IGF CultureWatch

November 30, 1999

AFTER THE SEMI-SUCCESSFUL campaign in Britain to reduce the age of consent for homosexuals, British gays are debating what should be the next campaign. Many are advocating that the priority should be anti-discrimination laws. Such a policy ignores the essential distinction between equal rights with straights and special rights for gays. This article advocates the former, and opposes the latter. The term 'Gay Rights' blurs this significant distinction. To the extent that gay rights simply means that gays should be afforded the same rights as straights, it should be strongly supported, but when it implies rights that belong only to gays but not to all straights, it should be vigorously opposed. 'Equal Rights, not Special Rights' has unfortunately become a slogan of the Christian Right. However they do not mean it, as is demonstrated by their opposition to an equal age of consent. Gays, and all those committed to equality under the law, must restate and recapture this principled position.

Equal rights would mean:

• an equal age of consent for gays and straights
• the right of gays to serve in the military
• the legal recognition of same sex unions, preferably marriage
• the right of adoption by gay families
• the right of inheritance for a gay partner if the other dies intestate, without a will

A philosophy of equal rights would oppose:

• hate crime legislation, which creates an additional penalty if the crime was an expression of hatred against gays
• legal prohibitions on anti-gay speech, unless it is threatening, in which case it is covered by the existing laws that apply to all
• laws making discrimination against gays illegal for private persons in employment, housing and so-called public places

The three principles that underpin this approach will be presented, followed by the case against anti-discrimination laws. It should be emphasised that state discrimination against gays should be ended and gays should be entitled to the same rights in law as straights, the principle of Civil Equality, while private discrimination should be condemned but not outlawed.

Three Principles

1. 'Gay rights' are neither human rights nor civil rights.

A Right is a moral entitlement. A Human Right means that it belongs to all human beings, regardless of nationality, gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation. Human Rights must meet three criteria: 1) they must be universal, applying to every human being , wherever and whenever they lived, 2) they are absolute, except when they come into conflict with each other, 3) they are inalienable, and so cannot be surrendered, e.g. no-one can sell themselves into slavery. These human rights were expressed by John Locke as 'life, liberty and property', in the French Declaration on the Rights of Man as 'liberty, property and security', and in the American Declaration of Independence as 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.

Civil Rights, or Civil Liberties, seek to embody these human rights into law, turning them into positive rights that can be claimed. Every person has an equal right to be free from interference by the state and others, in aspects such as freedom of speech, freedom of contract and freedom of association.

If Gay Rights are rights that only belong to gay people by virtue of being gay, ie they belong only to members of a particular group rather than to all individual human beings, they cannot be human rights because they do not meet the necessary criteria, notably the universality principle. Thomas Sowell has discussed how the black civil rights movement shifted from demanding equal rights to special rights in his book Civil Rights.

2. It is not the role of the law to impose morality.

This has been one of the biggest debates in political philosophy, between liberals and moral majoritarians. John Stuart Mill in On Liberty articulated the principle that people should be allowed to do as they pleased unless they do harm to others: the harm principle. This principle has been used extensively to promote equal rights for gays, e.g. in the Wolfenden Report. As the time Mill was strongly opposed by James Fitzjames Stephens. A more recent debate was between Lord Patrick Devlin, who thought that the law should express condemnation of that deplored by the majority of people, against Oxford philosopher H.L.A. Hart, who took a more liberal position. In such debates, gays have sided with the liberal view that it is not the role of the state to impose a particular conception of the good, even one endorsed by the majority. The law exists to enable people to go about their business, as long as they do not interfere with the rights of others. Ronald Dworkin expressed this principle of liberal neutrality as: No person is entitled to elevate his/her beliefs about how others should act above those of anyone else. It is very important to emphasise that for the state to allow an action is not to favour it.

3. Maximise the private.

The distinction between private and state (usually expressed as 'public') is extremely important in a free society. Unfortunately the definition of the private has become narrowed to include only the person's home, and sometimes not even that. The distinction between private and public should be ownership, not who goes there. 'Public' should mean government owned, not open to the public, as in a bar or club. Private property means that government has no right to interfere with that property unless someone's rights are being denied. A wide definition of private and a narrow definition of public (state) is the best protection for gays. The alternative is that government can legislate and interfere in areas open to the public e.g. at the Stonewall Inn, or sexual activity in cinema clubs, or sado-masochistic sex on private property (Operation Spanner). Those who control the power of the state will use it for their own purposes and preferences.

Anti-Discrimination Laws

Anti-discrimination laws would outlaw discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in employment, housing and 'public' areas. This was proposed in the US federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and exists in many US states and local jurisdictions. The Labour party conference in 1983 endorsed the idea, and many gay activists want this proposal to be at the forefront of gay campaigns.

Such laws should be opposed on the grounds that they would threaten civil liberties, society in general, and gays.

1. The Threat To Civil Liberties

Firstly, they attack freedom of association, the freedom to associate, and not to associate, with whomever we choose for whatever reason, good, bad or none. These reasons can be criticised but if some motives are made illegal, then one is no longer free. Anti-discrimination laws would force a Catholic to rent his property to someone whose activities he views as abhorrent. A fundamentalist school would have to hire homosexuals against their deepest beliefs (the cause that brought Anita Bryant into anti-gay crusades). A gay bar owner could not employ only gay barmen and women. Gay clubs could not exclude straights. Do not believe that these laws would only apply against straights. In Provincetown, Massachussetts, a male gay bar was refused a renewal of its alcohol licence because it excluded women and straight men, as was a lesbian bar in New York for its policy. In San Francisco a gay landlord was prosecuted for prefering gay men to women as tenants. The principle of freedom of association does not defend anti-gay discrimination, but recognises that bigots have rights too.

Secondly, they undermine freedom of expression. Anti-gay discrimination will occur, but employers and workers will not be allowed to express their true motives and will find other excuses to act. Employers would become legally responsible for the speech of their own employees, as in the case of the Irish worker compensated for the anti-Irish jibes of his fellow workers. Of course employers should seek to create an environment in which all workers feel able to carry out their works in a relaxed and comfortable environment, but it should not be the job of the employer to seek to regulate the speech of his or her workers unless it affects the business.

Thirdly, they are an attack on private property rights. One should set own one's rules on one's own property. In the famous US Supreme Court case, Hardwick versus Bowers, Hardwick was found guilty of anti-sodomy laws in his own home. Local anti-gays tried to prevent a lesbian retreat in Mississippi. Freedom of association and respect for privacy can only be protected by property rights, which allow individuals to carry out acts between consenting adults free from invasion. The recognition of private property rights is one of the great safeguards for gays, which they threaten at their peril.

Fourthly, they deny the free exercise of religion. A church which believes that homosexuality is a sin should not be forced to employ someone who does not accept a basic principle of the church. Church members and others of course could (and should) advocate that the church should change its position on homosexuality. However the church should be allowed to exercise its religious principles, as long as it does not seek to translate them into law simply because they are its principles. Laws would bring the state into the doctrinal affairs of the different churches and cause intense resentment amongst them.

2. The Threat to Society

Firstly, it will damage the economy. Unemployment is the biggest economic problem facing not only Britain but every western society. Most economists agree that a major factor in unemployment is what they call rigidities in the labour market. These are things which discourage employers offering work and workers accepting it. Anything which raises the cost of employment reduces the number of employment opportunities. One example is the minimum wage which will discourage employers from taking on inexperienced workers whose job productivity is difficult to predict. Another discouragement is employment legislation which makes it more difficult to sack a worker. If it is difficult to remove workers, then employers will be more cautious in taking on new workers. The fear of litigation if a gay claims to have been sacked on grounds of sexuality will discourage employers from offering employment.

This is not to advocate or defend discrimination. Discrimination has a price in the labour market because the employer is not employing the best, and will lose out to his competitors. This argument is developed in detail by the Chicago economist Gary Becker in The Economics of Discrimination.

Secondly, it undermines the political system. Such laws will contribute to what Arthur Schlesinger describes as the Balkanisation of politics. Government becomes a battleground between special interests seeking to use the power of the state to further their own interests. In the process, the public interest is ignored. Every group seeks to get its nose in the public trough, regardless of the cost to the rest of society. Special interest legislation divides society by emphasising differences in interests rather than common interests. This argument is developed more fully by public choice writers such as the Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan, and Mancur Olson in The Rise and Decline of Nations.

Thirdly, they will make the UK a more litigitious society. There is now considerable concern in the US with the massive costs in litigation, which raises the cost of products,services and employment considerably. (See Walter Olson, The Litigation Explosion.) There is now a strong movement for tort reform to reduce the problem. Anti-discrimination laws create yet another basis for additional litigation. Already considerable sums have ben awarded in the UK to those who claim some sort of discrimination, but little attention is given to who pays and the broader costs to society.

Fourthly, such laws will lead inevitably to quotas, government mandated preferences for government favoured groups. Despite claims to the contrary, and sometimes explicit references in legislation banning quotas, they are an almost inevitable consequence of such legislation .Why? These laws penalise motive, but motives are difficult to establish. If the motive is illegal , discriminators will not admit it. Those seeking to implement the laws move from a concern with 'disparate treatment,' i.e. with intent, to 'disparate impact' I.e. with effects. The question then becomes how many blacks or women or gays are employed.

To avoid costly litigation, compensation, and bad publicity, employers impose quotas. Even without legislation, the Bar Council is demanding 5% ethnic representation in barristers' chambers. This destroys equal treatment because prospective employees are not treated equally on the grounds of merit but because of certain characteristics. It is this which has created resentment and backlash against affirmative action. It may not be the intent of the law to create quotas but it is an unintended consequence.

3. The Threat to Gays

Firstly, they will perversely reduce employment and housing prospects for gays. If you are an employer making an appointment, you are aware that you may have to sack the worker in the future, because he or she is unsatisfactory, or because business requires it. The employer may be reluctant to employ someone gay, or who appears to be gay, because the employer faces the prospect that the employee would claim that he or she was dismissed because of his/her sexuality. Better to avoid the risk and not employ the person in the first place. Similarly, one of the biggest fears of any one renting out property is how difficult it may be to remove the tenants if they fail to pay the rent or damage the property.

Anti-discrimination law adds another potential obstacle to removing them. This creates an incentive to the owner to favour renting to a straight rather than a gay, providing he/she can find another reason to favour the straight. It would be yet another example of the perverse effects of laws leading to the opposite to that which was intended.

Secondly, they will contribute to a backlash against gays. In 1992 there were two referendums on gays in the states of Oregon and Colorado. The former was defeated, while the latter passed. The difference was that the Oregon proposition sought to condemn homosexuality in the state constitution, while the Colorado one sought to ban local authorities from passing anti-discrimination laws for gays. The moral majoritarian slogan against special rights for gays resonated with ordinary straights because there was an element of truth in it, whatever the motivation of its promoters. Appeals to equal rights will appeal much more to straights that appeals to special rights, and anti-gays will be quick to blur the distinction.

Thirdly, they reduce the self-esteem of gays by creating a victim mentality: that gays have no power but are dependent on the state to protect them. There is now a debate between victim and power feminism, between those who portray women as victims who need the protection against men, and these who emphasise the power and potential power of women. The power approach would be best for gays. The psychology of the victim leads to resentment not betterment. As Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic noted, "By legislating homosexuals as victims, it sets up a psychological dynamic that too often only perpetuates cycles of inadequacy and self-doubt". Gays are then led to assume that they cannot succeed without special protection, and straights will assume gays are successful because of preference not merit. The difference between power and victim approaches is reflected in the debate on the existence of the Pink Pound. On the one side are those who emphasise the existence of substantial economic resources in the hands of gays, and view gays as success stories. On the other, the victim gays seek to deny the power of the pink pound and prefer to present gays as poor and downtrodden.

Fourthly, anti-discrimination laws rely on the power of government, yet government has been the chief oppressor of gays. Gays will always be a permanent minority. It is very dangerous to rely on laws passed by the majority to protect them. These laws would legitimise interference in private matters. These are more likely to be used against gays in the longer term . The state should be seen as a threat to gays, not an ally.

Conclusion

Discrimination against people simply because of their sexual orientation exists and is wrong, but it is not the role of the law to correct every wrong. Law is not, and has not been, the solution to sex and racial discrimination and will not be for sexual orientation.

There is no easy or permanent solution to anti-gay discrimination. Gays can however seek:

• equality before law
• maximum freedom of association
• social disapproval of discrimination.

Gays must have equal rights to straights. They are entitled to nothing less� but also nothing more.

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Suggested Reading

• Bruce Bawer, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society, Simon & Schuster, 1994.
• Gary Becker, The Economics of Discrimination, University of Chicago Press, 1974.
• Richard Epstein, Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws, Harvard University Press, 1992.
• Sean Gabb, What To Do About Aids, Libertarian Alliance Pamphlet No.12, 1989.
• Brian Mickelthwait, Gay and Lesbian Rights: Property is Better than Politics, Libertarian Alliance, Political Notes No. 69, 1992.
• Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations, Yale University Press, 1982.
• Walter Olson, The Litigation Explosion, Plume, 1992.
• Richard Posner, Sex and Reason, Harvard University Press, 1992, chapter 11.
• Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors, Chicago University Press, 1993, chapters 5,6.
• Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, Morrow, 1984.
• Andrew Sullivan, The Politics of Homosexuality, New Republic May 10, 1993.
• Gay Rights or Human Rights? Economist February 6, 1993, pp.15-16

ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE aspects of George Chauncey's social history Gay New York 1890-1940 is the abundant evidence it provides that governments were consistently the enemy of gay people, but business entrepreneurs were often much friendlier.

This should not be surprising. Governments tend to impose the opinions and prejudices of the majority. By contrast, the free market is where people have an incentive to suspend their prejudices and simply try to make money from every available source. Thus free markets are the great solvent of prejudice.

And while government necessarily makes one law for everyone, the market is always open to a variety of minority tastes that can find themselves served as a "niche market." Government is unitary; markets are pluralistic.

Chauncey's book offers several examples of entrepreneurs ignoring pubic prejudice or evading the law in order to make money by catering to gays even when it was risky to do so.

Early in this century some heterosexual Turkish bathhouses began quietly tolerating gay men. According to one hostile account Chauncey quotes, "not a few of the places which cater to the public demand for steam baths are glad to enjoy the patronage of pansies [gay men]." The writer added that managers of the baths often received "fat tips" from their "degenerate patrons."

Strictly gay bathhouses were open as early as 1902, and as such were among the first gay commercial spaces in the city. Chauncey notes that there was considerable financial incentive for a bathhouse to develop a reputation as gay since that lent it a competitive edge in a period of declining public use of bathhouses.

Police generally ignored the baths, presumably because they were bribed to do so. The few raids were usually prompted by reformist and social purity groups who sent in their own investigators and then tried to force the police to shut them down.

A remarkable example of gay-tolerant entrepreneurship is provided by the history of the "Raines Law hotels" early in this century. When a law was passed forcing saloons to close on Sunday unless they were part of a hotel, many bars created several small cubicles with beds to qualify as hotels, which they then rented out to couples for sexual activity. Bars found to be fostering prostitution in this way were closed and allowed to reopen only if they did not admit women. Some bars then proceeded to garner income by renting out the cubicles to gay male couples.

The rooming houses where many of New York's single men lived also often accommodated gay men as tenants, respecting their privacy and permitting them to bring home male visitors. One major reason was simply the competition for lodgers among the city's many rooming houses. A few even became largely gay.

Chauncey comments: "Some landladies doubtless tolerated known homosexual lodgers for the same economic reasons they tolerated lodgers who engaged in heterosexual affairs, and others simply did not care about their tenants' homosexual affairs."

In the same way, many of the cafeterias and restaurants where most of those lodgers took their meals ignored the "disreputable character" of even their conspicuously gay patrons, "primarily because they were patrons."

By the 1920s, some restaurants and automats were heavily populated with gay men, especially late at night, and a few places openly catered to them. Chauncey points out that the gay men provided regular patronage at places that welcomed them, and sometimes the men's campy behavior attracted other patrons who found them entertaining.

Social purity groups and other "reformers" strongly disapproved of such open gay socializing, but often the police (or the politicians who controlled them) were simply bribed to not bother the restaurants. And some of the large restaurant chains had enough political clout to protect themselves from police interference.

By the early 1920s and into the 1930s gays and lesbians began to engage in more entrepreneurship themselves, opening their own speakeasies and restaurants and holding dances. Chauncey mentions one major gay entrepreneur first opened a small lunch counter, then opened a restaurant (promoted with the image of a sexually ambiguous couple), and later organized a "dinner dance and rumba review" at yet another restaurant.

Pay off the police, or "hire" them.

In some cases gay and gay friendly establishments paid off the police, in other cases they hired the police, ostensibly to provide security from public harassment, but also to provide protection from the police themselves. Chauncey reports that one entrepreneur who ran a gay cabaret protected his business by making his facilities freely available to a social club that included many policemen, allowing them to drink and socialize with female prostitutes.

Gays had always attended masquerade balls sponsored as fundraisers by local clubs, drawn by the opportunity to "dress up" or dance with a male partner in female costume. An investigator for a social purity group reported in 1918 that "a prominent feature of these dances is the number of male perverts who attend them." Organizers welcomed the gays who drew crowds of curiosity seekers.

But the police kept a watchful eye on the dances, uneasy about the gays and same-sex dancing ("disorderly conduct"). One dance organizer who stopped two men from dancing together later apologized to them, saying the police had forced him to stop them. Eventually the threat of police raids forced organizers to cancel the balls.

One of the oddest examples of entrepreneurship benefiting gays occurred when Prohibition ended. When the State Liquor Authority began to crack down on the gay presence in bars with mixed (gay and straight) clientele, gays tended to cluster at bars that were willing to risk serving them. But many bar owners found the cost and risk too great because police kept closing them for illegally serving gays (a gay presence was defined as "disorderly").

"As a result," says Chauncey, "organized criminal syndicates, the only entities powerful enough to offer bars systematic protection, took over the gay bar business." The syndicates, which developed during Prohibition, had enough money, political clout and inside police contacts to provide protection for the bars and their patrons; and the syndicates cared little about public opinion. The famed Stonewall Bar itself was a syndicate-owned bar.

One obvious subsidiary theme in all this is that laws often have surprising unintended consequences, but that is another column.

Originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1999.

Review: Children, commitment and consequences are among the forces that press straights to shoulder the full responsibilities of adulthood. Being a parent may not be an obligatory part of the formula, but it's still time gay male culture got in touch with its inner grown-up. [Books reviewed: Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, "Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America"; John-Manuel Andriote, "Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America"; Daniel Mendelsohn, "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity"; and Robin Hardy and David Groff, "The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood".]

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TO BE A HOMOSEXUAL in 1999 is to stand on the curb during the New York gay pride parade and feel your eyes water, faster than you can stop them, as row after row of openly homosexual police officers march by, in full uniform. Behind them, supporting them, the NYPD marching band:this from a police force whose members, some of them, had been known to turn their backs on their homosexual colleagues in earlier marches. To be a homosexual in 1999 is also to watch as, later in the same parade, a flatbed truck rolls past bearing a banner proclaiming WWW.RENTBOY.COM. On the platform, a dozen or more dancing hustlers wear only biker shorts or briefs. In due course they liberate themselves from their clothing altogether. They cover their crotches with their hands but offer generous glimpses of the goods. Later, some of them are told by on-duty police officers to leave or face arrest.

It was odd to see these two species, the men (and women) in their NYPD blues and the boys in their birthday suits, marching in the same parade, as though they had anything to do with one another. Odder still was that they had a great deal to do with one another. Some of these homosexual men become gay boys when they take off the blue uniforms after work and go down to the bars in Chelsea. Some of these gay boys become homosexual men when they put on creased trousers and report for their day jobs.

In individual gay men, the tension between the competing identities of ordinary adult citizen and "boy" - as in, "He's one cute boy, for 35" - can be energizing and endlessly amusing. Individual people, after all, can have it both ways, up to a point. In the struggle to define the public image of homosexuality in America, however, the two make war. The gay establishment tells heterosexual America: "We are just like you." And the boys, grinning, say just as loudly: "Like you? The last thing in the world we want is to be like you!" For 30 years, the identity paradox - the uneasy coexistence and sometimes open warfare of the adult culture with the "boy" culture - has turned the gay rights movement into a battle with itself.

"No book before has attempted to follow the germ of rebellion which began with Stonewall, as it blossomed in other cities into a national political movement," write Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, both of the New York Times, in their introduction to "Out for Good." Having conducted about 700 interviews with 330 people over seven years, they intend, they say, to record "a definitive history of the movement," beginning with New York's landmark Stonewall riots of 1969 and ending in 1987, when the AIDS crisis was in its ghastly full bloom. No book as ambitious as this one can be perfect. On the whole, however, the authors have succeeded in what they set out to do. The story - and it is a big, dense, messy, colorful, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, depressing story - is told with political acumen, reportorial vividness and narrative flair. The book is a remarkable accomplishment. Not least remarkable is its demonstration that the gay rights movement has been at least as decisively shaped by its internal struggles over identity as by its struggles with its opponents on the outside.

Though some black civil rights leaders huff and puff to repudiate any resemblance between their struggle and the gay-rights movement, the similarities seem hard to deny. Homosexuals faced legal discrimination and Jim Crow-style laws: As recently as 1967, the New York State Liquor Authority forbade bars to serve homosexuals, and one of the first activist campaigns in 1969 sought to "integrate" a Los Angeles restaurant (Barney's Beanery) that displayed a "Fagots [sic] Stay Out" sign. Police harassment was a constant feature of gay life, and a sex arrest often meant the end of a job or a career. (This problem is not yet solved. In Texas a year ago, two men were arrested for having sex at home.) In 1977, citing Leviticus, the Ku Klux Klan called for the execution of all homosexuals.

Particularly in the 1970s, gay churches were burned by arsonists, rebuilt, burned again. In 1973, 32 people died when an arsonist torched the UpStairs bar in New Orleans; one man who survived was notified on his hospital bed that he had been fired from his job as a schoolteacher. There was, and is, a drumbeat of violence, which is a sort of terrorism. Although it is true that homosexuality is not a race and, unlike ethnicity, has behavioral components, it is also true that, since the 1970s, racial discrimination and anti-black sentiment have been driven not by skin color racism, as such, but by fears of a stereotyped "black lifestyle." The supposed "black lifestyle" centers on crime, drugs and idleness, whereas the supposed "gay lifestyle" centers on promiscuity, disease and political extremism; but the aversions engendered by the two clusters of anti-social stereotypes are not so very different.

Why, then, has the gay movement so utterly failed to attain the gravitas and moral traction of black civil rights? A lot of reasons; and boys prancing around in the altogether must be prominent among them. To the consternation of many straight people - and many lesbians - gay men were doing everything in their power to be seen as sex-obsessed party animals. "Gay liberation," say the authors, "had somehow evolved into the right to have a good time - the right to enjoy bars, discos, drugs and frequent impersonal sex." One gay leader is quoted as saying, "Never forget one thing: What this movement is about is f-ing."

The party ended in July 1981, only 12 years after it began. "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals," said a New York Times headline on July 3. Even before AIDS, as John-Manuel Andriote, a Washington-based journalist, notes in "Victory Deferred," urban gay men were infected with diseases - gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis - at rates otherwise seen only in Third World countries. By the late 1970s, even before AIDS emerged, one doctor with the San Francisco public health department was warning, "Too much is being transmitted here."

"Victory Deferred" does not deliver quite what its subtitle ("How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America") promises; its real concern is how AIDS changed gay activism in America. About "gay life in America" - about the sick and the dying, and about the hearts and lives and tears of homosexual men and women - Andriote says little. Rather, his book is a comprehensive survey of institutional responses: how care-giving organizations, arising overnight, strained to the breaking point and beyond; how a few hardscrabble AIDS groups became, after the government started spending big money, 18,000 organizations, many of them run by expense account professionals; how, with astonishing success, desperate and outraged homosexuals created what amounted to their own Food and Drug Administration. Andriote is more diligent than literary, and he has a weakness for bureaucratic sentences like, "AID Atlanta was the only gay community-based ASO among the eleven RWJ sites to be selected as the program's coordinating agency." Still, he is encyclopedic and knowledgeable. People who want to know how a community mobilized in the face of an unprecedented crisis will want to start here.

In recent years, as the epidemic has receded toward survivability, homosexual thinkers and activists began to rise from the bedsides of the ill and consider the questions that AIDS had only temporarily suppressed. The boy culture seemed deeply implicated in the health crisis. But was it really to blame? In 1997, a group of activists and academics, calling themselves Sex Panic!, argued that AIDS hysteria and conservative backlash, among gays as well as straights, were reviving sex phobia and repression. Robin Hardy, writing with David Groff in "The Crisis of Desire," takes this view. Hardy was a writer and activist who was HIV-positive but died, still healthy, in a hiking accident in 1995. He left behind an unfinished book, which his friend Groff, a writer and editor, has completed with skill. Sometimes the book rages, sometimes it ponders; to Groff's credit, however, its moods seem to belong to one author, not two, and the writing is never less than accomplished. For Hardy, gay identity and gay promiscuity are more or less the same thing. The unfettered exploration of sexual pleasure is liberating not just for homosexuals but for everybody, representing "progress toward a society that values pleasure." Before AIDS, he says, "We believed we were at the beginning of a new age in human relations - and we were." Even today, promiscuous but safe sex is "far more effective - not to mention affirming - than strategies of closure, repression, penalization of promiscuity and enforced monogamy put forward by the state and by some of our big-time thinkers." Hardy regrets having HIV, but he does not regret the sex that gave it to him. "Communal sex," he writes, "is to gay men what golf is to, well, other kinds of men: they find beauty and bonding in it."

It must be said that Hardy is, for the most part, more thoughtful than that. But it must also be said that Hardy's vision seems strange to those of us who lead a different sort of life, who put commitment ahead of sex and who consider ourselves no less authentically gay for doing so. One wonders, too, if it isn't childish to condemn medicine, government and society for their indifferent and moralistic responses to AIDS while complaining about the loss of the sex.

To Daniel Mendelsohn, a classicist and a writer of distinction, falls the task of confronting the paradox that Hardy pushes to one side. "The Elusive Embrace" is that rare thing, a genuinely beautiful essay: a musing meditation on gay culture, on Greek language and myth, on his own family and life, that is not so much written as braided. The voice is intimate, probing, often of a loveliness that brings you up short: "His nostrils were delicate, like snail shells; they trembled when he spoke, if you got that close. I asked him out. His dark hair, when I finally kissed him, was glossy and smelled sweet, like a child's."

Mendelsohn writes: "For a long time I have lived in two places." One place is at the edge of New York's Chelsea, the Mecca of the gay boy culture; the other is in a town an hour away, where Mendelsohn and his friend Rose are raising her young son Nicholas. In the city he is a cosmopolitan who can melt into the anonymous adventurism of the streets; in the town his intimate encounters are with spittle and pediatricians. Why, he wonders, does he never think of straight men as "boys," which is the way he would think of them if they were gay? The answer, in a word: Nicholas. "Children are the secret weapon of straight culture: they have the potential to rescue men from inconsequentiality. Fatherhood has the power to confer authenticity on men; it can be what saves them from eternally being boys themselves."

Playfulness, says Mendelsohn, is what distinguishes gay style from straight style. "Desire and sex are just an expression of an almost willful insistence on constant play," he writes. "Without anyone but yourself to be responsible for - to wait for - there is no reason, really, not to play." Yet he is glad to have Chelsea, the playground, to return to between long visits with Nicholas. "You move between two places," he says. "Gay identity hovers between strange extremes."

This will always be true. The boy culture will never vanish, nor should it. Straight men have poker nights and football outings; gay men have dance clubs and the Halloween high heel drag race. But the balance will shift and is shifting already. Any culture is infantilized, necessarily, when its members are denied the power to enter into adult commitments - to own, to vote, to defend one's country, to marry. Black men, recall, were once "boys," when they were denied the full prerogatives of citizenship and of adulthood. For gay life in America, the epochal change going on just now is the emergence of an agenda advancing not the right to have fun but the right to assume responsibility; to serve in the military, to mentor and rear the young and to marry.

Of those, marriage is the most important. One day America may allow homosexuals to enter into the single most important commitment that adults make, the formal bond to another human being for (one hopes) life. When that happens, gay culture's long adolescence ends. Mendelsohn is right: Children make men out of boys. But so does the bond of marriage. So, for that matter, does feeding your wasted partner, carrying him up the stairs, wiping the vomit from his mouth and embracing him in the darkness. "In sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part": These are words spoken by grown-ups.

A COMMON CHARGE against gay conservatives is that we are narrow and selfish, ignoring the needs of the disadvantaged. A typical example of this criticism is a recent article by Richard Goldstein in New York's Village Voice. Goldstein dismisses gay conservatives as "a recent arrival in the movement," then chides the Log Cabin Republicans for including too few poor, black, and female members. Finally, he upbraids Andrew Sullivan, the most prominent gay conservative in America, for focusing on gay marriage instead of things like "justice" and economic "security" for oppressed people.

Among progressives, words like "justice" and "security" are placeholders for a broad range of policy choices. As one recent and especially articulate letter to San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter put it, "our struggle for equality should include the struggle for universal access to health care, a guaranteed living wage, affordable and adequate housing for all," and so on. The writer reasons that these are "gay rights issues" because "we are everywhere." Gay conservatives, whom he disparages as out-of-touch, upper-class white males, are then faulted for not backing his policy preferences.

These critics are dead wrong about the gay right. As a matter of fact, gay conservatives are not "new arrivals" to the movement. Contrary to the widespread pop-history about the Stonewall riot, the American gay civil rights movement did not begin in any radical upheaval of the late 1960s. Embarrassing as this may be to some, many of the organizers of the movement in the 1950s were middle-class, white, male, and distinctly "assimilationist" (read: conservative) in their approach to gay civil rights. While it's true that there were also dedicated communists among these pre-Stonewall organizers, some, like Dorr Legg, were lifelong Republicans. They risked losing their freedom, jobs, families, and homes to a far greater degree than we do now.

Further, the undeniable demographic imbalance in the movement has not been limited to gay Republicans. As Stephen Murray notes in American Gay, even radical "queer" and AIDS street-theater groups have been mostly white and middle-class. Of course, there is no reason to conclude from this history that only conservative, wealthy, white males should lead the movement today.

Aside from its errors of history and fact, the left's critique of gay conservatives suffers more serious theoretical weaknesses.

First, it operates from an unworkably expansive definition of what constitutes a gay issue. If, as some would have it, anything that affects the life of any gay person anywhere is a gay issue, then there are no issues that aren't gay issues. It may make strategic sense occasionally to take sides on other issues in order to form political alliances (and the ideological tilt of those alliances will vary). An all-encompassing conception of gay civil rights, however, would make it illegitimate to focus on narrowly defined gay concerns.

That has profound consequences. Any organization that took this definition seriously would get little done for gay civil rights since it would constantly be distracted and divided by important peripheral questions. To avoid being unduly narrow, we become impossibly wide.

Even granting this limitless conception of gay civil rights, why are gays more qualified to hold forth on race and class issues than, say, a union of bricklayers? Sure, we're not incompetent to talk about them; but we're not more competent by virtue of being gay, either. To avoid being selfish, then, we become arrogant.

Second, accepting the notion that every conscientious citizen (gay or not) should be concerned about the problems of beleaguered groups, the next question is how to deal with those problems. Bromides about justice cannot mask how complicated the inquiry now becomes.

Consider the above-mentioned proposals, for example. There's a good argument that state-controlled "universal access to health care" would mean rationed and inefficient health care, with less incentive for entrepreneurial investment in lifesaving treatments and drugs for diseases like AIDS. A government-mandated "guaranteed living wage" - essentially a dramatically higher minimum wage - would be inflationary and would depress employment, hurting the lower classes most of all. "Affordable and adequate housing for all" is pleasant-sounding code language for things like rent control. Yet rent control discourages private investment in low-cost housing, hardly a boon to the poor. It goes on and on like that.

Third, even on strictly gay issues, the critique of gay conservatives' priorities badly misfires. Same-sex marriage, for example, offers more to Goldstein's disenfranchised constituencies than he imagines.

Allowed to wed, poverty-stricken gays will have an opening to the array of advantages marriage provides, including health care, tax breaks, testimonial privileges, and Social Security benefits. The generally higher physical, emotional, and financial health enjoyed by married couples will finally be available to disadvantaged gays - people that are in far greater need of those benefits than rich white boys are.

Women, whose desire for variety in sexual partners is on average lower than men's, are disproportionately more likely to access the benefits of same-sex marriage. Why belittle this simple measure of justice and security for gay women?

What we have is not a debate between a generous group of people who care about the downtrodden and a stingy group of people who don't. What we have, among other things, is a complicated debate between distinct visions of how to help them. That's a serious discussion, unlike the polemical one Goldstein and friends want.

First appeared in the New York Times, July 5, 1999.

AT ITS BEST, "Out for Good" vividly reports the activism and intramural conflicts of the 1970's gay and lesbian movement. The middle of this book is superb, but its frame weakens it. To end with the funeral of a Los Angeles political patron, Sheldon Andelson, in 1987 is peculiar. An epilogue about Bill Clinton's campaign promises of 1992 is even stranger.

Neither phenomenon makes sense as the climax of the gay and lesbian movement. Was the goal of the historical figures discussed in this book only to be a rarely greased cog in the Democratic Party? For some, it was. But there were and are gay and lesbian congeries of activist sex radicals, socialists and gay libertarians, not just caucuses of the Democratic Party. The authors, Dudley Clendinen, an editorial writer for The New York Times, and Adam Nagourney, a metropolitan reporter for The Times, largely ignore the many disparate groups of gay and lesbian advocates seeking broad social or political changes to dote on those seeking to be part of one political party.

Starting the book with the Stonewall Inn "riot" may make sense for an account of New York gay politics, but other than a symbol, little developed from it. (Even for New York City, another raid -- on the Snake Pit later in the summer of 1969 -- was more consequential for political organizing.) Before Stonewall, San Francisco provided models and precedents both of impolite public protests and of working with and within government for recognition and protection.

There is certainly plenty in the book about San Francisco and Los Angeles politics in the 1970's and 80's, but the foundational role of gay organizing in those cities is ignored to repeat the familiar tale of what was a false start in New York. Perhaps the best indicator of New York's nonleadership is one the authors note. The first municipal gay rights ordinance in the nation was introduced in the New York City Council on Jan. 6, 1971. One was enacted 15 years, 2 months and 14 days later -- following 3 states, 11 counties and 48 other cities.

After the unfortunate choice of an opening point, "Out for Good" is actually less New York-centered than other histories of the gay and lesbian movement during the 70's and 80's. It includes richly detailed accounts of battles in Minnesota and Miami and of a 1973 fire bombing in New Orleans, though the major focal points are California, Boston, New York and Washington. After detailed accounts of the 1977 repeals of gay rights ordinances in Miami and St. Paul, the authors mention but do not tell the story of the first success in combating such a campaign (in Seattle in 1978).

The authors also provide the perspectives of many female leaders, both lesbian separatists and those eager to take over organizations and to control resources mostly supplied by men. Yet there is hardly anything about lesbian mobilizations around such issues as child custody.

The multiple narratives within the book are character-driven. This makes it engaging reading. There are plenty of villains (most of them egomaniacs), some heroes and heroines, and strong plot lines about particular battles. The overall line of development is obscure, not least because the book's two endings are so arbitrary.

With so many would-be leaders and so few followers of any particular one, the authors' focus on those who commanded some media attention at one time or another is predictable. Most of the figures of the gay and lesbian movement who were prominent burned out from infighting, were singed by attacks (often very personal ones) or faded away from exhaustion. Many have died since 1992, when work on this book began. Anyone interested in the perspectives of earlier prominent figures in the gay and lesbian movement has to be grateful for the prodigious efforts the authors made in interviewing 330 people (some multiple times), and to hope that their records will be available to future researchers.

A truly definitive history, which the authors twice claim in the introduction to have produced, has to look beyond celebrities and leaders to those who worked out of the spotlight and to the "free riders" -- that is, the many people who gained from movements to which they contributed no time or energy. A definitive history would also have to provide a clearer analytical framework.

Along with individual profiles, a definitive history of the American gay and lesbian movement needs to compare this movement with those in other countries and with other contemporary movements in the United States. The civil rights movement and the Christian right are two with direct relations to the gay and lesbian movement, and offer useful comparisons of relative success, amount of infighting, frequency of schisms and so on. This lack is especially surprising because Mr. Clendinen has written extensively about the Christian right.

But systematic comparisons would make the book even longer and might not interest those who thrive on gossip about celebrities (even mostly forgotten minor-league ones). Instead of jettisoning background before Stonewall, the authors should have removed the account of mobilizations around AIDS. Their account is more reliable and far better substantiated than Randy Shilts's, but there are other, better analyses of AIDS activism (e.g., the second half of Steven Epstein's "Impure Science"). The authors dwell at inordinate length on David Goodstein, who published The Advocate for most of the years between 1975 and 1985 and repeatedly failed to shape gay movement strategy.

As prodigious as their interviewing efforts were, as interesting and reliable and well documented as their reporting is, and as well written as this book is, a more sweeping history not only of gay politics but also of gay culture can be found in "The Other Side of Silence," by John Loughery. "Out for Good" is the best history of gay mobilizations during the 1970's and useful on the early 80's, but Mr. Loughery's more analytic history, with its longer time frame, remains the best book so far available on the emergence of 20th-century American gay culture and politics.

First published in late June 1999 in The Weekly News (Miami) and other gay newspapers.

Organizers of next April's Millennium March on Washington (MMOW), which aims to "promote equal rights for all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals," are celebrating their commitment to diversity, defined as "parity by gender and for people of color." According to the group's recent press release, "The movement has progressed so that the board of directors of this march are [sic] now made up of 60 percent people of color, African American, Native American, Latino/latina and Asian American, as well as 60 percent women."

This commitment to "parity," and even "parity plus," is now so common among lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgendered activist groups that it's barely alluded to, even though all non-white minorities together are considerably under half of the US population (which is still 73 percent non-Hispanic white). And while women are a bit more than 50 percent of the general population, surveys repeatedly suggest that gay males outnumber lesbians by close to 2 to 1. But I really don't want to get into the numbers game, because for those of us who believe personal merit, rather than identity group membership, should be the determining factor for selecting leadership, the whole issue of "proportional representation" based on race or gender is offensive.

I point this out not to be churlish, and at the risk of inviting the inevitable, and mindless, critique of "racist and sexist." But when a policy becomes as ingrained within our community as "parity" has become, it deserves to be given a second look. Consider, for example, that at the last March on Washington, in 1993, the smattering of gay white males allowed to be speakers at the all-day rally could be counted on one hand, literally. If anything less than representation reflecting actual demographics constitutes discrimination, then pale gay males were discriminated against by their own rights march! Aside from those deemed fit to speak, organizers had also mandated 50 percent minority quotas on state organizing committees.

The following year, for the Stonewall 25th anniversary march and rally in New York City, the event's executive committee required 50 percent gender parity and 25 percent representation by people of color. But since many of the regional delegations that filled the larger national steering committee failed to achieve their quotas, it was decided at a planning meeting (held that summer in Milwaukee) that women present could cast three votes apiece, and people of color, two. This meant giving more weight to the vote of a black lesbian than to that of a black man, and more weight to his vote than to that of a gay white male. (One delegate suggested that to improve gender and skin color "parity" at future planning meetings, some of those who were of the wrong gender and racial classification should stay home.)

The parity mantra isn't limited to national marches. A few years ago, a national planning meeting of representatives from chapters of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation operated under a convoluted quota requirement that went this way: Each chapter sent two delegates to the meeting, but unless one of the two delegates was a person of color and one was a woman, the chapter was penalized by getting only one vote instead of two. To avoid this, only when one delegate was a lesbian of color could the second be a gay white male (I said it was convoluted).

Over time, well-intended support for greater inclusiveness in the gay and lesbian movement has become twisted into something altogether different. Rather than fostering greater mutuality grounded in an appreciation of diversity, what has emerged is a politically correct tribalism that champions apportioning representation based on gender and race/ethnicity, creating superficial diversity that works against the equality vital for true community. At the heart of the parity paradox is the illiberal assumption that we can only be represented by someone of our own gender and skin color (with the caveat that the candidate be on the political left, or else she or he is likely to be dismissed as an "inauthentic" representative of his/her respective identity group).

"Diversity," in effect, has become a veil for positing the fundamental differentness of people based on their race or sex, rather than suggesting something altogether different (and desirable) -- the removal of barriers that separate. Just how insidious has this become? At a forum sponsored by the National Association of Gay and Lesbian Journalists that I attended in New York City, someone loudly protested that an African-American panelist wasn't dark-toned enough to provide adequate "diversity."

Another predictable outcome is tokenism, with some female and minority delegates selected solely on the basis of race and gender. This means that others, who truly are qualified, get tarred with the "token" stigma.

When good faith attempts to foster diversity on the basis of equality, such as affirmative outreach, are replaced by rigidly applied quotas to ensure parity, chasms are created that no amount of "diversity training" can overcome. And, despite all the self-righteous rhetoric, often the not-so-subtle subtext is that the participation of gay white guys is not desirable, and that the optimum "diversity" would be 100% "progressive" women of color. This message, in fact, may go a long way toward answering the question posed by a recent cover story in The Advocate magazine, which asked, "Where are the men" in today's gay rights movement?

Anyone who dares raise objections to "parity" can expect to receive a lecture about the primacy of diversity. I know this from personal experience, as I was once scolded as "someone who thinks white men are the main victims of discrimination" simply for raising the issue of gender and race quotas at an activist gathering. For that reason, many who sense that hostility toward gay white men, rather than desires for equality and community, is at play have learned not to express the opposition they feel toward these policies. Many others, often with badly needed technical expertise, steer clear of activist organizations altogether.

At one time, of course, characterizing individuals on the basis of their gender and race and treating all other characteristics as secondary would itself have been called sexist and racist, and rightly so. Apportioning votes on the basis of skin color or sex is not only profoundly anti-democratic and anti-liberal, but profoundly un-American.

Nobody should dispute that in the recent past women and people of color were formally excluded from power. But if policies based on remedying collective guilt (rather than fostering equal opportunity) rankle society at large, a growing number of gay white men also are expressing resentment toward the "oppression hierarchies" that classify them as privileged members of the patriarchy and belittle the bigotry they, too, face every day.

Unlike guarantees of equal opportunity for all comers, requiring an outcome of parity ultimately work against a united, diverse, and truly democratic (as in one person, one vote) lesbian and gay movement. It's time to reexamine received dogma and to once again join together to work for real equality by emphasizing our common humanity. In short, it's time to stop defining diversity as the application of parity requirements that not only disproportionately discriminate against gay white males, but serve to reduce all concerned to stand-ins for their race and gender.

First appeared in the June 17, 1999, Windy City Times.

MODERN GAY LIBERATION is a creation not of Stonewall but of the 1960s.

In a previous column I sketched some notable examples of gay activism during the 1960s. The examples showed that the pace of gay activism accelerated rapidly in the second half of the decade, virtually assuring a thriving gay movement in the 1970s whether Stonewall happened or not.

However, the 1960s gay movement did not work in isolation. It was aided by large-scale changes in America's public culture, changes that not only helped the gay movement, but encouraged even gays who had no contact with the movement to be more self-accepting and step forward to claim civic equality.

When someone shakes a soft drink can before opening it, then pulls the tab, the contents spurt out. The Sixties were the shaking; Stonewall simply pulled the tab.

As gay historian Jim Levin pointed out in his valuable 1983 study Reflections on the American Homosexual Rights Movement, if there was a single theme underlying the various social trends of the 1960s it is the growing willingness to question received opinion, to "Question Authority" as one button urged, and to assert individual moral autonomy against the agents of social control -- governments, law, religions, psychiatry, even "propriety."

For instance, the 1960s black civil rights movement demonstrated how unjust some laws were and how irrational were the social prejudices behind those laws. It was easy for gays to see parallels to anti-gay laws and realize how the social opprobrium they endured was like prejudice against blacks.

Frank Kameny coined the slogan "Gay is Good" in 1968 in clear imitation of "Black is Beautiful." Whatever else "Black is Beautiful" meant, it meant that equality should not depend on becoming identical to the dominant majority.

The other main model of social protest was the anti-Viet Nam war movement. Increasingly militant demonstrations suggested to gays that it was legitimate to protest government policy and to consider resisting laws which directly threatened them.

Then too, the fact that some heterosexual anti-war protesters claimed to be gay in order to protest the war or avoid the draft suggested to many young gays that it might not be so scary to acknowledge being gay after all.

Perhaps the best example of the 1960s social ethos was the embrace by some young people of the idea of a "counterculture," a lifestyle emphasizing relaxation of rules, hierarchies and traditional moral strictures.

The theme of the counter-culture was the libertarian one of self-exploration and personal authenticity, in contrast to conformity or conventional respectability. A zealous non-judgmental attitude prevailed, a rule of "Do your own thing." The advocacy of personal authenticity was not lost on gays. The politicized New Left held "teach ins," but the counter-culture held "be-ins".

The counter-culture encouraged the use of psychoactive drugs to explore "alternative consciousness." It encouraged the exploration of Asian religions -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, a plethora of gurus. Despite meager results and more quest than insight, the effect of both was to disestablish moralistic Christianity as the sole model of religion.

The counter-culture fostered sexual expression as a means of helping people find personal liberation and permitted occasional bisexual behavior by heterosexuals for the same reason. Its non-assertive attitudes encouraged a kind of mild androgyny among males that challenged aggressive masculinity and the stereotype that gays were unique in lacking masculinity. When a shocked young women once told one such man that he was wearing "girl's tennis shoes," he looked puzzled, shrugged, and said simply, "I don't care."

The imperatives of personal authenticity and self-discovery were reinforced by the newly reborn women's movement, which urged women to reject traditional social role limitations. Women were encouraged to "raise their consciousness" and rethink their self-concepts and preconceptions about women's capacities and autonomy. The message for women was given powerful impetus by the availability of the birth control pill after 1960, allowing women to assert greater control over their sexuality.

The feminist call to reject socially fostered self-concepts and assert sexual self-ownership had clear relevance for gays, even when not directly aimed at them.

One of the most conspicuous changes during the 1960s was the greater openness about sex. Social historians now argue whether there was actually more sex (yes, some), but there was certainly more talk about it in newspapers, magazines, on television talk shows, in living rooms. There was more sex in novels, in plays, in movies. One small magazine mischievously titled itself Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.

Partly this was pushed along by the ongoing sexual revolution and the increasing separation of sex from reproduction. But in greater measure it resulted from U.S. Supreme Court decisions steadily restricting the definition of obscenity, allowing an ever-widening range of sexual material to be published.

Inevitably, greater public discussion of homosexuality followed, especially in the latter half of the 1960s, if only because gays were exotic and controversial. The number of newspaper and magazine article multiplied year by year. At one point New York television talk show host David Susskind seemed to have gays on his program so frequently that a contemporary cartoon parodied him by drawing a homosexual interviewing a group of David Susskinds.

Early gay activists solicited and welcomed this publicity, even though it was seldom uniformly favorable, because they saw it as a way of letting closeted gays know they were not alone and sending the message of gay legitimacy to gays they could not reach otherwise. As we know from the results, the strategy worked.

It deserves mention too that during the 1960s there were growing numbers of intellectual challenges to the chief sources of anti-gay oppression: to orthodox Christianity by liberal religion, process theology, and existential theology; to traditional ethical principles by "situation ethics;" and to state enforcement of morals by the concepts of victimless crimes and the over-reach of the criminal law.

Finally, a growing number of researchers and theorists challenged the notion that gays were mentally ill or, like Thomas Szasz, said frankly that the whole concept of mental illness was simply a device for the social control of disapproved behavior.

Despite its excesses and occasional nuttiness, the '60s has a lot to teach us still.

First appeared June 3, 1999, in the Windy City Times.

Along about this time o' year,
My po'r ol' heart fills up with fear.
Examinations 'r comin' roun'-
Like to drive a fella right to the groun'.
- From "The Talking Examination Blues" (circa 1955)

ALONG ABOUT THIS TIME OF YEAR my own poor old heart fills up with fear mainly because editors start making aggressive noises about Stonewall Anniversaries and Gay Pride columns.

Gay Pride is coming up again," they chirp. "You know what that means."

It means I have to think of something new to say about gay pride. This year is even worse.

"And it's the 30th anniversary of Stonewall," they inform me, as if I could escape this fact. "Isn't that exciting?" they burble. But that's ancient history, for goodness sake. In 1969 most young gays weren't even born. Especially most gays under thirty. We might as well celebrate the Battle of Tours, whenever that was.

What is there to say about gay pride? Worse yet, what is there new to say about gay pride? Not much. Nevertheless, yielding to editorial persuasion, and the fact that I would like to keep my job, I have come up with the definitive schema on gay pride. Feel free to take notes.

Thesis one: Being gay is wonderful and we all should feel proud that we are gay.

Put this way the idea of gay pride seems pretty silly. You can really only feel proud about the things you accomplish. But being gay is not something you accomplish; it is something you discover about yourself. You do not choose to be gay any more than you choose your race or height or your eye color.

This is a definitive argument against the whole notion of gay pride. There is no possible rebuttal. Which accounts for the fact that no one bothers to rebut it. But oddly, it makes almost no impression on anyone at all.

People go right ahead talking about gay pride, saying they feel gay pride, claiming they are glad to be gay, and all the rest. So we must try to make sense of what seems on the surface to be nonsensical. This leads to:

Thesis two: True, you don't choose to be gay, but you can choose to come out and you can take pride in coming out, in having the courage to overcome social stigma and affirm your own character.

This thesis at least has the advantage of being defensible. But coming out is getting easier and easier, at least in most places, so coming out is not such a big deal any more. Fifteen year old tots are coming out these days, so doing it in your 20s or 30s does not seem like much of an achievement, much less a source of pride.

Then too, I have known people who are out of the closet but who conduct their lives badly. They may be rude and insensitive. They may act foolishly and even destructively. They can cause pain to others and themselves. Maybe they thought that after they came out, they had no further obligations--as if that were all. Are they examples of gay pride? Not that I would want to introduce to anyone. Sometimes I wish they would just go back into the closet. (I have a list.) These plain facts lead us to:

Thesis three: "Being gay" is, in an important sense, more than just being openly homosexual. It seems to require that you develop the strength of character, the emotional stability, and social equipoise to live openly and function well in a primarily heterosexual society that still offers many opportunities for missteps and miscalculations.

Flourishing in this milieu necessarily involves rolling with some punches, evading others, blocking some karate chops, and occasionally using jujitsu to throw an adversary off-balance. (These are metaphors, please note.) It can also include firm resistance and a calm assertion of one's own dignity. The trick is to understand these techniques and to know which is appropriate under what circumstances. Some gays, alas, do not manage their lives well under these intermittently adverse circumstances. if you can, that is something to take pride in.

Still, the Gay Pride parades and events as we see them today do not seem so individualistic as all this. They do not seem to be involve a collection of people expressing pride about achieving social adeptness. So what is going on? This leads us to:

Thesis four: A gay person might say he was proud of our community and the institutions that we have created over the last thirty or forty years. We created social service, health care institutions and advocacy groups. We created clubs, sports leagues and business groups. We increased our political presence in both parties and in large corporations. Of all these accomplishments we can be proud.

But there is a problem here. The "we" that did the work to create "our" community is some of us "we" but not others of us "we." Some of us "we" (and you know who you are) did absolutely nothing to help. In order to be justifiable, pride in anything should probably be proportional to the contribution a person made to it. Just being around while other people did some work does not seem like much of an achievement.

A person could reply, maybe somewhat testily, "Well, those things show what gays can achieve." So they do. And that is excellent. And people who created those things deserve the credit and deserve to feel a sense of pride. But what about the others? It seems a little odd to say you are proud of someone else's hard work. That sort of collective thinking ultimately seems parasitic; it seems strange to be proud of being a parasite. So we wind up at our final rationale for gay pride:

Thesis five: "gay pride" may lack a firm basis in careful thinking, but it is an entirely understandable and reasonable reaction to past persecution and stigmatization. It represents a kind of over-compensation. Proclaiming "Gay Pride" is something like an archer who aims above the target in order to hit the target. We tell people to be proud in order to overcome the negative messages the culture sends.

Well and good, but since our goal is a society in which gay is viewed as no different from heterosexual, "gay pride" is at best a temporary response in our current transitional era. As acceptance of gays grows over time, it will become less significant, and will finally be irrelevant.

If this is true, then "Gay Pride" is mainly a form of PR propaganda aimed both at the large number of gays who have yet to fully accept themselves, and at those heterosexuals who still find themselves able to feel a smug, disdainful superiority to gays.

This rationale for "Gay Pride" has the most merit, chiefly because it is the most honest.

See you at the parade.

AS WE GATHER to celebrate, if not our pride, at least our enthusiasm for its possibility, it is natural for us to look back to see how far we've come. Fortunately, this retrospective reveals much to give thanks for. The public acceptance of gays and lesbians, while hardly complete, has reached levels undreamed by most of us when we were growing up. We blinked and now high school students are attending the prom with their gay lovers, and openly gay couples are moving to the suburbs to buy houses and raise children. Moreover, straight couples, their future contributions to the gay community packed in strollers, line the Gay Pride parade route to gawk and cheer on their gay friends. Frosty fraternization has given way in many urban centers to an active miscegenation of straight and gay societies.

You would think that these developments would be received with optimism by our best and brightest, would be recognized as welcome indications that our decades of activism, struggle and stairmaster have actually gotten us somewhere. You would be ever so wrong.

In fact, our community's intelligentsia (in the Starbucks sense of the word) is united in tight-lipped horror at the sight of gay people finding acceptance in the straight world. Waterman pens have been scribbling furiously these last few years, filling page after latté-stained page with jeremiads on our heedless assimilation into the faceless gray hordes of our breeder brethren. According to these theorists, what gay people should have been fighting for all these years, or in fact were fighting for until it slipped their minds sometime during the video for Justify My Love, was not admittance into the status quo, but the freedom to celebrate openly our repudiation of it without fear of retaliation . The acceptance that should have been our goal was the straight world's acceptance of our rejection of them.

Alas, instead we have become its gaudy, grasping clone. Our community has become Lolita's mother writ large, pathetically aping a culture we do not understand and that regards us with only the most thinly veiled contempt. Yet it is precisely this contempt that we embrace as approval.

This, in essence, is the party line among our pondering class, with the notable exception of Andrew Sullivan. Perhaps its most engaging popularizer is Daniel Harris, whose recently published The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture weds a catty, bitter voice to the normally puritanical dourness of the anti-assimilationists. It stands as an exemplary statement of the anti-assimilationist position. As such, I will use it and its author as my touchstones for responding to its charges.

Harris's book is both an atlas of a lost world and an elegy for its passing. Like an anthropologist observing a once isolated tribe fed into the maw of modern culture, he takes copious notes, summons to memory the glories that once were, and resigns himself to the inevitable. Whether it's camp, drag, leather, personal ads, pornography, or gay self-help manuals, he finds exactly the same pattern. A brief period of florescence in the days of oppression, followed by a swift decline once "the market" assimilated gay people to its banal calculus. As he writes:

By looking closely at the changes that have occurred in gay culture in the past few decades, I attempt to represent the process through which a culture with unique traditions and rituals is submerged into the melting pot, its distinguishing characteristics dissolving into the grey (sic), flavorless gruel as its members are accepted by society at large.

Harris's perspective here relies quite heavily on a liberal flavor of Marxism known as the Frankfurt School. One of its central tenets is that modern mass culture, perfected in America, is one of the oppressing class's greatest tools for keeping the masses down, distracted from the struggle for liberation by Pop Tarts and The Spice Girls. This mass culture effaces all regional, ethnic and class differences through the relentless leveling effect of its technology (telephone, television, Internet, etc.)

As long as gay people were isolated from this mass culture, protected by our pariah status from its blandishments, we were able to maintain our saucy singularity. Armed with feather boas and Judy Garland records, we bravely held out against the silent spring of sameness. But gay liberation ended all that, and as a result we have become absorbed into the undifferentiated mass of polyester and Kraft cheese singles that is the "mainstream."

As Harris puts the matter succinctly, "Gay liberation and the gay sensibility are staunch antagonists."

Here is the gauntlet thrown down before us by Harris and his co-religionists. Do we want to be liberated, or do we want to be human? Because apparently we can't have both. Decisions don't get much starker than that. Like all myths of fall, this argument projects an image of uncompromising clarity, of a sword rightly dividing the word of truth, that makes it attractive out of all proportion to its truth or cogency.

In the face of such unanimous and scathing opprobrium, can anything be said in defense of assimilation? I would answer with an emphatic yes. In fact, I believe that assimilation is precisely what will create a more adult, humane and multi-faceted gay community.

Perhaps the first inkling that assimilation might not be all that bad comes when you examine the Garden of Eden that supposedly preceded it: The closet. Or for those few wealthy or talented enough, a hermetic fraternity dissimulating itself to the outside world through art and culture. What claim to superiority over assimilation could these crabbed modes of existence possibly possess? In what system of values could it be superior to live in unrelenting fear and self-hatred, circumscribed without by legal discrimination and within by the internecine conflict between the need to be authentic and the desire to belong?

That, as they say, is a very interesting question, and its answer even more so. The superiority of assimilation over what preceded it is immediately apparent the minute the distinction is framed in terms of justice, politics, and individual freedom. There's no contest.

This superiority, however, disappears, or at least becomes less obvious, the minute the issue is examined in purely cultural terms. And it is in these terms that Harris et al. frame their arguments. Granted, in the old days millions of people were subjected to torment and injustice, but this system created a cultural elite of tastemakers, artists and ironic observers of the world that hated them. "Gay life" was not a given, doled out to everyone who just happened to be homosexual. On the contrary, it was a crucible of refinement that only the chosen few could endure, much less flourish in.

Paradoxically, Harris's ideal world is fundamentally an aristocratic one. This will seem surprising to those seduced by the neo-Marxist analysis that is the manifest content of his book. But Marxism has for decades been the acceptable mask worn by closet aristocrats in Western society. This is harder to see in the United States, since, lacking its own aristocratic traditions (the Old South excepted), there's really nothing to compare Marxist cultural snobbery to. However in England and France, where aristocratic class systems are still living memories, this ruse is both more widely practiced and more easily detected.

The eternal malaise of the middle class has always been its self-hatred. Middle class people can claim neither the heroic struggles of the proletariat nor the cultural hauteur and effortless savoir faire of the aristocracy. They have so completely absorbed the contempt coming from both above and below at a life lived solely for making money, that one of the main activities of middle class people now consists of trying to atone for their cultural vapidity by proving to the world that they're not middle class. This goes ten-fold for the middle class's intelligentsia.

The middle class responds to its self-hatred either with frantic efforts to imitate aristocrats (the sole reason Jaguar cars are still in production, by the way) or with uncritical idolization of blue collar authenticity (Bruce Springsteen, Harley-Davidson, etc.) If they know too much about working class life to indulge in this latter self-deception, they identify some non-Western indigenous people, preferably in the end stages of cultural or actual genocide, to hold up as an ideal of the authentic life they so sadly lack (Tibet, any American Indian tribes within driving distance of Santa Fe, etc.). It is the genius of Marxism considered as a jeu d'esprit to allow both processes to occur simultaneously. It hallows the authenticity of the proletariat , but on the basis of an aristocratic ethos.

And this creates the great unspoken dilemma that faces the middle class Marxist. The proletarian-worshipping side of her soul hates the poverty and cultural marginalization of the workers; yet her efforts to alleviate these injustices, if successful, lead directly to the embourgeoisment of her erstwhile heroes. There is no disillusionment so cruel as that experienced by the middle class Marxist intellectual when he discovers that the workers (or Tibetans?see above) he idolized as the ultimate antidote to his own middle class mediocrity, once freed of their chains, proceed immediately to the nearest mall to buy Nikes and projection TVs of their very own. They want Disney World, not the classless society.

This is a painful moment for the Marxist theoretician, for the impulse that causes him to recoil from this discovery is irreducibly aristocratic, and thus can only be acknowledged obliquely. The rage the middle class Marxist feels at being deprived of a marginalized group to provide him with vicarious authenticity can only find expression as a theoretical insight into the fiendish duplicity of the capitalist system. Concepts like "repressive desublimation" and "false consciousness" are then dutifully confected to explain the ingratitude of the masses, and to mask the narcissism of their unrequited savior.

If you replace "workers" in the paragraphs above with "homosexuals", and "capitalists" with, well, capitalists, you have reproduced almost exactly Harris's argument and have described the psychological mechanics that produce it. The proletarian/aristocratic dichotomy is in full force, and pre-Stonewall gay life is easily accommodated in either mode. Under the aspect of proletarian virtue, gay life is recast as Hogan's Homos, where a hardy band of streetwise POWs, establishing clandestine lines of communication with the outside world, "much like prisoners rapping in code on the pipes of their cells", manage to hoodwink their captors at every turn. Under the aspect of aristocratic superiority, gay life is presented as Queen Acres, where unspeakably sophisticated gays tutor their hillbilly cousins in the wilds of straight America. Different shows, same network.

Once we delve beneath all the Marxist theoretical blather, we discover that his argument boils down to the simple claim that gay liberation has been a disaster not because it is ineffective, not because it is immoral, but because it is vulgar. This is a word that appears often in The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, the bearer of a telling ubiquity.

The gay world Harris memorializes so reverently was an elitist institution that only the best could belong to. It was a bastion of discrimination in both senses of the word. But then gay liberation came along, and the cozy connoisseurs club, that tweedy home of recondite perceptions and unerring apercus, was crashed by hordes of unwashed parvenus who couldn't tell the difference between purple and aubergine. The illuminati were replaced by sans culottes in culottes, and gay life just hasn't been worth the trouble since.

One can almost see Harris's lip curl with disdain as he surveys the wreckage wrought by the democratization of gay life. Here he is, for example, fuming about the picture of gay relationships conveyed in gay self-help literature:

The propagandistic fictions surrounding the Uxorious Gay [the word means excessively deferential to one's spouse?NL] operate by reenacting the rituals of heterosexual courtship and by deliberately de-exoticizing gay relationships, turning homosexual lovers into glamorless hausfraus who wash socks, entertain in-laws, pick up laundry from dry cleaners and agonize over dish-pan hands.

It would be futile to point out to Harris that what "de-exoticizes" relationships is familiarity, not false consciousness, and that doing laundry and entertaining relatives is the everyday reality even of single people, because it is precisely the ordinariness of it all that Harris can't stand. It's just too common. He can't feel special in such a world, therefore it must be wrong.

Harris gives the game away right at the beginning of the book when he writes, "Sometime in my early adolescence, I acquired, while living in the very heart of Appalachia, a land of lazy southern drawls, a British accent... my peers were budding good old boys whose fathers drove tractors and pickup trucks and spoke in an unmusical twang that I, a pompous fop in my teens, found distinctly undignified." The only odd thing about this passage is that it is written in the past tense.

He then goes on to describe how he became utterly captivated by the Hollywood divas of the day, completely entranced by "the patrician inflections of characters who conversed in a manufactured Hollywood idiom meant to suggest refinement and good breeding."

Exactly.

One way to look at The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture is as a long, tortuous attempt to justify these aristocratic longings to their owner, without having to subscribe (overtly) to aristocratic politics. Make no mistake, Harris is still sneering at the uncouth accents of his compatriots, except now he calls them consumers instead of hicks and they live in a subdivision instead of a holler. And the esoteric world of European neo-Marxist theorizing has replaced the ballrooms and summer homes of Manhattan high society. Different shows, same network.

If that were all that was going on, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture would be at best an eccentric collection of insights into gay life, both marred and catalyzed by a central, if indispensable, self-deception. Unfortunately, there is a darker side to the phenomenon.

The attentive reader of Harris's book will be immediately struck by a curious feature of its argument. Though gay life is its putative subject, at every opportunity Harris defines it in such a way as to make homosexuality itself disappear. Whenever he analyzes a particular feature or tradition of gay life, he is immediately at great pains to point out that it has nothing whatever to do with sexuality per se, but is merely an artifact of an alienated consciousness or a marginalized social reality.

For example, when Harris discusses camp and drag, he writes, "the preciousness of the aesthete... reflects less the homosexual's innate affinity for lovely things, for beauty and sensuality, than his profound social discontent, which we attempt to overcome by creating flattering images of ourselves as connoisseurs and Epicureans." And later, "the homosexual's love of Hollywood was not an expression of flamboyant effeminacy, but, rather, in a very literal sense, of swaggering machismo."

Likewise, in his discussion of the leather and S&M subcultures, he makes the rather astounding claim that, "since the inception of the S/M movement, the cult of leather has served as a way for the gay man to identify himself to others and to engage in ostensibly illicit practices that, far from representing an epidemic of sexual pathology, have become simply a pretext for a perverse act of networking." [italics added]

Networking? Networking? The thesis is so preposterous that Harris himself has to abandon it, and scant pages later is cataloguing with disdain the acts of bootlicking, mummification, flogging, wholesale dildo invasion etc. that define S/M practice. By the end of the chapter he is even mocking the members of the leather community who have tried to portray S/M as primarily a form of self-actualization instead of the pursuit of sadistic sex, his own earlier and identical claim conveniently forgotten.

It becomes all too clear that for Harris, gay identity is completely constituted by its oppression. This in turn becomes the way Harris explains away aspects of gay life that he finds uncomfortable. If gay men idolize divas as a protest against social marginalization, then it can't be used to prove that they are effeminate. If they devote their lives to S/M out of a need to "network", then it can't be because they like to get beat up or beat someone else up. Oh no.

The attractiveness of this theoretical sleight of hand becomes clearer when we discover that Harris himself was quite the sissy in his youth, "sashaying around the house in brightly colored caftans," and giving regular drag performances in his high school gym to no doubt bewildered students and faculty. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Harris' theoretical commitments are designed to explain away a feminine side that perhaps even today troubles an unquiet virility.

Harris explicitly links the two concerns, when he writes:

I was not attracted to Hollywood stars because of their femininity, nor did my admiration of them reflect any burning desire to be a woman... as if diva worship were simply a ridiculous side effect of gender conflicts. Instead it was their world, not their femininity, that appealed to me, the irrepressibly madcap in-crowd of Auntie Mame, of high spirits and unconventional characters....

Um, sure. Saying that a diva's femininity plays no part in the world she creates for others is heartbreakingly naive, not to say sexist. And the fact that dressing up in caftans and imitating Bette Davis is a form of social protest taken up only by homosexual men, not migrant farm laborers or Native Americans?groups one would think suffer from equal amounts of alienation and cultural displacement?is a puzzle Harris still needs to resolve, at least for me if not for himself. One gets the distinct impression that much of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture is simply Harris repeating obsessively to himself "I am a man I am a man" as he changes into a clean caftan.

It would be easy to dismiss Harris's necessary illusions as yet another example of self-hating homo hokum if they did not so vividly illustrate a tendency at work in most anti-assimilationist thought. One of the submerged purposes of the often arcane political theory used to justify these positions is, simply put, to make homosexuality disappear. Homosexuality ceases to be anything in or for itself and becomes instead a style of radical will or a stray emanation from the penumbra of the class struggle or a behavioral artifact of alienated consciousness?anything, that is, except homosexuality. Anything but what it really is.

Hidden beneath the exterior of radicalized theory lies yet one more example of what I call the "homosexuality plus" method of justifying homosexuality. The method assumes that homosexuality all by itself cannot be justified; it can only be justified by drawing attention away from its horrible reality and towards something else, something supposedly good that homosexuals are as well. "Sure, they're homosexuals, but they're so refined!" or "They're not just pansies, they're great artists, too!" The goal of this method is not to have homosexuality accepted, but to have it overlooked. It is apology masquerading as affront.

This, in a nutshell, is Harris' strategy. The subtext of his argument is that homosexuality can only be acceptable if it is serving a larger, and emphatically non-sexual, end, in this case cultural authenticity understood as resistance to "the Market." Though he mocks the attempts of the Mattachine Society and modern gay-marriage advocates to sanitize homosexuality by assimilating it to some higher moral ideal, he is guilty of the same charge.

The truth of the matter is that there is no escaping assimilation. As Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody. The alternatives to "assimilation" offered by its vehement opponents are themselves merely avenues of assimilation into other parts of heterosexual culture?either assimilation into bohemianism or assimilation into the culture of left-wing activism. But neither of these alternatives are uniquely gay modes of feeling and acting. They were both created by heterosexuals, just like malls and monogamy. The perverse truth Harris points out in his book is that the only mode of existence that can truly be said to reflect a unique gay identity and culture is the closet! His reduction of moral issues to culture politics allows him to heroicize the world of homosexual men and women, cut off from one another, living lonely lives of terror in small towns all across America, because it produced exotic modes of cultural resistance.

At this point I think it is legitimate to ask Harris why gay people should feel obligated to fulfill his cultural fantasies at the expense of simple justice and freedom in their own lives. He needs to justify the pursuit of an intellectual mirage?the Garden of Eden where primitive gay culture exists untainted by money or heterosexuality?at the expense of (and as a replacement for) equality with heterosexuals in all aspects of life. He needs to explain why we need to feel guilty because we have not met his need to feel special.

The anti-assimilationists also fail to recognize that assimilation is a two-way street. It is not simply a matter of gay people surrendering their transgressive identities to the Borg collective of straight society. An obvious, but often overlooked, fact about assimilation is that it can only occur once gay people have actually come out of the closet. A married homosexual man who presents a faultless heterosexual fa?ade to the world, tells fag jokes at work and cruises forest preserves and truck stops at night is not assimilated, for he offers nothing that requires assimilation. He is making no claim for acceptance on behalf of his sexuality, because he does not believe it is acceptable in the first place. Assimilation is the antithesis of the closet.

Straight society cannot accommodate openly gay people without making radical changes to its own consciousness and values, something straight people themselves have always acknowledged. Indeed, the claim to moral equality with heterosexuals explicit in the drive to assimilate is far more disquieting to straight society than any amount of transgressive street theater taking place in a gay ghetto far, far away. If you doubt this, just ask yourself which spectacle panics and outrages the straight world more: the International Mr. Leather competition, or a gay wedding ceremony. The latter makes a claim to legitimacy wholly lacking from the former. In this matter, the Christian Coalition possesses a better understanding of the subversive implications of gay assimilation than our café intellectuals.

What Harris and his ilk fail to realize is that assimilation is the solution to many of the problems they identify in modern gay life. The gays who want to flee the ghetto for the suburbs are precisely the people who, like Harris, are sick and tired of a "community" whose sole values are a hot body, eternal youth and a fabulous wardrobe. It is their way of thumbing their noses at the Hunky Golightlies who hold sway in Boy's Town, and the mind-numbing superficiality of the culture these have created. In other words, assimilation is a sign of maturity among gay people, both individual and communal.

For the shocking truth about gay men is that they never shine more brightly than when they are in the company of heterosexuals. A gay man among heterosexuals is often witty, cultured, sensitive, engaging on all levels. But the minute gay men are alone together, the IQ suddenly plummets at least 500 points. Conversation ceases and the desperate posing and primping begins, the endless game of you're-not-hot-so-I-don't-have-to-talk-to-you. Ph.D's in art, philosophy and literature suddenly can speak of nothing beyond the gym, the bar or the bathhouse. Plato's cave becomes the Valley of the Dolls.

I'll say it loud and proud: We need assimilation to free us from slavery to our own oppressive social structures and sex roles.

Lastly, assimilation answers the original need created by growing up as gay people in a homophobic society. The pain we felt when we realized we were homosexual was the pain of separation from the culture and traditions that we were born into. We wanted to belong, not stand apart. The rage we feel at homophobia is rage at all it has kept us from, whether that is the religion of our people, the communal life of our neighborhood, or the vital traditions of our forebears. We were right to refuse the phony integration offered by the silence and shame of the closet. Our unrelenting campaign to force recognition of who we really are, without apologies, is entirely just. But it would be foolish for us to recoil from the world around us at the moment when it is finally beginning to see that we are in fact valuable members of any community. Having been involuntarily excluded by homophobia, we should not voluntarily exclude ourselves through heterophobia.

Since I do not believe that the gay sensibility is an accidental artifact of our oppression, I do not fear that assimilation will erode the sprightly spark that is our hallmark. Even in the very heart of the ghetto, where the only oppression we face comes from our friends, gay men still dress up in women's clothes and worship divas. All the "networking" opportunities in the world haven't emptied the leather bars. That won't change any time soon. But it needs to be recognized that we will have achieved true liberation only when we no longer have to justify our sexual orientation by carrying anyone else's moral baggage, whether that be Daniel Harris's aristocratic Marxist snobbery or Ralph Reed's puritanical Christian snobbery. We don't have to by gay and liberal or gay and free-market patriots in order to justify who we are.

Contrary to the fantasies of the Left and the Right, there is no necessary connection between homosexuality and morality or immorality. It is a sexual orientation, a pure capacity, nothing more. It can be deployed in the service of any lifestyle or ideology we choose. There are certainly good reasons for rejecting the materialism and banality of much of our culture, but homosexuality isn't one of them. The task of leading the examined life is a human burden, not a sexual one.

At the beginning of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Harris states that his main goal is to free gay culture from its adolescence. Yet Harris' view of gay history is the best example of the problem he is trying to solve. Adolescence is the age of heroes, of Golden Ages and secret societies, of the willful enchantment of life's banal realities. It is the flight from the responsibilities of adulthood into a cocoon of fantasy where all one's inadequacies are reborn as marks of divine favor. So it is with the gay world Harris wants to hang on to. He can't bring himself to leave the exclusive clubhouse where he and his childhood friends played at being glamorous ladies of high society, uttering secret passwords in perfect patrician dialect. The fact that his fantasy does not involve Star Trek does not make it any less adolescent.

Assimilation will cost us certain things that we now treasure. Our sense of specialness, of superiority, of safety behind the walls of the ghetto?all these will have to disappear or undergo extensive facial reconstruction. But in the end we will gain more than we lose. Becoming part of the wider community will ennoble both our humanity and that of the straight people who accept us as equals. To grasp this opportunity requires merely our willingness to leave behind the childhood of the closet and the adolescence of the ghetto to embrace the possibilities of adulthood, like a flower opening to the sun.

Copyright © 1997 by Niall Lynch. Reprinted with permission. Reproduction in whole or in part requires prior written permission.