IGF CultureWatch

First appeared June 22, 1997, in The Washington Post.

IN 1980, WORD BEGAN TO LEAK OUT that Congressman Jon Hinson (R) had been in a gay movie theater when it caught on fire and that he had later been arrested at the Iwo Jima Memorial, a well-known gay cruising spot in Washington. Once Hinson knew these incidents would be made public, he visited fundamentalist Protestant preachers in his Mississippi district and asked for their continued support. He got it, and was re-elected in a three-way contest, albeit narrowly.

Today, of course, no gay candidate could find political solace at the hands of the Christian Right, which has become the major opposition to the political and social revolution known as gay liberation.

But readers of Didi Herman's The Antigay Agenda, Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right (The University of Chicago Press) would not find Hinson's 1980 experience so surprising. Herman points out that conservative Protestant discussion of homosexuality in the 1960s and 1970s was relatively neutral. In 1970, for example, Christianity Today said of a gay Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles, "The great majority are indistinguishable in appearance from a typical WASP congregation... [who attend] in the hope that God, with a little help from his friends, will make his love known to them.î By the late 1980s, however, in response to social, political and even economic trends, the newly emergent political Christian Right had made opposition to gay and lesbian demands a centerpiece of its platform.

Herman's short 200-page book contains a wealth of information about conservative Protestantism and its battle against gay liberation. (She considers Roman Catholic views a separate topic). She discusses, for example, the Christian Right's portrayal of gay men not as stereotyped "effeminate, limp-wristed, ineffectual,î but as "masculinity out of control.î Gay male sex, in the words of Christian Right polemicists, is "raucous revelry, perverse promiscuity, orgiastic opulence, and apollyonic abandon.î Lesbians are attacked, less colorfully, as the logical extension of antifamily feminism.

Moreover, we learn of tensions within the Christian Right between the pietists, who value personal religious experience, and those -- now ascendant -- who want the church to influence the nation. We read of tensions between Christian conservatives who (secretly?) support a powerful theocratic state, and their secular economic allies, who prefer a smaller government with a live-and-let-live approach to morality.

The Antigay Agenda argues that the Christian Right's opposition to gay liberation is more than just a reaction to change. Rather, the antigay stance is part and parcel of fundamental Protestantism's core beliefs, including the infallibility of the Bible and a long-standing distaste for declining social -- and sexual -- standards, of which homosexual behavior is only one among many (abortion, divorce, pornography, promiscuity, etc.).

Ultimately, however, and even ironically, Herman exhibits the same flaws she sees -- correctly, in my view -- in the conservative Protestant operatives with whom she disagrees. She takes what Christian Right leaders consider a marginal doctrine known as postmillennialism -- that Christians must take over the world in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ -- and posits it as the prime motivation for conservative Christian political ambitions. This sounds very much like the Religious Right strategy of exhibiting examples of gay extremism -- e.g., the Lesbian Avengers wearing "We Recruitî T-shirts to a public school -- to demonstrate that homosexuals prey on children.

Moreover, such an analysis ignores other explanations for the Christian Right's foray into politics. For example, this is probably the first generation of Protestant fundamentalists in which a majority of its adherents are college educated and financially well off. As such, they want to get a place at the table once set exclusively for establishmentarian, mainline Protestants. This is similar to the kind of imprint on society and its politics, traditionally sought by ethnic, racial and other groups, including newly liberated gays and lesbians.

Herman's strategy for countering the conservative Christian antigay movement, which she makes near the end of the book, is "an invigorated, emancipatory, left-wing movement," though she offers no evidence that such a broad counter-attack would be attractive to a majority of Americans.

Despite its weaknesses, Herman's book presents considerable information not previously part of the nation's political discourse. And despite her British locale, the only miscue I noticed was her description of Phyllis Schlafly as "a longtime Christian activist." Schlafly is much better described as a political activist.

More importantly, while Herman makes clear her sympathy for gay and lesbian political goals, she dissects the Christian Right's antigay stance dispassionately, giving, as it were, the devil his due. For anyone on either side of this passionate and important conflict, that is an impressive accomplishment.

I REMEMBER THE MOMENT VERY WELL. It was a little more than a year ago, but it seems like a lifetime now. I was headed out the door of my Washington office, brief case in hand, bound for a pleasant, relaxing weekend in New York with friends. My secretary stopped me and said a reporter from The Advocate was on the phone.

I had spoken to this reporter before. So, when I picked up the phone and heard him say he needed to talk to me in person, I wasn't surprised. We agreed to meet the following Monday when I returned from New York. I hung up the phone and left the office, determined to enjoy my rare weekend "off duty." But at that moment, I sensed my life was about to change - irrevocably and fundamentally. Or was it?

The conversation on Monday confirmed what I suspected. The Advocate - in an article about DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, intended to "out" me as a gay - but not openly so - Republican Member of the House of Representatives. Armed with that knowledge, I decided to beat them to the punch by making the announcement myself.

What followed was a kaleidoscope of decisions, activities, and conversations that most gays and lesbians handle over the course of months - or years. In my case - my very public case - I only had five short days. Between Monday and Friday I had to lay out a game plan; inform my staff and colleagues in the House about my sexual orientation and why I was acknowledging it; write a press statement and letters to key supporters; and call to a seemingly endless list of friends, supporters, and, yes, family. You see, I come from a family?and I know many of you can relate to this?where we never discussed such personal things as "feelings."

No "operation" as complex as this, of course, ever comes off exactly as you plan it. Too many people had to be notified. The press got wind and Thursday evening - twelve hours ahead of schedule - the story broke on the late evening television news. That broke the dam and by the next morning every media outlet in the country had the story.

The phones rang, and they rang, and they rang - in Tucson and in Washington. Incidentally, by the time the calls and faxes tapered off and tallied the numbers, over 97 percent of everyone we heard from expressed support in one way or another.

All of this - this astonishing, compressed chain of events - occurred during the final week leading up to Congress' August recess. While I was trying to manage this life-changing event - politically and personally - Congress was considering, and voting on, Welfare Reform and the final version of illegal immigration legislation. All this, simultaneous with phone calls to my 86-year-old mother and to news outlets in Arizona. What a week!

Friday ended; Welfare Reform was on its way to the White House for Presidential signature, and Jim Kolbe had taken his place as the second openly gay Republican in the United States Congress. Saturday morning I flew home to Arizona, went to the office and did one-on-one interviews with each of the television news outlets in my community. The questions by now were boringly repetitious and predictable - but they had to be answered - patiently, honestly, candidly. I remember saying at the end of the last interview, half to myself and half to the assembled press: "That's it, folks. You've got your story. Now I am going back to being the Congressman I was before."

And I did. An hour later, I stood in front of an audience at the University of Arizona praising the Udall Foundation for its establishment of a Native American Intern Program. The next week, I conducted my usual August series of town halls, listening to voters praise or vilify Congress and me for what we had done - or not done.

Was I slipping back into denial, a habit I formed early in adult life and gradually shed as I came to terms with my own sexuality? I believe the answer is emphatically "no." I was simply reasserting myself as the Congressman from Arizona's Fifth District, the acknowledged Republican leader for free trade and open markets, the new advocate of Social Security Reform, the proponent of less government, lower taxes and more individual responsibility. These were the issues I had been advocating for twelve years in Congress and six years before that in the Arizona Senate. Oh, yes, I happened to be a gay person, too. But, being gay was not - and is not today - my defining persona.

Which leads me to the substance of my remarks tonight. Are we - Log Cabin members and friends - Republicans first, or are we gay persons who happen to think our political views incidentally make us Republicans, also?

If I focus on the need to liberalize trade, cut taxes, and balance the budget, does that mean I cannot also be recognized as a quiet voice of reason on issues of civil liberties and individual rights for homosexuals in our society? Conversely, if I become a "poster boy" and talk mostly about gay/lesbian issues, do I reduce myself to irrelevance with my Republican brethren in the House and cause Republicans?

To answer these questions, I ask you to think back to the celebration we had this Spring, marking the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut in major league baseball, the breaking down of the color barrier in America's national pastime. Can anyone here tonight doubt how Jackie Robinson paved the way for a generation of sports greats from the African-American community - from Jackie Robinson and Mohammed Ali to Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods? It wasn't because Jackie Robinson held frequent press conferences, or made speeches, or participated in boycotts. It was because he played baseball, and he played it well.

To his potential detractors, he left no room for doubt that he had been hired by Branch Rickey to do anything except play the best baseball the National League had to offer. Jackie Robinson succeeded in breaking the color barrier in baseball because he proved he was a great baseball player. He paved the way for countless other minorities in professional sports, not because he trumpeted his color but because he played baseball so well. That's what Mohammed Ali did with his right jab and that is what Michael does with his incredible slam-dunks and that is what Tiger Woods is doing for golf with an awesome, cool performance at the Masters. They hit baseballs, throw knock-out punches, shoot baskets flawlessly, and hit golf balls with deadly precision. And they just happen to be African Americans or people of color.

Do they deny their color with their acts of professionalism? Do we deny that we are gay or lesbian by being gathered here tonight as Log Cabin Republicans? Certainly not. And yet there are many in the gay community for whom "gay Republican" is a contradiction in terms.

I, for one, reject such narrow-minded thinking. Just as there are Republicans and Democrats with different points of view, African-Americans who disagree over affirmative action, veterans who differ about a flag burning amendment to the Constitution and Jews who passionately differ as to whether Israel should be supported at any political price - so, too, will there be gays who differ about DOMA and ENDA - and, yes, about immigration policies and taxation of capital gains.

We are not monolithic. We are diverse? varied? individualistic. It is this latter characteristic - our belief in individual liberty - that brings us together tonight as Log Cabin Republicans - Republicans who happen to be gay. This is a core value I dare say we share with the vast majority of fair-minded Americans. There is nothing intrinsically "gay" about it.

As I often remind my constituents in southern Arizona, our nation was founded on the proposition, stated so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, "...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." For more than two hundred years now we, the people of the United States of America, have struggled to realize the full meaning of our creed: to create an opportunity society that empowers all citizens to achieve the American Dream. And make no mistake: it has been a struggle.

I ask my constituents to consider the words of Abraham Lincoln, whom I revere as our greatest President. A century and a half ago - in 1855, when he was still a country lawyer - he dared to suggest that the nation was failing to live up to its promise that "all men are created equal." As Lincoln said,

We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Doesn't it seem strange, I ask my constituents, to think that Lincoln's words were considered radical at the time, and that such thinking would help provoke a civil war?

I remind my friends and neighbors in southern Arizona that personal liberty - the freedom to choose - is the cornerstone of our American democracy. If each of us is to fully enjoy the opportunities and blessings of liberty, then all of us must accept responsibility for our own actions, and for how our actions will affect the lives of others.

As Friedrich August von Hayek, the great Austrian economist, explained:

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions.

I believe proprietary self-interest and concern for one's fellow man are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they go hand in hand, and I believe that together they comprise the "content of our character" by which Dr. Martin Luther King said each of us should be judged.

The American ideal of limited government of the people, by the people, and for the people is also a radical concept. Our founding fathers dared to believe that government should derive its authority from the consent of the governed, and not the other way around. Thomas Jefferson elaborated on his conception of "good government" when he took the oath of office as our nation's third President in 1801. He said:

The sum of good government is to restrain men from injuring one another and leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

James Madison, who succeed Jefferson as President, clearly saw the dangers inherent in unlimited government. He warned that:

...there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

It is not that I and my fellow Republicans in Congress who seek to change the status quo believe the Federal government is some sort of malevolent agent, intentionally seeking to deprive us of our liberty. Rather, we believe the power of the federal government has grown far beyond anything our founding fathers could have imagined. More important, it has grown so large it gets in the way of citizens' ability to maximize their individual freedom and opportunities. Jefferson and Madison understood intuitively that government, in and of itself, cannot provide happiness. That is something you must pursue for yourself. What our government can ensure - and what your fellow American citizens ought to honor - is your liberty, in law, to live out your American Dream.

Ronald Reagan said it very well more than a decade ago in a speech he entitled, "A Time for Choosing." He said these words:

...for almost two centuries we have proved man's capacity for self-government, but today we are told we must choose between a left and a right or, as others suggest, a third alternative, a safe middle ground. I suggest to you there is no left or right, only an up or down. Up - to the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism...

With those words, Ronald Reagan expressed what should be the credo of all Log Cabin Republicans - "individual freedom consistent with law and order." Isn't that what we as Republicans believe in? Surely, that expresses what we as Log Cabin Republicans - concerned with government intrusion into our private lives, devoted to maximizing individual liberties and responsibilities - must believe.

I am both fascinated and amused with the convergence in views of some Republicans on the right side of our Party with the views of gay, liberal Democrats. Neither would even admit their common philosophy, but it is there, nevertheless. The so-called conservative Republican deplores big government, welfare programs, erosion of personal liberties - and then votes for constitutional amendments to ban flag burning, or to proscribe specific medical procedures for a doctor performing an abortion, or to deny gays their rights to fully participate in our society.

Liberal, gay Democrats, on the other hand, deplore the intrusion of government into the bedroom or the doctors' examining room - and then proceed to wax eloquent for programs that would nationalize the entire health care delivery system, or compel poor people to live in sub-standard housing operated by the liberal bureaucracy, or decry programs to give education vouchers to lower income parents so that they might send their children to schools of their own choosing.

We might be excused for excessive hubris for thinking Log Cabin Republicans are the only gays who really understand that individual liberties are for everyone. Why is it, then, that as gay Republicans we have allowed gay Democrats, largely committed to the collectivist state, to speak for gay and lesbian rights? Why are the ones committed to expanding government control over our lives in housing and in education, the ones who would nibble at our freedom through use and abuse of the tax code and regulatory system - why - how - are they presumed to speak for gay rights? What distortion of the definition of freedom and liberty has given them unfiltered access to the megaphone, claiming to express the views of all gays?

But, just as we must not abandon the battlefield of policy to the illiberal left, so we must not allow the religious fundamentalists to use "morality" as a cudgel against us. For many gays, the process of coming out involves shedding the guilt and shame associated with our sexuality. In that process, most of us conclude - rightly, I believe - that we are not "immoral" just because we are homosexual.

Unfortunately, many gays go a step further and reject any association of behavior and morality. A rejection of the hypocrisy of the rigid morality of the 1950s has led conservatives and liberals alike to flee from public discourse about what is right or wrong. And so, we have a society where divorce rates and illegitimate births are soaring, where teenage violence and drug use is rampant. We may invoke a moral position for ourselves, but we adopt moral neutrality for everyone else. The result is a backlash in society, for the simple fact is - people yearn for moral guidance.

As columnist Dan Perreten recently pointed out, we must not lose sight of the distinction between the words "moral" - principles of right and wrong in behavior - and "moralizing." We are, Perreten notes, so offended by the practitioners of the latter that we fail to acknowledge the importance of the former. Just as we must challenge liberal Democrats on policy issues where we know them to be wrong, so must we engage in an honest, candid debate with ourselves on moral issues that affect the gay and lesbian community.

The fact is, we belong to the party that really talks about concerns of the gay community. Ours is the party of Abraham Lincoln, of Theodore Roosevelt, of Ronald Reagan. It is the party of freedom, liberty, and individual responsibility. We are a minority within the Republican party when we think of ourselves as gays. But when we add all those Republicans, and other Americans who won't be identified with a party - all those who do not want government telling them what to do - then we are a majority. When we understand this simple fact and act like majority Republicans, we will win.

Call it "safe middle ground" if you like, but it represents the historical mainstream of Republican thinking for 150 years. Republicans will support, and elected officials will vote, "our way" if the question is framed as one of "individual rights," not of "lifestyle." Opposing discrimination on the basis of one's sexual orientation is not a matter of defending a lifestyle; it is protecting our rights as individual American citizens, just as surely as all of us would oppose discrimination against Jews or women or African-Americans because such discrimination is contrary to the fundamental principles underlying our Constitution. Discrimination should be an abomination to all Republicans - Log Cabin Republicans and moral majority Republicans. But it is equally right for Republicans to oppose special privileges for any group - quotas or special legal protection.

Sometimes we must show special courage as gay Republicans, standing up to the conventional wisdom in both the Republican party and the gay community. But with a foot in both groups, true to the principles we know to be right, we can gain the respect and acceptance of gays and Republicans alike. When you argue the case to your Congressman or state Assemblyman for school choice - when you tell them this is an exercise of individual choice in education - you show them a face of gay Republicans they may not have seen before. When you talk to them about how lower taxes can expand jobs and opportunities for Americans of all stripes, you speak a language they understand but have not heard from the gay community.

We gain acceptance and build our bridges, not by stressing that we are gay people who are Republicans, but that we are Republicans who happen to be gay or lesbian - that we are Republicans who care about families and schools, who believe in a strong national defense and laws that are tough on criminals, who worry about the environment and want to balance the budget so the next generation is not saddled with the fruits of our profligacy.

My constituents and my Republican colleagues in Congress respect me and support me because they know I am fighting for open markets, free trade and consumer choice, for a balanced budget, and for an honest overhaul of our Social Security system. To them, these issues are no less important, and I am no less qualified to make the case for them, now than before my announcement. Free trade is the engine of our economic prosperity and the ticket to future competitiveness. Balancing the budget - a feat Republicans achieved this year for the first time in 30 years - matters because it says we care about our nation's stability. And thinking honestly about transforming Social Security from a dead-end tax into a real retirement savings plan says that we care about the future for the next generation.

Log Cabin Republicans have already shown they can speak to the broad concerns of all Republicans. Four years ago, in the New York mayoral race, Log Cabin Republicans introduced an ad, the tag line for which was: "Who says crime is not a gay issue?" That simple message speaks volumes, both about ourselves as gay Republicans, and to the large majority of Republicans who have the same worries about crime and safety. "Who says crime is not a gay issue?" Of course it is. It's everybody's issue. The sooner we speak to it - and to similar issues - the sooner we speak to middle America, the sooner we enter the mainstream of American politics.

In the 1996 Republican presidential sweepstakes, Log Cabin Republicans demonstrated their moral courage and constancy, by taking on the prospective Republican nominee when a Log Cabin contribution was first accepted and then rejected. When Log Cabin stood its ground, Senator Dole's campaign changed its attitude, accepted the contribution, issued an apology, and conferred new respect to this organization. When Log Cabin Republicans endorsed Dole's Presidential bid, they demonstrated that they were an important part of the team.

The cause for all gay persons, Republicans and Democrats alike, will be advanced when we focus not on what sets us apart from our fellow Americans but on what we share in common; when we demonstrate our concern and our commitment, our expertise and our execution, on issues that matter to main street America.

Bruce Bawer, in a recent column, talks about a revolution that is taking place in America today - a revolution he says that is the worst nightmare of a far-left gay activist. It is a revolution brought about by people who work in corporations, worship in our churches, speak through our news media and teach in our schools. It is a revolution brought about by ordinary gay people who live their lives in ordinary ways on every ordinary day.

By doing so, Bawer says, other ordinary Americans "have grown from ignorance into knowledge, from lies into truth, from prejudice into love." There are still two Americas, he notes, one in which homosexuality is accepted as part of everyday life and another in which gays continue to be demonized and discriminated against. But, if we are ever to eliminate the division, it will be because of those ordinary people living their ordinary lives. It will also be because a few brave, extraordinary people, some of whom are gathered here tonight, choose to reject the politics of exclusion and group identity. You are here tonight because have chosen to pursue the politics of inclusion and mainstream values.

Last December, just a few months after my announcement made big news, I was privileged to speak at the dedication of a statue commemorating the 150th anniversary of the peaceful arrival of The Mormon Battalion in the Presidio of Tucson during the Mexican War. I shared the dais that day with my friend and colleague from the Arizona Congressional delegation, Matt Salmon, and Gordon Hinkley, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. More than 7,000 people came from throughout Southern Arizona. Most were Mormons, and maybe a third were directly descended from members of the Mormon Battalion.

In my remarks, I noted that the men of the Mormon Battalion had volunteered to serve their country in spite of the fact that the federal government had done little to protect them from religious persecution. These were men who, along with their families, had been driven from their homes in the East by angry, intolerant neighbors. In many cases their property had been stolen or confiscated. Some of their brethren - including Joseph Smith, founder of the faith - had even been murdered for their beliefs. Despite all this, 500 Mormon men faithfully answered the call to enlist and march 2,000 miles from Iowa to California. This arduous, six-month trek remains the longest infantry march in U.S. Army history. And they accomplished this remarkable feat without a shot being fired in anger.

I noted that the statue honoring the Mormon Battalion was really a monument to peace? and tolerance. This was a message this audience could understand. At least three times they interrupted my remarks with their applause. And in the months that have followed my office has received more requests for that speech than for any other I have ever given.

Last spring, in the wake of Susan Molinari's resignation announcement, I joined a small group of my Republican House colleagues to discuss the leadership races. Names were being tossed around - moderates who might run for Conference Vice-Chairman or Secretary. Finally, someone turned to me and said: "Well, Jim, why don't you run? You've got the seniority, you're a moderate, and you've shown your leadership on trade and other issues. You'd be a good candidate!"

"Oh, sure," I replied. "I'm sure our Republican caucus is ready to elect a pro-choice, gay person to the leadership."

"Oh, goodness," the first individual responded, "I had forgotten about that!"

Well, good. Perhaps, from time to time, this individual - and others - need to be gently reminded that I am gay, if only so that they remember how secondary it is in my political and everyday life.

Arizona Republic cartoonist Steve Benson got it right after my coming out when he did a cartoon - two identical drawings of Jim Kolbe, side by side. One was labeled: "Jim Kolbe, hard-working, fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republican Congressman from Arizona - before he announced he was gay." The second, same caricature, had the same label, except "After he announced he was gay." Looks like the same guy to me.

GAY RIGHTS ADVOCATES sometimes suggest that if the Bible condemns homosexuality, so much the worse for the Bible. Yet that position hardly works for everyone. Many people maintain that the Bible is the true word of God, and not all who do are die-hard homophobes. Some are social liberals who feel torn between their political and their religious convictions. Others are gay and lesbian youth who feel forced to choose between being gay and following God. To tell such people "so much the worse for the Bible" seems counterproductive, even cruel.

But what is the alternative? Is it possible to affirm the truth of the Bible yet deny the anti-gay conclusions the Church has drawn from it for centuries? To answer that question, I want to explore another case where the Church has re-interpreted Scripture: usury. For centuries the Church used the Bible to condemn the lending of money for interest - for any interest, not just excessive interest. Today it has more money in the bank than many major corporations. And its explanation for this shift - that cultural changes render the Biblical prohibitions inapplicable - works just as well for homosexuality as for interest banking.

The Bible condemns usury in no uncertain terms. In the Book of Exodus God says "if you lend money to my people, to the poor among you. you shall not exact interest from them" (22: 25). The fifteenth Psalm says that those who lend at interest may not abide in the Lord's tent or dwell on his holy hill (1-5). Ezekiel compares usury to adultery, robbery, idolatry, and bribery, and asks whether he who "takes advanced or accrued interest; shall he then live? He shall not. He. shall surely die; his blood shall be upon him." (18: 10-13; see also Deut. 23:19, Lev. 25: 35-37, Neh. 5: 7-10, Jer. 15:10, Ezek. 22: 12, and Luke 6:35)

The Biblical case against usury does not stand alone. Plato and Aristotle condemned the practice, as did Aristophanes, Cato, Seneca, and Plutarch. So did Saints Anselm, Augustine, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Jerome, and Ambrose, citing both Scripture and natural law. Numerous church councils and synods forbade usury: for instance, at the Third Council of Lateran (1179 C.E.), Pope Alexander III declared that both the Old and New Testaments condemn it and that violators should be excommunicated. Subsequent popes repeated these sanctions. In 1745, in the encyclical Vix Pervenit, Benedict XIV pronounced that "any gain which exceeds the amount the creditor gave is illicit and usurious." Protestant opponents of usury included Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and Urlich Zwingli. Nor is this condemnation unique to the Judeo-Christian tradition: the Qur'an condemns usury as well (2: 275, 3: 130). In short, the case against usury, like the case against homosexuality, appears to have strong biblical, philosophical, patristic, ecclesiastical, and theological grounds.

So what happened? Did the Church suddenly realize that it was missing out on something lucrative, and thus rescind its earlier prohibition? Not surprisingly, Church leaders offer a quite different explanation. According to them, economic conditions have changed substantially since Biblical times, such that usury no longer has the same consequences as it did when the prohibitions were issued. Therefore, those prohibitions no longer apply. As Father Richard McBrien, former chair of the University of Notre Dame theology department, writes,

The teaching on usury changed because certain theologians in the sixteenth century concluded that economic conditions had changed, making the old condemnations obsolete, and that the experience of lay Christians had to be listened to. Thus, Navarrus (d. 1586), a professor at Salamanca in Spain and author of a Manual for Confessors, argued that an "infinite number of decent Christians" were engaged in exchange-banking, and he objected to any analysis which would "damn the whole world."

McBrien's example of Navarrus is helpful here, for it shows how the Church's pastoral experience influenced its understanding of Scripture. Faced with otherwise "decent Christians" engaging in a traditionally forbidden practice, the Church re-examined the earlier prohibitions and found that they depended on conditions that no longer held.

Yet are we not today in a similar position regarding homosexuality? Even Christian traditionalists have begun to recognize that the stereotype of all gays as corrupt, hedonistic, sex-crazed heathens is unsupportable. On the contrary, many gay and lesbian relationships appear loving, nurturing, and fulfilling. As Richard B. Hays, a Methodist professor of New Testament at Duke University, points out, "There are numerous homosexual Christians whose lives show signs of the presence of God, whose work in ministry is genuine and effective. How is such experiential evidence to be assessed?"

Hays is appealing to a familiar Biblical principle here: "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matt. 7:20). Surprisingly, however, he ultimately concludes that homosexual relationships are immoral. I suggest that Hays, and countless other theologians like him, have dropped the ball. They notice that many gay and lesbian relationships manifest themselves as good, but then opt for the prohibitions of Scripture over the evidence of their own experience. What they fail to notice is that the Church's history on usury provides a way out of this apparent dilemma.

Consider the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans, perhaps the most problematic text for gay and lesbian advocates. Paul writes of Gentiles who have given themselves up to "dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons due penalty for their error" (1:26-7).

It seems fairly clear that Paul viewed such acts as a sign and consequence of the Fall. (Some, like John Boswell and William Countryman, have argued that Paul's use of "unnatural" - para physin - carries no moral force. My argument does not require this conclusion, but if it is true, so much the better.) Granting (for the sake of argument) that Paul morally condemned such relationships, must contemporary Christians condemn homosexual relationships as well? Not necessarily. Suppose that in Paul's time homosexual relationships were typically exploitative, paganistic, or pederastic - as virtually all scholars would agree. If Paul condemned homosexuality because it had such features, but such features are no longer typical, then Paul's condemnation no longer applies. Substantial changes in cultural context have altered the meaning and consequences - and thus the moral value - of homosexual relationships. Put another way, using the Bible's condemnations of homosexuality against contemporary homosexuality is like using its condemnations of usury against contemporary banking.

This context-sensitive approach preserves not only the inerrancy of the Bible but also the authenticity of experience. For the religious believer, both are important: surely the Creator of all things reveals himself in lived experience as well as ancient texts. Indeed, to accept the text at face value while ignoring the evidence of experience would be to betray a rather impoverished view of revelation - one that has been rejected by centuries of official Church teaching.

But does this approach leave any room for mystery or for faith? If we need only consult experiential evidence to determine God's will, of what use is the Bible? I have not suggested, however, that we need only consult experiential evidence; I have merely suggested that experiential evidence, like Biblical evidence, is an important source of revelation. Nor have I denied that Biblical evidence may contradict experiential evidence and thus result in mystery. In this case, however, the contradiction is merely apparent. There is still room for mysteries of faith; this just happens not to be one of them.

The usury analogy also provides a better model for re-interpretation than do the more commonly cited issues of divorce and slavery. The Biblical case against divorce is at least as strong as that against homosexuality; indeed, Jesus forcefully condemns divorce (Matt. 5: 31-32) but never mentions homosexuality. This fact is startling when one considers how many advocates of "traditional Christian values" - Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and Phil Gramm, for instance - are divorced. Perhaps they consider divorce a one-time failure as opposed to an inveterate sin (though Jesus, who likened divorce to adultery, apparently disagrees). Or perhaps they accept an argument similar in strategy to the usury argument: divorce during Jesus's time had disastrous social consequences for women that it no longer has; thus, the Biblical condemnations are obsolete. The problem with the divorce analogy is many fundamentalists maintain that those who divorce and remarry are inveterate sinners, just as Jesus's words suggest.

By contrast, virtually no one wants to maintain the Bible's approval of slavery. Nevertheless, the Bible's position appears clear: Leviticus states, "You may acquire slaves from the pagan nations that are around you" (25:44). St. Paul writes, "Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ" (Eph. 6:5). Are such pronouncements (and many more like them) context-specific in a way that renders them inapplicable today?

Many believers think so. They argue that during Biblical times slavery was significantly different from its antebellum American form; specifically, Biblical masters were much kinder to their slaves. This argument concedes that cultural context is relevant to interpretation, and thus buttresses the case in favor of homosexuality. But it also concedes that under some certain circumstances human beings may own one another - a repugnant conclusion. Some believers try to avoid this conclusion by noting that according to St. Paul, "there is no longer slave or free" (Gal. 3:28). Yet this response also buttresses the pro-gay case, for the same passage says, "there is no longer male and female." Erase that distinction, and homosexuality becomes a non-issue.

Perhaps the slavery example shows that the revisionist approach - or at least, the assumption that the Bible is inerrant - inevitably leads to absurdity. Perhaps it is time for gay rights advocates to bite the bullet and say, "Look, the Bible's just wrong sometimes." For those unprepared to make that concession, the Church's stance on usury suggests a useful and coherent alternative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So I can't come in?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First then, how did gay communities come to be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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