IGF CultureWatch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First appeared in Reason, January 1996.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First appeared in The Windy City Times July 20, 1995.

IN THE WAKE OF THE APRIL 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing, it was sometimes pointed out that a very similar ammonium nitrite bomb is used to destroy the FBI Washington headquarters in an obscure novel called The Turner Diaries by William Pierce.

By July 5, New York Times correspondent John Kifner had tracked down people who said chief suspect Timothy McVeigh was a fan of the book.

"He carried the book all the time," one gun collector told Kifner. "He sold it at [gun] shows. He'd have a few copies in the pockets of his cammies... They were supposed to be $10, but he'd sell them for $5. It was like he was looking for converts."

The Turner Diaries(1978) is an authoritarian, white supremacist, anti-Semitic novel in which Earl Turner, through a series of diary entries, records his work in helping the "Organization" --essentially a Nazi underground group. By bombing government buildings, and sabotaging businesses and utilities, the Organization foments civil disorder, seizes a stronghold in California and eventually takes over the country, exterminates minorities, and provides "wise and benevolent rule."

Almost lost among the denunciations of blacks and Jews are references to "gay bars, massage parlors, porn stalls, liquor stores, and similar capitalist ventures." In the same vein, Turner notes a rise in "sexual debauchery:" "the queers, the fetishists, the mixed-race couples, the sadists... are parading their perversions in public and the public is joining them."

It has generally gone unremarked that The Turner Diaries is Pierce's first novel. There is a second: Hunter, published in 1989. Hunter is a kind of preliminary or "prequel" to the first book showing how actions here and now could plausibly lead to the creation of the "Organization" and its revolution.

In Hunter, Oscar Yeager ("Yeager" is German for "hunter" or "rifleman"), a former combat pilot in Vietnam with a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado (Pierce himself has a Ph.D. from Colorado) finds himself revolted by the decay of modern society as exemplified by drug use, race mixing, and open homosexuality, and decides to become a vigilante, shooting interracial couples.

Eventually Yeager meets members of a group called the "National League" (Pierce's organization, which publishes his books, is called National Alliance) who educate him about the key role of Jews in the decay of civilization and destruction of the white race. At the end, the League goes underground and Yeager recommends destroying the economic infrastructure to foment civil disorder.

In a way, Hunter constitutes a kind of Old Testament to the Turner Diaries' New Testament. The OT is a history of the ancient Jews; Hunter is the history of a man being taught how Jews destroy civilization. The NT is about the founding of a new religion replacing Judaism; Turner Diaries is about the founding of a new regime with a literally religious attitude toward racial purity that overcomes both Judaism and Christianity.

The notion is not entirely fanciful. The OT has 39 books: Hunter has 39 chapters. The NT has 27 books. The Turner Diaries has 28 chapters, thus going one step beyond, or overcoming, Christianity.

However that may be, Hunter, published 11 years after The Turner Diaries, contains Pierce's updated thoughts and his response to recent social change. It is far more anti-gay than The Turner Diaries. Along with denunciations of Jews, blacks, "race traitors," and man-hating feminists, there are more than 20 hostile references to homosexuals, queers, fairies, fags, faggots, and sodomites.

Yeager is disgusted by "the open displays of homosexual behavior by an increasing number" of young people. "Queers" are said to have a "general antipathy toward the heterosexual world." Yeager's girlfriend shows a "natural revulsion" when "two obviously 'gay' men had swished into a restaurant where they were eating... and held hands as the perused the menus."

Yeager asks, "don't these fags realize all the hatred they're causing... Do they really think they can keep rubbing the average guy's nose in their filth indefinitely and there'll never be any payback?" Comes the reply from his mentor, "Gays are really not rational. They're a lot like Jews in some ways. They don't know when to stop pushing."

In one episode Yeager cheerfully agrees to kill Sen. Howard Carter, a powerful New England Republican who is a closet "homosexual and pederast."

Gaining entrance to the office, Yeager first kills the senator's Jewish legislative aide: "The knife slipped easily into Sheldon Schwartz' belly and Oscar ripped savagely upward with it, spilling the man's entrails on the carpet. The eviscerated Schwartz could utter no more than a long wheezing gasp as his knees buckled and he fell forward."

Coming to investigate, Carter sees Yeager with the knife, freezes with horror and exclaims, "Oh Shit!"

"'Yes, and that's all she wrote, faggot,' was Oscar's reply as he plunged the ten-inch blade into the center of Carter's chest."

In a later incident gay activists picket the publishers of a book called The Growing Threat of AIDS in America that urges universal HIV testing and quarantining of those infected. One day two demonstrators slosh allegedly infected blood on a female employee.

The next day the woman's husband drives up, shoots and kills some of the demonstrators while 30 New York policemen assigned to keep order do nothing to stop him. The police even order the demonstrators not to run away while the man stops to reload his gun.

Originally published July 11, 1995, in The Advocate.

Another Sunday in June, another bonanza for the religious right. To the gentle whir of Christian Broadcasting Network cameras, gay people in cities across America hold their annual Mardi Gras. In the middle of Main Street, men frolic in Speedos. Bare-chested women wave their fists. Activist leaders give speeches praising their audience's dedication, victimhood, and all-around fabulousness. Thousands dance from dusk till dawn. Then exhausted by having made such a strenuous contribution to the cause, the participants go their separate ways. And in the ensuing weeks and months, while they're absorbed in their lives and careers, money from underpaid Iowa farmhands and dirt-poor Arkansas pensioners helps finance the conversion of raw parade footage into slick videotapes efficiently designed to prop up the misperceptions that undergird continued inequality.

More than anything else, Gay Pride Month symbolizes for me the ineffectuality of our movement in comparison with the religious right. A few years ago that movement's leaders decided they didn't want to remain a marginal subculture but wished instead to become a respected part of the political mainstream and to wield real secular power. They've succeeded - in fact, they've convinced a lot of moderate Christians that extreme reactionary fundamentalists speak for them and are socially and culturally closer to them than are most gays.

How have they managed this? By talking to Americans consistently about shared ideals and values, while gay leaders have too often focused on differences. By identifying themselves with God, America, and family, while gay leaders have too often derided all three. Perhaps most ironically, these people who have little interest in or knowledge of Western Civilization have presented themselves as defenders thereof and have depicted gays as the greatest threat to it, while gay leaders - instead of reminding the world that homosexuals, of all groups, have made the most disproportionately large contributions to the great Western heritage of thought, art, literature - have too often responded by attacking Western civilization as being homophobic.

Although its power base is rural, the Christian Coalition has learned how to exploit modern media with remarkable sophistication. Meanwhile, although creative gay people crowd the fields of publicity, advertising, and every branch of showbiz, our big annual media moment is always a public-relations nightmare, reinforcing the deplorable notion that gay people, as a group, represent some kind of bizarre revolt against nature. This is, of course, the entire thrust of queer ideology; we call ourselves "queer," then wonder why the world continues to think of us as, well, queer - and why parents of gay kids can't deal with the idea of their kids' being (to borrow from the Microsoft World thesaurus) "odd, quaint, curious, eccentric, extraordinary, fantastic, freakish, peculiar, singular." Far from lending support to this damaging view, we should be helping heterosexuals to understand that what's natural to one individual isn't necessarily natural to another and that to affirm one's homosexual identity is not to defy nature but to embrace one's own true nature.

While we've got truth on our side - the truth that accepting one's emotional orientation is a socially positive act of honesty, wholeness and self-respect - the Christian Coalition has lies: the lie of "choice," of "recruitment," of homosexuality as an undisciplined, carnally obsessive rebellion against all good things and an emblem of cultural collapse. The success of Pat Robertson's supposedly scripture-based arguments against gay rights rests entirely on his constituents' ignorance about homosexuality and their crude understanding of biblical interpretation; the more Christians can be educated about both, the more they'll recognize the mendacity of Robertson's anti-gay assertions.

Yet even as Robertson and company spread their lies expertly through such vehicles as "The 700 Club," many of us maintain, perversely, that it's not worth the effort to confront those lies and to set plainly before straight America the truth about who we are. To the extent that we take this view, our society will remain one that defines gay men and lesbians largely in the terms of religious right propaganda and one that accordingly denies us equal rights and respect. Granted, there's a minority of pathological bigots whose hate will never be vanquished. But most of those who might well be written off as intractably rigid or zealous homophobes are in fact quite willing to hear what we have to say and are quite capable of changing their views once they've walked, as it were, in our shoes. I've met too many former homophobes who have become gay-rights supporters to reject the possibility of wide-scale social change on this front.

The more of this kind of activism we can accomplish, the more we'll deserve our annual party. Celebrations are great, you know, once you have won the war; our problem is that we're still in the thick of battle - a battle that will be won only through a disciplined, determined effort to counter the Christian Coalition's falsehoods with the truth about who we are. When that victory's achieved, I'll enjoy a gay-pride event as much as anybody.

Originally appeared June 15, 1995, in the Windy City Times.

We need constantly to remind ourselves that the chief opposition to gay equality is religious. In the here and now, that means primarily fundamentalist Protestantism and the Catholic hierarchy.

We may conduct much of our liberation efforts in the political sphere or even the "cultural" sphere, but always undergirding those and slowing our progress is the moral/religious sphere. If we could hasten the pace of change there, our overall progress would accelerate, in fact, would be assured.

In that light, it is fascinating to catch the Catholic church in mid-transition on an important moral issue that has some historical and doctrinal parallels to our own: anti-semitism.

No one can doubt that the New Testament contains anti-semitic passages and explicit condemnations of "the Jews." There are far more, and more specific, anti-Jewish references in the New Testament than there are anti-gay texts in the Old and New Testaments combined.

Perhaps the best known and most bizarre is in the gospel named for Matthew which says that when a crowd of Jews shouted to Pilate that he should crucify Jesus, they added gratuitously, "His blood be on us and on our children." Historically this is preposterous, but there it is "holy writ."

The gospel named for John is even more insistently and vehemently anti-semitic. A few examples: "And this was why the Jews persecuted Jesus." "This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him." "I know that you (Jews) are of your father the devil." "The Jews took up stones again to stone him." "The Jews assured him (Pilate), 'We have a law and by the law he ought to die.'" "They (Jews) cried out 'away with him, away with him, crucify him.'"

Other writings of the early church fathers are littered with condemnations of Jews, Jewish customs, Jewish beliefs. And the Christian hierarchy and its flock acted on that hostility for centuries through inquisitions, expropriations, displacements, slaughters, and pogroms, all coming to an appalling height in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

Hitler himself allegedly told a delegation of church leaders that he was merely putting into practice what the Christian churches had preached for nearly two thousand years.

Malcolm Hay's pioneering book, "The Foot of Pride: Europe and the Jews" is still a useful place to start in learning the full story.

But the moral revulsion against the Holocaust was so strong that many decent people felt a need to rethink the texts that appeared to lead to such a result. Watching them do so can help provide a model for how similar changes will come about on gay issues.

Last March 23 [1995], the Catholic archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, delivered a remarkable lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem called "Antisemism: the Historical Legacy and the Continuing Challenge for Christians."

The speech is a fascinating attempt to cope with and evade the fact of Christian anti-semitism and its roots in ancient Christian writings. Bernardin draws on historical research, modern Catholic teaching, and current Biblical interpretation, emphasizing the original contexts of the texts, all to de-emphasize their significance.

To begin with, Bernardin drives a wedge between the texts and their plain, literal meaning by asserting that "There are texts that remain open to anti-Judaic interpretation." He refers to "what many consider to be problematic New Testament texts," and he notes that "John" is "the most problematic of all New Testament books in its outlook toward the Jews and Judaism."

Later he goes further, saying that "it is not certain that any of these texts themselves can be legitimately termed antisemitic or even anti-Judaic...." Note the words that produce wriggle room: certain, themselves, legitimately.

Second, carefully citing church documents, he usually refers to "forms of racism, including anti-semitism" and calls anti-semitism "the most tragic form that racist ideology has assumed in our century."

But those documents are an attempt to exonerate the church for its religious persecution by pretending that the motivation was something other than the unwillingness of Jews to accept the central Christian doctrine-that Jesus was the messiah. Bernardin does go a bit further, acknowledging a theological element, but he cautiously downplays what he is doing. And he avoids writing of "Christian anti-semitism," preferring to speak of "antisemitism in a Christian context."

Third, Bernardin frankly says, "Retranslation ... and reinterpretation certainly are to be included among the goals we pursue in the effort at eradicating antisemitism."

We could call this the "Where there's a will, there's a way" school of Biblical interpretation. Nowhere else does Bernardin quite so openly acknowledge the moral impetus behind the effort to find other, more innocuous meanings for these texts.

Among the techniques of reinterpretation he suggests are emphasizing the limited original context and denying the general application of the texts. Another is attributing their form to "polemical" aims, that is, deliberate exaggeration or distortion. Elsewhere he flatly if tacitly denies that Jesus ever said that the Jews are "children of the devil." He does this by approvingly quoting a scholar who says the words are "an affirmation which is placed on the lips of Jesus." That is, "placed" illegitimately, by someone else.

Bernardin also argues that anti-semitism does not begin with Christianity. Since there were pre-existing anti-semitic influences, then anti-semitism was no necessary part of church doctrine, he asserts. So if anti-semitism became part of Christianity, then Christianity was also a victim rather than a perpetrator.

Bernardin comes close to saying just this when he quotes the Pope speaking of Catholic "acquiescence ... to intolerance and the weakness of so many of [the church's] sons and daughters who sullied her face." In other words, Catholicism was not guilty, only Catholics.

Two years ago, writing in "Theological Studies," John Noonan traced earlier Catholic doctrinal changes on marriage, slavery, religious freedom, and lending money at interest. Clearly the Catholic church is now changing on anti-semitism even as we watch.

So we know the Catholic church will find a way to change its position on homosexuality when it finally feels morally compelled to do so. Our task is to seize the moral high ground and press our moral case with gentle but relentless pressure.

Originally appeared June 11, 1995, in The Washington Post.

I AM GAY AND have been in the gay rights movement since I came out in 1981. I am also a conservative, a libertarian.

Sad to say, the gay rights movement has always been seen as being on the political left, as one more whining interest group claiming entitlement to all sorts of special treatment from the government. Or we are seen as having a simply fabulous time cavorting at Gay Pride parades and throwing condoms at Catholic services. Whether as crybabies or as Dionysian celebrants, we always appear outside the mainstream.

I cringe at both images. Most gay men and women do not go around demanding government favors or living a hedonistic "gay lifestyle." But just enough of us act out these images, or tolerate them, that they become real in the public mind. Middle America feels uncomfortable about this, at the very least. Our right-wing enemies love it, because it gives them someone to hate and someone to use as a foil for attracting mainstream support to their own causes. By accepting, and in some cases cultivating, these images, we lose friends and help our enemies.

As a conservative, I wish such images would evaporate. If there was ever a time when they made sense, on grounds of either truthfulness or usefulness, it ended when the Republicans took control of Congress. The waiting line for government benefits now leads nowhere, and public frolics now gain nothing but disapproval.

What can government give gays? Merely the form, not the substance, of what we need and want. What we are really after is not merely legal rights but acceptance into the mainstream of American life - and acceptance is granted or withheld by the mainstream majority at its pleasure. If we want to be accepted, we must be welcomed. Lord knows it's easier to change the votes of a few legislators than the hearts and minds of millions of our fellow citizens. But politicians are weathervanes, they are not the wind.

So we should end some of our present practices:

We should loudly reject all "compensatory" agendas: hiring quotas, affirmative action and group reparations - all of which I've heard advocated for "when we get our rights." The people who benefit most from such programs are the bureaucrats who administer them and the members of the "victim" groups with the best political connections.

We should stop pressing for "domestic partners" legislation. It creates a special class of rights for a small class of people. The real beneficiaries would be the lawyers who would litigate the differences and similarities between domestic partnership and marriage.

We should not hate Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and their allies. Leave the hating to them. They will eventually destroy themselves, as Joe McCarthy and other haters did.

We should stop feeling sorry for ourselves. We may be victims, but frankly no one cares. This country's wellsprings of liberal guilt began running dry about 20 years ago, and by now they are flat empty.

Finally, we should stop seeing AIDS as anybody else's problem. The sad fact is that every gay man who got AIDS by sex got it from another gay man, and by doing something he chose to do. People with AIDS deserve sympathy, but it is the sympathy one extends to a chain smoker who comes down with lung cancer. It is not the same kind of sympathy one feels for someone who was struck by lightning or run down by a drunk driver.

But that's enough on the negative side. What positive actions can we take?

For starters, each of us should come out whenever it is reasonably safe. The best way to explode the myths about us is for each of us to become known as just another human being with the same needs, goals and drives as other human beings - except in a single respect that poses no threat to anyone else.

Our legislative goal should be for civil rights legislation with disclaimers of any quotas, guidelines, reparations or government-imposed and group-based remedies. It should emphasize private lawsuits for damages rather than enforcement by a bureaucracy.

In the legislatures, we should also lobby for the right to marry. Domestic-partners legislation makes us an officially sanctioned class of oddities and freaks. By seeking marriage, we demonstrate our wish to be part of the great American middle-class way of life.

Among ourselves, we must be willing to talk about morals, to impose them on ourselves and to do so conspicuously. As long as our primary image is one of gleeful promiscuity - an image promoted not only by our enemies but also by our own magazines and our own bars - we will be ostracized. Until we start imposing honesty, fidelity and emotion on our lives - in other words, until we are willing to talk about moral standards - we will make little real progress in social acceptance.

In a curious way, AIDS itself may be helping us find social acceptance. This terrible disease has brought to a screeching halt - at least in my generation of gay men - the manic boozing, drugging and screwing of the '70s and '80s. It has forced us to attend more to friendships, stability and the consequences of our actions. It has opened us to human suffering; one friend told me that caring for someone with AIDS was the first unselfish thing he had done in his adult life. AIDS has enabled us to show, to ourselves and to the mainstream, that we too are capable of great suffering, compassion, work and sacrifice. By our work with each other, we have shown mainstream society what we have to offer it, and how much it loses and wastes by excluding us.

The common theme of all this is simply facing the facts, working to bring out the best in ourselves and offering something admirable to the mainstream. All these views put me in odd company politically. But if you had to agree about everything with everyone else in an organization before you could join it, we'd have 260 million political parties in this country.

Conservatives are the people I happen to agree with most of the time. At least they are attempting to deal with the moral issues of our time (such as welfare dependency and violence) on a moral plane, and not as something for which the only remedy is another government program and more spending.

After I come out to them, I find that most conservatives are perfectly tolerant (and not as cloyingly condescending as my liberal straight friends). The Helmses and Robertsons are in the minority. And it eventually dawns on the conservatives that if they want to keep the support of gays like me, they had better keep at least a distance between themselves and the haters.

Finally, moving in conservative circles permits me to ask my conservative friends where this country would be without those great gays - Whittaker Chambers, J. Edgar Hoover, Walt Whitman and Cardinal Spellman. It's a polite way to remind them that we have been in their midst and doing good deeds from the beginning.

My liberal friends tend to employ three styles of attack on my views. The first is ad hominem: How can you talk about morality when we all know that once you did this or that randy deed? My answer is that a) the fact that your first response is to attack the messenger (me) shows that you can't repel the message; and b) I had my adolescence like everyone else, and it's over.

My liberal friends' second attack is some variation on "Do you mean that you're against all attempts to right the wrongs that have been done to us?" My answer is that I am as much in favor of basic civil rights for gays as they are. Where we differ is in the need for group-based remedies and in perceiving ourselves as victims whose main recourse should be coercion by the government.

The third attack from my liberal friends is usually some form of "Well, you have a good point, but..." At that, I know I've made some progress.

I have a feeling there are many more conservative gays than there seem to be. The time is ripe for us to leave the plantation of liberal government and start acting like what we are - a group of adults who want to live lives as normal and as healthy as everyone else in the mainstream. If we do, I think we will be on the path to my dream - an America in which being gay is no more remarkable than being left-handed.

Originally appeared in The Advocate, May 16, 1995, and was reprinted in the collection Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy (Free Press, 1996).

GAY CULTURE. We hear - and use - the phrase all the time, but what does it mean? Well, if we're talking about gay men, it can mean camp. It can mean Streisand, "Dynasty," Madonna. Some months ago a guest Advocate columnist raised the issue of whether the shared interest of many gay men in such cultural phenomena is innate. A straight friend of his had claimed that the gay-icon status of a Judy Garland, say, was simply the consequences of gay men taking their cues from other gay men. The writer of the piece demurred, insisting that gay boys feel strongly drawn to certain things at a very young age.

I agree. To be sure, not all gay men respond powerfully to the same stuff. I never cared for "Dynasty," for example, nor am I a big opera fan. But I do find myself watching Mildred Pierce, Mommie Dearest, and Auntie Mame virtually every time they're on TV, and I enjoy them out of all proportion to their objective merits. The same goes for the British sitcom "Absolutely Fabulous"; not till weeks after I fell for it did I discover that it was a nationwide gay favorite.

Obviously these tastes have something to do with my being a gay man. But what, exactly? For every canonical gay taste I share, there are ten I don't. In any event, I don't think such tastes are a direct consequence of my homosexuality. Would Alexander the Great have loved Auntie Mame? Would Richard the Lion-Hearted have become addicted to "Ab Fab"? When a ten-year-old gay kid finds himself drawn to such phenomena, I suspect, it's not because of a genetic link between sexual orientation and cultural tastes, but because some complex conjunction between his as-yet-unarticulated awareness of his own differentness and society's signals to him about emotional orientation, sexual identity, and gender roles.

There's a distinction, of course, between "Ab Fab" and gay culture as it's understood by people who give prizes for "gay books" and such. But the dividing line isn't clear. Must a "gay movie" be written and directed by gays? Does a "lesbian novel" require a lesbian author, a lesbian protagonist? This question has plagued the Lambda Literary Awards - and to my mind has underscored the difficulty inherent in the whole notion of "gay culture" as something distinct from "straight culture."

On the one hand, I can understand the desire to honor art works that profitably ponder the meaning of gayness. On the other hand, I'm wary about the ghettoizing of gay culture. I'm also uncomfortable with the argument that gay people must "support gay culture." What can this mean? At best it's empty political rhetoric; at worst it's an insistence that we must embrace every novel, play, or movie produced by gay people whether or not we actually like it. This is totalitarianism, pure and simple.

It's also confining, for there's no part of the cultural landscape without a gay element. Even if gays constitute as much as fifteen percent of the population, the gay contribution to Western art, architecture, music, and literature far exceeds what it should be statistically. If you accept the right-wing claim that only one in a hundred people is gay, then the gay contribution is truly extraordinary. Think about it: A group comprising one percent of the population producing Erasmus, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Marlowe, Bacon, Hölderlin, Hans Christian Andersen, Tchaikovsky, Proust ... the list goes on and on to include three of the four major nineteenth-century American novelists, one (perhaps both) of the two great nineteenth-century American poets, and two of the three most noted mid-twentieth-century American dramatists.

The immensity of the debt that Western civilization owes to gay and lesbian genius is pretty ironic, given that homosexuality is often described as a threat to Western civilization by those strangest of allies, the culturally philistine religious right and neo-conservative intellectuals. Especially ironic is the case of Allan Bloom the late author of The Closing of the American Mind. That 1987 best-seller, which defended the traditional literary canon against multiculturalism, became the neocon bible, a key text in the so-called culture wars. As those wars wore on the neocons began to mimic the rhetoric of the religious right, bizarrely linking the decline of American art, culture, and higher education to a deterioration of "family values," which in turn was blamed mostly on increasing acceptance of gays. Gays, then, were Western civilization's worst enemies - and Bloom its most ardent defender.

Yet what few readers knew was the Bloom (who died in 1992) was gay. His allies knew but that didn't keep them from bashing gays in print. Years ago, at a social occasion, a leading neocon was overheard saying to an associate, "Isn't it a shame about Allan Bloom?" He meant, of course, "Isn't it a shame that he's gay?" In fact the real shame was that neocons saw no moral difficulty in celebrating Bloom while vilifying gays generally - and that Bloom, for his part, never publicly confronted them with the fact that Western civilization, far from being threatened by homosexuality, is to a staggeringly disproportionate degree the creation of gay men and women.

"Do you want to protect your children from gay influence?" I imagine him writing. "Very well. Destroy the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, silence Messiah and Swan Lake, and burn Moby Dick and The Portrait of a Lady. Gay culture is all around you - and it belongs to everybody."

NEW YORK'S NEW GOVERNOR, George Pataki, plans to reverse Mario Cuomo's policy of granting health benefits to the domestic partners of all unmarried state employees. Mr. Pataki is part of a rising political tide that includes Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who said in vetoing his state's domestic partnership bill that "government policy ought not to discount marriage by offering a substitute relationship that demands much less." That's legitimate, but it overlooks that there are two kinds of domestic partnerships -- heterosexual and same-sex. Although the most vocal opposition to domestic partnerships is aimed at gay couples, giving them benefits doesn't undermine marriage. Rather, it remedies the injustice that homosexuals can't marry the people with whom they share their lives, and it creates financial incentives for stable relationships. Is this not the goal we seek in encouraging marriage?

Giving domestic partnership benefits to unmarried heterosexual couples, on the other hand, does undermine marriage. They give people who can marry all the financial benefits of a legal union without demanding commitment. "If two heterosexuals are going to shack up together, then they ought to get married," said the Rev. Charles Bullock, who fought successfully to overturn a partnership law in Austin. "If they're not going to make that commitment to each other, why should the city?"

Although the voters' shift to the right in 1994 has imperiled domestic partnership laws, the trend toward giving benefits remains strong in the workplace -- most recently at Microsoft, Time Inc., and Capital Cities/ABC. Even Coors, perhaps America's most famously conservative company, is studying the issue.

But many politicians, upset by rising illegitimacy and divorce rates, say that such policies fly in the face of concern about family stability. As Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said in seeking to overturn the District of Columbia's domestic partnership law, "We must begin to take a stand for the family." Gay leaders haven't helped themselves in this debate. They invariably urge that heterosexual couples be included in legislation and corporate policies. Many have even denounced the traditional family as a stifling, patriarchal institution, thereby fueling a middle-class backlash.

Gay leaders would be better off making a pro-family case, playing up their commitment to their partners and their desire for a legal union. This argument has found sympathy in the private sector. In 1992 Stanford University extended benefits to domestic partners of homosexuals (but not heterosexuals) because "their commitment to the partnership is analogous to that involved in contemporary marriage," said Barbara Butterfield, a university vice president.

Governments invariably get this wrong, while businesses usually get it right. Every city that has adopted domestic partnership laws has included both same-sex and heterosexual couples, and in almost every case more heterosexuals than homosexuals have filed for partnership status.

But many private organizations-including Stanford, Montefiore Medical Center, Lotus Development Corporation and the Public Broadcasting Service -- have extended benefits only to same-sex couples. Most of these companies have said that if homosexual couples are allowed to legally marry, these policies would be ended -- which is as it should be.

"This policy discriminates against heterosexuals who choose not to marry," an embittered heterosexual employee at Lotus said. Exactly. And that's a point that Governor Pataki and sensible gay activists ought to be able to agree on: commitment should be encouraged, while relationships without commitment should not expect social recognition or financial benefits.

Originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal November 29, 1994.

IF YOU LISTEN CAREFULLY, you can hear the sound of a taboo cracking. In September, William Bennett told the Christian Coalition: "In terms of damage to the children of America, you cannot compare what the homosexual movement has done to what divorce has done. It is not even close." Last month, when Rep. Steve Gunderson (R., Wis.) publicly came out of the closet, Rep. Newt Gingrich pronounced the matter of no political importance. Then this month, The Washington Blade quoted Mr. Gingrich as saying that the GOP's stance on homosexuality "should be toleration."

Maybe Republicans are ready, at last, to decouple the debate about family from the obsession with homosexuality. They now have the chance to build pro-family policies that embrace all responsible Americans, homosexual and heterosexual alike. In pleading for those policies I address myself to Republicans not because I am one (I'm not) but because Republicans are uniquely positioned to build a stable, principled and humane position between the politics of intolerance and the politics of radicalism. And if they let the moment slip by, the cost to society may be steep - as we have seen once before.

During the debate on race in the 1960s, Republicans stood on the sidelines and on occasion pandered to racist whites. "We Republicans had a great history, and we turned it aside," Jack Kemp wrote in 1993.

Republicans could have constructed stable, principled ground between the politics of white backlash and of affirmative action. They could have severed the cause of color-blindness from the taint of white bigotry. Instead, racial policies tumbled into the morass of color tests, race-norming and ethnic entitlements - policies that exacerbate and institutionalize racial tensions. All Americans, black and white, suffer as a result.

Now another historic window opens. This time the issue is homosexuality and the family. At a stroke, the pro-family movement could enlarge its tent, disarm the charge that "family values" means intolerance and, most important, bolster the family itself.

To recognize this opportunity, pro-family advocates must first acknowledge reality. To wit: Homosexuals exist and are not going away. Any policy insisting that homosexuals lead lives of loveless celibacy or furtive secrecy is futile and inhumane, to say nothing of unrealistic. Because fewer and fewer homosexuals are willing to hide, the old deal - homosexuals pretending to be heterosexual and heterosexuals pretending to believe them - is off.

"That may be," say anti-gay activists, "but homosexuality is a threat to the family." But this is a canard. Divorce, illegitimacy and infidelity are the enemies of the family. Homosexuality is a peculiar and rare human trait that affects only a small percentage of the population and is of little inherent interest to the rest. To see it as a threat to the family, you need to believe that millions of heterosexual Americans will turn gay if not actively restrained - an absurd notion. And it is perfectly possible to venerate the traditional family without despising those who are, for whatever reason, unable to have one.

Yet two claims made by anti-gay activists are true. Many activists on the gay (and nongay) left are hostile to traditional institutions in general and the family in particular. And the American family is in trouble. Half of all new marriages end in divorce; 30% of children are born out of wedlock and a fourth live in fatherless homes. Sexual license has had dire consequences - illegitimacy, child abandonment, child poverty and more.

Those facts underpin all of the country's most serious problems. But they have nothing to do with homosexuality. Whatever one may think of gay people's sexual practices, they do not produce illegitimate children or account for more than a tiny fraction of divorces. Conversely, condemning homosexuality does no good for the beleaguered family. Indeed, anti-gay rhetoric is today an obstacle to dealing squarely with the crisis of the family, on both sides of the debate.

On the one side, blaming homosexuals for the decline of the family leads the family's friends to avoid the real issues. It fools them into believing they are talking about saving the family when in fact they are merely talking about hammering homosexuals. David Boaz of the Cato Institute recently counted reports and articles by "pro-family" groups and discovered that they devoted obsessive attention to homosexuality while virtually ignoring divorce. This is pro-family?

In the other side, blaming homosexuals for the decline of the family also allows the enemies of the family to avoid the real issues. Instead of confronting the real problems, they can point to the ugly rhetoric of anti-gay activists and say: "See what `family values' really means? It means beating up on people who are different and snooping in our bedrooms." (In just that same way, advocates of ethnic entitlements have been able to point to racists and say, "See what `colorblind' really means?")

In recent years an alternative has emerged, a principled, pro-family but not anti-gay position:

"No," family advocates might say, "we are not anti-gay. We are pro-responsibility. We welcome open homosexuals who play by the rules of monogamy, fidelity and responsibility. And we frown upon heterosexuals and homosexuals who do not play by those rules.

"We believe that marriage and fidelity are crucial social institutions that channel lust into love and caprice into commitment. We believe faithful relationships are not only good for children but help keep men settled and help keep the burdens of caring for one another off society's shoulders. And we support extending these norms to all Americans, gay and straight.

"We do not insist that homosexuals `change,' which is impossible, or that they live lives of lovelessness and despair; we do ask that they - and heterosexual Americans - settle down into patterns of responsibility. We believe in the genuine universality of family values. We embrace all who embrace those values, without regard to sexual orientation."

Here is a fully consistent and staunchly pro-family position, one whose benefits are manifold. It elevates family values to genuine universality. It separates the real issue (responsibility vs. license) from the phony one (straight vs. gay). It hurts radical activists by putting them in the position of arguing for license rather than for toleration of minorities.

This paradigm opposes partner benefits for unmarried heterosexuals, who should get married if they want the benefits of marriage. But it may accept partner benefits for homosexuals, who can't get married but should be encouraged to settle down. It holds that the two-parent family is special and should be favored by public policy - not at the expense of homosexuals per se, but at the expense of single people (including homosexuals) and childless couples (again including homosexuals).

This view doesn't require family advocates to like homosexuality, but it does require them to accept the importance of settled relationships for homosexuals. No easy sell, perhaps, but consider the alternative. More non-fringe, non-radical homosexuals emerge into public view every day. As the stereotype of the homosexual as antisocial deviant crumbles, a party or faction that tolerates gay-baiting rhetoric in the name of "family values" makes "family values" look more and more like common bigotry.

That would be tragic, since there is no problem more urgent than shoring up the family. But as long as family advocates imply that it is better to be an adulterous or licentious heterosexual than a faithful and monogamous homosexual, the chance to rescue the pro-family position from the taint of intolerance goes unclaimed.