense of community. We are looking for other tradition-centered Jews who can help build a place that embraces both the Torah and gay people. Not a synagogue, not a building, but a place for all the dispersed who are in search of community with Israel and communion with God. In this place, this House of the Lord, now somewhat hypothetical and private (and soon, I pray, to be concrete and public), those of us who have withered in the darkness, or in the light of day have been banished, will discover our names etched upon the walls.