IGF CultureWatch

Originally published Sept. 20, 1994, in The Advocate.

"STONEWALL 25," EXULTED A FRIEND after the march in June [1994], "saw the last gasp of the radical gay left." Perhaps. Certainly things are changing dramatically. Left-wing gay groups are floundering; the Log Cabin Republicans grow apace. While the gay left seems increasingly barren intellectually and unable to distinguish tactics from strategy, moderate gay voices are being raised and listened to. Unable or unwilling to address the important questions that openly gay moderates are raising, gay-left honchos have chosen instead to paint us dishonestly as a bunch of bigoted, reactionary, self-serving, upper-class conformists.

Last spring in Gay Community News, Urvashi Vaid lodged a by-now-familiar complaint: "By aspiring to join the mainstream rather than continuing to figure out the ways we need to change it, we risk losing our gay and lesbian souls in order to gain the world." But nobody's "aspiring to join" the mainstream; the point is that most gays live in that mainstream. What Vaid apparently hasn't been able to reconcile to her worldview is the emergence from the closet and from political silence of increasing numbers of gays whose politics differ dramatically from her own. The more visible such people become, the clearer it will be how out of touch many gay-left leaders are with the majority of those whom they claim to represent.

Although Vaid and her philosophical allies routinely label gay moderates as members of a "new gay right," most of those so described would consider themselves politically liberal to middle-of-the-road. We've been described as wanting to exclude certain gay people. Wrong. Nor do we deny or disavow the heroic contributions of gay activists over the past three decades. What we are about is building on those contributions and moving beyond certain ways of thinking that harm all of us.

Above all, the moderate gay rights movement is, quite simply, about gay rights. By contrast, gay-left leaders apparently view those rights as only one plank of a comprehensive socialist platform that all gays are inherently obligated to support. In a July 4 Nation essay titled "A Socialism of the Skin," Tony Kushner argued that socialism follows from homosexuality as night follows day. Speaking up for "solidarity," Kushner assailed what he sees as "assimilationism." But it's Kushner who's the assimilationist: Far from wanting all gays to be themselves free of pressure from anyone, straight or gay, to become something other than who they are he wants us all to conform to his notion of what it means to be gay. When he applauds solidarity, he means solidarity on his terms. Yet as more of us come out, it becomes increasingly clear that few of us identify with his extreme ideology.

Kushner warned of "the emergence of increasing numbers of conservative homosexuals ... who are unsympathetic to the idea of linking their fortunes with any other political cause." Put it this way: Most gays liberal or conservative, libertarian or moderate reserve the right to make their own linkages. Most would deny that their homosexuality obliges them to subscribe to the laundry list of far-left positions. Most feel, as I do, that what we're up against in this country is mainly the ignorance that makes many straight people fear homosexuality and consider it a threat to American society.

For Vaid and Kushner, however, the enemy is American society itself, and the gay rights movement is principally a means of attacking its foundations. Uninterested in such bourgeois goals as gay marriage and military service, they agree with Donna Minkowitz, who in an appearance on Charlie Rose's show a couple of days before Stonewall 25, declared that "we don't want a place at the table - we want to turn the table over." That sentiment is as philosophically alien to most gays as it is to most straight people.

In his Nation piece Kushner wrote that he "expect[s] both hope and vision from [his] politics." Yes, utopian hope and vision. He admitted his utopianism, citing Oscar Wilde's remark that "a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at." But we've allowed ourselves to be guided for too long according to his map; it's time to replace it with a map of the real world. Kushner scorns gay people who, plotting their courses on such maps, patiently persevere in their attempt to change straight people's attitudes. "I am always suspicious," he complained, "of the glacier-paced patience of the right." Well, more and more gay people are impatient with the queer left's abiding fascination with aimless utopianism; we're impatient with models of activism that involve playing at revolution instead of focusing on the serious work of reform.

Kushner insisted that gay people require "a politics that goes beyond." Yes - beyond counterculture posturing and extreme ideological rhetoric. What we require is a politics that recognizes the real-world possibilities and limitations of politics - a realpolitik that stands a chance of effecting a genuine improvement in the lives of gay Americans, rather than a self-indulgent millenarianism full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in the New York Native, August 1994.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where is your Pride Issue column, Varnell?

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

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

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

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

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

"What does it say?" he asked suspiciously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I must have looked startled.

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

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

She smiled brightly.

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

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

A glimmer of an idea stole into my mind.

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

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

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

And I rushed off to my word processor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First appeared in National Review, January 24, 1994.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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