IGF CultureWatch

WHETHER MEASURED by the pitch of national emotion it stirs, prominence of the magazine covers it graces, the quantity of congressional hearings it generates, the number of Hollywood B-movies it spawns, or the volume of press releases that pour out of newsroom fax machines, the debate over lesbian and gay rights clearly has come of age.

Just as clearly, it was the election of Bill Clinton, the first president to openly embrace homosexual rights, and the consequent debate over lifting the ban on gays in the military that propelled the movement out of the gay ghettos of New York City and San Francisco to the center of national discussion in Washington and in living rooms, coffee shops, and workplaces across the country. Somewhat unexpectedly, the movement thus finds itself at a watershed. Its sudden prominence has forced gay and lesbian leaders to articulate their aims, even as they grope for a political strategy to achieve them.

The classic civil rights approach adopted by blacks seems to predominate for now. While many want to distance the movement from the radical left, with rare exceptions the leaders of gay and lesbian groups hew to a left-liberal political plank, demanding a new civil rights bill that would add homosexuals to the panoply of groups granted legal status as protected classes.

Surprisingly, however, a quite different path is also emerging and appears to be gaining popularity among the gay intellectual and political elite, offering the possibility that this civil rights movement could veer off on an unexpected course. The values of this new politics are far more traditional, even conservative, and yet its demands are also much more radical. It enjoys a distinctly American moral appeal that disarms opponents, even as its radicalism inspires a fierce, instinctive opposition.

Its primary political and legal aim is to end discrimination by the state; those who embrace it fully would leave private discrimination legally unaddressed. Its linchpin is government sanction of same-sex marriage. On the social font, the primary goal of the new politics is to gain social acceptance - not, as the gay left would do, to subvert straight culture and superimpose its own. And its method is not an act ofCongress, but the deeply personal acts of thousands of individuals who emerge from the closet and declare their homosexuality.

"It is clear to me," says Tim McFeeley, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the largest and perhaps most influential gay and lesbian organization in the country, "that regulation, to the point of preventing any two people from loving each other or entering into a public commitment that declares and publicizes two people's commitment and love for each other, is really central in terms of the government's control over our lives."

Marriage, many gay leaders now insist, is the most obvious and profound form of state discrimination against gays and lesbians. An entire body of law hinges on the marriage contract, they argue, and with it an entire body of rights that constitute the essence of the legal bias against homosexuals - from property rights to hospital-visitation privileges - as well as a deeply felt social validation. They also acknowledge that marriage is their most radical demand, considered by many, McFeeley says, to be "terrible, dangerous, countercultural."

This new politics (its leading theoretician is Andrew Sullivan, editor of The New Republic) has grown out of an odd confluence of accident, historical experience, and the unique nature of the homosexual taboo.

In an unplanned turn of events, just as the gay and lesbian movement achieved political momentum, the debate over the military ban suddenly switched public attention from social prejudice against Greenwich Village drag queens and leather dykes to blatant government discrimination, including classic witch hunts, against the most patriotic and socially conservative members of American society.

The movement also is reaching prominence at a time when historical experience is illuminating the pitfalls of the traditional civil rights focus on oppression and victimization. Across the board, from the radical left to conservatives, gay and lesbian leaders shun affirmative action, saying that it is not a goal and is not under discussion.

In this connection, movement leaders have been stung by the effectiveness of the conservative charge that gays and lesbians are demanding "special rights." This charge was at the core of the Colorado initiative that bars protections for homosexuals. No two words raise more hackles among movement leaders.

Alan Klein, a cofounder of Queer Nation, calls the phrase a "crafty campaign by the religious right to scare people, a scare tactic that says blacks or Latinos or gays and lesbians are looking for something more than they're entitled to. That is crazy and a misstatement. All that these groups and the gay and lesbian civil rights movement want are the same rights that everyone else has."

The problem, of course, is that the charge rings true. A federal civil rights law would, by definition, add gays and lesbians to the list of protected classes. "It is in fact true that antidiscrimination laws are special privileges," says a prominent Washington libertarian who is gay but not out publicly. "In every case, if you're talking about the private sector, these are special rights."

Jonathan Rauch, author of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, adds, "What the right has figured out is that if you can frame someone as a special pleader, a special interest in America, that person is rightly in trouble." It is the very potency of the "special rights" charge that has forced a subtle shift in political strategy - at least at the rhetorical level - away from the victim model that other groups have embraced.

Most important, however, is the recognition that while discrimination against lesbians and gays shares many characteristics with discrimination against blacks, there are profound differences as well. Lesbians and gays face a unique brand of prejudice that makes the traditional civil rights course ill-suited to their cause and in many ways unworkable. Unlike blacks or women, lesbians and gays can disguise themselves - or, in the language of Jim Crow, can "pass" - and thereby avoid discrimination. As a result, the closet remains a huge barrier both to gaining social acceptance and to adopting affirmative action.

This is because discrimination is not targeted at gays and lesbians per se but at gays and lesbians who are openly so. Unknown numbers of lesbians and gays have achieved economic success and reached the apex of their callings. Nor do bias and its potential economic consequences accumulate through generations against homosexuals as a group, as they have for blacks.

So whereas legal protections for other minorities have led irresistibly toward government-imposed quotas, it's not likely that legal protections for gays and lesbians will move in a similar direction. For one thing, numerical targets for gays and lesbians would require that they declare their sexual orientation, like it or not. Moreover, as Rauch argues, the victim model simply does not fit very well. "It's not true at the economic or the cultural level," he says. "Who enjoys more cultural influence in Hollywood today, gay people or fundamentalist Christians!"

At the same time, the closet nourishes and sustains the social taboo. "This is a very important distinction:' McFeeley says. "It really comes down to the heart of whether or not we're going to be successful in the strategy of getting civil rights legislation for gay and lesbian people. And that's because the closet and the invisibility offer something that people see as a solution." It is the essence, he argues, of Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn's proposed "don't ask, don't tell" compromise on the military ban.

Indeed, movement leaders argue that the closet lies at the heart of the gay rights movement, as a matter of public policy and as a matter of its very moral legitimacy. Discrimination against gays and lesbians manifests itself less in a lack of economic opportunity than in the deep sense of shame, fear, and self-loathing that homosexuals so often feel, especially when they are young. It operates in quiet and debilitating ways, says Torie Orborn, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, one of the largest gay rights groups.

"It's in the teenage suicide rate," Osborn says. "It's in the number of people who are in the closet who are afraid to tell their families or their colleagues that their lover is of the same gender. It functions, in essence, to restrict our lives, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness in a way that cuts across class and race boundaries. The closet is the most potent example of the feeling of being ashamed or embarrassed or fearful just about who you are."

Greater social tolerance and freedom are goals that every gay and lesbian seems to share. Betty Willis, a Washington lobbyist who is coming out publicly by allowing her name to be used, echoes many when she says her wish is "simply to live a normal life like everyone else, and to not have to hide, to not have to live underground, to not be afraid."

For this reason, says McFeeley, the closet is not a viable option. "It's so simple," he says. "We keep tiptoeing around this, not just the politicians but everybody, including gay people in their relations with their parents. They never confront the real issue, which is, 'Why do you have to be out!'"

The answer, he says, is, "I am a human being, and the essence of being human is loving someone else. Denying that or disguising that or hiding that love is very, very injurious to human beings. It is in fact a self-rejection of who you are." Love, celebrated in literature, in art, in commerce, and in daily life, "is something that is so natural that non-gay people don't even have to think about it. Open any magazine, you see it in the ads, men and women being together, being happy, being loving, being thoughtful, being romantic, having fun, sharing life, having kids - all those images, they're constant. But if you grow up gay, you have a sense that you're not allowed to do that. And this is what the closet is all about."

The rhetoric of politics does not admit such talk, McFeeley concedes. "This is the talk of therapy," he says. "This is not the kind of talk you usually engage in in public policy debates about taxes or aid to Bosnia. But the public policy issues [such as] should gays be in the military - you can't resolve that issue without talking about these touchy-feely subjects about people loving. We don't have any systematic language to use in discussing love as a factor in public policy debates. We're uncomfortable talking about these things not only with strangers. We have problems talking about these things with our families."

The peculiar nature of discrimination against gays and lesbians also contributes to what many feel is a confusion between the political objective of changing social attitudes and the personal objective of self-acceptance. Those who want to build social tolerance insist that radical sexual politics is self-defeating. They argue that the celebratory demonstrations of drag queens and "dykes on bikes" at gay-pride parades may be therapeutic for the participants, but smack of self-indulgence and what Rick Sincere, cofounder of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty, calls "a sociology of the left that rejects hierarchy, that rejects prioritizing, that rejects value-based decision making."

April's March on Washington revealed a division between the radical gay left, which views sexual defiance and rejection of social norms as a political end, and the moderate view that the aim is not to overturn mainstream culture but to join it. Gay leaders like to smooth over differences between the ascendant mainstream organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign Fund and such activist groups as Queer Nation and ACT UP - what some call the "suits versus the queers" divide. Although organizers of the March on Washington emphasized a mainstream image, a raft of speakers made crude jokes about religious groups and public figures. One comedienne said she was pleased that "we finally have a First Lady we can fuck."

While its role may be receding, the gay left still strongly influences the movement's overall agenda, especially its powerful tendency toward political correctness. Its radicalism and politics of rejection also have clear parallels in other civil rights movements: the Black Panthers, the feminist bra burners, and the century-old debates over whether to seek integration or separation.

Denny Lee, a member of ACT UP New York, believes that acceptance alone is unacceptable. "It's not merely tolerance that we're looking for," Lee says. "It's something much more profound than that, and something much more important too." Social institutions, he says, "need to be redefined to encompass wider groups. And I think that's what the gay rights movement is doing, namely, we're trying to change the culture."

Osborn of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force carefully allows "room for a variety of tactics." But she is "not sure what the goal is" of the "in-your-face cultural guerrilla theater. It seems to be a kind of self-expression more than anything else."

Rauch argues that rejection of social norms is "a statement about radicalism, not a statement about homosexuality." The movement, he contends, will have to address these fundamental differences in aim and strategy. "Just below the surface there's a tension between bourgeois homosexuals like me, who buy into the standard notion of American life and want to be a part of it," he says, "and the radical homosexuals who see their sexuality as implicitly rejecting bourgeois American values. It's not yet clear whether this is a movement about social liberation and egalitarianism or whether this is merely a movement about integrating homosexuals into the standard model of american life."

Rauch sees a risk that the radical agenda "isolates us. And we can't win that fight." The religious right is "not wrong about everything," he contends. "The values of stability and family, hard work and education and thrift and honesty, are bedrock values for society" and should be embraced by the gay and lesbian movement. This is why, he argues, gay and lesbian marriage is such a fundamental aim. "In the long term, I think in America hate and superstition lose when they're directly, openly confronted," he contends. "That one we win. But if we come off as anti-family, we will lose� It's unwinnable. And it shouldn't be won."

The more radical groups, however, charge that mainstream gays are engaging in their own form of intolerance and hypocrisy by ostracizing drag queens and other fringe elements. "The fear is that we become hypocritical as a movement if we exclude our own members," Lee says.

Rick Sincere of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty concedes the point but counters that the left too often views the gay movement as part of a larger aim to "overturn Western civilization" and insists "that they want to have sex when they want it and how they want it, no matter who it offends." Similarly, Rauch says that tolerance does not mean "that you abolish criticism and disagreement about what is good taste and what isn't."

The far right, Sincere argues, exploits the radical image with videos that show only "the drag queens and the leather queens and the people simulating fellatio in the street. The average American in rural Kentucky who has never met a gay person before is going to think this is what gay people do all the time." It's as though, he says, "you took somebody from another planet and set them down in New Orleans in the middle of February and showed them Mardi Gras and said this is what heterosexual Americans do 365 days a year. They have no context in which to judge that, and they're going to believe it."

Again, many argue, the closet is the problem, and opening it is the key to combating what Pat Buchanan calls the "visceral recoil" straights feel toward lesbians and gays. When the black civil rights movement began, notes the Washington libertarian, "all blacks were visible, and they all in some way represented their race. And they may have resented that. They may have said,'listen, I didn't ask to be an ambassador of the black race. I want to live my life and not worry about what other people think.' But like it or not, you could see them all, and in some sense you judged the black community by all the blacks you knew as well as the ones you saw on television."

The lesbians and gays most likely to be seen demonstrating on television are those who are most alienated from the mainstream, he argues, while those most able to counter that image are also most likely to be closeted and invisible. Hilary Rosen, a recording industry lobbyist, board member of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, and a liberal Democrat, maintains that those gays and lesbians who are most offended by the images put out by the radical left are precisely those who must come out. "If I have an obligation as a Democrat to be active and out and vocal," she says, "I can't think of anybody who has more of an obligation than a gay Republican."

The Washington libertarian, aware of his self-contradiction, argues that the more people who come out, "the more people there are who are going to know a gay person and like or love that person and realize that these people are not some figment of Pat Buchanan's fevered imaginatian, but their next-door neighbor, their son, their boss, their secretary. And that changes the way people think."

He recalls attending a gathering of some 200 gay and lesbian Republicans in suburban Washington, "all well dressed, well coiffed." Their biggest concern was that every time gay people were on television, "they were prancing in the Castro Street parade wearing jockstraps," he says. But at the end of the cocktail hour, when asked for volunteers for a new gay organization's board of directors, nobody, including him, raised a hand.

1.

There were fourteen of us at the family dinner table. Among us we represented four generations

We were at my sister's house just outside of Victorville, part of a growing community in Southern California's high desert, about two hours east of Los Angeles. It was a little above 30 degrees outside, and the sky was a clear window on a million stars.

My sister and parents, as well as a number of my uncles and aunts had moved here partly because of the affordable housing, partly because they are golfers and their neighborhood is built around a lovely golf course, and partly because it is the kind of quiet community that is the antithesis of the city none of them ever liked. They are endlessly satisfied with the distance they have put between themselves and Los Angeles. In most of these details, I am very different from my family.

Still, I come up to visit them often. They are my family, and I enjoy spending time with them. But they are also something else to me, they are my ground. A large part of the country is made up of people like them, people who do not often get involved in the political rhetoric I am used to-the rhetoric of the media, of academic debates, of the centers of power. People like my family, suburban, church-going people, are consumed with the day-to-day details their lives demand, and have little time for things like the Big Picture, the Effect that Society has on Individuals, the Law. I have always been drawn toward Big Picture issues.

But in the small things, the family rituals, I share a great deal with them. My family is located squarely at the heart of the middle class, and so am I. In that among other things, I am much like them. And here among these people I loved, having one more in a lifetime of family dinners, I noticed something that struck a chord in me, not because it was unusual, but because it was so very usual that it went without any comment at all. As I looked around the table, I realized that of the fourteen people busily loading their plates and talking, five of us were gay.

And no one cared.

The cast of characters was for the most part as familiar to me as the photographs on the walls of my apartment. My grandmother and parents were there, as were my sister and brother-in-law. Two of my seven uncles were with us: One sat next to his wife, while the other was there with his long-time male partner. My sister's stepson Rick had brought his girlfriend. Early in the evening Rick's brother called to let us know he would be there, too. When he arrived, he introduced us to the young man he had brought along as his date. Since in my family there is always enough food, my sister set another place at the table for the additional guest with little fuss or concern.

The fact that he and his date were the same sex was no big deal.

Just before dessert, my aunt Ann and uncle Fred dropped by. Even among my family, who, with rare exceptions are politically conservative Republicans, these two have always been especially conservative. I have long been uneasy with both major parties, but am a registered Democrat, and sometimes adopt democratic party positions I don't wholly support so Fred and I will have something to argue about. The never-ending political debates between Fred and me are a family tradition as anticipated and invariable as turkey on Thanksgiving, and Ann is always there to chide me with some argument Fred might have forgotten. Our debates are usually loud and intense; whatever the details, we both care deeply about politics. Because of our political passions I have long felt a special kinship with Fred and Ann, and they have always felt close to me. Most of the rest of the family discusses politics only reluctantly.

In making her greetings to everyone, Ann, as usual, saved her special zeal for my uncle's partner. He is, in fact, one of those people who came into the family's enthusiastic embrace easily. While my family generally accepts all comers, in the natural course of things some are more loved than others. My uncle's partner was a favorite from the start.

2.

This domestic picture will be an affront to some people who are homosexual. I have long been aware that the family I come from is not like the families many lesbians and gay men were brought up in and had to escape, the families the Mad Pats at the notorious 1992 Republican Convention thought they could use as a weapon against lesbians and gay men. While that strategy backfired badly for the party the Pats were trying to help, it remains true that because of the disquiet these people exploit, many gay people are unable to have the kind of relationship with their family that I have.

That said, I bring my family up for a very specific reason. They are not alone. They and hundreds of thousands of families like them are too often absent in the discussion about gay rights, not as weapons against gay people, but as their imperfect allies. The public discussion of homosexuality tends to take place at the extremes-since the loudest objections come from radical conservatives, the opposition tends to be equally intense, equally extreme. While this makes for symmetry, the fervor on both sides sometimes excludes people like my family who have a more moderate interest in the issue. Those people, who are neither particularly articulate nor especially inflamed feel as if they have no place in the ring.

I think these families and family members should be acknowledged-people of good faith who, while they are not champions of gay rights, have found a way to respect and accept their lesbian and gay members as well as they can. In some ways, that kind of unexpressed but lived support is more important than all the manifestos and the blood-boiling demonstrations.

Those families and those children can have the relationship they have because giants paved the way, lesbians and gay men who took what, for the time was a radical position in a wholly uncomprehending world--that they should be accepted in their entirety, regardless of their sexual orientation. The almost unbelievable bravery of Harry Hay and Frank Kameny and the other men and women who can be counted as founders of the gay rights movement in America helped to change the way we think about people who are homosexual.

New leaders are always emerging, but some of them do not always recognize that there are differing styles of activism. Since the mid-nineties, a number of high-profile lesbians and gay men have proudly been calling themselves Queer. This is particularly true in the gay press. While groups like Queer Nation have come and gone, there continues to be a number of activists who seem to be most satisfied when they can make others most uncomfortable.

When it comes to use of the term "queer," I am one of those who feels uncomfortable.

3.

There is no shortage of lesbians and gay men who employ this in-your-face attitude toward the world at large. But what is it supposed to accomplish?

It is true that linguistics are a part of the strategy of identifying as Queer. When minorities embrace the words used against them, they mitigate, to some extent, the use of the words as weapons.

But that strategy has never been fully successful. African-Americans once tried to defuse the word "nigger" in a similar way. But despite their best intentions, the word never lost its force as an expletive, as any member of the Ku Klux Klan can attest. "Nigger" still pierces, still causes harm.

A second reason for lesbians and gay men to identify themselves as Queer is to exercise some control over their position in the world. Rather than having a name imposed, the group chooses its own. Even if the group chooses a name that already exists, it is still a form of empowerment, or at least is said to feel that way.

Whatever its value, though, this tactic has the potential to try the public's patience. Minority groups are not like nations or states; they do not have a unified government that can decide once and for all what the country and its people will be called. As group members debate, editorial rooms across the country do their level best to keep up.

It is in this context that I have wrestled with myself over whether, as a gay man, I am Queer. I have decided that I am not. "Queer" is the word of the Other, of the Outsider. I do not feel like I am outside anything due to my sexual orientation.

4.

The generations of lesbians and gay men who lived in the time leading up to the Stonewall riots in 1969 were radicals by definition. They said out loud what at the time was unsayable - that sexual orientation should not matter. While sexual orientation is obviously a difference among people, people are different in a multitude of ways. Hair color, for example, is a more obvious difference than sexual orientation, since it is immediately visible. But we did not create a systematic or legal hierarchy of preferred over less-preferred and non-preferred hair color, granting blondes and brunettes rights that are unavailable to redheads, requiring people who choose to marry to marry someone whose hair color is different than theirs, or the same. Hair color is one of thousands of differences that can be noticed but carries no legal or normative weight.

Since the pioneering sex studies in Germany early in the Twentieth Century, those arguing for equality for lesbians and gay men have asserted that sexual orientation is not a sickness or pathology, that it is another neutral difference that should be treated neutrally. For most of the last century, the established society disagreed, said that sexual orientation was a difference that mattered, and would be treated under law as if it mattered.

Since Stonewall, though, the law has made considerable strides toward neutrality. Equality was the ultimate goal, the elimination of the laws that treated homosexuality and heterosexuality differently. Bit by bit that equality is being recognized. As Barney Frank has observed, movements like that mid-nineties Colorado explicitly to deny equality to lesbians and gay men arose in part because tolerant cities like Aspen enacted their equal-protection guarantees. Colorado For Family Values, the group which backed the Colorado constitutional amendment, wanted to return to the inequality that its members were comfortable with because they felt that inequality slipping away. If the gay rights movement had not had its successes, CFV would not have been necessary.

Like members of CFV, those who want to identify themselves as Queer are capitalizing on the significance of the surface difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Some have been outspoken in their focus on this difference.

But to say that lesbians and gay men are different from heterosexuals is no more than a tautology. The game of definitional difference can be played on a number of axes. In addition to being gay, for example, I am also male, of Italian background, and am Catholic; I practice law and write for a living, am reasonably well-educated, and a baby boomer. To some extent, each of these is as important to my identity as my sexual orientation. Therefore, I could identify myself at any given moment as a gay man, a male, an Italian (or more broadly a Caucasian), a Catholic, a baby-boomer, a lawyer or a writer, and would be telling the truth.

But by choosing one group to identify with, I would also be leaving out a great deal. I am no more male than I am Italian or Catholic or lawyer or writer or homosexual. All fit together in some way that adds up to me. Therefore, while I do claim membership in all of those groups, and while some are more important to me than others, it would be too easy to lose sight of the whole if I were to grant one group status as The Group I identified with. To me, each is an adjective about me, none is me.

Each of us belongs in a lot of groups, many of which overlap. Any individual could draw a Venn diagram of the dozens or hundreds of groups she or he belongs in, and the intersection of all those circles would be a group of one.

The poet Maya Angelou has made this point explicit:

"In my work, in everything I do, I mean to say that we human beings are more alike than we are unalike, and to use that statement to break down the walls we set between ourselves because we are different. I suggest that we should herald the differences, because the differences make us interesting, and also enrich and make us stronger. [But] the differences are minuscule compared to the similarities. That's what I mean to say."

Experiences of love and loss, trust, betrayal, jealousy, injustice, joy and pain, comfort, rage--all these are points at which we can touch one another as people because they are experiences every one of us shares. One of the jobs of the artist has been to explore those touching points, to bring us together from our varied and diverse particulars into a single place where we can recognize something we have in common. Hamlet, for example, is a Dane, a heterosexual, and a male, but he is also the embodiment of something that transcends all human categories, the human dilemma of indecision. The particulars of his story are interesting and relevant, but in his very particular story we can also find something universal, something all of us know. From the moment Shakespeare created his Hamlet, agonizing with the decision he faces, generations of individuals who have encountered this ambivalent hero have seen something of themselves on the stage. Anyone who has ever had to choose a restaurant or a video to rent knows on a trivial level how hard it is to finally decide to act. And everyone knows how difficult the larger decisions are - what profession or job to enter, where to live, who to trust, or to love. Hamlet's truth about the difficulty of decision defies gender and race and sexual orientation, and everything else.

5.

Balancing our similarities and differences is the juggling act of identity. The current focus on the ways lesbians and gay men differ from heterosexuals simply reinforces the walls between us, and leaves no gate. In this, lesbians and gay men dishonor the success of those whose work has so much changed the world.

A generation ago, I could not have had the dinner with my family that I did. What my family and I have in common would have been destroyed by a single difference. To maintain a relationship with them, the burden would have been on me to lie. In my family, those days are gone. The five gay men who were at that family table could be honest, and we were not penalized for our honesty. And the family as a whole was benefited by remaining intact, by keeping all of the bonds between us alive. We could find some reassurance in our similarities while taking advantage of the differing viewpoints each brings to the family's dynamic.

That is only one measure of what the very loose phrase "gay rights" means. It is my understanding that the goal of the gay rights movement all along was to allow lesbians and gay men to live their lives irrespective of their sexual orientation, not superrespective of it. This was difficult to do when heterosexuals focused - sometimes obsessively - on homosexuality. Lesbians and gay men know their sexual orientation is a part of their make-up, but it isn't any more important to them than a heterosexual's sexual orientation is to them. Sex is certainly a part of an ordinary life, but most people - lesbians and gay men included - spend more time watching TV than having sexual intercourse. Most people spend more time on hold waiting to talk to a live customer service representative than having sexual intercourse.

But by identifying as Queer, lesbians and gay men do exactly the same thing that the most virulent homophobes do, make their sexual orientation hyper-important, more important than any single factor should be in a complex human personality. By marking ourselves as Outsiders, we deny what we have in common with others.

Lesbians and gay men in the past were radicals because they had no other choice. That is no longer true. Because of decades of radical work, millions of people are able to view homosexuality now within the context of ordinary human variations, and like my family, pay it no mind. That seems to me to be the goal achieved. It has clearly not been achieved everywhere, but we are far enough along the road that the choice to avoid a radical identity is available.

Some lesbians and gay men may choose to follow the path of the sexual outlaws, determine that they prefer to be the Outsider. This pose has long been a kick for the young, whether straight or gay. But in adopting that pose in the modern world, lesbians and gay men will have made a choice that no one else imposed. In that they will be less like the gay sexual outlaw John Rechy proclaimed himself to be and more like pop icon Madonna. Whatever else can be said about Madonna's various choices of persona, she has made each one as a choice and not let anyone else dictate what part her sexuality plays within her identity. As a gay man in the sixties, no one gave Rechy that choice.

The act of making an identity has always been a difficult one. The surface advantage of group identification is that an identity comes prefabricated. Choosing an identity off the rack saves a great deal of time and hard emotional exploration. The downside, of course, is that an off-the-rack identity was designed for the mass-market, does not have the individual in mind. Thus, some people who are homosexual find that they are criticized for not being "gay enough," of departing from the party line in certain instances, of not wearing their gay identity properly. But that is because, unlike the tailor-made identity, one bought in the current department store of identities will only come close to the actual proportions of its wearer. The small gaps and sags may be tolerable to an individual, but the purchaser must know he or she is buying something that was manufactured for millions. And like all uniforms, it comes with expectations.

6.

For the most part, homosexuality is no longer outside the law. While there are certainly laws that still need to be changed - some dramatically - the strategy for change may need to be rethought. While confrontations were required in the early days because a majority of people were simply dead to the problems faced by lesbians and gay men, confrontations are less necessary now, and in some cases are probably harmful.

That is because confrontation is a strategy for those who are not being heard. Lesbians and gay men do not want to argue with the heterosexual majority because we like arguing; the point is to persuade a majority that the law is unfair when it treats them differently than heterosexuals, and to get those who disagree to change their minds. That is how the Constitution's First Amendment is supposed to work. Confrontation is a last resort. It is dramatic, extreme, a battering ram to bust down a door that will not open. Confrontation is the antithesis of persuasion.

But in most cases, the doors of discussion are open to sexual orientation. After all of the work that has been done, particularly in the last two or three decades, most people are aware that lesbians and gay men have a grievance, and will listen, even though many will not agree. The work that is left, then, is not acknowledgment that lesbians and gay men exist; the task is to change what minds can be changed.

Radicals, though, continue to live in a world where they believe they are not being heard at all. They treat the world as if it were populated only by their polar opposites. This is as true of the religious radicals as it is of the gay radicals. Both sides hurl images out of their own personal horror movies into the debate. The crusades in Colorado and Oregon were not so much about homosexuality and religion as they were about sado-masochism and the Spanish Inquisition. Grotesque images of chained and (barely) leather-garbed San Francisco parade-goers were pitted against the sour faces of paranoid preachers and the bruised bodies of the victims of gay-bashings. No matter which side you talked to, the end of the world was imminent. The same strategy pervaded the debate over the American military's "don't-ask-don't-tell" policy. The military's argument was a simple one: removing the ban on open lesbians and gay men would destroy our armed forces. The prejudice against lesbians and gay men is so powerful, it was argued, that heterosexual service members would ignore their too-fragile military discipline, violence and chaos would be unstoppable, and the country would be left defenseless.

Most people are aware that such apocalyptic thinking is just self-dramatization in a world that adores indulgence. There is no winning with the extremists. It should be clear by now that the Mad Pats of the world will never accept open homosexuality. But they do not need to. No political issue is ever settled finally. There are no public questions whose resolution will command 100 percent of the population. In that sense, politics is not mathematics. From the death penalty and abortion to requirements that all drivers wear seat belts, no law completely satisfies.

But it is a mistake to attribute the intransigence of the relatively small numbers of zealots to the public at large. Lesbians and gay men have many friends among the voters, even among religious voters, and many more whose vague fears can be answered. Oregon's law was defeated by a majority in that state, and before being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Colorado initiative won by only a slim margin.

Those numbers are important. By even the best counts, only ten percent of the population is homosexual. That means that there are millions of heterosexuals who have already come to understand the issue of inequality lesbians and gay men face. Even the loss in Colorado could have been won if a few thousand votes had been different. Persuading those numbers is a far different task than the homosexual pioneers faced.

The people who have yet to be persuaded are going to be like my family. Grand Theories about Justice and Social Change will not do the trick with them, and visions of the apocalypse leave them cold. They do not much care for theories. They respond to what is in front of them, to what they can see and feel. They are not interested in how lesbians and gay men are different from them - that much is obvious. They want to know about the common ground. Lives become connected not through difference, but through similarity. Connected lives become interesting because of difference, but they do not initially connect at that level. Remember the first stages of love, where so much time is devoted to revelations such as, "Oh, you like Rocky and Bullwinkle, too."

There are many more people yet to make those connections with. The task is finding where the connections can be made. Sexual orientation is no longer so all-important that it overrides everything else about a person. My family used to think that. They do not anymore. My gay uncle and his partner are just like the rest of my family, sexual orientation aside. The news is that sexual orientation can be set aside. Being gay makes my uncle and his lover interesting, but other things make them interesting, too.

Some lesbians and gay men, especially the artists, may balk at the implication that in certain ways they are quite ordinary. To a generation brought up to worship individuality, this is anathema. But there are many things that make each of us unique. Sometimes it is very nice to share small and common things, to just watch TV with someone or talk about sports, or help a sister making cookies in the kitchen. It is on those ordinary battlefields that what is left of this war can be won.

It is a great burden to make your life always and everywhere extraordinary. Homosexuality used to be that kind of a burden. But homosexuality no longer makes anyone extraordinary by default. Perhaps the new radicals regret that sort of specialness and are trying to reconstruct it. There are probably, though, many more valuable ways in which they are unique. What lesbians and gay men have lost in forced distinctiveness, they have gained in options. They do not have to approach politics only from the outside-there are gay lobbyists and elected officials as well as street protesters.

The battle for gay rights has not left the streets and the books, but it is now being waged inside a million private homes, too. The assumption that heterosexuals are irretrievably opposed to gay rights is unfair, one more stereotype that hinders this debate. Heterosexuals of good faith have every right to find such an assumption as offensive as lesbians and gay men have ever found any stereotype about them, and for the same reasons.

I am not a Queer because I do not have to be one. I am not that different from most people in this country. As a gay man who is other things besides, I stand my best chance of finding a connection with someone, of starting a conversation, of changing a mind. That exposure is one of the fundamental principles of coming out-reality undermine the fears that invisibility permits, and opens the possibility of dialogue. It is in those plain and often tentative encounters that I and millions of others can make our contributions.

It is unfair that the burden is still on lesbians and gay men, but that is a reality we cannot wish away. But this residue of injustice cannot be compared to the injustice those who came before us faced. The world is listening now because of what those pioneers did, and to assume anything less is to deny what my heroes have accomplished, those men and women whose work in a hostile world gave me the gift of a family I love. Those men and women were radical so I would not have to be.

SAM NUNN didn't need to hold Senate hearings to come up with his "don't ask, don't tell" solution for handling gays in the military. If he'd asked me, I could have told him this was exactly the policy some of my relatives suggested years ago when I informed them that I planned to tell my grandmother that I was gay. They said, "She's old, it'll kill her. You'll destroy her image of you. If she doesn't ask, why tell?"

"Don't ask, don't tell" made a lot of sense to these relatives because it sounded like an easy solution. For them, it was. If I didn't say anything to my grandmother, they wouldn't have to deal with her upset over the truth about her grandson. But for me, "not telling" was an exhausting nightmare, because it meant withholding everything that could possibly give me away and living in fear of being found out. At the same time, I didn't want to cause Grandma pain by telling her I was gay, so I was easily persuaded to continue the charade.

If I hadn't been close to my grandmother, or saw her once a year, hiding the truth would have been relatively easy. But we'd had a special relationship since she cared for me as a child when my mother was ill, and we visited often, so lying to her was especially difficult.

I started hiding the truth from everyone in 1965, when I had my first crush. That was in second grade and his name was Hugh. No one told me, but I knew I shouldn't tell anyone about it, not even Hugh. I don't know how I knew that liking another boy was something to hide, but I did, so I kept it a secret.

I fell in love for the first time when I was 17. It was a wondrous experience, but I didn't dare tell anyone, especially my family, because telling them about Bob would have given me away. I couldn't explain to them that for the first time in my life I felt like a normal human being.

By the time I was an adult, I'd stopped lying to my immediate family, with the exception of my grandmother, and told them that I was gay. I was a second-rate liar so I was lucky that Grandma was the only person in my life around whom I had to be something I wasn't. I can't imagine what it's like for gays and lesbians in the military to hide the truth from the men and women with whom they serve. The fear of exposure must be extraordinary, especially because exposure would mean the end of their careers. For me, the only risk was losing Grandma's love.

Hiding the truth from her grew ever more challenging in the years that followed. I couldn't tell her about the man I then shared my life with. I couldn't talk about my friends who had AIDS because she would have wondered why I knew so many ill men. I couldn't tell her that I volunteered for a gay peer-counseling center. I couldn't talk to her about the political issues that most interested me because she would have wondered why I had such passionate feelings about gay rights. Eventually I couldn't even tell her about all of my work, because some of my writing was on gay issues. In the end, all we had left to talk about was the weather.

If being gay were only what I did behind closed doors, there would have been plenty of my life left over to share with my grandmother. But my life as a gay man isn't something that takes place only in the privacy of my bedroom. It affects who my friends are, whom I choose to share my life with, the work I do, the organizations I belong to, the magazines I read, where I vacation and what I talk about. I know it's the same for heterosexuals because their sexual orientation affects everything, from a choice of senior-prom date and the finger on which they wear their wedding band to the birth announcements they send and every emotion they feel.

So the reality of the "don't ask, don't tell" solution for dealing with my grandmother and for dealing with gays in the military means having to lie about or hide almost every aspect of your life. It's not nearly as simple as just not saying, "I'm gay."

After years of "protecting" my grandmother I decided it was time to stop lying. In the worst case, I figured she might reject me, although that seemed unlikely. But whatever the outcome, I could not pretend anymore. Some might think that was selfish on my part, but I'd had enough of the "don't tell" policy, which had forced me into a life of deceit. I also hoped that by telling her the truth, we could build a relationship based on honesty, a possibility that was worth the risk.

The actual telling was far less terrifying than all the anticipation. While my grandmother cried plenty, my family was wrong, because the truth didn't kill her. In the five years since, Grandma and I have talked a lot about the realities of my life and the lives of my gay and lesbian friends. She's read many articles and a few books, including mine. She's surprised us by how quickly she's set aside her myths and misconceptions.

Grandma and I are far closer than we ever were. Last fall we even spent a week together in Paris for her birthday. And these days, we have plenty to talk about, including the gays in the military issue. A few months ago, Grandma traveled with me to Lafayette College, Pa., where I was invited to give a speech on the history of the gay civil-rights movement. After my talk, several students took us to dinner. As I conversed with the young women across the table from me, I overheard my grandmother talking to the student sitting next to her. She told him he was right to tell his parents he was gay, that with time and his help they would adjust. She said, "Don't underestimate their ability to change."

I wish Sam Nunn had called my grandmother to testify before his Senate committee. He and the other senators, as well as Defense Secretary Les Aspin and the president, could do far worse than listen to her advice.

Originally appeared May 10, 1993, in The New Republic.

AT 10:30 ON A WEEKNIGHT in the spring of 1991, Glenn Cashmore was walking to his car on San Diego's University Avenue. He had just left the Soho coffee house in Hillcrest, a heavily gay neighborhood. He turned down Fourth Street and paused to look at the display in an optician's window. Someone shouted, "Hey, faggot!" He felt pain in his shoulder and turned in time to see a white Nissan speeding away. Someone had shot him, luckily only with a pellet gun. The pellet tore through the shirt and penetrated the skin. He went home and treated the wound with peroxide.

Later that year, on the night of December 13, a 17-year-old named John Wear and two other boys were headed to the Soho on University Avenue when a pair of young men set upon them, calling them "faggots." One boy escaped, another's face was gashed and Wear (who, his family said, was not gay) was stabbed. Cashmore went to the hospital to see him but, on arriving, was met with the news that Wear was dead.

This is life--not all of life, but an aspect of life--for gay people in today's America. Homosexuals are objects of scorn for teenagers and of sympathy or moral fear or hatred for adults. They grow up in confusion and bewilderment as children, then often pass into denial as young adults and sometimes remain frightened even into old age. They are persecuted by the military, are denied the sanctuary of publicly recognized marriage, occasionally are prosecuted outright for making love. If closeted, they live with fear of revelation; if open, they must daily negotiate a hundred delicate tactical issues. (Should I bring it up? Tell my boss? My co-workers? Wear a wedding band? Display my lover's picture?)

There is also AIDS and the stigma attached to it, though AIDS is not uniquely a problem of gay people. And there is the violence. One of my high school friends--an honors student at Brophy Prep, a prestigious Catholic high school in Phoenix--used to boast about his late-night exploits with a baseball bat at the "fag Denny's." I'm sure he was lying, but imagine the horror of being spoken to, and about, in that way.

If you ask gay people in America today whether homosexuals are oppressed, I think most would say yes. If you ask why, they would point to the sorts of facts that I just mentioned. The facts are not blinkable. Yet the oppression diagnosis is, for the most part, wrong.

Not wrong in the sense that life for American homosexuals is hunky-dory. It is not. But life is not terrible for most gay people, either, and it is becoming less terrible every year. The experience of gayness and the social status of homosexuals have changed rapidly in the last twenty years, largely owing to the courage of thousands who decided that they had had enough abuse and who demanded better. With change has come the time for a reassessment.

The standard political model sees homosexuals as an oppressed minority who must fight for their liberation through political action. But that model's usefulness is drawing to a close. It is ceasing to serve the interests of ordinary gay people, who ought to begin disengaging from it, even drop it. Otherwise, they will misread their position and lose their way, as too many minority groups have done already.

"Oppression" has become every minority's word for practically everything, a one-size-fits-all political designation used by anyone who feels unequal, aggrieved or even uncomfortable. I propose a start toward restoring meaning to the notion of oppression by insisting on objective evidence. A sense of grievance or discomfort, however real, is not enough. By now, human beings know a thing or two about oppression. Though it may, indeed, take many forms and work in different ways, there are objective signs you can look for. My own list would emphasize five main items. First, direct legal or governmental discrimination. Second, denial of political franchise--specifically, denial of the right to vote, organize, speak or lobby. Third--and here we move beyond the strictly political--the systematic denial of education. Fourth, impoverishment relative to the non-oppressed population. And, fifth, a pattern of human rights violations, without recourse.

Any one or two of those five signposts may appear for reasons other than oppression. There are a lot of reasons why a people may be poor, for instance. But where you see a minority that is legally barred from businesses and neighborhoods and jobs, that cannot vote, that is poor and poorly educated and that lives in physical fear, you are looking at, for instance, the blacks of South Africa, or blacks of the American South until the 1960s; the Jews and homosexuals of Nazi Germany and Vichy France; the untouchable castes of India, the Kurds of Iraq, the women of Saudi Arabia, the women of America 100 years ago; for that matter, the entire population of the former Soviet Union and many Arab and African and Asian countries.

And gay people in America today? Criterion one--direct legal or governmental discrimination--is resoundingly met. Homosexual relations are illegal in twenty-three states, at least seven of which specifically single out acts between persons of the same sex. Gay marriage is not legally recognized anywhere. And the government hounds gay people from the military, not for what they do but for what they are.

Criterion two--denial of political franchise--is resoundingly not met. Not only do gay people vote, they are turning themselves into a constituency to be reckoned with and fought for. Otherwise, the Patrick Buchanans of the world would have sounded contemptuous of gay people at the Republican convention last year, rather than panicked by them. If gay votes didn't count, Bill Clinton would not have stuck his neck out on the military issue during the primary season (one of the bravest things any living politician has done).

Criterion three--denial of education--is also resoundingly not met. Overlooked Opinions Inc., a Chicago market-research company, has built a diverse national base of 35,000 gay men and lesbians, two-thirds of whom are either not out of the closet or are only marginally out, and has then randomly sampled them in surveys. It found that homosexuals had an average of 15.7 years of education, as against 12.7 years for the population as a whole. Obviously, the findings may be skewed if college-educated gay people are likelier to take part in surveys (though Overlooked Opinions said that results didn't follow degree of closetedness). Still, any claim that gay people are denied education appears ludicrous.

Criterion four--relative impoverishment--is also not met. In Overlooked Opinions' sample, gay men had an average household income of $51,624 and lesbians $42,755, compared with the national average of $ 36,800. Again, yuppie homosexuals may be more likely to answer survey questions than blue-collar ones. But, again, to call homosexuals an impoverished class would be silly.

Criterion five--human rights violations without recourse--is also, in the end, not met, though here it's worth taking a moment to see why it is not. The number of gay bashings has probably increased in recent years (though it's hard to know, what with reporting vagaries), and, of course, many gay-bashers either aren't caught or aren't jailed. What too many gay people forget, though, is that these are problems that homosexuals have in common with non-gay Americans. Though many gay-bashers go free, so do many murderers. In the District of Columbia last year, the police identified suspects in fewer than half of all murders, to say nothing of assault cases.

And the fact is that anti-gay violence is just one part of a much broader pattern. Probably not coincidentally, the killing of John Wear happened in the context of a year, 1991, that broke San Diego's all-time homicide record (1992 was runner-up). Since 1965 the homicide rate in America has doubled, the violent-crime arrest rate for juveniles has more than tripled; people now kill you to get your car, they kill you to get your shoes or your potato chips, they kill you because they can do it. A particularly ghastly fact is that homicide due to gunshot is now the second leading cause of death in high school-age kids, after car crashes. No surprise, then, that gay people are afraid. So is everyone else.

Chances are, indeed, that gay people's social class makes them safer, on average, than other urban minorities. Certainly their problem is small compared with what blacks face in inner-city Los Angeles or Chicago, where young black males are likelier to be killed than a U.S. soldier was in a tour of duty in Vietnam.

If any problem unites gay people with non-gay people, it is crime. If any issue does not call for special-interest pleading, this is it. Minority advocates, including gay ones, have blundered insensitively by trying to carve out hate-crime statutes and other special-interest crime laws instead of focusing on tougher measures against violence of all kinds. In trying to sensitize people to crimes aimed specifically at minorities, they are inadvertently desensitizing them to the vastly greater threat of crime against everyone. They contribute to the routinization of murder, which has now reached the point where news of a black girl spray-painted white makes the front pages, but news of a black girl murdered runs in a round-up on page D-6 ("Oh, another killing"). Yes, gay-bashing is a problem. But, no, it isn't oppression. It is, rather, an obscenely ordinary feature of the American experience.

Of course, homosexuals face unhappiness, discrimination and hatred. But for everyone with a horror story to tell, there are others like an academic I know, a tenured professor who is married to his lover of fourteen years in every way but legally, who owns a split-level condo in Los Angeles, drives a Miata, enjoys prestige and success and love that would be the envy of millions of straight Americans. These things did not fall in his lap. He fought personal and professional battles, was passed over for jobs and left the closet when that was much riskier than it is today. Asked if he is oppressed, he says, "You're damn straight." But a mark of oppression is that most of its victims are not allowed to succeed; they are allowed only to fail. And this man is no mere token. He is one of a growing multitude of openly gay people who have overcome the past and, in doing so, changed the present.

"I'm a gay person, so I don't live in a free country," one highly successful gay writer said recently, "and I don't think most straight people really sit down and realize that for gay people this is basically a totalitarian society in which we're barely tolerated." The reason straight people don't realize this is because it obviously isn't true. As more and more homosexuals come out of hiding, the reality of gay economic and political and educational achievement becomes more evident. And as that happens, gay people who insist they are oppressed will increasingly, and not always unfairly, come off as yuppie whiners, "victims" with $50,000 incomes and vacations in Europe. They may feel they are oppressed, but they will have a harder and harder time convincing the public.

They will distort their politics, too, twisting it into strained and impotent shapes. Scouring for oppressions with which to identify, activists are driven further and further afield. They grab fistfuls of random political demands and stuff them in their pockets. The original platform for April's March on Washington called for, among other things, enforced bilingual education, "an end to genocide of all the indigenous peoples and their cultures," defense budget cuts, universal health care, a national needle exchange program, free substance-abuse treatment on demand, safe and affordable abortion, more money for breast cancer "and other cancers particular to women," "unrestricted, safe and affordable alternative insemination," health care for the "differently-abled and physically challenged" and "an end to poverty." Here was the oppression-entitlement mentality gone haywire.

Worst of all, oppression politics distorts the face of gay America itself. It encourages people to forget that homosexuality isn't hell. As the AIDS crisis has so movingly shown, gay people have built the kind of community that evaporated for many non-gay Americans decades ago. You don't see straight volunteers queuing up to change cancer patients' bedpans and deliver their groceries. Gay people--and unmarried people generally--are at a disadvantage in the top echelons of corporate America, but, on the other hand, they have achieved dazzlingly in culture and business and much else. They lead lives of richness and competence and infinite variety, lives that are not miserable or squashed.

The insistence that gay people are oppressed is most damaging, in the end, because it implies that to be gay is to suffer. It affirms what so many straight people, even sympathetic ones, believe in their hearts: that homosexuals are pitiable. That alone is reason to junk the oppression model, preferably sooner instead of later.

If the oppression model is failing, what is the right model? Not that of an oppressed people seeking redemption through political action; rather, that of an ostracized people seeking redemption through personal action. What do you do about misguided ostracism? The most important thing is what Glenn Cashmore did. After John Wear's murder, he came out of the closet. He wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times denouncing his own years of silence. He stepped into the circle of people who are what used to be called known homosexuals.

This makes a difference. The New York Times conducted a poll on homosexuals this year and found that people who had a gay family member or close friend "were much more tolerant and accepting." Whereas oppression politics fails because it denies reality, positive personal example works because it demonstrates reality. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it," Queer Nation's chant, is not only a brilliant slogan. It is a strategy. It is, in some ways, the strategy. To move away from oppression politics is not to sit quietly. It is often to hold hands in public or take a lover to the company Christmas party, sometimes to stage kiss-ins, always to be unashamed. It is to make of honesty a kind of activism.

Gay Americans should emulate Jewish Americans, who have it about right. Jews recognize that to many Americans we will always seem different (and we are, in some ways, different). We grow up being fed "their" culture in school, in daily life, even in the calendar. It never stops. For a full month of every year, every radio program and shop window reminds you that this is, culturally, a Christian nation (no, not Judeo- Christian). Jews could resent this, but most of us choose not to, because, by way of compensation, we think hard, we work hard, we are cohesive, we are interesting. We recognize that minorities will always face special burdens of adjustment, but we also understand that with those burdens come rewards of community and spirit and struggle. We recognize that there will always be a minority of Americans who hate us, but we also understand that, so long as we stay watchful, this hateful minority is more pathetic than threatening. We watch it; we fight it when it lashes out; but we do not organize our personal and political lives around it.

Gay people's main weapons are ones we already possess. In America, our main enemies are superstition and hate. Superstition is extinguished by public criticism and by the power of moral example. Political activists always underestimate the power of criticism and moral example to change people's minds, and they always overestimate the power of law and force. As for hate, the way to fight it is with love. And that we have in abundance.

Originally published in 1993.

Jeb and Dash offers an unrivaled look at the life and thoughts of a gay man living in the Washington, D.C., of the 1920s, putting us much in the debt of the surviving niece who edited his diaries.

Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life, 1918-1945 (Ina Russell, ed., 1993) is an important and stunning book. It is fact, the diary of a gay man in Washington, D.C., two-thirds of it set in the 1920s. But it often reads like a novel thanks to the skillful editing of Ina Russell.

The work is enjoyable on two levels. One is simply as a superbly told story. The other is in capturing our history, a window to our scantily documented past. The truism that history is written by the victors explains the rarity of our written record, for gays and lesbians have seldom been victors in the eyes of society. So then, Jeb and Dash assumes an importance simply because of its singularity, its voice amidst an ocean of silence.

One has become so accustomed to the idea that the gay and lesbian world began with Stonewall that it comes as a shock to read entries, thoughts and observations written perhaps even before our parents were born, which sound freshly contemporary.

The fact is that there were gays and lesbians long before Stonewall. And they had developed patterns of association, a sense of community, even a common sense of oppression. What they had not developed was a systemic way of linking those small groups together, communicating, or creating a historic record of their existence. And so for us they ceased to exist. But now with this diary, we can reclaim some sense of the past and recognize the long traditions upon which our community is based.

It is perhaps one of the great ironies that the catalyst for reclamation of gay history is a straight woman. Ina Russell inherited the diaries from her uncle in 1965, all fifty years of them. They stack taller than her.

She skimmed a few primarily to confirm her belief that he was gay, and looking for things about the family. Once Jeb moved out on his own that meant the traditional Sunday journey back for dinner and the faithful journal entry that night. She says that perhaps she wasn't ready then, didn't have the "maturity" then to edit the diaries, and besides, there was no way they would possibly have been published.

"In the late eighties you could tell, I don't know if everybody could tell but I could tell that gay issues were going to be very up front, that I really had a good shot at getting them published," said Russell. So she began the task.

Fifty years of diaries, with each day devoutly entered save for when struck by the direst of illness. Each beginning with the weather, and breakfast, and ... Clearly the raw material needed some pruning.

"I wanted to do a love story. He was a one man man," said Russell. "He was a romantic. He slept with a lot of people but that was irrelevant."

C.C. Dasham - Dash - was the center of Jeb Alexander's life and the book. He was an obsession for Jeb from first glance, to their six month affair a few years later, and for decades more until Jeb's last breath. Reading the diary I sometimes wanted to reach into the pages, grab him by the ever present lapels and shake, bellowing, "get a life, get over him and go on."

"Boy gets boy, boy loses boy, boy sulks forever," is the way Russell put it. She found it both frustrating and charming. But that was part of the reason she decided to end the book in 1945; after all, sulking as a literary device can only go so far.

She changed names to offer some cover for possible survivors and family, and made minimal use of composite characters to make the story line easier to follow. But the voice of Jeb Alexander sings through. Russell says she "surprised, not quite so much surprised as gratified that they (the diaries) were sometimes wonderfully lyrical and well written. I was afraid that they might not be."

Jeb and Dash is packed with the names of places which at least some of the gay set frequented. A little digging turned up continuities that remind us how small our community is, even across time.

It is a recognition of continuity: Cruising Lafayette Square (which faded only long after Stonewall) and Dupont Circle; the persistence of panhandlers and bums; and watering holes where the friends of Dorothy gathered.

Hammond's in Georgetown was a regular haunt for Jeb. The owner retired in the late 1940's and the place became the Georgetown Grill, a gay bar which survived into the 1980's, until that owner decided to retire. We had lost sight of the fact that the place had a gay clientele even before it was known as the Grill.

Krazy Kat in 1920 was a "Bohemian joint in an old stable up near Thomas Circle ... (where) artists, musicians, atheists, professors" gathered. Miraculously the structure still stands, five blocks from the White House, as a gay bar called the Green Lantern.

Jeb was typical of many gay men in first repressing his sexuality, then embracing it in stages. His pattern seems so contemporary - discovering a cruising area, his first brief affair and inevitable broken heart, eventually working into a pattern of friendships, a sense of community, and greater self-acceptance.

These first excerpts are taken from a few weeks in 1920, the summer of his twentieth year. They are filled with the melodramatic hyperbole that only a highly romantic youth could have penned.

Wednesday, 25 August: I have at last found a friend, a lovable, handsome fellow, a realization of the friend I have dreamed of during all those lonely nights while I walked alone through the streets. Above all, our friendship is mutual. It has burst into full blossom like a glowing, beautiful flower. It happened like this: I went to Lafayette Square and found a seat in the deep shade of the big beech. It is the best bench in the park. A youth sat down beside me, a youth in a green suit with a blue dotted tie. He has beautiful eyes and sensuous lips. He wants to become a diplomat, but is devoted to music. Earlier tonight he had been singing at the Episcopalian Church, and is taking vocal lessons. His name is Randall Hare.

We strolled down to the Ellipse, where we sat affectionately together on a dim bench. Later we came to rest in the moon-misted lawns near the (Washington) Monument. With an excess of nervous caution I gazed about, watching for some prowling figure. "We are safe," Randall whispered. And he was right. Nothing disturbed us and we lay in each other's arms, my love and I, while the moon beamed from a spacious sky and the cool night breezes rustled our hair. The black trees stood like sentinels against the silvery grass. Afterwards we lay close together and gazed at the stars above, becoming fast friends, exchanging confidences. Ah, happiness! As [Oscar] Wilde said, Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!

Sunday, 5 September: During the ride back (on the streetcar) Randall had his hand lying on mine, and a girl across the aisle made an audible remark about it to her companions. But Randall in his melodious voice said, "We should worry," and kept his hand on mine. He said, "Be glad she noticed, so she won't be shocked the next time she sees it." He said there was not reason boys should not be demonstrative toward one another, as girls and Frenchmen were.

Sunday, 12 September: On this day I realized complete disillusionment. My "friendship" with Randall Hare was a fabrication! Friendship indeed! We went to Washington Cathedral. As we left the beautiful open air service and strolled together across the lawns, we had an unpleasant exchange with some rudeness on his part. I became somewhat stammering. Randall said scornfully, "What have you been believing? Did you think that when I wasn't with you I was singing!" I replied, "I did think that, and I feel deceived." He leaned back looking disgusted. "If I wanted a clinging vine I'd find - a woman." End of my friendship with him! I shall never find real friendship, never!

Randall Hare is one thread running through the diaries. Jeb is alternately attracted to and repelled by Randall who always seems so sure of himself and able to get it. He embodies the compromises many gay men made until very recently. In his youth he is a perennial in Jeb's accounts of cruising, then marries a woman for cover and has children, and continues to indulge in his voracious appetite for men, including the enduring object of Jeb's desire, Dash.

Over the course of years we meet a limited cast of characters. Isador is the most flamboyant, a proud, true queen who paid the price, as this entry shows.

Sunday, 7 January 1927: A cloudless day. Patches of snow on the walks. Isador arrived in a cab to pick up his belongings that had been packed by those magnificent Christians of the Young Men's Christian Association. I watched the scene from inside the lobby door. The packages and bags had been placed outside. Brindle, the malignant desk clerk, stood on the sidewalk with his arms crossed. The cab pulled up and Isador emerged, wearing a brown suit with a tan handkerchief tucked in his pocket, and a tan felt hat. Brindle pursed his lips as Isador, attempting a futile jocular conversation, began to load his possessions into the back seat of the car. He got in front with the driver and as they pulled away, his eyes met mine through the glass of the door and he waved vigorously, calling, "Thank you, Jeb dearest." Brindle turned around. My heart sank when I saw the expression on that reptilian beast's face.

Brindle wiped his feet on the mat. "I didn't realize that Mr. Pearson was a friend of yours." I replied, "He is a classmate in my art history class at George Washington University. We share school books." "Can't you share with someone less unnatural?" My voice shook, but I told that reprehensible beast, "I consider it a valid economy to be sharing books with Mr. Pearson."

Waiting for the elevator took an eternity. I found myself imagining that I was helping Isador put this packages in the cab, until the details became so vivid that it almost seemed that in fact I had helped him. And after all, there is no benefit in having two of us evicted from the Y. It is bad enough for something so humiliating to happen to one.

Hans appears to have been briefly a lover of Jeb and later a friend. He is involved with the theater in Washington. At the depths of the depression and unable to find work, he returns to his native Germany to disappear in the Nazi crackdown on homosexuals.

There is Nicky, once the lover of a successful older man, who attempted suicide when he was named in divorce proceedings by the man's wife. He is later drafted and lost in action off the coast of New Guinea in the Second World War.

There are tiny peeks at parties in apartments and private homes where the most vibrant gay social life flourished. But Jeb was more a recluse who seldom allowed himself to be dragged onto the faster track.

"If only Isador had written a diary," laments Russell, "we would have a much broader picture of gay life in D.C. ... I can tell, though I don't get to look at it much, that there was a much rowdier, bawdier subculture, more freewheeling than this particular little look at it." She says that Isador was much too busy having fun and so didn't write a diary.

Jeb's story is a quieter one, more of the daily routine of life than of the weekend flings. And in this day - no, eon - of AIDS, the closing paragraph of the diary is bittersweet, both sobering and consoling, a commentary we do well to remember.

It reminds us that neither loneliness nor heartbreak is new, nor is our persecution, nor our capacity to form communities, and survive. Above all, it is a testament to our endurance. Memory is often our only defense, our only celebration of those we have held dear. So bear witness, treasure your past and speak it, for that is what keeps it alive.

Monday, 31 December 1945: (I) walked in the rain to Crescent and got a seat at the bar. Houndstooth blustered in, bundled against the rain. We talked and had a good time. So many boys in the bar tonight, back from the war. Without saying anything to Houndstooth, I drank a silent toast to the memory of dear Hans, who has simply disappeared, and to sweet Nicky, who will never come back because he is a skeleton at the bottom of the Pacific. It hurts to think about them. When the clock behind the bar struck midnight I banged a salt shaker against my glass to make noise, and together old Houndstooth and I sang "Auld Lang Syne."

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Permission to excerpt was generously granted by the editor and publisher.

Originally appeared August 31, 1992, in National Review.

Review. In refreshing contrast to the ideological and personal axe-grinding found in so much gay history, Eric Marcus's Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights allows his subjects to speak eloquently for themselves. One lesson: A free-market democracy like America's, though it may officially have inculcated moral teachings that were conservative in the extreme, has unleashed practical social dynamics that were revolutionary in allowing millions to come to terms with their sexual natures.

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THE WORD "important" is dropped into reviews as pretentiously and often these days as phrases like "hugely entertaining" and "profoundly true." I have hardly used such expressions before, and never together. But Making History is true, entertaining, and important in most unusual measure.

Interviewing 45 utterly different Americans, who since 1945 have been involved in utterly different ways in raising the status of homosexuals, Eric Marcus has used his background in television journalism to good effect, but combined it with a patience and an honesty for which only written literature has time. The reader is permitted to sit down quietly with each individual and listen to him, or her, telling his own story in his own words.

We are allowed entirely to forget Marcus, yet his labor has been enormous. Each of his subjects is briefly but beautifully described in an introduction which sets the individual in context and gives us a simple sketch of the person and scene. Thus:

The room ... was filled with the delightful songs of her many pet birds. Shirley's hair is mostly grey and cut in a flattop style. She looked out from behind thick, black-rimmed glasses and spoke in a deep, smoky voice. As she talked about her past, her eyes often filled with tears.

My admiration for the way Marcus introduces us to his acquaintances, then leaves them alone with us, is enormous. He does not try to be smart and he does not judge. In a field riven by personal bitterness, stupid ideological disputes, and the sound of grinding axes, this educated neutrality - judicious almost to the point of being curt - is water in the desert.

We talk to a woman who, as a young secretary in 1945, aware of her feelings for other women but quite unaware how far she was part of any great category or movement, started to type her own little "newsletters" of a rather innocent kind, making as many copies as the carbon would permit, and sending them to friends, who would send them to others.

We talk to ex-nun Jean O'Leary: "I was always in love at the convent... I had eight relationships while I was there. God was an innocent bystander ..."; to drag-queens and Communists; to a conservative congressman and a sports coach whose careers were wrecked by their homosexuality; to schoolteachers who do not want to be named; and to a black attorney, alone now and elderly, playing the organ in his living room: "He talked about his past shyly and always with a mixture of pain and wonderment." Some are strange, some so very familiar. Some are cocky and carefree; others speak through clenched teeth. There is a sort of pervasive melancholy, but also an unfocused hope for the future.

You will see from the handful mentioned above how various are Marcus's choices. He has most emphatically not made this a Who's Who of self-appointed gay "community" leaders, thank God, and many of his choices are individuals quite unheard of. What separates them, in age, background, and outlook, gives sparkle to these pages. But what links them? What thoughts emerge with any insistence from so unusual a miscellany?

To this reader, the first lesson is the utter inefficacy of education, propaganda, newspaper headlines, and received wisdom in changing what people are. Readers of a conservative disposition will share my delight in the way the collapse of Communism has shown George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four thesis to be untrue: Half a century of ruthlessly concerted mind-control never went (we now realize) more than an inch deep. Well, my conservative friends, it turns out that what is true in matters commercial and political is true in matters sexual, too. This book will remind the middle-aged how nothing we were allowed to read or hear when we were young portrayed homosexuality as anything other than the wicked and destructive perversion of a tiny minority. Every contributor to this book was immersed in that. And do you know they never believed a word of it?

That is the second lesson of this anthology: Though the moral teachings of a free-market democracy were conservative in the extreme, the practical dynamics of the society it created were revolutionary. Virtually every speaker in the book agrees that it was the freedom to leave home, to make your own living in your own way in the place of your choice, that allowed him to come to terms with his homosexuality. In the West, Marxist voices were siding with sexual freedom, conservative voices with sexual orthodoxy: yet in the East, Marxist systems were imposing that orthodoxy. Western conservatives were fostering societies in which what they called perversion could flourish. The irony is delicious. In the West we see the importance of allowing anti-gay sentiment its own institutions, its own voices: we hear it, and choose our response. Under Communism, silence: no voice, no choice, just the most terrible repression.

A third lesson concerns the disgraceful record of medical and psychiatric science in this evolving story. Marcus interviews Dr. Evelyn Hooker, who reminds us that in the Fifties every authority in psychology and medicine agreed that homosexuality disordered the personality - and nobody so much as bothered to test the assertion. She did, and with a very simple method. Using her profession's own tests for 'balance" in personality, she presented to a panel of professional colleagues the profiles of each of sixty cases. Thirty were homosexuals, thirty were heterosexuals. She asked the panel to "score" each case, without telling them which were which. The resultant scores showed no difference between the two.

What is so worrying here - and other interviews in the book confirm it - is not that scientists' beliefs are influenced by the mores of their age, but that their science is so supine in the face of them. Many will conclude from Marcus's story that scientific truth has finally triumphed over the conventional moral wisdom. My own conclusion is that the conventional moral wisdom has changed, and science has followed it. I draw from this story the moral not that medical science was a slave to fashion, but that all science is.

This bears upon another observation. Insistent throughout these vignettes is the wish to believe that one was "born" homosexual. Again and again that conviction is stated. I make no judgment on the facts: research has yet to determine the controversy. I remark only on the wish of many of us who are gay that it be determined one way rather than the other. Why one should want to conclude that any trait "couldn't be helped" I leave it to others to speculate, myself suspecting that it has something to do with defensiveness. Medical science has begun to find "evidence" of sexual predetermination. Distrust it this time, as you should have done last time.

Justifying his admirably non-celebrity-oriented selection, Eric Marcus quotes Lytton Strachey:

It is not by the direct method of scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places. ... He will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses. ... He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

In this, Mr. Marcus has succeeded. Both in its field and among a wider audience this book will prove compulsive reading.

As will Neil Miller's impressive Out in the World. This is not a homosexual guide to foreign holidays, but a dipping down of that same little bucket into scenes of homosexual life from countries all over the world.

Miller is a journalist and he knows how to write: coolly, sometimes skeptically, often humorously, with an eye always to the salient. His description of the blank incomprehension he met in Egypt when he tried to suggest there was such a thing as "a gay man," to men for whom sodomizing each other was one of the commonplaces of life, lives in the memory. His account of a gay bar in Tokyo in which a customer sat, coat and tie adjusted, while a hospital-ward-style screen was placed around him and remained in place for ten minutes while something involving a call-boy occurred, after which the screen was removed to reveal the same customer, coat and tie still intact ... that, too, I shall never forget.

There is much that is serious in this book: most notably Miller's clear evidence that "the homosexual"-as a concept, a type, and an identity - is far from self-evident to most non-Christian and non-Jewish peoples; but it is all written up in entertaining and readable prose. "Gay Studies," it seems, is emerging from a dark age of self-pity, self-flagellation, political correctness, and academic turgidity. This can only be applauded.

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Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990, An Oral History.
By Eric Marcus (Harper Collins, 544 pages, $25).

Originally appeared October 7, 1991, in The New Republic.

MAYOR DAVID DINKINS marched with the gay contingent this year in New York's St. Patrick's Day parade. Michael Burke, a thirty-year-old resident of New Jersey, threw a can of beer at him. Burke missed, thus avoiding a felonious assault charge. Instead he was charged with reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct. Because the crime was deemed bias-related, and because it was Burke's first offense, the prosecutors recommended, and the defendant and the judge accepted, what's known as an alternative sentence: forty hours of community service in the New York Mayor's Office for the Lesbian and Gay Community.

Burke might have gone to jail, surely an appropriate sentence for a man who tried to brain a public official. He might have done community service at a head-trauma clinic, where he could see the consequences of violent acts like his own. Instead he was sent to work with gays. This penalty makes sense only as a corrective for his repugnant attitude toward homosexuals.

Hardly anyone seems to share my dismay. The New York Times article about the sentence carried the approving headline: "Beer Flinger Sent to a Fitting Cooler. -- At the Sentencing Project in Washington, assistant director Marc Mauer says that such sentences may help prevent violent acts in the future. "I think we do have a responsibility, purely from a crime-control point ofview, to confront the causes of his action. -- Matt Foreman, the executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project in New York, said he was thrilled with the sentence.

Should prejudice, which often leads to injustice, be punished? Should hate, which often leads to violence, be a crime? More and more well-meaning Americans are now saying yes to both questions. It's the wrong answer. I say this despite being a member of the class that Burke allegedly sought to denigrate. The minority-led march toward attitude activism and prejudice policing is dangerous and counterproductive.

To see why, consider separately the two component issues in the beer-can incident. One, a man hurled a dangerous object at a public official. Two, he did this because ostensibly?he denied it?he was prejudiced against homosexuals. Obviously the act of violence deserves punishment. The hard question is: What do you do about the prejudice that lay behind the act?

One option is the by-now-familiar inculcation of tolerance - racial, sexual, cultural - being pursued in universities around the country. Everyone has heard the stories. A University of Michigan student who makes a tasteless joke is required to attend gay-sensitivity sessions and publish a piece of self-criticism called "Learned My Lesson. -- The University of Maine posts messages on the inside of bathroom stall doors: "Sexual harassment is not defined by the intentions of the accused... [but] by the effect on the victim." People for the American Way, a liberal group originally founded to counter the thought-policing influence of right-wing fundamentalists, recently issued a report urging universities to combat prejudice even "when there have been few, if any, overt expressions of intolerance on campus."

The campus efforts to stamp out prejudice have been failing egregiously and noisily, just as they should. Universities' business is to test prejudices in debate, not to regulate them. But short of hard-core political correctness is a compromise approach, one that is much harder to object to. This is the hate-crimes approach. It says that prejudice by itself should not be punished, but prejudice together with violence should be.

There's something to be said for hate-crimes laws. The argument is that crimes such as cross burnings are a threat directed against a whole class, and a vulnerable class at that. Clearly, throwing a swastika-emblazoned rock through a synagogue window is not the same as throwing any old rock through any old window. More and more state legislatures agree. At least two-thirds of them, according to the Anti-Defamation League, have adopted statutes against hate crimes. For instance, Michigan's law specifies up to two years in prison and up to $5,000 in fines for "ethnic intimidation, -- in which a person assaults, vandalizes, or threatens "with specific intent to intimidate or harass another person because of that person's race, color, religion, gender, or national origin. "

The trouble is that in practice such laws come close to criminalizing prejudice. Ohio passed an "ethnic intimidation -- law, which deems crimes more serious if committed "by reason of the race, color, religion, or national origin of another person or group of persons. -- This verges on making what a defendant says or believes about race a part of the crime - and, as a state appellate court pointed out in overturning the law, it "vests virtual complete discretion in the hands of the state to determine whether a suspect committed the alleged acts based on... race, color, religion, or national origin. -- A St. Paul, Minnesota, ordinance (also under challenge) goes a step further: the law makes it a misdemeanor to place "on public or private property a symbol, object, appellation, characterization, or graffiti, including but not limited to a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm, or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, or religion." This seems to say that it's a hate crime to upset someone. In Florida a black man has been charged under the state's hate-crime law for calling a white policeman a "cracker."

Why shouldn't the law be used to combat destructive attitudes? For instance, why shouldn't a violent racist be sentenced to work for the NAACP, where he can confront the humanity of the people he hates? Why shouldn't a swastika-scrawler be sentenced to study the Holocaust?

First, because forced reeducation rarely works. A lot of governments have tried it, and the results are to be seen in the rubble of communism.

Second, because the biggest problem in America today for minorities and non-minorities alike is not racism, prejudice, homophobia, or what have you. It's also not drugs, medical underinsurance, or even poverty. It's violence. Young black men face more risk in the streets of Chicago's South Side and Los Angeles's Watts than American soldiers faced in Vietnam. Hate crimes activists argue that bias-motivated crime deserves special handling because it is especially harmful to society. But they have a hard time explaining why this is so. Why is it more terrorizing or socially destabilizing to stab someone because he's Jewish, for instance, than to stab someone for his sneakers? The former signals that Jews are in danger; the latter signals that everyone is in danger. And there's an insidious cost to coming down especially hard on violence that's linked to bias, drugs, or other secondary ills. Necessarily, if you say that assault motivated by bias is especially objectionable, you also say that assault not motivated by bias is less objectionable. Tying the fight against violence to other political agendas clutters and compromises what needs to be a clarion message: violence is intolerable, period.

Third, and most important, because the goal itself is misguided. The ADL, in a 1988 report, said, "Importantly, laws which more severely punish violent manifestations of anti-Semitism and bigotry demonstrate the country's resolve to work toward the elimination of prejudice. -- For private groups such as the ADL and the NAACP, as well as for parents and preachers, "elimination of prejudice -- is indeed a worthy goal. But different groups will have different ideas of what constitutes "prejudice." (Is secular humanism prejudice against Christians? Is Afrocentrism prejudice against whites?) That is why eliminating prejudice is exactly what "the country" - meaning its governmental authorities - must not resolve to do. Not only is wiping out bias and hate impossible in principle, in practice "eliminating prejudice -- through force of law means eliminating all but one prejudice - that of whoever is most politically powerful.

Personally, being both Jewish and gay, I do not expect everybody to like me. I expect some people to hate me. I fully intend to hate those people back. I will criticize and excoriate them. But I will not hurt them, and I insist that they not hurt me. I want unequivocal, no-buts protection from violence and vandalism. But that's enough. I do not want policemen and judges inspecting opinions.

I think it's ironic and a little sad that gays, of all people, would endorse a criminal sentence that has overtones of forced re-education. Homosexuals know a thing or two about being sent for therapy or reeducation to have their attitudes straightened out. Jews, too, know something about courts that decide whose belief is "hateful. -- As on campus, so in the courtroom: the best protection for minorities is not prejudice police but public criticism - genuine intellectual pluralism, in which bigots, too, have their say. Minorities above all should be worrying about Michael Burke's sentence.

First appeared in the New Republic August 28, 1989.

LAST MONTH IN NEW YORK, a court ruled that a gay lover had the right to stay in his deceased partner's rent-control apartment because the lover qualified as a member of the deceased's family. The ruling deftly annoyed almost everybody. Conservatives saw judicial activism in favor of gay rent control: three reasons to be appalled. Chastened liberals (such as the New York Times editorial page), while endorsing the recognition of gay relationships, also worried about the abuse of already-stretched entitlements that the ruling threatened. What neither side quite contemplated is that they both might be right, and that the way to tackle the issue of unconventional relationships in conventional society is to try something both more radical and more conservative than putting courts in the business of deciding what is and is not a family. That alternative is the legalization of civil gay marriage.

The New York rent-control case did not go anywhere near that far, which is the problem. The rent-control regulations merely stipulated that a "family" member had the right to remain in the apartment. The judge ruled that to all intents and purposes a gay lover is part of his lover's family, inasmuch as a "family" merely means an interwoven social life, emotional commitment, and some level of financial interdependence.

It's a principle now well established around the country. Several cities have "domestic partnership" laws, which allow relationships that do not fit into the category of heterosexual marriage to be registered with the city and qualify for benefits that up till now have been reserved for straight married couples. San Francisco, Berkeley, Madison, and Los Angeles all have legislation, as does the politically correct Washington, D.C., suburb, Takoma Park. In these cities, a variety of interpersonal arrangements qualify for health insurance, bereavement leave, insurance, annuity and pension rights, housing rights (such as rent-control apartments), adoption, and inheritance rights. Eventually, according to gay lobby groups, the aim is to include federal income tax and veterans benefits as well. A recent case even involved the right to use a family member's accumulated frequent-flier points. Gays are not the only beneficiaries; heterosexual "live-togethers" also qualify.

There's an argument, of course, that the current legal advantages extended to married people unfairly discriminate against people who've shaped their lives in less conventional arrangements. But it doesn't take a genius to see that enshrining in the law a vague principle like "domestic partnership" is an invitation to qualify at little personal cost for a vast array of entitlements otherwise kept crudely under control.

To be sure, potential DPs have to prove financial interdependence, shared living arrangements, and a commitment to mutual caring. But they don't need to have a sexual relationship or even closely mirror old-style marriage. In principle, an elderly woman and her live-in nurse could qualify. A couple of uneuphemistically confirmed bachelors could be DPs. So could two close college students, a pair of seminarians, or a couple of frat buddies. Left as it is, the concept of domestic partnership could open a Pandora's box of litigation and subjective judicial decision-making about who qualifies. You either are or are not married; it's not a complex question. Whether you are in a "domestic partnership" is not so clear.

More important, the concept of domestic partnership chips away at the prestige of traditional relationships and undermines the priority we give them. This priority is not necessarily a product of heterosexism. Consider heterosexual couples. Society has good reason to extend legal advantages to heterosexuals who choose the formal sanction of marriage over simply living together. They make a deeper commitment to one another and to society; in exchange, society extends certain benefits to them. Marriage provides an anchor, if an arbitrary and weak one, in the chaos of sex and relationships to which we are all prone. It provides a mechanism for emotional stability, economic security, and the healthy rearing of the next generation. We rig the law in its favor not because we disparage all forms of relationship other than the nuclear family, but because we recognize that not to promote marriage would be to ask too much of human virtue. In the context of the weakened family's effect upon the poor, it might also invite social disintegration. One of the worst products of the New Right's "family values" campaign is that its extremism and hatred of diversity has disguised this more measured and more convincing case for the importance of the marital bond.

The concept of domestic partnership ignores these concerns, indeed directly attacks them. This is a pity, since one of its most important objectives-providing some civil recognition for gay relationships�is a noble cause and one completely compatible with the defense of the family. But the way to go about it is not to undermine straight marriage; it is to legalize old-style marriage for gays.

The gay movement has ducked this issue primarily out of fear of division. Much of the gay leadership clings to notions of gay life as essentially outsider, anti-bourgeois, radical. Marriage, for them, is co-optation into straight society. For the Stonewall generation, it is hard to see how this vision of conflict will ever fundamentally change. But for many other gays�my guess, a majority�while they don't deny the importance of rebellion twenty years ago and are grateful for what was done, there's now the sense of a new opportunity. A need to rebel has quietly ceded to a desire to belong. To be gay and to be bourgeois no longer seems such an absurd proposition. Certainly since AIDS, to be gay and to be responsible has become a necessity.

Gay marriage squares several circles at the heart of the domestic partnership debate. Unlike domestic partnership, it allows for recognition of gay relationships, while casting no aspersions on traditional marriage. It merely asks that gays be allowed to join in. Unlike domestic partnership, it doesn't open up avenues for heterosexuals to get benefits without the responsibilities of marriage, or a nightmare of definition litigation. And unlike domestic partnership, it harnesses to an already established social convention the yearnings for stability and acceptance among a fast-maturing gay community.

Gay marriage also places more responsibilities upon gays: it says for the first time that gay relationships are not better or worse than straight relationships, and that the same is expected ofthem. And it's clear and dignified. There's a legal benefit to a clear, common symbol of commitment. There's also a personal benefit. One of the ironies of domestic partnership is that it's not only more complicated than marriage, it's more demanding, requiring an elaborate statement of intent to qualify. It amounts to a substantial invasion of privacy. Why, after all, should gays be required to prove commitment before they get married in a way we would never dream of asking of straights?

Legalizing gay marriage would offer homosexuals the same deal society now offers heterosexuals: general social approval and specific legal advantages in exchange for a deeper and harder-to-extract- yourself-from commitment to another human being. Like straight marriage, it would foster social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence. Since there's no reason gays should not be allowed to adopt or be foster parents, it could also help nurture children. And its introduction would not be some sort of radical break with social custom. As it has become more acceptable for gay people to acknowledge their loves publicly, more and more have committed themselves to one another for life in full view of their families and their friends. A law institutionalizing gay marriage would merely reinforce a healthy social trend. It would also, in the wake of AIDS, qualify as a genuine public health measure. Those conservatives who deplore promiscuity among some homosexuals should be among the first to support it. Burke could have written a powerful case for it.

The argument that gay marriage would subtly undermine the unique legitimacy of straight marriage is based upon a fallacy. For heterosexuals, straight marriage would remain the most significant -- and only legal -- social bond. Gay marriage could only delegitimize straight marriage if it were a real alternative to it, and this is clearly not true. To put it bluntly, there's precious little evidence that straights could be persuaded by any law to have sex with -- let alone marry -- someone of their own sex. The only possible effect of this sort would be to persuade gay men and women who force themselves into heterosexual marriage (often at appalling cost to themselves and their families) to find a focus for their family instincts in a more personally positive environment. But this is clearly a plus, not a minus: gay marriage could both avoid a lot of tortured families and create the possibility for many happier ones. It is not, in short, a denial of family values. It's an extension of them.

Of course, some would claim that any legal recognition of homosexuality is a de facto attack upon heterosexuality. But even the most hardened conservatives recognize that gays are a permanent minority and aren't likely to go away. Since persecution is not an option in a civilized society, why not coax gays into traditional values rather than rail incoherently against them?

There's a less elaborate argument for gay marriage: it's good for gays. It provides role models for young gay people who, after the exhilaration of coming out, can easily lapse into short-term relationships and insecurity with no tangible goal in sight. My own guess is that most gays would embrace such a goal with as much (if not more) commitment as straights. Even in our society as it is, many lesbian relationships are virtual textbook cases of monogamous commitment. Legal gay marriage could also help bridge the gulf often found between gays and their parents. It could bring the essence of gay life�a gay couple�into the heart of the traditional straight family in a way the family can most understand and the gay offspring can most easily acknowledge. It could do as much to heal the gay-straight rift as any amount of gay rights legislation.

If these arguments sound socially conservative, that's no accident. It's one of the richest ironies of our society's blind spot toward gays that essentially conservative social goals should have the appearance of being so radical. But gay marriage is not a radical step. It avoids the mess of domestic partnership; it is humane; it is conservative in the best sense of the word. It's also practical. Given the fact that we already allow legal gay relationships, what possible social goal is advanced by framing the law to encourage those relationships to be unfaithful, undeveloped, and insecure?