IGF CultureWatch

Originally appeared November 28, 1994, in The New Republic.

In everyone here sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have been had they been loved.
That nothing cures.
- Philip Larkin, "Faith Healing"

I can remember the first time what, for the sake of argument, I will call my sexuality came into conflict with what, for the sake of argument, I will call my faith. It was time for Communion in my local parish church, Our Lady and St. Peter's, a small but dignified building crammed between an Indian restaurant and a stationery shop, opposite a public restroom, on the main street of a smallish town south of London called East Grinstead. I must have been around 15 or so. Every time I received Communion, I attempted, following my mother's instructions, to offer up the sacrament for some current problem or need: my mother's health, an upcoming exam, the starving in Bangladesh or whatever. Most of these requests had to do with either something abstract and distant, like a cure for cancer, or something extremely tangible, like a better part in the school play. Like much else in my faith-life, they were routine and yet not completely drained of sincerity. But rarely did they address something that could unsettle the comfort of my precocious adolescence. This time, however, as I filed up to the Communion rail to face mild-mannered Father Simmons for the umpteenth time, something else intervened. Please, I remember asking almost offhandedly of God, after a quick recital of my other failings, help me with that.

I didn't have a name for it, since it was, to all intents and purposes, nameless. I don't think I'd ever heard it mentioned at home, except once when my mother referred to someone who had behaved inappropriately on my father's town rugby team. (He had been dealt with, she reported darkly.) At high school, the subject was everywhere and nowhere: at the root of countless jokes but never actualized as something that could affect anyone we knew. But this ubiquity and abstraction brought home the most important point: uniquely among failings, homosexuality was so abominable it could not even be mentioned. The occasions when it was actually discussed were so rare that they stand out even now in my mind: our Latin teacher's stating that homosexuality was obviously wrong since it meant "sticking your dick in the wrong hole"; the graffiti in the public restroom in Reigate High Street: "My mother made me a homosexual," followed closely by, "If I gave her the wool, would she make me one too?" Although my friends and family never stinted in pointing out other faults on my part, this, I knew, would never be confronted. So when it emerged as an irresistible fact of my existence, and when it first seeped into my life of dutiful prayer and worship, it could be referred to only in the inarticulate void of that Sunday evening before Communion.

From the beginning, however - and this is something many outside the Church can find hard to understand - my sexuality was part of my faith-life, not a revolt against it. Looking back, I realize that that moment at the Communion rail was the first time I had actually addressed the subject of homosexuality explicitly in front of anyone; and I had brought it to God in the moments before the most intimate act of sacramental Communion. Because it was something I was deeply ashamed of, I felt obliged to confront it; but because it was also something inextricable - even then - from the core of my existence, it felt natural to enlist God's help rather than his judgment in grappling with it. There was, of course, considerable tension in this balance of alliance and rejection; but there was also something quite natural about it, an accurate reflection of anyone's compromised relationship with what he or she hazards to be the divine.

To the outsider, faith often seems a kind of cataclysmic intervention, a Damascene moment of revelation and transformation, and no doubt, for a graced few, this is indeed the experience. But this view of faith is often, it seems to me, a way to salve the unease of a faithless life by constructing the alternative as something so alien to actual experience that it is safely beyond reach. Faith for me has never been like that. The moments of genuine intervention and spiritual clarity have been minuscule in number and, when they have occurred, hard to discern and harder still to understand. In the midst of this uncertainty, the sacraments, especially that of Communion, have always been for me the only truly reliable elements of direction, concrete instantiations of another order. Which is why, perhaps, it was at Communion that the subject reared its confusing, shaming presence.

The two experiences came together in other ways, too. Like faith, one's sexuality is not simply a choice; it informs a whole way of being. But like faith, it involves choices - the choice to affirm or deny a central part of one's being, the choice to live a life that does not deny but confronts reality. It is, like faith, mysterious, emerging clearly one day, only to disappear the next, taking different forms - of passion, of lust, of intimacy, of fear. And like faith, it points toward something other and more powerful than the self. The physical communion with the other in sexual life hints at the same kind of transcendence as the physical Communion with the Other that lies at the heart of the sacramental Catholic vision.

So when I came to be asked, later in life, how I could be gay and Catholic, I could answer only that I simply was. What to others appeared a simple contradiction was, in reality, the existence of these two connected, yet sometimes parallel, experiences of the world. It was not that my sexuality was involuntary and my faith chosen and that therefore my sexuality posed a problem for my faith; nor was it that my faith was involuntary and my sexuality chosen so that my faith posed a problem for my sexuality. It was that both were chosen and unchosen continuously throughout my life, as parts of the same search for something larger. As I grew older, they became part of me, inseparable from my understanding of myself. My faith existed at the foundation of how I saw the world; my sexuality grew to be inseparable from how I felt the world.

I am aware that this formulation of the problem is theologically flawed. Faith, after all, is not a sensibility; in the Catholic sense, it is a statement about reality that cannot be negated by experience. And there is little doubt about what the authority of the Church teaches about the sexual expression of a homosexual orientation. But this was not how the problem first presented itself. The immediate difficulty was not how to make what I did conform with what the Church taught me (until my early 20s, I did very little that could be deemed objectively sinful with regard to sex), but how to make who I was conform with what the Church taught me. This was a much more difficult proposition. It did not conform to a simple contradiction between self and God, as that afternoon in the Communion line attested. It entailed trying to understand how my adolescent crushes and passions, my longings for human contact, my stumbling attempts to relate love to life, could be so inimical to the Gospel of Christ and His Church, how they could be so unmentionable among people I loved and trusted.

So I resorted to what many young homosexuals and lesbians resort to. I found a way to expunge love from life, to construct a trajectory that could somehow explain this absence, and to hope that what seemed so natural and overwhelming could somehow be dealt with. I studied hard to explain away my refusal to socialize; I developed intense intellectual friendships that bordered on the emotional, but I kept them restrained in a carapace of artificiality to prevent passion from breaking out. I adhered to a hopelessly pessimistic view of the world, which could explain my refusal to take part in life's pleasures, and to rationalize the dark and deep depressions that periodically overwhelmed me.

No doubt some of this behavior was part of any teenager's panic at the prospect of adulthood. But looking back, it seems unlikely that this pattern had nothing whatsoever to do with my being gay. It had another twist: it sparked an intense religiosity that could provide me with the spiritual resources I needed to fortify my barren emotional life. So my sexuality and my faith entered into a dialectic: my faith propelled me away from my emotional and sexual longing, and the deprivation that this created required me to resort even more dogmatically to my faith. And as my faith had to find increasing power to restrain the hormonal and emotional turbulence of adolescence, it had to take on a caricatured shape, aloof and dogmatic, ritualistic and awesome. As time passed, a theological austerity became the essential complement to an emotional emptiness. And as the emptiness deepened, the austerity sharpened.

In a remarkable document titled "Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics," issued by the Vatican in 1975, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made the following statement regarding the vexed issue of homosexuality: "A distinction is drawn, and it seems with some reason, between homosexuals whose tendency comes from a false education, from a lack of normal sexual development, from habit, from bad example, or from other similar causes, and is transitory or at least not incurable; and homosexuals who are definitively such because of some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged to be incurable."

The Church was responding, it seems, to the growing sociological and psychological evidence that, for a small minority of people, homosexuality is unchosen and unalterable. In the context of a broad declaration on a whole range of sexual ethics, this statement was something of a minor digression (twice as much space was devoted to the "grave moral disorder" of masturbation); and it certainly didn't mean a liberalization of doctrine about the morality of homosexual acts, which were "intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of."

Still, the concession complicated things. Before 1975 the modern Church, when it didn't ignore the matter, had held a coherent view of the morality of homosexual acts. It maintained that homosexuals, as the modern world had come to define them, didn't really exist; rather, everyone was essentially a heterosexual and homosexual acts were acts chosen by heterosexuals, out of depravity, curiosity, impulse, predisposition or bad moral guidance. Such acts were an abuse of the essential heterosexual orientation of all humanity; they were condemned because they failed to link sexual activity with a binding commitment between a man and a woman in a marriage, a marriage that was permanently open to the possibility of begetting children. Homosexual sex was condemned in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons as premarital heterosexual sex, adultery or contracepted sex: it failed to provide the essential conjugal and procreative context for sexual relations. The reasoning behind this argument rested on natural law. Natural law teaching, drawing on Aristotelian and Thomist tradition, argued that the sexual nature of man was naturally linked to both emotional fidelity and procreation so that, outside of this context, sex was essentially destructive of the potential for human flourishing: "the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love," as the encyclical Gaudium et Spes put it. But suddenly, a new twist had been made to this argument. There was, it seems, in nature, a group of people who were "definitively" predisposed to violation of this natural law; their condition was "innate" and "incurable." Insofar as it was innate - literally innatus or "inborn" - this condition was morally neutral, since anything involuntary could not be moral or immoral; it simply was. But always and everywhere, the activity to which this condition led was "intrinsically disordered and [could] in no case be approved of." In other words, something fundamentally in nature always and everywhere violated a vital part of the nature of human beings; something essentially blameless was always and everywhere blameworthy if acted upon.

The paradox of this doctrine was evident even within its first, brief articulation. Immediately before stating the intrinsic disorder of homosexuality, the text averred that in "the pastoral field, these homosexuals must certainly be treated with understanding and sustained in the hope of overcoming their personal difficulties. ... Their culpability will be judged with prudence." This compassion for the peculiar plight of the homosexual was then elaborated: "This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it. ..." Throughout, there are alternating moments of alarm and quiescence; tolerance and panic; categorical statement and prudential doubt.

It was therefore perhaps unsurprising that, within a decade, the Church felt it necessary to take up the matter again. The problem could have been resolved by a simple reversion to the old position, the position maintained by fundamentalist Protestant churches: that homosexuality was a hideous, yet curable, affliction of heterosexuals. But the Church doggedly refused to budge from its assertion of the natural occurrence of constitutive homosexuals - or from its compassion for and sensitivity to their plight. In Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's 1986 letter, "On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," this theme is actually deepened, beginning with the title.

To non-Catholics, the use of the term "homosexual person" might seem a banality. But the term "person" constitutes in Catholic moral teaching a profound statement about the individual's humanity, dignity and worth; it invokes a whole range of rights and needs; it reflects the recognition by the Church that a homosexual person deserves exactly the same concern and compassion as a heterosexual person, having all the rights of a human being, and all the value, in the eyes of God. This idea was implicit in the 1975 declaration, but was never advocated. Then there it was, eleven years later, embedded in Ratzinger's very title. Throughout his text, homosexuality, far from being something unmentionable or disgusting, is discussed with candor and subtlety. It is worthy of close attention: "[T]he phenomenon of homosexuality, complex as it is and with its many consequences for society and ecclesial life, is a proper focus for the Church's pastoral care. It thus requires of her ministers attentive study, active concern and honest, theologically well-balanced counsel." And here is Ratzinger on the moral dimensions of the unchosen nature of homosexuality: "[T]he particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin." Moreover, homosexual persons, he asserts, are "often generous and giving of themselves." Then, in a stunning passage of concession, he marshals the Church's usual arguments in defense of human dignity in order to defend homosexual dignity:

It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.

Elsewhere, Ratzinger refers to the homosexual's "God-given dignity and worth"; condemns the view that homosexuals are totally compulsive as a "demeaning assumption"; and argues that "the human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation."

Why are these statements stunning? Because they reveal how far the Church had, by the mid-1980s, absorbed the common sense of the earlier document's teaching on the involuntariness of homosexuality, and had had the courage to reach its logical conclusion. In Ratzinger's letter, the Church stood foursquare against bigotry, against demeaning homosexuals either by anti-gay slander or violence or by pro-gay attempts to reduce human beings to one aspect of their personhood. By denying that homosexual activity was totally compulsive, the Church could open the door to an entire world of moral discussion about ethical and unethical homosexual behavior, rather than simply dismissing it all as pathological. What in 1975 had been "a pathological constitution judged to be incurable" was, eleven years later, a "homosexual person," "made in the image and likeness of God."

But this defense of the homosexual person was only half the story. The other half was that, at the same time, the Church strengthened its condemnation of any and all homosexual activity. By 1986 the teachings condemning homosexual acts were far more categorical than they had been before. Ratzinger had guided the Church into two simultaneous and opposite directions: a deeper respect for homosexuals, and a sterner rejection of almost anything they might do.

At the beginning of the 1986 document, Ratzinger bravely confronted the central paradox: "In the discussion which followed the publication of the [1975] declaration ... an overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral or even good. Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." Elsewhere, he reiterated the biblical and natural law arguments against homosexual relations. Avoiding the problematic nature of the Old Testament's disavowal of homosexual acts (since these are treated in the context of such "abominations" as eating pork and having intercourse during menstruation, which the Church today regards with equanimity), Ratzinger focused on St. Paul's admonitions against homosexuality: "Instead of the original harmony between Creator and creatures, the acute distortion of idolatry has led to all kinds of moral excess. Paul is at a loss to find a clearer example of this disharmony than homosexual relations." There was also the simple natural-law argument: "It is only in the marital relationship that the use of the sexual faculty can be morally good. A person engaging in homosexual behavior therefore acts immorally." The point about procreation was strengthened by an argument about the natural, "complementary union able to transmit life," which is heterosexual marriage. The fact that homosexual sex cannot be a part of this union means that it "thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living." Thus "homosexual activity" is inherently "self-indulgent." "Homosexual activity," Ratzinger's document claimed in a veiled and ugly reference to HIV, is a "form of life which constantly threatens to destroy" homosexual persons.

This is some armory of argument. The barrage of statements directed against "homosexual activity," which Ratzinger associates in this document exclusively with genital sex, is all the more remarkable because it occurs in a document that has otherwise gone further than might have been thought imaginable in accepting homosexuals into the heart of the Church and of humanity. Ratzinger's letter was asking us, it seems, to love the sinner more deeply than ever before, but to hate the sin even more passionately. This is a demand with which most Catholic homosexuals have at some time or other engaged in anguished combat.

It is also a demand that raises the central question of the two documents and, indeed, of any Catholic homosexual life: How intelligible is the Church's theological and moral position on the blamelessness of homosexuality and the moral depravity of homosexual acts? This question is the one I wrestled with in my early 20s, as the increasing aridity of my emotional life began to conflict with the possibility of my living a moral life. The distinction made some kind of sense in theory; but in practice, the command to love oneself as a person of human dignity yet hate the core longings that could make one emotionally whole demanded a sense of detachment or a sense of cynicism that seemed inimical to the Christian life. To deny lust was one thing; to deny love was another. And to deny love in the context of Christian doctrine seemed particularly perverse. Which begged a prior question: Could the paradoxes of the Church's position reflect a deeper incoherence at their core?

One way of tackling the question is to look for useful analogies to the moral paradox of the homosexual. Greed, for example, might be said to be an innate characteristic of human beings, which, in practice, is always bad. But the analogy falls apart immediately. Greed is itself evil; it is prideful, a part of Original Sin. It is not, like homosexuality, a blameless natural condition that inevitably leads to what are understood as immoral acts. Moreover, there is no subgroup of innately greedy people, nor a majority of people in which greed never occurs. Nor are the greedy to be treated with respect. There is no paradox here, and no particular moral conundrum.

Aquinas suggests a way around this problem. He posits that some things that occur in nature may be in accordance with an individual's nature, but somehow against human nature in general: "for it sometimes happens that one of the principles which is natural to the species as a whole has broken down in one of its individual members; the result can be that something which runs counter to the nature of the species as a whole, happens to be in harmony with nature for a particular individual: as it becomes natural for a vessel of water which has been heated to give out heat." Forget, for a moment, the odd view that somehow it is more "natural" for a vessel to exist at one temperature than another. The fundamental point here is that there are natural urges in a particular person that may run counter to the nature of the species as a whole. The context of this argument is a discussion of pleasure: How is it, if we are to trust nature (as Aquinas and the Church say we must), that some natural pleasures in some people are still counter to human nature as a whole? Aquinas's only response is to call such events functions of sickness, what the modern Church calls "objective disorder." But here, too, the analogies he provides are revealing: they are bestiality and cannibalism. Aquinas understands each of these activities as an emanation of a predilection that seems to occur more naturally in some than in others. But this only reveals some of the special problems of lumping homosexuality in with other "disorders." Even Aquinas's modern disciples (and, as we've seen, the Church) concede that involuntary orientation to the same gender does not spring from the same impulses as cannibalism or bestiality. Or indeed that cannibalism is ever a "natural" pleasure in the first place, in the way that, for some bizarre reason, homosexuality is.

What, though, of Aquinas's better argument - that a predisposition to homosexual acts is a mental or physical illness that is itself morally neutral, but always predisposes people to inherently culpable acts? Here, again, it is hard to think of a precise analogy. Down syndrome, for example, occurs in a minority and is itself morally neutral; but when it leads to an immoral act, such as, say, a temper tantrum directed at a loving parent, the Church is loath to judge that person as guilty of choosing to break a commandment. The condition excuses the action. Or, take epilepsy: if an epileptic person has a seizure that injures another human being, she is not regarded as morally responsible for her actions, insofar as they were caused by epilepsy. There is no paradox here either, but for a different reason: with greed, the condition itself is blameworthy; with epilepsy, the injurious act is blameless.

Another analogy can be drawn. What of something like alcoholism? This is a blameless condition, as science and psychology have shown. Some people have a predisposition to it; others do not. Moreover, this predisposition is linked, as homosexuality is, to a particular act. For those with a predisposition to alcoholism, having a drink might be morally disordered, destructive to the human body and spirit. So, alcoholics, like homosexuals, should be welcomed into the Church, but only if they renounce the activity their condition implies.

Unfortunately, even this analogy will not hold. For one thing, drinking is immoral only for alcoholics. Moderate drinking is perfectly acceptable, according to the Church, for non-alcoholics. On the issue of homosexuality, to follow the analogy, the Church would have to say that sex between people of the same gender would be - in moderation - fine for heterosexuals but not for homosexuals. In fact, of course, the Church teaches the opposite, arguing that the culpability of homosexuals engaged in sexual acts should be judged with prudence - and less harshly - than the culpability of heterosexuals who engage in "perversion."

But the analogy to alcoholism points to a deeper problem. Alcoholism does not ultimately work as an analogy because it does not reach to the core of the human condition in the way that homosexuality, following the logic of the Church's arguments, does. If alcoholism is overcome by a renunciation of alcoholic acts, then recovery allows the human being to realize his or her full potential, a part of which, according to the Church, is the supreme act of self-giving in a life of matrimonial love. But if homosexuality is overcome by a renunciation of homosexual emotional and sexual union, the opposite is achieved: The human being is liberated into sacrifice and pain, barred from the matrimonial love that the Church holds to be intrinsic, for most people, to the state of human flourishing. Homosexuality is a structural condition that restricts the human being, even if homosexual acts are renounced, to a less than fully realized life. In other words, the gay or lesbian person is deemed disordered at a far deeper level than the alcoholic: at the level of the human capacity to love and be loved by another human being, in a union based on fidelity and self-giving. Their renunciation of such love also is not guided toward some ulterior or greater goal - as the celibacy of the religious orders is designed to intensify their devotion to God. Rather, the loveless homosexual destiny is precisely toward nothing, a negation of human fulfillment, which is why the Church understands that such persons, even in the act of obedient self-renunciation, are called "to enact the will of God in their life by joining whatever sufferings and difficulties they experience in virtue of their condition to the sacrifice of the Lord's cross."

This suggests another analogy: the sterile person. Here, too, the person is structurally barred by an innate or incurable condition from the full realization of procreative union with another person. One might expect that such people would be regarded in exactly the same light as homosexuals. They would be asked to commit themselves to a life of complete celibacy and to offer up their pain toward a realization of Christ's sufferings on the cross. But that, of course, is not the Church's position. Marriage is available to sterile couples or to those past child-bearing age; these couples are not prohibited from having sexual relations.

One is forced to ask: What rational distinction can be made, on the Church's own terms, between the position of sterile people and that of homosexual people with regard to sexual relations and sacred union? If there is nothing morally wrong, per se, with the homosexual condition or with homosexual love and self-giving, then homosexuals are indeed analogous to those who, by blameless fate, cannot reproduce. With the sterile couple, it could be argued, miracles might happen. But miracles, by definition, can happen to anyone. What the analogy to sterility suggests, of course, is that the injunction against homosexual union does not rest, at heart, on the arguments about openness to procreation, but on the Church's failure to fully absorb its own teachings about the dignity and worth of homosexual persons. It cannot yet see them as it sees sterile heterosexuals: people who, with respect to procreation, suffer from a clear, limiting condition, but who nevertheless have a potential for real emotional and spiritual self-realization, in the heart of the Church, through the transfiguring power of the matrimonial sacrament. It cannot yet see them as truly made in the image of God.

But this, maybe, is to be blind in the face of the obvious. Even with sterile people, there is a symbolism in the union of male and female that speaks to the core nature of sexual congress and its ideal instantiation. There is no such symbolism in the union of male with male or female with female. For some Catholics, this "symbology" goes so far as to bar even heterosexual intercourse from positions apart from the missionary - face to face, male to female, in a symbolic act of love devoid of all non-procreative temptation. For others, the symbology is simply about the notion of "complementarity," the way in which each sex is invited in the act of sexual congress - even when they are sterile - to perceive the mystery of the other; when the two sexes are the same, in contrast, the act becomes one of mere narcissism and self-indulgence, a higher form of masturbation. For others still, the symbolism is simply about Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, and the essentially dual, male-female center of the natural world. Denying this is to offend the complementary dualism of the universe.

But all these arguments are arguments for the centrality of heterosexual sexual acts in nature, not their exclusiveness. It is surely possible to concur with these sentiments, even to laud their beauty and truth, while also conceding that it is nevertheless also true that nature seems to have provided a spontaneous and mysterious contrast that could conceivably be understood to complement - even dramatize - the central male-female order. In many species and almost all human cultures, there are some who seem to find their destiny in a similar but different sexual and emotional union. They do this not by subverting their own nature, or indeed human nature, but by fulfilling it in a way that doesn't deny heterosexual primacy, but rather honors it by its rare and distinct otherness. As albinos remind us of the brilliance of color; as redheads offer a startling contrast to the blandness of their peers; as genius teaches us, by contrast, the virtue of moderation; as the disabled person reveals to us in negative form the beauty of the fully functioning human body; so the homosexual person might be seen as a natural foil to the heterosexual norm, a variation that does not eclipse the theme, but resonates with it. Extinguishing - or prohibiting - homosexuality is, from this point of view, not a virtuous necessitys, but the real crime against nature, a refusal to accept the pied beauty of God's creation, a denial of the way in which the other need not threaten, but may actually give depth and contrast to the self.

This is the alternative argument embedded in the Church's recent grappling with natural law, that is just as consonant with the spirit of natural law as the Church's current position. It is more consonant with what actually occurs in nature; seeks an end to every form of natural life; and upholds the dignity of each human person. It is so obvious an alternative to the Church's current stance that it is hard to imagine the forces of avoidance that have kept it so firmly at bay for so long.

For many homosexual Catholics, life within the Church is a difficult endeavor. In my 20s, as I attempted to unite the possibilities of sexual longing and emotional commitment, I discovered what many heterosexuals and homosexuals had discovered before me: that it is a troubling and troublesome mission. There's a disingenuous tendency, when discussing both homosexual and heterosexual emotional life, to glamorize and idealize the entire venture. To posit the possibility of a loving union, after all, is not to guarantee its achievement. There is also a lamentable inclination to believe that all conflicts can finally be resolved; that the homosexual Catholic's struggle can be removed by a simple theological coup de main; that the conflict is somehow deeper than many other struggles in the Church - of women, say, or of the divorced. The truth is that pain, as Christ taught, is not a reason to question truth; it may indeed be a reason to embrace it.

But it must also be true that to dismiss the possibility of a loving union for homosexuals at all - to banish from the minds and hearts of countless gay men and women the idea that they, too, can find solace and love in one another - is to create the conditions for a human etiolation that no Christian community can contemplate without remorse. What finally convinced me of the wrongness of the Church's teachings was not that they were intellectually so confused, but that in the circumstances of my own life - and of the lives I discovered around me - they seemed so destructive of the possibilities of human love and self-realization. By crippling the potential for connection and growth, the Church's teachings created a dynamic that in practice led not to virtue but to pathology; by requiring the first lie in a human life, which would lead to an entire battery of others, they contorted human beings into caricatures of solitary eccentricity, frustrated bitterness, incapacitating anxiety - and helped perpetuate all the human wickedness and cruelty and insensitivity that such lives inevitably carry in their wake. These doctrines could not in practice do what they wanted to do: they could not both affirm human dignity and deny human love.

This truth is not an argument; it is merely an observation. But observations are at the heart not simply of the Church's traditional Thomist philosophy, but also of the phenomenological vision of the current pope. To observe these things, to affirm their truth, is not to oppose the Church, but to hope in it, to believe in it as a human institution that is yet the eternal vessel of God's love. It is to say that such lives as those of countless gay men and lesbians must ultimately affect the Church not because our lives are perfect, or without contradiction, or without sin, but because our lives are in some sense also the life of the Church.

I remember, in my own life, the sense of lung-filling exhilaration I felt as my sexuality began to be incorporated into my life, a sense that was not synonymous with recklessness or self-indulgence - although I was not immune from those things either - but a sense of being suffused at last with the possibility of being fully myself before those I loved and before God. I remember the hopefulness of parents regained and friendships restored in a life that, for all its vanities, was at least no longer premised on a lie covered over by a career. I remember the sense a few months ago in a pew in a cathedral, as I reiterated the same pre-Communion litany of prayers that I had spoken some twenty years earlier, that, for the first time, the love the Church had always taught that God held for me was tangible and redemptive. I had never felt it fully before; and, of course, like so many spiritual glimpses, I have rarely felt it since. But I do know that it was conditioned not on the possibility of purity, but on the possibility of honesty. That honesty is not something that can be bought or won in a moment. It is a process peculiarly prone to self-delusion and self-doubt. But it is one that, if it is to remain true to itself, the Church cannot resist forever.

Originally appeared in The Advocate, November 15, 1994.

A CHARGE HEARD frequently these days is that some "assimilationist" or "straight-acting" gays are endeavoring to secure equal rights for themselves by selling out "gay-acting" or "nonconformist" gay people -- including drag queens and leathermen -- with whom straight America is uncomfortable.

This allegation always bemuses me. Leaving aside the question of whether such a plot is actually afoot, how, I wonder, can anyone believe that John and Jane Q. Public are more comfortable with "straight-acting" gays than with "gay-acting" ones? On the contrary, nothing's more disconcerting to some folks than a gay man or women who, by failing to conform to stereotype, confounds any attempt to define neat, safe boundaries between the "worlds" of gay and straight. Gay or not, entertainers like Richard Simmons and the late Paul Lynde owe their appeal largely to people's eagerness to have their stereotypes affirmed, their condescension certified. With every word and gesture, such celebrities reinforce the comfortable notion that a homosexual is somebody odd, amusing, flamboyant, ridiculous, and, of course, tragically sad and lonely deep down. A person you can recognize at a hundred paces and whom you would probably never see in your own neighborhood anyway.

What makes many straight people uncomfortable by contrast is any image of gay life and love that seems too ordinary, too familiar. Years ago when I enthusiastically reviewed Prick Up Your Ears, the film about gay playwright Joe Orton, I didn't hear a peep of complaint from my editors at the reactionary American Spectator, for that movie gave a picture of gay life that they were comfortable with. It showed gays as weird, alienated, grubby, marginal, fundamentally unhappy, and destined for tragic ends. The showdown came, rather, over a few positive sentences I wrote about Longtime Companion, which dared to show gay men in steady jobs and fulfilling relationships. To many people that's the revolutionary image.

This way of thinking is by no means confined to right-wingers. Take James Wolcott, who in a 1989 issue of Vanity Fair ridiculed David Leavitt's novel Equal Affections for presenting "a gay version of that nice young couple down the block." Gays, Wolcott made it clear, should be "sexual outlaws." That review was an early salvo in what has since become an assault on "gays next door" by straight liberals who often don't see how offensive they're being. Consider an editorial in the New York Times that appeared in June on the morning of the Stonewall 25 march. After declaring support for gay rights, the editorial criticized "gay moderates and conservatives" for seeking "to assure the country that the vast majority of gay people are 'regular' people just like the folks next door." Like the folks next door? Look again, Times editors: Many of us are the people next door. Similarly, in a recent issue of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Joe Morgenstern described gay moderates as "a small army of gays who just want to be ordinary Americans." Correction: Most of us are ordinary Americans.

It's not ghetto-bound nonconformist gays, then, but ordinary gays next door that many people find threatening. Why? Because next door to them means next door to their kids. Gays next door means the possibility of a gay man or lesbian as their kids' homeroom teacher or the family doctor or the minister at their church or the friendly neighbor whose lawn their teenage sons mows every weekend. Heaven knows Junior will never know or want to be like an Allen Ginsberg or a Truman Capote or a Quentin Crisp, but -- horrors! -- what about the lawyer next door who happens to be gay? He's somebody they could actually imagine Junior liking and identifying with. Good Lord, deliver us!

A lot of straight people, then, who are entertained by drag queens camping it up in West Hollywood, "open-minded" about an aging beat poet coupling with somebody else's kid in the East Village, and fully supportive of the rights of gays on Castro Street feel deeply threatened by the thought of two gay men in suits coming out of the house next door to them in Scarsdale or San Bernardino or Walnut Creek and picking up the morning newspaper off the porch on their way to work. As Christopher Isherwood said in 1948, "Homosexual relations frequently are happy. Men [and women] live together for years and make homes and share their lives and their work, just as heterosexuals do. This truth is particularly disturbing and shocking even to 'liberal' people, because it cuts across their romantic, tragic notion of the homosexual fate." Exactly. If gays in America are ever to achieve equal rights, we must make it our business to overcome not only outright reactionary bigotry, which seeks to drive us back into the closet, but also this kind of lingering, often liberal discomfort, which -- intentionally or not -- insidiously demands that we know our place. Let's get out the word: Our place is wherever we want it to be.

First published in Christopher Street magazine, October 1994.

The lesbian and gay left has declared war against the growing numbers of moderates, libertarians, and out-and-proud conservatives (along with other ideological deviants) within the gay movement. Gays committed to fighting for equality in all spheres of life but who aren't part of the gay-left and lesbian-feminist coteries that have heretofore dominated organized "lesbigay" politics increasingly find themselves targeted and scapegoated.

Spearheading this campaign (or at least its latest round) has been a chorus of recent articles by Tony Kushner, Richard Goldstein, Sara Miles, and Urvashi Vaid, all taking aim at gay "assimilationists" for (in Miles' words) aiding the "backlash against feminism, multiculturalism, and affirmative action."

Here's a look at these attacks and what I believe lies behind them.

The Left Strikes Back
In December 1993, Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner told the Advocate that, in his view, "the serious gains we've made are gains made by people I would identify as progressive - by the Left," but that he feared the gay movement might abandon its commitment to a broad, left-wing agenda. When Newsweek asked him to contribute a major article commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Kushner used the opportunity to attempt to further marginalize gays who are not on the political left, thus giving a skewed portrait of who gay people are.

With the zeal of a true believer, Kushner wrote that "To be a progressive person is to resist Balkanization, tribalism, separatism." Unfortunately, for the last decade "progressives" have been the ones advocating identity-group based "remedies" (i.e., quotas, set-asides and dual standards) that have exacerbated racial tensions and fermented resentments between the genders, while promoting the idea that individuals needn't take responsibility for their own lives ("victims" being entitled, its seems, to perpetual government largess).

Gay white men, of course, take their lumps for enjoying the privileges of the white male patriarchy. "Will the hatred of women, gay and straight, continue to find new and more violent forms of expression," Kushner wrote, "and will gay men and women of color remain doubly, or triply oppressed, while white gay men find greater measures of acceptance, simply because they are white men?"

What an old, tired refrain! The fact is in Los Angeles and other urban areas gay men are more likely to be victims of hate crimes than are African-Americans - or lesbians. According to a Klanwatch researcher quoted in the late William Henry III's much more balanced Stonewall retrospective in Time, "People now are less likely to condemn someone for being black or Hispanic," while anti-gay bigotry "has become more acceptable."

Kushner isn't alone, of course, in suggesting that sexism and racism motivate gays - particularly gay white men - who don't embrace the left's idea of a progressive agenda. A December 1993 New York Times op-ed by Donald Suggs of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and Mandy Carter of the Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF) held gay white men responsible for black homophobia. Suggs and Carter, both African-Americans, began by asserting that "leaders of the gay and lesbian movement have given highest priority to the interest of their most powerful constituents - white men," which apparently alienated gays of color from the gay rights movement, causing, in turn, black churches to support the religious right (got that?).

The piece ended with the charge that "Anyone who tries to widen the focus of gay activism is characterized in some gay publications as a white-male basher or is accused of caving in to political correctness."

This reference, I suspect, applies to me, since I criticized GLAAD in the November 1993 issue of Christopher Street, writing that "Support for greater inclusiveness in the gay and lesbian movement has been twisted into something altogether different - a rationale for bashing gay, white men."

One might, by the way, ask Suggs and Carter to explain just what they considered to be the exclusively "gay white male" issues that have dominated the gay movement: Sodomy law repeal? Domestic partnership? Employment and housing discrimination? Gays in the military? AIDS? None of which, of course, solely concern "gay white men."

What I imagine they're really criticizing is the gay community's failure to embrace what Kushner and others conceive of as a grand alliance of the radical left. Kushner's Newsweek piece lamented that the traditions of radical America are under siege, without showing the slightest understanding why Americans have grown fed up with megabuck government programs - paid for by middle-class taxpayers - that produce little and often make things worse for the supposed beneficiaries.

Time reported that according to its just-completed poll, those Americans who described homosexuality as morally wrong made up exactly the same proportion (53%) as in a poll taken in 1978 - "before a decade and a half of intense gay activism." Despite this striking failure to change popular opinion, Kushner would have gays renew their commitment to a sweeping left-wing alliance. Down that path lies ruin, for the more that the fight for gay equality is linked with the radical left, the less likely we'll be to win the hearts and minds of a nation founded on belief in individual liberty and personal responsibility.

But the politics Kushner only hinted at in Newsweek became explicit in "Homosexual Liberation: A Socialism of the Skin," the opus he penned for the July 4th issue of the Nation. Freed from the need for euphemisms, Kushner's Nation tract laid it on the line: "Homosexuals...like most everyone else, are and will continue to be oppressed by the depredations of capital until some better way of living together can be arrived at." He quoted Oscar Wilde's essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism," to the effect that "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at."

At least it can be said of Wilde that he lived before the monstrous dystopia of state socialism cast its shadow upon the planet, depriving countless millions of life and liberty. Kushner has no excuse.

To advance his call for ideological purity, Kushner took aim at both New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan and author Bruce (A Place at the Table) Bawer - the gay left's best-loved whipping boys. He disapprovingly quoted Sullivan's statement that "Every right and responsibility that heterosexuals enjoy by virtue of the state [should] be extended to those who grow up different. And that is all."

Sullivan's thought crime was to argued that gays must demand public equality but should not seek to legislate private tolerance. Bawer, for his part, was castigated for writing that the movement for gay equal rights should not be linked "with any left-wing cause to which any gay leader might happen to have a personal allegiance."

Kushner responded that "Like all assimilationists, Andrew and Bruce are unwilling to admit that structural or even particularly formidable barriers exist between themselves and their straight oppressors...nowhere do they express a concern that people of color or the working class or the poor are not being communed with."

He added, "Such a politics of homosexuality is dispiriting. Like conservative thought in general, if offers very little in the way of hope, and very little in the way of vision. I expect both hope and vision from my politics."

Well I do, too. And, I have no doubt, so do Sullivan and Bawer. But it is not the false dream of the gay left, promising "utopia" through a socially re-engineered humankind, with its reeducation camps (or sensitivity retreats) and distribution of perks and political position according to race and gender categories (class having all but been abandoned, after white working folks proved notoriously unreceptive to the left's appeals).

Spare us, Lord, from artists and academics who dream of utopia. I'll opt for equality before the law any day, and take responsibility for making my own garden grow.

Outrageous
Also spare us from leftist lesbigay journalists offering up revelatory articles on gay centrists/conservatives. A case in point was Sara Miles "Do the Right Thing" in the July/Aug. 1994 issue of Out magazine. Ms. Miles explains it all to you, entering enemy territory to interview Kushner's bete noires, Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan, along with original cold-warrior Marvin Liebman, Log Cabinboy Rich Tafel, and a host of others.

To be fair, Miles allowed these activists to speak for themselves at some length. On the other hand, she submerged their remarks into a text that is relentlessly patronizing. "These men's criticisms of existing gay politics and subculture are rooted in the same backlash against feminism, multiculturalism, and affirmative action that fuels the broader neoconservative movement," she huffed. Gee, I guess they've failed to see the light. What's more, she continues, "Adding a couple of token, respectable lesbians or a black face to the letterhead [of conservative gay groups] won't change the essential nature of an argument that pits 'good' gays against 'bad' queers, and that sneers about 'political correctness' when challenged for its elitism."

Actually, the "backlash" charge is an all-too-typical canard slung at anyone who dares point out that the multi-culti emperor has no clothes (or, at any rate, that the "diversity" gang seems more interested in dishing out perks based on gender and race than on promoting community based on equality).

Hunter (After the Ball) Madsen told Miles that ethnic separatism has been dressed up as multicultural diversity. Andrew Sullivan lamented the movement's embrace of racial gerrymandering. And Rich Tafel warned that gays lose when we appear to be the next liberal group looking for "special rights" from taxpayers. "By making an impression on traditionally conservative institutions," he said, "traditionally liberal institutions will follow or join in. The reverse is not true." But Miles was having none of it.

She claimed, in fact, that "Calling the national [gay] groups 'left' is inaccurate." Was this a stunning burst of myopia, or did she merely lack the courage of her own left-wing convictions? At any rate, she should ask NGLTF about its stand on NAFTA, the Gulf War, and welfare for illegal aliens. Moreover, as columnist Paul Varnell pointed out in the Windy City Times, the language of the movement's ubiquitous "Fight the Right" campaigns seldom seems to distinguish between religious-right extremists and the roughly half of the country that considers itself politically conservative.

Speaking of the left and gay groups, it's not surprising that the very PC and quota-obsessed organizers of the Stonewall 25th anniversary march in New York City, who employed "weighted voting" and other schemes to "empower" women and people of color at the expense of equality for all, wound up beset by mismanagement and internal turmoil. When the commemoration ended, the committee was over $300,000 in debt. Call it another victory for left-wing (dis)organizational strategy, with its "appointment-by-quota, only-leftists-need-apply," mentality, along with a fixation on "process" and consensus-based decision-making (a demand for uniformity that, in effect, stifles democratic debate).

Those who, like Miles, deny that the movement organizations are skewed to the left often point to "moderate," nonpartisan groups like the Human Rights Campaign Fund. But recently in the Washington Blade Bob Roehr looked behind some of the congressional defeats the movement has suffered. "None of HRCF's registered lobbyists are Republican, none a conservative Democrat," Roehr wrote, even though "few issues are decided along straight party lines." He added that, like other gay political groups, HRCF's staffing patterns "are dominated by a rather small, strongly left-of-center segment of the political spectrum. It is not the broad, diverse base necessary to attract and cultivate a majority of votes in Congress."

Although Miles had just argued it was "inaccurate" to label national gay groups as part of the left, she wound up doing the same thing herself. In fact, she ended her piece in Out asserting that "the decision to situate gay and lesbian rights within a progressive framework was a choice" made by the radicals who took to the streets "while Marvin Liebman was living in the closet and cheerleading for the Vietnam War."

But some of us see Stonewall as a beginning, not a permanent movement model. In today's politics, it's the hard left that repeatedly proves itself "reactionary" and resistant to evolution.

Voice Chimes In
Just when I thought the left had vented enough spleen against conservatives/libertarians (the left makes no distinction) to leave it satiated for awhile, the Village Voice appeared with a special Stonewall 25 section picking up the battle cry. Richard Goldstein's "The Coming Crisis of Gay Rights" was heartfelt but predicable. The gay political agenda is now in jeopardy, it seems, because not all gays are loyally adhering to the party line.

Goldstein took aim (surprise, surprise) at Sullivan, Bawer, Liebman, and (finally, recognition!) yours truly. We were labeled "gayocons" - and treated as if we advocated the same positions on all matters sexual and political, with no significant variances among us.

Goldstein claimed "the biggest blunder of gay conservatives" is ignoring "the vital bond between queers and feminists" and that "feminism is a movement that honors the individual." With what ideological blinders does he view the world? Contemporary feminism has become notorious for excommunicating from its ranks women who deviate from approved ideology - just look at the hatchet job the feminist leadership is carrying out against Christina Hoff Sommers, whose book Who Stole Feminism? dares suggest that radical feminism's anti-male bile is out of touch with ordinary women.

Goldstein added, for good measure, that the charge of "political correctness" made against the left is indicative of "jargon appropriated from male chauvinists" and that we "worship the sexual hierarchy that affirms male power." I'd say we're simply trying to be masculine-affirmative in the face of explicit feminist, lesbigay savaging of the very concept of manhood.

"Nearly all members of this fraternity are white. And male. And they act like it," Goldstein charged. In this, he echoed Miles, who also played the "sexism" card (you didn't think she'd let that one go by, did you?) when she called Bawer, Madsen and Liebman on the carpet for having "written books that purport to speak for the movement yet leave lesbians out entirely." But the reasons these authors didn't dwell on lesbian issues is they know (sometimes from painful experience) that any gay man who takes up lesbian-specific concerns or describes lesbian activists' views is pounded for presuming he can speak on behalf of women. So it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Goldstein at least recognized we're not quite as bad as our straight counterparts on the Right. Being gay ourselves, after all, presents certain "contradictions" in our thought. Goldstein even found himself complimenting me (I think): "New York Native columnist Stephen H. Miller monitors 'male bashing' by the women's movement, and regularly rails against the 'feminist-directed 'lesbigay' amalgamation' of gay life. He's every bit as bitchy as Howard Stern when it comes to identity politics, but every bit as fervent as Tony Kushner when it comes to gay rights - and every bit as out."

Ah, sweet recognition. If I write a book, I'll be sure to use it on the jacket.

Urvashi Vaid's Amerika
Last but by no means least, the gay left's escalating intolerance for ideological diversity got a boost from an old hand at this game, former NGLTF executive director Urvashi Vaid, who is writing a book from Anchor/Doubleday titled Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (hint: she's against it). As part of the build-up, a Vaid call to arms, "The Status Quo of the Status Queer," ran in the June issue of Gay Community News. The essence of her thesis: Gays and lesbians who seek to join the mainstream are sell-outs to the radical cause.

Vaid complained that recent developments on the cultural front - Newsweek's lesbian chic cover story, the Ikea ad featuring a gay male couple, Tom Hanks's praise for two gay teachers while accepting his Philadelphia Oscar - left her "feeling very uneasy." Lamented Vaid: "As more of us move into a space where we can be personally gay or lesbian...we risk being appeased."

Rather than aspiring to join the mainstream, Vaid wants lesbians and gays to radicalize American society by "building a powerful, grassroots, political movement rooted in notions of Liberation and not merely Rights."

Vaid never really said what she means by "Liberation," but judging from her speeches it's not hard to figure out. In a 1991 tour de force, she wailed that the world "has taken off its ugly white hood to show its sexist, racist, anti-gay and capitalist face" (emphasis added).

This, by the way, brings to mind a Newsday op-ed piece by Raan Medley, a lawyer and former member of ACT BLACK (the African-American caucus of ACT UP), who called the Ikea ad "the culmination of 25 years of...de facto segregation by one of the nation's best organized, most politically cohesive and, indeed, narcissistic minorities" - a sentiment shared by the religious right, no doubt.

Unreconstructed hard leftists like Vaid aren't looking to regenerate community through volunteerism; state-engineered restructuring of personal relationships is more in line with her thinking. Alas, she runs into that old leftist conundrum: the masses aren't interested in the kind of world she and her cohorts know is in their best interest.

Vaid clearly doesn't like the fact that consumers in a free market can chose to support what they like - she's upset that "Lifestyle magazines keep appearing (Out, 10 Percent) while movement driven political papers like OutLook and Gay Community News falter." She pined: "The gay and lesbian liberation movement has turned into a gay and lesbian marketing movement" and complains that "a political movement is not what is being sold."

And there's more. "Has anyone read Christopher Street lately?" she asked. "The anxiety and misogyny of the male writers read as it if is the 1970s." Now Christopher Street is about the only major gay publication that will publish serious work on men's issues - the rest of the gay magazine world having gone "lesbigay."

Maybe she had in mind pieces I've written for CS on topics ranging from the feminist/"queer" demonizing of gay masculinity and men's community to the misuse of race and gender quotas within gay organizations (gay white men, as noted above, being privileged members of the patriarchy from whom power must be wrested). Why is it that many radical lesbian feminists who hold "women's culture" sacred go ballistic at the thought "men's culture" might also be valuable and unique?

Vaid needn't agree with me, but that's not her point. Despite the gay left's dominance of lesbian and gay media (including many of the "lifestyle" magazines Vaid dismisses - like Out - and certainly the Advocate and most gay papers, as well as the Gay Cable Network), Vaid doesn't seem to think the community should abide any forum for views that aren't politically correct.

And speaking of PC, Vaid also doesn't like the term one whit, seeing it as part of the "backlash against race and gender equality - the same enemy behind the white hood." Vaid told Sara Miles in Out, "I'm so tired of hearing people throw around 'politically correct' as a term to shut everyone up. It's exactly like saying 'nigger-lover." Now, just who in the movement is trying to shut up whom by making incendiary comparisons?

To those of us who have knocked our heads against the PC inanity that riddles the movement - running afoul of the language police, enduring castigation for the collective guilt of white maledom, or being driven from leadership positions in gay organizations for questioning the wisdom of community building based on the rigid application of racial and gender quotas - Vaid's hyperbole rings exceedingly hollow.

At the conclusion of her GCN manifesto, Vaid called for "a full-scale frontal assault" against "the coming of a racist, sexist gay and lesbian Right." This is pure Stalinism - silencing anyone who opposes the hard left's dominance of the gay movement by labeling us racist and sexist. And it's typical Vaid.

I remember that when Vaid resigned from NGLTF a few years back, an article by gay journalist Rex Wockner, quoting both her fans and critics, appeared in Outweek and other gay papers. Vaid's supporters were outraged, writing letters to the editor that said the criticism of Vaid - a lesbian of color - was motivated by sexism and racism. Her defenders also pointed to a fawning assessment of Vaid's tenure published in another gay publication, holding it up as a model for how her departure should have been covered by everyone.

The problem is not that Vaid is a dogmatic lefty, but that her views now represent "mainstream" (sorry, Urvashi) lesbian and gay political thought. She is cheered when she arrives at lesbian/gay gatherings. And her lover, comedian Kate Clinton (who organized a fundraiser for Lorena Bobbitt - no joke) gives her added cache.

Bruce Bawer told me he views the recent flurry of attacks on gay centrists/conservatives as a sign that hard-left gay activists are running scared, fearing loss of their foot soldiers as lesbian and gay folks cease to defined themselves solely as marginalized outcasts.

But these remain delicate times for the gay community; the same advances into the mainstream that unnerve gay leftists have provoked fierce new attacks by the radical right. And to the homophobes, all gays and lesbians are part of an undifferentiated bloc intent on subverting the bourgeois norms that underlie social order - especially when we (horrors) demand the right to marry the person we love or serve our country in the armed forces (both of which, somehow, get lumped in with "special rights").

This means that gays who eschew the entrenched, leftover left must fight against both radical gay lunacies and homophobic right-wing bigotries - an ongoing battle on two fronts, with no rest for the weary.

Originally appeared in The Advocate, October 23, 1994.

AMONG THE GAY PRESS'S RESPONSES to my 1993 book A Place at the Table was the charge by some critics that I'm "sex-negative." Frank Browning griped that I want to "to have everyone put on 30 pounds, buy a Brooks Brothers suit, and wander off on the golf links, becoming [an] upper-class version of Ozzie and Harry. Those who don't want to take risks should join Mr. Bawer on the golf course. Those who want to feel alive will benefit from the exploration of our bodies and what our bodies can grant."

Golf? Ozzie and Harry? Brooks Brothers? What, I wondered, does any of this have to do with what I've written? I've never been on a golf course. Or worn a Brooks Brothers suit. And when did I join the upper class? Of course I want gay people to enjoy what their bodies can grant. I also want them to have equal rights under the law, the love and respect of their friends and families, and a meaningful life beyond their orgasms. I want gay kids to grow up knowing that, as wonderful as sex can be, gay identity amounts to more than belonging to a "culture of desire."

Browning and others mocked me for being "serious." Well, isn't discovering oneself as a gay individual in this society a serious challenge? Isn't gay rights a serious issue? Being serious about gay rights in public discourse doesn't preclude being able to have fun in one's personal life. Yet if some right-wing critics can't write about homosexuality without smirking, some gay writers seem unable to address the subject without prattling frivolously about their own sex lives and longings.

Which is a shame, because it's vitally important for us to recognize that at the heart of homophobia lies an inability to see that gays can love each other as deeply and as seriously as straights can. Explaining why he'd refused to print my review of the film Longtime Companion, an American Spectator editor told a New York Observer reporter, "Bawer was striking a total equivalence between a heterosexual couple in love and a homosexual couple in love. To me, that wasn't convincing." That editor isn't alone in rejecting the idea of the moral equivalence of gays and straights.

It's not only heterosexuals who draw these sex-related distinctions. "The defining thing about being gay," a gay man tells Susan Bergman in her new memoir, Anonymity, "is that you like to have sex a lot." Many gays agree. Yet plenty of straight men would tell you that copulation is the be-all and end-all of their lives too. To suggest that gays are more defined by their libidos is to collaborate in the widespread, dehumanizing view that gay sex is invariably mechanical, impersonal, even bestial, while straight sex in an integral part of the complex web of human feeling, connectedness, and commitment before God. That, in short, we're about lust and they're about love.

On the radio the other day, Howard Stern was interviewing a gay college student. They both agreed that when you're gay your whole life centers on sex, and it doesn't matter at all whom you're having it with. One of Stern's sidekicks commented delightedly, "Like dogs!"

Or, perhaps, like children. At the close of a recent AIDS benefit in New York City, the emcee exhorted the audience, "Play safe!" I winced. Why? Because it irks me that gay sex is routinely described as play-as if we're children, coupling sportively behind the barn-while straight adult sex is never referred to in this way. The implication is that straight sex is grown-up and gay sex is kid stuff.

"[Bawer] is the kid in grade school who just got mad at the other kids because they didn't do what the teacher said," the late John Preston told The Advocate in 1993. "Bawer doesn't like sex." Preston's metaphor is illuminating. Deep down many folks (gay as well as straight) do see gays as kids and straights as bossy teachers out to thwart their fun. It's not sex I deplore but this systematic devaluing of gay life.

To be sure, as a friend notes, "Sex is what makes us gay." But our sexual orientation doesn't define us any more than straights are defined by their orientation. Anti-gay propagandists depict gay rights as a battlefield on which gays fight selfishly for the sake of their decadent, undisciplined sex lives while straights fight selflessly in the defense of their innocent children. That's an outrageously fraudulent picture of the conflict, and we can't let it stand. We must communicate to straight America that when it comes to children, the interests of parents and gays-many of whom are parents-are congruent. The conflict should more properly be seen as a dialogue between, on the one hand, gays and straights of goodwill who care about families and understand homosexuality and, on the other, straights who don't understand homosexuality or don't want to or don't give a damn one way or the other.

As for sex, we must help straights see that for us, as for them, sex can be anything from casual fun to a fundamental component of a loving, committed relationship. Until we make that clear, to many of them we'll continue to look like a somewhat lower order of being whose personal lives can't possibly be morally equivalent to their own. And thereupon hang our rights.

Originally appeared in the Advocate on October 18, 1994.

WHILE CHANNEL SURFING one day a few months ago, I came across a gay public-access show on which an interviewer fired names at gay activist-journalist Michelangelo Signorile, asking him to respond with the first word that came to mind. "Bruce Bawer," the interviewer said. "Confused," Signorile replied.

The answer made me laugh -- and it also made me do some thinking about confusion. There's a lot of it around. Indeed, the more I've talked to other people -- both gay and straight -- about homosexuality and related subjects, the more I've come to recognize how important a part confusion has played not only in the perpetuation of homophobia (which, after all, involves in many cases a confusion of homosexuality with pederasty or subversion or misogyny) but also in the conflicts that are raging in gay circles between, well, people like me and Signorile.

Certainly a lot of confusion has arisen from the fact that many of us use the same words to mean different things. Take gay and homosexual. Most of us use these words to designate a natural orientation. Some gay activists, however use them to refer only to a natural orientation that's acted upon and openly acknowledged -- you're only gay, in other words, if you're out loud and proud. Some, like Larry Kramer, have additional criteria: "Any gay who says he's conservative," Kramer has maintained, "is not a gay."

Meanwhile a lot of straight people, as we all know, genuinely think that homosexuality is a subversive choice -- that gay people choose to be gay and could, if they wished, choose to be straight. We need to correct this confusion -- but the task isn't made any easier by the fact that we can't even get it clear among ourselves what we're talking about when we use the words homosexual and gay.

Nor are we clear among ourselves about the goals of the gay rights movement. Do we want social acceptance and respect, equal rights under the law, sexual liberation, increased self-esteem, Marxist utopia? All of the above? Or do we simply want to vent our anger at society, get the rage out of our system? Is the movement's role to provide gays (or, perhaps, the world generally) with a more ambitious vision of sexual pleasure or human relations than that reflected in the relationships of our parents? Or do we just want an excuse to throw condoms at priests or run naked up Fifth Avenue?

Different people have different answer to these fundamental questions. Many have never really figured out what their answer is; for some, the answer seems to vary according to mood or the weather or whoever they've listened to most recently. And some think they know what their answer is but contradict themselves. A certain gay person may say, for instance, that the proper goal of gay politics is to achieve equal respect and acceptance, but if he hears you speaking to heterosexuals about homosexuality in a way that'll help them understand and accept it, he'll accuse you of sucking up to the enemy, of caring too much about what straight people think. Or another gay person may say she wants equal rights, then engage in blatantly counterproductive forms of protest and defend her actions by saying, "Well, I felt like it" or "All gay self-expression is good." I see this kind of confusion about first principles constantly, and it's a big reason, I think why our movement seems so terribly out of focus and so much less successful than it should be.

One corollary of this widespread confusion is an often unconscious tendency to obscure the lines dividing several closely related but decidedly different topics of discourse. Homosexuality, gay culture, the "gay community," gay sex, your or my personal life, gay politics: these are all different entities. To talk about one does not oblige you to talk about the others. This may seem a simple and obvious point, but if you listen to some gay political leaders on TV or read books by some queer-studies scholars, you're liable to find these entities hopelessly confused with one another.

A famous gay writer, in an important piece about gay politics for a major political journal, devotes several sentences to describing the physical attraction of two other gay writers with whom he disagrees. A noted queer-studies scholar, in the essay on gay literature in an influential history of the American novel, spends several paragraphs on his own childhood. This is not just run-of-the-mill inappropriateness-it's the product of a sensibility that refuses to honor the distinctions among the various entities listed above.

We've been encouraged to see such rhetorical practices as displaying a fabulous irreverence, an impertinent refusal to observe distinctions or social niceties, that's distinction gay -- and indeed there's a place for irreverence and for personal references in public discourse. But in routinely failing to observe the distinctions I've mentioned and discuss subjects in an appropriate tone, we only increase the confusion of straight people who are making a sincere effort to "get it." And that doesn't get us anywhere.

First appeared October 3, 1994, in The New Republic.

IN THE WORLD OF anti-gay activism, researcher Paul Cameron is something of a darling. When columnist Pat Buchanan wrote about AIDS and gay death in March 1993, he cited a study by Cameron. When columnist Don Feder wrote about gay servicemen and child molestation in July 1993, he also cited Cameron. Two years ago Cameron served as the scientific consultant for both the Oregon Citizens Alliance and Colorado for Family Values, the main groups pushing antigay referenda on those states' election ballots. Statistics from Cameron's studies were included in "Gay Agenda,� a videotape produced by the religious right and widely circulated during last year's debate on gays in the military. Also last year, officials of the U.S. Navy and Army circulated Cameron's studies around the Pentagon as they tried to block Bill Clinton's softening of the gay ban. More recently, officials of Clinton's Justice Department cited a Cameron study in a brief prepared in connection with a gay ban lawsuit.

So who is Paul Cameron? Not the dispassionate, respected analyst that these boosters would have you believe. Cameron is chairman of the Family Research Institute (FRI), an arch-right Washington think tank that counts neanderthal GOP Representative Robert Dornan of California among its national advisory board members. Cameron himself is also a demonizer of gays: several times he has proposed the tattooing and quarantining of AIDS patients and raised the possibility of exterminating male homosexuals. Most important, he is the architect of unreliable "surveys� that purport to show strains of violence and depravity in gay life.

Until 1980 Cameron was an instructor of psychology at the University of Nebraska. When his teaching contract was not renewed, he devoted himself fulltime to a think tank he founded called the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS),where he touted himself as an expert on sexuality, particularly on the societal consequences of homosexuality. During the 1980s he published hysterical pamphlets alleging that gays were disproportionately responsible for serial killings, child molestation and other heinous crimes.

Shortly after Cameron made these claims, several psychologists whose work he had referenced -- including Dr. A. Nicholas Groth, director of the Sex Offender Program at the Connecticut Department of Corrections -- charged Cameron with distorting their findings in order to promote his antigay agenda. When the American Psychological Association (APA) investigated Cameron, it found that he not only misrepresented the work of others but also used unsound methods in his own studies. For this ethical breach, the APA expelled Cameron in December 1983. (Although Cameron claims he resigned, APA bylaws prohibit members from resigning while under investigation.)

In 1987 Cameron moved to Washington and created FRI, a "non-profit educational and scientific corporation.� Ever since, he has been a virtual one-man propaganda press, periodically revising his brochures and distributing them to policymakers. "Published scientific material has a profound impact on society,� he has said.

Unfortunately, the misrepresentations persist. Distortions and sloppy methods continue to shape Cameron's studies. As anyone who has taken a statistics class knows, a survey is valid only if the sample it uses is representative of the whole population. Sex surveys pose a particular problem, since many people who normally would be included in a representative sample are loath to discuss their private lives. That, however, hasn't deterred Cameron from his work.

Consider, for instance, his 1983 ISIS study, a survey of the sexual and social behavior of 4,340 adults in five American cities. Although thousands of heterosexuals allegedly responded to his survey, Cameron could get only forty-one gay men and twenty-four lesbians to respond. The extremely small sample size should have invalidated any conclusions about the sexual behavior of the gay population. In any case, the skewed results of the survey show that Cameron did not get an adequate random sample of heterosexuals either. He claims to have found that 52 percent of male heterosexuals have shoplifted; that 34 percent have committed a crime without being caught; and that 12 percent have either committed or attempted to commit murder. Most people would toss out such a survey but Cameron published the results in several pamphlets and in "Effect of Homosexuality upon Public Health and Social Order,� an article in Psychological Reports.

In one pamphlet, Murder, Violence and Homosexuality, Cameron asserts that you are fifteen times more apt to be killed by a homosexual than by a heterosexual during a sexual murder spree; that homosexuals have committed the most sexual conspiracy murders; and that half of all sex murderers are homosexuals. Cameron based these conclusions on a sample of thirty-four serial killers he selected from the years 1966 to 1983. He stacked the deck not only by including phony figures (he counts in his sample the claims of Henry Lee Lucas, who subsequently recanted his boast that he murdered hundreds of people) but by examining only those serial killers with an apparent sexual motive. This allowed him to include John Wayne Gacy and his victims but to exclude the great majority of serial killers who are heterosexual, according to sociologist Jack Levin, the author of Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace.

In Cameron's writings on child molestation?the pamphlet Child Molestation and Homosexuality and two published articles, "Homosexual Molestation of Children/Sexual Interaction of Teacher and Pupil� and "Child Molestation and Homosexuality'?he concludes that gays have perpetrated between one-third and one-half of all child molestations; that homosexual teachers have committed between one-quarter and four-fifths of all molestations of pupils; and that gays are ten to twenty times more apt to molest children than are heterosexuals. These figures are said to be based on the content of other child molestation studies, yet Cameron has distorted those studies to get the results he wants. For example, he defines all adult male molestation of male children as molestations committed by homosexuals, a definition rejected by the very experts Cameron cites. Groth, among other experts, has explicitly said that most molesters of boys are in fact men who are heterosexual in their adult relationships. These men are attracted to boys, he says, largely because of the feminine characteristics of prepubescents, such as a lack of body hair.

Cameron also has provided anti-gay organizations with research indicating absurdly high rates of extreme sex practices and venereal diseases among gays and lesbians. In his pamphlets on these subjects, Cameron has claimed, for instance, that 29 percent of gay men practice "urine sex� and that 37 percent of gay men have sadomasochistic sex. Gay men, he says, are fourteen times more apt to have syphilis than heterosexual men and are three times more apt to have had lice. Lesbians are said to be nineteen times more apt to have syphilis than straight women and are four times more apt to have had scabies. Cameron's findings, however, are based on two sources: his discredited 1983 ISIS survey and other studies that ignore random sampling techniques. Several studies Cameron cites to support his conclusions rely on the responses of gay men who were recruited entirely from V.D. clinics.

A Cameron study that has received perhaps the most attention is "The Lifespan of Homosexuals.� It concludes that less than 2 percent of gay men survive to old age; that lesbians have a median age of death of 45 that gays are 116 times more apt to be murdered than straight men and twenty-four times more apt to commit suicide, etc. The source of this material? A comparison of obituaries from gay newspapers with a sample from regular newspapers?a method that would be laughed at by any reputable scholar. Obituaries in gay papers do not accurately portray deaths in the gay population as a whole. They are not meant to provide a public record of deaths of all gays but to allow members of the urban gay community to express mourning for their peers, particularly those whose lives have been cut short by illness or accident. Gays who die outside these communities or who die of natural causes are much less likely to be written up in a gay paper.

In the coming months, public debate over gay issues is going to get even more intense; the military gay ban question is far from settled, and at least two states may see anti-gay referenda on their ballots this fall. Cameron will help out with these campaigns as he pushes his new book, The Gay Nineties. His research will again be cited by anti-gay activists everywhere. It's time to set the record straight.

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.