IGF CultureWatch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First appeared in National Review, January 24, 1994.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A note on terminology: Halacha (Hebrew for "law") refers to the legal portion of the Talmud and of post-Talmudic literature, a halachist being a student and interpreter of that law. Hesed, often translated as ?steadfast love,? is used in the scriptures to denote the perfect devotedness that can exist between husband and wife as well as the love of God for his people.

I AM AN ORTHODOX RABBI, and I am gay. For a long while I denied, rejected, railed against this truth. The life story that I had wanted - wife, kids, and a family that modeled Torah and hesed - turned out to be an impossible fantasy. I have begun to shape a new life story. This essay is part of that life story and thus remains unfinished, part of a stream of consciousness rather than a systematic treatise.

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It is hard to say how or when I came to know myself as a gay man. In the beginning, it was just an array of bodily sensations; sweaty palms and that excited sort of nervousness you feel around certain people occurred without awareness. The arrival of the hormonal hurricane left me completely dumbfounded. Just when my body should have fulfilled social expectations, it began to transgress them. I had no physical response to girls. But I was physically pulled, eyes and body, toward guys. I remember my head turning sharply once in the locker room for an athletic boy whom I admired. At the time, I must have noticed my body's involuntary movement, but it meant nothing to me. I understood nothing. How could I? I had no idea what it meant to be homosexual. Faggot or homo were words reserved for the boys hounded for being passive, or unathletic. None of this said anything about sexual attraction. There were no categories for this experience, no way to explain the strange muscle spasms, the warm sensation on my face, or the flutter in my chest. Not until years later, after countless repetitions of such events, did it slowly, terrifyingly, break through to my consciousness.

When other boys were becoming enraptured by girls, I found my rapture in learning Torah. I was thrilled by the sprawling rabbinic arguments, the imaginative plays on words, and the demand for meaning everywhere. Negiah, the prohibition to embrace, kiss, or even touch girls until marriage, was my saving grace. The premarital sexual restraint of the Halacha was a perfect mask, not only to the world but to myself.

My years in yeshiva were spectacular, in some measure because they were so intensely fueled by a totally denied sexuality. There were many bachurim (students) in the yeshiva whose intense and passionate learning was energized with repressed sexual energy. For me, the environment deflected sexual energy and generated it as well. The male spirit and energy I felt in yeshiva was both nourishing and frustrating. I do not know if I was alone among my companions or not. From those early years, I remember no signs by which I could have clearly read my gayness or anyone else's. I only know that I was plagued with stomachaches almost every morning.

Later, on one desperate occasion, beset with an increased awareness of my attraction to a fellow yeshiva student, I visited a sage, Rav Eliashuv, who lives in one of the most secluded right-wing Orthodox communities in Jerusalem. He was old and in failing health, but still taking visitors who daily waited in an anteroom for hours for the privilege of speaking with him for a few minutes.

Speaking in Hebrew, I told him what, at the time, I felt was the truth. "Master, I am attracted to both men and women. What shall I do!" He responded, "My dear one, then you have twice the power of love. Use it carefully." I was stunned. I sat in silence for a moment, waiting for more. "Is that all!" I asked. He smiled and said, "That is all. There is nothing more to say."

Rav Eliashuv's words calmed me, permitting me to forget temporarily the awful tensions that would eventually overtake me. His trust and support buoyed me above my fears. I thought that as a bisexual I could have a wider and richer emotional life and perhaps even a deeper spiritual life than is common - and still marry and have a family. For a long while I felt a self-acceptance that carried me confidently into rabbinical school. I began rabbinical training with great excitement and a sense of promise. At the center of my motivations were those powerful rabbinic traditions that had bowled me over in my early adolescence. I wanted more than anything else to learn and to teach Torah in its full depth and breadth. I finished rabbinical school, still dating and carefully avoiding any physical expression, and took my first jobs as a rabbi. There were many failed relationships with wonderful women who could not understand why things just didn't work out. Only after knocking my shins countless times into the hard wood of this truth was I able fully to acknowledge that I am gay.

It has taken a number of years to sift through the wreckage of "my life as I wanted it" to discover "my life as it is." It has taken more time to exorcise the self-hatred that feeds on shattered hopes and ugly stereotypes. I am still engaged in that struggle. I have yet to receive the new tablets, the whole ones, that will take their place in the Ark beside the broken ones. Rav Nachman of Bratzlav teaches that there is nothing so whole as a broken heart. It is in his spirit that I continue to try to make sense of my life.

Although much has changed in the past few years as I have accepted my gayness, much remains the same. I am still a rabbi, and I am still deeply committed to God, Torah, and Israel. My religious life had always been directed by the desire to be a servant of the Lord. None of that has changed. The question is an old one, merely posed anew as I strive to integrate being gay into my life. Given that I am gay, what is it that the God of Israel wants of me!

Of course, many will hear this as an illegitimate question - fallacious in thinking that the God of Israel can somehow accept and move beyond my gayness. Leviticus 18:23 instructs: "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman, it is an abhorrence." I do not propose to reject this or any text. For the present, I have no plausible halachic method of interpreting this text in a manner that permits homosexual sex.

As a traditionalist, I hesitate to overturn cultural norms in a flurry of revolutionary zeal. I am committed to a slower and more cautious process of change, which must always begin internally. Halacha, as an activity, is not designed to effect social revolution. It is a society-building enterprIse that maintains internal balance by reorganizing itself in response to changing social realities. When social conditions shift, we experience the halachic reapplication as the proper commitment to the Torah's original purposes. That shift in social consciousness in regard to homosexuality is a long way off.

If I have any argument, it is not to press for a resolution, but for a deeper understanding of homosexuality. Within the living Halacha are voices in tension, divergent strands in an imaginative legal tradition that are brought to bear on the real lives of Jews. In order to know how to shape a halachic response to any living question, what is most demanded of us is a deep understanding of the Torah and an attentive ear to the people who struggle with the living question. Confronting new questions can often tease out of the tradition a hiddush, a new balancing of the voices and values that have always been there. There is no conclusive psak halacha (halachic ruling) without the hearing of personal testimonies, and so far gay people have not been asked to testify to their experience.

How can halachists possibly rule responsibly on a matter so complex and so deeply foreign, without a sustained effort at understanding? Whatever the halachic argument will be, we will need to know much more about homosexuality to ensure that people are treated not merely as alien objects of a system but as persons within it. Halachists will need to include in their deliberations the testimony of gay people who wish to remain faithful to the Torah. Unimagined halachic strategies, I believe, will appear under difierent conditions We cannot know in advance the outcome of such an investigation. Still, one wonders what the impact might be if Orthodox rabbis had to face the questions posed by traditional Jews, persons they respect and to whom they feel responsible, who are gay.

There is one quasi-halachic issue I must address - that of choice. One of the mitigating factors in halachic discourse is the presence of free will in matters of law. A command is only meaningful in the context of our freedom to obey or disobey. Thus the degree of choice involved in homosexuality is central to the shaping of a halachic response. There is indeed a certain percentage of gay people who claim to exercise some volition in their sexual choices. But for the vast majority of gay people, there is no "choice" in the ordinary sense of the word. Gay feelings are hardwired into our bodies, minds, and hearts. The strangeness and mystery of sexuality is universal. What we share, gay or straight, is the surprising "queerness" of all sexual desire. The experience of heterosexuals may seem less outlandish for its being more common, but all sexual feeling is deeply mysterious, beyond explanation or a simple notion of choice.

The Halacha addresses activities, however, not sexual identities; thus, in halachic Judaism there is no such thing as a gay identity - there are only sexual impulses to control. The tradition describes all sexual desire as yetzer ha'ra (evil impulse), rife with chaotic and destructive possibilities. Heterosexual desire is redeemed and integrated back into the system through a series of prescriptions and prohibitions that channel sexuality and limit its range of expression. Confined within marriage, giving and receiving sexual pleasure, even in nonprocreative ways, is raised to the level of mitzvah.

Homosexual desire, in contrast, is not seen as redeemable and thus remains an implacable yetzer ha'ra that needs to be defeated rather than channeled. In this argument, gay people are treated as people with a dangerous and destructive sexual desire which must be repressed. The spiritual task of a gay person is to overcome the yetzer ha'ra that prods one to have erotic relations with members of the same sex.

The unfairness of this argument begins with the recasting of homosexuals as heterosexuals with perverse desires. The Torah is employed to support the idea that there is only one sexuality, heterosexuality. God confirms heterosexual desire, giving heterosexuals the opportunity to enjoy love and companionship. With the impossibility of another sexuality comes the implicit assumption that gay people can "become" straight and marry and, indeed, should do so.

This has in fact been the ordinary state of affairs for many, if not most, gay men and women throughout history. I know a number of gay (or bisexual) men who have married and sustain relationships with their wives. Of those, most have had an affair at some point that did not end their marriage. Two gay rabbis I know were married and are now divorced, and a third remains happily married, surviving recurrent bouts of depression and emotional exhaustion. What disturbs me most in this sometimes heroic attempt at approximating the traditional ideal is the cost to the heterosexual spouse.

While in my first rabbinical post, I decided to come out to an older rabbi and seek his advice. He counseled me to find a woman and marry. I asked him if I was duty-bound to tell her about my attractions to men and my general sexual uninterest in women. He said no. I was shocked to hear that it was all right to deceive a woman who could very easily be damaged by such a marriage. It made no sense to me.

Surely some heterosexual women might be willing to marry a gay friend who could provide children and be a wonderful father.

There have been rare instances of gay women and men who have worked out marriages where the "uninterest" was mutual. I struggled for a number of years to find such a woman, gay or straight, with whom to begin a family. Sometimes I still torment myself to think that this is all possible, when it is not. I still feel ripped apart by these feelings - wanting a woman at the Shabbat table and a man in my bed. If I am judged for some failure, perhaps it will be that I could not choose the Shabbat table over the bed, either for myself or for the forlorn woman who, after dinner, wants the comfort of a man who wants her back.

Having rejected this option, the standard Orthodox position is to require celibacy. Many recent articles and responsa regard gay sex as indistinguishable from adultery, incest, or bestiality. The heterosexual is asked to limit sexuality to the marital bed, to nonrelatives, to human beings; the homosexual is asked to live a loveless life. I have lived portions of my adult life as a celibate clergyman. While it can have spiritual potency for a Moses or a Ben Azzai, who abandoned sexual life for God or Torah, it is not a Jewish way to live. Always sleeping alone, in a cold bed, without touch, without the daily physical interplay of lives morning and night - this celibate scenario is life-denying and, for me, has always led to a shrinking of spirit. What sort of Torah, what voice of God would demand celibacy from all gay people? Such a reading of divine intent is nothing short of cruel.

Many gay people now and in the past have been forced to purchase social acceptance and God's love through a denial of affection and comfort and, worse, a denial of self. Today many simply leave Judaism behind in order to salvage a sense of dignity and to build a life. This understanding of homosexuality leaves no sanctified option for gay people, no possibility of keddusha or keddushin.

I have come to understand my gayness as akin to my Jewishness: it is integral to my sense of self. I did not choose it, but it is mine. To try to escape it would be self-defeating. There is nothing left to do but celebrate it. Whether in or out of the given halachic rubric, I affirm my desire for a full life, for love, and for sexual expression. Given that I am gay and cannot be otherwise, and given that I do not believe that God would demand that I remain loveless and celibate, I have chosen to seek a committed love, a man with whom to share my life.

But so little of life is carried on in the bedroom. When I indeed find a partner, what sort of life do we build together? What is it that the God of Israel wants of me in regard to family and community!

Struggling with God and with Torah as a gay person was just the beginning. To be Jewish is to be grounded in the continuity of the Jewish people as a witness - a holy people, a light among the nations - a blessing to all the families of the earth. How does a gay person help to shape the continuity of the Jewish people? The carrying forth of the Jewish people I accomplished by marriage and procreation. It is both a tool of the Abrahamic covenant and its most profound meaning statement.

We are a people on the side of life - new life, more life, fuller life. The creation story invited the rabbis to read God's blessing of "be fruitful and multiply" as a command to have two children, a male and a female. Every Jewish child makes the possibility of the Torah's promise of a perfected world more real, more attainable. Abraham and Sarah transmit this vision by having children. Often the portrayal of blessing includes being surrounded with many children. Childlessness is a punishment and curse in the tradition, barrenness a calamity.

Gay life does not prevent the possibility of producing or raising Jewish children, but it makes those options very complicated. Being gay means that the ordinary relationship between making love and having children is severed. This is a deep challenge to the structure of Judaism, since its very transmission is dependent on both relationship and reproduction. For Jews who feel bound by mitzvot, bound by the duty to ensure that life conquers death, the infertility of our loving is at the core of our struggle to understand ourselves in light of the Torah.

This problem, among others, lies at the root of much of the Jewish community's discomfort with gay people. To a people that was nearly destroyed fifty years ago, gay love seems irresponsible. Jews see the work of their lives in light of the shaping of a world for their children. By contrast, gay people appear narcissistic and self-indulgent. Gay people's sexuality is thus a diversion from the tasks of Jewish family and the survival that it symbolizes, and is perceived as marginal to the Jewish community because we are shirkers of this most central and sacred of communal tasks.

This challenge also has a moral chord that strikes deep into the problems of gay subculture. The tradition understood parenting as one of the major moral crucibles for human development. No judge could serve without first being a parent for fear that without the experience of parenting, one could grasp neither human vulnerability nor responsibility. Being heterosexual carries one down a path that demands years of selfless loving in the rearing of children. While not all straight couples have children, and some gay couples adopt them, the norm is shaped less by choice and more by biology. Yet if gay people do not ordinarily fall into monogamous coupling and childbearing, how do we find our place in the covenant? And what of the moral training that caring for children provides; how do we make up for that? Is there another job to be done that requires our service to God and to the Jewish people? Of all the problems entailed in gay sexuality, this one looms for me, both spiritually and emotionally.

Although there is no obvious biblical resource for this dilemma, there are biblical writers who struggled to address God's will in very new social circumstances. Isaiah was one such writer who bridged the worlds before and after the Exile. Some familiar passages have become charged for me with new meaning. In these verses Isaiah is speaking to his ancient Israelite community and trying to convince them that God's covenantal plan for Israel is larger than they think. The covenant begins with Abraham and Sarah but has become much more than a family affair. He speaks to two obvious outsider groups in chapter 56, the b'nai ha'nechar, the foreigners of non-Israelite birth, and the sarisim, the eunuchs:

Let not the foreigner say,
Who has attached himself to the Lord,
"The Lord will keep me separate from His people"
And let not the eunuch say,
"I am a withered tree."

In the Talmud, a eunuch is not necessarily a castrated male, but a male who is not going to reproduce for various reasons (Yevamot 80b). Why does Isaiah turn his attention here to the foreigners and the eunuchs? In the chain of the covenantal family, the foreigner has no past and the eunuch no future. They both seem excluded from the covenantal frame of reference. It is this "exclusion" that the prophet addresses:

For thus said the Lord:
"As for the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
Who have chosen what I desire
And hold fast to My covenant -
I will give them, in My House
And within my walls,
A monument and a name
Better than sons or daughters.
I will give them an everlasting name
Which shall not perish."

The prophet comforts the pain of eunuchs with the claim that there are other ways in which to observe, fulfill, and sustain the covenant. There is something more permanent than the continuity of children provides. In God's House, the achievement of each individual soul has account. A name in the Bible is the path toward the essence, the heart of being. It is passed on to progeny. But there is another sort of a name, a name better than the one sons or daughters provide. The covenant is carried forward by those who live it out, in the present. Loyalty to the covenant is measured in God's House in such a way that even if one's name is not passed on through children an eternal name will nonetheless be etched into the walls. Isaiah offers a place to the placeless, an alternative service to the person who cannot be part of the family in other ways:

As for the foreigners
Who attach themselves to the Lord,
to be His servants -
All who keep the sabbath and do not profane it,
And who hold fast to my covenant -
I will bring them to my sacred mount
And let them rejoice in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
Shall be welcome on My altar;
For My House shall be called
A House of prayer for all peoples."
Thus declares the Lord God,
Who gathers the dispersed of Israel:
"I will gather still more to those already gathered."

So inclusive is God's plan for the Israel in the world that any foreigner can join. The notion of conversion, so obvious to us now, was a striking innovation for the generation of Isaiah. Conversion is about rewriting the past. Like adoption, conversion redefines the meaning of parents and family. Birth and lineage are not discarded. The central metaphor for Israel is still family, but Isaiah and later tradition open up another avenue into the covenant. Those with no future are promised a future in the House of the Lord; those with no past are nevertheless included in Irael's destiny. God can only require the doable. A foreigner cannot choose a different birth, or the eunuch a different procreative possibility. Gay people cannot be asked to be straight, but they can be asked to "hold fast to the covenant." God will work the story out and link the loose ends as long as we hold fast to the covenant. Holding fast to the covenant demands that I fulfill the mitzvot that are in my power to fulfill. I cannot marry and bear children, but there are other ways to build a family. Adoption and surrogacy are options. If these prove infeasible, the tradition considers a teacher similar to a parent in life-giving and thus frames a way that the mitzvah of procreation can be symbolically fulfilled.

Holding fast to the covenant demands that I seek a path toward sanctity in gay sexual life. The Torah has much to say about the way people create keddusha in their sexual relationships. The values of marriage, monogamy, modesty, and faithfulness that are central to the tradition's view of holiness need to be applied in ways that shape choices and life styles.

Holding fast to the covenant means that being gay does not free one from the fulfillment of mitzvot. The complexities generated by a verse in Leviticus need not unravel my commitment to the whole of the Torah. There are myriad Jewish concerns, moral, social, intellectual, and spiritual, that I cannot abandon. Being gay need not overwhelm the rest of Jewish life. Single-issue communities are political rather than religious; religious communities tend to be comprehensive of the human condition. The richness of Jewish living derives in part from its diversity of attention, its fullness.

For gay Orthodox Jews, this imagination of engagement between ourselves and the tradition is both terribly exciting and depressing. Regretfully, the communities that embrace us, both gay and Jewish, also reject us. The Jewish community wishes that we remain invisible. The gay community is largely unsympathetic and often hostile to Judaism. There are some in the gay community who portray Judaism as the original cultural source of homophobia. More often, the lack of sympathy toward Jewish observance derives from the singlemindedness of gay activism. Liberation communities rarely have room for competing loyalties.

Gay synagogues have filled a void for many, providing a place of dignity in a Jewish community. This work is part of a movement toward a fuller integration in the larger Jewish community for which most gay Jews long. Gay-friendly synagogues may well point the way, modeling a community of families and singles, young and old, straight and gay that is in spirit much closer to my hopeful future imagination than anything yet.

Gay Jews who wish to be part of an Orthodox community will find very few synagogues in which there is some level of understanding and tolerance. Some gay Jews attend Orthodox services and remain closeted in their communities. It is crucial that Orthodox rabbis express a loving acceptance for known gays in their synagogues even if public legitimation is now impossible. Attacks on homosexuality from the pulpit are particularly painful to those who have remained connected to the traditional synagogue, despite the hardships.

I have hesitated until now to address the central halachic concerns of homosexuality. Real dialogue is necessary before such a process of responsa writing can begin. Still, it appears to many Orthodox Jews that in the case of homosexuality there is little use for dialogue in the face of such a clear biblical prohibition. A number of my colleagues and friends want very much to respond compassionately to gay people, but feel compelled to remain loyal to what they see as the unambiguous word of the Torah. Let me offer the possibility of an intermediate position to demonstrate that real listening may indeed give birth to new halachic strategies.

The Torah very specifically forbids anal intercourse between two men. If the Torah expressly forbids only this one form of sexual fulfillment, could we articulate a possible "halachic" form of gay loving that excludes anal intercourse but permits a loving physical and emotional relationship between two men or two women? After all, heterosexuality is not a free zone of activity for halachically committed Jews. For the sake of holiness, the Torah requires heterosexual couples to refrain from intercourse during menstruation. Why not offer such a sanctified option to gay men who wish to find acceptance in the halachic community?

For many gay men, this will not be a realItic choice. But until it becomes a real possibility, who knows who will agree to commit? Of course, this challenge to gay Jewish men will be sincere only if the halachic community then takes a lead in accepting the couples who commit in this covenantal fashion. (Lesbian women would be accepted without condition, because there is no Torah text that specifically prohibits their relationships.)

I offer this framework knowing that Orthodox Jews will protest that there are rabbinic prohibitions that invalidate it, and that many gay Jews will feel that it too severely limits the essence of gay lovemaking. Let it then simply demonstrate at least the beginnings of a language of discourse between the tradition as it now stands and the lives of gay people.

For the present, in regard to sexual behavior, I personally have chosen to accept a certain risk and violate the Halacha as it is presently articulated, in the hope of a subsequent, more accepting halachic expression. I realize that this is "civil disobedience." It is not the system itself which I challenge but its application to an issue that has particular meaning for me and for those like me. There is always the possibility that I am wrong. Ultimately, the halachic risks that I take are rooted in my personal relationship with God, Who I will face in the end. It is this faith that makes me both confident and suspicious of myself.

I have, admittedly, a rather privatized form of community. I am closeted and have chosen to write this essay in anonymity to preserve what is still most precious to me: the teaching of Torah and caring for my community of Jews. What concerns me most is neither rejection by the Orthodox community, nor the loss of my particular pulpit. Were I to come out, the controversy would collapse my life, my commitments, my identity as a teacher of Torah, into my gayness. Still, the secrecy and the shadowy exItence of the closet are morally repugnant and emotionally draining. I cannot remain forever in darkness. I thank God that for the time being, the Torah still sheds ample light.

I have a small circle of friends, gay and straight, men and women with whom I share a sense of community. We are looking for other tradition-centered Jews who can help build a place that embraces both the Torah and gay people. Not a synagogue, not a building, but a place for all the dispersed who are in search of community with Israel and communion with God. In this place, this House of the Lord, now somewhat hypothetical and private (and soon, I pray, to be concrete and public), those of us who have withered in the darkness, or in the light of day have been banished, will discover our names etched upon the walls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.

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

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

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

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

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

And no one cared.

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The poet Maya Angelou has made this point explicit:

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

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

5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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