Woody’s Tavern owner David Norton offers a public statement of apology to a group of University of Louisville students and faculty almost a year and a half after he chased the group out of his Old Louisville bar using racist and sexist slurs. Until this week, Mr. Norton denied the incident ever occurred. providing context for what follows.

In this video, bar owner David Norton apologizes for being ‘a fool’; the Director of the Fairness Campaign – a local LGBT civil rights organization – Chris Hartman speaks about dismantling racism; and University of Louisville Professor of Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies Karla Story – one of those on the receiving end of Mr. Norton’s denigrating remarks – speaks about the value of Mr. Norton’s apology to all minority communities who wish to feel safe in public spaces. Fairness Campaign board member Keith Brooks is seen at the beginning of the video briefly providing context for what follows.

We are not fundamentally gays who happen to be human. We are fundamentally humans who happen to be gay. Therefore, all impulses that predominantly manifest in humans no matter of what ancestry, ethnicity, dialect, race, nationality, religion or politics will also manifest in humans no matter of what sexuality.

The more freedoms we are given to participate in mainstream activities, institutions, rituals, etc. the more gay people will do so. The drive to participate and assimilate will in the long-run win out once we achieve equality and protection under the law for we are not fundamentally driven by an ideology, we are fundamentally driven by our humanity.

The Gay Lesbian Civil Rights Movement’s most important success will be that of creating an environment in which gay people feel free and welcome to express their basic core humanity without regard to their sexuality. The energy that out gay people now must expend in order to make their place openly and honestly is unfair and distracting.

Most gay people, no matter what their outward face, desire a life of community in which their sexuality is irrelevant but acknowledged. The ways in which our humanity expresses itself are indistinguishable from the ways in which all other peoples have expressed their humanity throughout all of time: creativity and relationship. Ultimately gay people are only as queer as our environment makes us. The current gay subculture is mostly a temporary reactionary formation that will subside once the mainstream more fully welcomes us as the full human beings we already know ourselves to be.

Some gay activists go too far in rejecting all things that were previously denied to us. That, I think, is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Wanting a family, children, a monogamous committed relationship, acceptance, respect, belonging, normalcy, etc. isn’t a sign that some sort of fascist heterosexism is at play but a sign that standard human impulses are at play and that they are inescapable and undeniable. Any attempts to paint them as artificial notions brainwashed into us is rather silly and confused.

Gay people are not from Mars.

(“I wonder if the monogamistic, parenting impulse is hard wired to our brain or something we learn from culture?” Justin R. asked in comment #99 to the article Gay America: The Next Generation on BlogCritics.org. The above article was my response.)

I feared the numbers of these ‘silenced’ would temporarily grow given the increased visibility of our movement since ‘gay marriage’ came forward as a national issue and the resulting increased vigor of those in opposition. John Cloud’s “The Battle Over Gay Teens” (full article here), if nothing else, lessened that fear.

Some gay teens today live openly in insular accepting environments which now include not just college but also high school. Not surprisingly, some don’t understand what’s at stake for them later on in life. They have, it seems, fallen victim to the illusion – brought about by the very recent emergence of openly gay celebrities – that being gay is ‘no big deal’.

Convincing these gay teens as they approach adulthood that it is important to talk about their lives without denying their innate homosexuality may at first prove difficult. But I suspect, as happened with me, they will eventually grow to appreciate what the gay activist leaders of the past have achieved and have not achieved for them.

For most out gay teens today, they will mature into a country (USA) that will, for the most part, bar them from marrying the one they love. Many may enter adulthood in states that categorize them as unfit to foster or adopt children. Many will be banned from clubs, churches and organizations and face job and housing discrimination with no legal recourse available to them.

Still, to be fair, I think for many if not most gay youth, figuring out how to BE in a heterosexual world is confusing and frustrating enough. But then they are confronted with the extra burden of understanding the forces seeking to not just deny them equality under the law but also to equate them, as a whole, with rapists, alcoholics and the mentally ill.

I’m surprised, given all that, how many gay people do ‘come out’ okay and relatively undamaged. I’m not surprised at the anger and passion out there. That anger and indignation is what has galvanized our movement. I’m confident most gay youth will come to appreciate this anger expressed by many activists as not a militant anger but a valid sensible one given all that has been said by leaders such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the Pope.

Afterall, we fight for the full humanity of people who are gay. The Fundamentalists and all those anti-gay forces they’ve rallied around them fight for a hypocritical immoral ideology based on lies and hate. As I’ve said before, ideologies come and go, but we gay people are here forever and now that we’ve emerged from the closet of medieval superstitious ignorance about sexuality, there’s no going back.

With that in mind, there is too much at stake for any gay person, young or old, to believe we have reached any sort of post Gay Lesbian Civil Rights Movement identity. Gay teens who believe their place at the table of society has been permanently set are in for quite a shock when they try to sit down at that table later in life. Therefore, we still very much need new generations of outspoken Gay and Lesbian leaders to speak with force, courage and steadfastness on behalf of those without a voice, still too afraid to speak.

(This article was written as a comment (#86) to the post Gay America: The Next Generation on BlogCritics.org.)

In response to John Cloud’s article in Time Magazine: The Battle Over Gay Teens (full article) I wrote:

World views which see gay people as fundamentally flawed and in need of redemption cause great suffering to gay people and especially to gay youth living in predominantly conservative communities. It is a disgrace that most mainstream churches have chosen to go with old evil mischaracterizations of gay people instead of educating themselves about sexuality and the realities of homosexuals throughout history. For starters, one can look at the regularity of intersex conditions in newborns. Mother Nature is quite clear in her insistence on existing along a spectrum.

Your article Mr. Could, intentionally or not, will surely help expose the lies and slander heaped upon gay people and our lives by the Christian Fundamentalists who wish to deny Mother Nature’s workings by forcing everything to comply with a simplistic, black and white, heaven and hell ideology.

We gay people, by existing, have confounded their bizarre insular lives by intruding upon it and revealing the bankruptcy and shallowness of their ideas (at least when it comes to gay people). Indeed, we are full human beings who have finally, as a group, come to understand that our difference does not preclude us from the expectation of a life of dignity, equality and justice.

Thankfully, though still too few, courageous religious leaders of many faiths are speaking out against irrational anit-gay teachings and the great suffering these teachings and ideologies promote. Just as with racism, homophobia will never disappear completely, but we can relegate it, like racism, to the margins of society and collectively decide to no longer tolerate cowardly leaders irresponsibly using their power to scapegoat another minority group of people during times of great change.

Best regards,
Patrick of Queer Visions

The Battle Over Gay Teens

What happens when you come out as a kid? How America’s gay youths are challenging the right–and the left.

By John Cloud

In May, David Steward, a former president of TV Guide, and his partner Pierre Friedrichs, a caterer, hosted an uncomfortably crowded cocktail party at their Manhattan apartment. It was a typical gay fund raiser–there were lemony vodka drinks with mint sprigs; there were gift bags with Calvin Klein sunglasses; Friedrichs prepared little blackened-tuna-with-mango-chutney hors d’oeuvres that were served by uniformed waiters. Billionaire philanthropist Edgar Bronfman Sr. was there; David Mixner, a gay activist and longtime friend of Bill Clinton’s, was holding court with Jason Moore, director of the Broadway musical Avenue Q.

But the odd thing was that the gay (and gay-friendly) élite had gathered to raise money not for one of its established charities–the Human Rights Campaign, say, or the Democratic National Committee–but for an obscure organization that has quietly become one of the fastest-growing gay groups in the U.S., the Point Foundation. Launched in 2001, Point gives lavish (often full-ride) scholarships to gay students. It is one of the few national groups conceived explicitly to help gay kids, and it is a leading example of how the gay movement is responding to the emergence this decade of hundreds of thousands of openly gay youths.

Kids in the States are disclosing their homosexuality with unprecedented regularity–and they are doing so much younger. The average gay person now comes out just before or after graduating high school, according to The New Gay Teenager, a book Harvard University Press published earlier this year. The book quotes a Penn State study of 350 young people from 59 gay groups that found that the mean age at which lesbians first have sexual contact with other girls is 16; it’s just 14 for gay boys. In 1997 there were approximately 100 gay-straight alliances (gsas)–clubs for gay and gay-friendly kids–on U.S. high school campuses. Today there are at least 3,000 gsas–nearly 1 in 10 high schools has one–according to the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (glsen, say “glisten”), which registers and advises gsas. In the 2004-05 academic year, gsas were established at U.S. schools at the rate of three per day.

The appearance of so many gay adolescents has, predictably, worried social conservatives, but it has also surprised gay activists, who for years did little to help the few teenagers who were coming out. Both sides sense high stakes. “Same-sex marriage–that’s out there. But something going on in a more fierce and insidious way, under the radar, is what’s happening in our schools,” says Mathew Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, an influential conservative litigation group that earlier this year won a court order blocking a Montgomery County, Maryland, teachers’ guide that disparaged Evangelicals for their views on gays. “They”–gay activists–”know if they make enough inroads into [schools], the same-sex-marriage battle will be moot.”

Most gay activists would rather swallow glass than say Mat Staver was right about something, but they know that last year’s big ucla survey of university freshmen found that 57% favor same-sex marriage (only about 36% of all adults do). Even as adult activists bicker in court, young Americans–including many young conservatives–are becoming thoroughly, even nonchalantly, gay-positive. From young ages, straight kids are growing up with more openly bisexual, gay and sexually uncertain classmates. In the 1960s, gay men recalled first desiring other males at an average age of 14; it was 17 for lesbians. By the ’90s, the average had dropped to 10 for gays and 12 for lesbians, according to more than a dozen studies reviewed by the author of The New Gay Teenager, Ritch Savin-Williams, who chairs Cornell’s human-development department.

Children who become aware of their homosexual attractions no longer need endure the baleful combination of loneliness and longing that characterized the childhoods of so many gay adults. Gay kids can now watch fictional and real teens who are out on shows like Desperate Housewives, the dating show Next on mtv and Degrassi (a high school TV drama whose wild popularity among adolescents is assured by the fact that few adults watch it). Publishers like Arthur A. Levine Books (of Harry Potter fame) and the children’s division at Simon & Schuster have released something like a dozen novels about gay adolescents in the past two years. New, achingly earnest books like Rainbow Road, in which three gay teens take a road trip, are coming this month. Gay kids in the U.S. can subscribe to the 10-month-old glossy YGA Magazine (YGA stands for “young gay America”) and meet thousands of other little gays via younggayamerica.com or outproud.org. Gay boys can chat, vote for the Lord of the Rings character they would most like to date–Legolas is leading–learn how to have safe oral sex and ogle pictures of young men in their underwear on the ruttish chadzboyz.com. Not that you have to search so far into the Web: when University of Pittsburgh freshman Aaron Arnold, 18, decided to reveal his homosexuality at 15, he just Googled “coming out,” which led to myriad advice pages.

While the phrase “That’s so gay” seems to have permanently entered the (straight) teen vernacular, at many schools it is now profoundly uncool to be seen as anti-gay. Straight kids meet and gossip and find hookups on websites like facebook.com, where a routine question is whether they like guys or girls or both. When Savin-Williams surveyed 180 young men ages 14 to 25 for an earlier book, “… And Then I Became Gay,” he found that nearly all had received positive, sometimes enthusiastic, responses when they first came out. (Many others are received with neutrality, even boredom: University of Washington senior Aaron Schwitters, who was not interviewed by Savin-Williams, says when he came out to his fellow College Republicans at a club meeting last year, “there was five seconds of awkward silence, someone said ‘O.K.,’ and we moved on.”) That doesn’t mean young lesbians and gays will never get shoved in the hallway, and multiple studies have shown that gay kids are at higher risk for suicide than their straight peers are. But the preponderance of Savin-Williams’ 20 years of research indicates that most gay kids today face an environment that’s more uncertain than unwelcoming. In a 2002 study he quotes in the new book, gay adolescents at a Berkeley, California, school said just 5% of their classmates had responded negatively to their sexuality.

O.K., that’s ultraliberal Berkeley, but the trend is clear: according to Kevin Jennings, who in 1990 founded a gay-teacher group that later morphed into glsen, many of the kids who start gsas identify themselves as straight. Some will later come out, but Jennings believes a majority of gsa members are heterosexuals who find anti-gay rhetoric as offensive as racism. “We’re gonna win,” says Jennings, speaking expansively of the gay movement, “because of what’s happening in high schools right now … This is the generation that gets it.”

Jennings is a spruce, fit, deeply ideological 42-year-old who wants government to spend money to combat anti-gay bias in schools. He often asserts that “4 out of 5″ students have been harassed because of their sexual orientation. (He doesn’t mention that glsen’s last big survey, in 2003, found “a significant decline” since 2001 in the use of epithets like fag. Or that about the same proportion of kids–three-quarters–hears fag as hears sexist remarks.) Regardless, the pro-gay government programs he favors seem highly unlikely in this political environment. That’s in part because of the growing influence on the right of another gay force: gays who don’t want to be gay, who are sometimes called, contentiously, “ex-gays.” On talk radio, on the Internet and in churches, social conservatives’ canniest strategy for combatting the emergence of gay youth is to highlight the existence of people who battle–and, some claim, overcome–their homosexual attractions. Because kids often see their sexuality as riverine and murky–multiple studies have found most teens with same-sex attractions have had sex with both boys and girls–conservatives hope their “ex-gay” message will keep some of those kids from embracing a gay identity. And they aren’t aiming the message just at teens. On one of its websites, the Christian group Focus on the Family has warned that boys as young as 5 may show signs of “gender confusion” and require “professional help.”

It’s important to note that nearly all mental-health professionals agree that trying to reject one’s homosexual impulses will usually be fruitless and depressing–and can lead to suicide, according to Dr. Jack Drescher of the American Psychiatric Association, who has studied programs that attempt to alter sexuality. Last month Tennessee officials charged that one of the longest-running evangelical ministries for gays, Love in Action of Memphis, Tennessee, was operating unlicensed mental-health facilities. The state said Love in Action must close two residential homes–which include beds for teenagers–or apply for a license. (The ministry’s attorney, Nate Kellum, said in an e-mail that the licensure requirement “is intended for facilities that treat mental illness” and not for a “faith-based institution like Love in Action.”)

Few young gays actually want to change: six surveys in The New Gay Teenager found that an average of just 13% of young people with same-sex attractions would prefer to be straight. Nonetheless, gay kids trying to change can find unprecedented resources. As recently as the late ’90s, Exodus International, the premier organization for Christians battling same-sex attractions, had no youth program. Today, according to president Alan Chambers, the group spends a quarter of its $1 million budget on Exodus Youth; about 80 of Exodus’ 125 North American ministries offer help to adolescents. More than 1,000 youths have visited an Exodus-affiliated website called livehope.org to post messages and read articles like “Homosexual Myths” (No. 2: People are born gay). The website, which started as a modest Texas chat board in the late ’90s, now gets referrals from scores of churches in 45 countries. “Twenty years ago, most churches wouldn’t even let Exodus in the door,” says Scott Davis, director of Exodus Youth. “Now there are open doors all across the country.”

Davis and I met in July at Exodus’ first ever Youth Day, held at a Baptist convention center outside Asheville, North Carolina. About 100 people ages 15 to 25 were there to worship, sway their arms to Christian rock, listen to advice about how to stop masturbating (“Replace thoughts that aren’t worthy of God with thoughts that are,” Davis said) and hear the testimony of adults who say they now live heterosexual lives.

An attractive, married 27-year-old, Davis says he was never drawn sexually to men. Rather, he represents a new group of young, straight Christians who are criticizing older Evangelicals for long denouncing gays without offering them what Davis calls “healing.” Davis looks nothing like a stereotypical Fundamentalist; he wears spiky hair, Fauvist T shirts, an easy smile. He first noticed the wave of young people coming out when he was pastor of a student church at Virginia Tech. I asked how his group could succeed when homosexuality has been so depathologized among kids. “glsen has 3,000 gsas, but who knows how many student ministries there are, how many Bible clubs in schools?” he answered. “And my hope is they will be the ones who care for these kids.”

In a jarring bit of rhetorical mimicry, many Christians who work with gay kids have adopted the same p.c. tributes to “tolerance” and “diversity” employed by groups like glsen. One of the savviest new efforts is called Inqueery (slogan: “Think for yourself”). Founded by a shaggy-haired 26-year-old named Chad Thompson, inqueery.com looks at first like a site designed to bolster proudly gay teens. Pink borders surround pictures of stylish kids, and bold text reads, “Addressing lgbt [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered] Issues on High School & College Campuses.” Thompson, who realized in fourth grade that he was attracted to boys, remembers hurtful anti-gay jokes, and he is convincing when he denounces such bias. “The Christian church has a sordid history–a history of the televangelists from the ’80s who would malign homosexuals and say they’re all perverts and pedophiles and going to hell–but didn’t actually offer you redemption,” he says.

Still, Thompson never accepted a gay identity–”Heterosexuality is God’s design,” he says–and today he is a leading spokesman for young Christians rejecting homosexuality. Thompson says a new kind of bigotry has emerged–among gays. “Those of us who have chosen not to embrace this orientation are often misunderstood and sometimes even ridiculed,” he writes in a pamphlet he distributes at campus speaking engagements. Thompson, who has written a book with the near parodic title Loving Homosexuals as Jesus Would, hasn’t been completely successful in rejecting his gay desires. He admits he still notices handsome men and says, as though he had an internal Geiger counter, “My attractions are probably about 1% of what they used to be.” But the idea that liberals and gay activists are attacking Christian strugglers like Thompson has inspirited and unified social conservatives. The Rev. Jerry Falwell spoke at this year’s Exodus conference for the first time, and others have begun to agitate for “equal access” for ex-gays in schools.

Earlier this year, a conservative nonprofit called Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (pfox, whose website says it supports “families touched by homosexuality”) approached the pta about exhibiting at the association’s conference. The pta said no: “From what we saw in the application, it seemed more of an agenda than just a resource for parents,” says a pta official. But the association did allow the liberal group Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays to present an anti-bullying workshop. When I spoke with pfox executive director Regina Griggs about the pta’s rebuff, she projected a sense of crepitating resentment: “How can you be more diverse than an organization that says if you’re happy being a homosexual … that’s your right? But if you have unwanted feelings or are a questioning youth, why can’t you make those decisions? I guess diversity stops if you are a former homosexual.”

So the Christian right has found its strategy–inclusion, prayer, the promise of change–and the gay movement has found one–gsas, scholarships, the promise of acceptance. But what of the kids themselves? In July, I met 30 way-out-and-proud lgbt youths at a Michigan retreat arranged by the Point Foundation; these high-achieving Point scholars are getting from $4,000 to $30,000 a year to pay for their educations and are considered by some gays to be the movement’s future leaders. A few days later at Exodus’ Youth Day in North Carolina, I interviewed 13 of the kids fighting their attractions. Few at either conclave seemed interested in the roles their movements had set for them. Instead they were gay or Christian (or both) in startlingly complex ways.

Take Point scholar Maya Marcel-Keyes of Chicago, for instance. The 20-year-old daughter of conservative activist and former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, Marcel-Keyes has a girlfriend but has dated two boys; identifies herself as queer (not lesbian), pro-life and “anarchist”; and attends Mass whenever she can spare the time from her menagerie. (When Marcel-Keyes and I spoke recently, she and her girlfriend had a rabbit, a ferret, a cockatiel, two rats and two salamanders.) For their part, several of the young Exodus Christians seemed more stereotypically gay–”I love that Prada bag!” a 16-year-old boy at the Youth Day squealed several times–than some of the Point scholars who had been out for years. Others had gone to Exodus with no intention of going straight. Corey Clark, 18, belongs to his gsa at Governor Mifflin Senior High in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and says he sees nothing wrong with being gay. He attended Youth Day because he wanted to better understand his evangelical church and friends who say gays should change. “Actually,” he says, “I’ve heard so many good things about gay pride”–in the media and at school–”but I hadn’t heard directly about the downside.”

It’s remarkable that a boy like Clark could grow up in a small town and hear more good than bad about gays. But he still waited until he was 17 to come out. You don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to ask whether it’s always a good idea for a child to claim a gay identity at 13 or 14. Cornell’s Savin-Williams, who is generally sunny about gay kids’ prospects, notes that those who come out early tend to have a harder time at school, at home and with their friends than those who don’t.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the straight world isn’t always ready to accept a gay kid. But the gay world doesn’t seem ready either.

on the first day of the point foundation’s retreat, which was held in a town on Little Traverse Bay called Harbor Springs, Michigan, the 38 students who made the trip were given gift bags that contained, among other items:

• 91¼2-oz. (270 g) jar of American Spoon Sour Cherry Preserves
• Fujifilm QuickSnap Flash camera
• small tin of Trendy Mints from Henri Bendel, New York City
• DVD of the 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, in which a teenage boy is masturbated by an adult
• The Harbor Springs Visitors Guide
• The Aug. 16 issue of the gay magazine the Advocate, whose cover featured a shirtless man and blared, summer sex issue.

There was only one Point scholar at the retreat under 18–Zachery Zyskowski, 17, who is in his second year at ucla. Zyskowski came out at 13, helped start the gsa at his school and graduated valedictorian; he is far too precocious to be scandalized by a magazine or dvd. (He has watched Hedwig twice. Point executive director Vance Lancaster says the film, a cult musical about the relationship between a drag queen and a young singer, was already a favorite for many scholars. He also says it “reflects reality”: “I don’t see the negative repercussions to our students, who are very intelligent, thoughtful and mature.”)

But when I opened my gift bag, it occurred to me that gay adults are still figuring out how to deal with gay kids. The gay subculture, after all, had been an almost exclusively adult preserve until the relatively recent phenomena of gay adoption and out teens. Point scholar and Emory College junior Bryan Olsen, who turned 21 in August and has been out since he was 15, told me during the retreat, “It probably sounds anti-gay, but I think there are very few age-appropriate gay activities for a 14-, 15-year-old. There’s no roller skating, bowling or any of that kind of thing … It’s Internet, gay porn, gay chats.”

Olsen believes Point is an exception, and despite the gift bags, he’s right. The weekend retreat was packed with anodyne activities such as a boat ride to twee Mackinac Island. Lancaster spends an inordinate amount of energy pairing each scholar with a career-appropriate mentor. The mentors are accomplished and tend to be wealthy–a hedge-fund manager, a university president, movie people–and all undergo background checks.

Point was the brainchild of Bruce Lindstrom, 60, who in 1976 helped Sol Price launch the warehouse retail industry with the first Price Club, in San Diego. Lindstrom had grown up in an evangelical family in Riverside, California, and says when his parents and two brothers learned he was gay, they stopped talking to him. His nephew Nathan Lindstrom, 29, says whenever Bruce sent gifts home, the kids were told, “This is from Uncle Bruce, the sodomite.”

For years afterward, Lindstrom tried to find a gay organization that was helping kids “not to go through what I went through.” He discovered that few gay groups did much for young people. Many gay activists didn’t want to fuel the troglodyte notion that they were recruiting boys and girls. glsen’s Jennings recalls that when he first started raising money more than a decade ago, “the attitude was either ‘Isn’t it cute that you’re working with kids?’ or ‘Why are you working with kids? What are you, f______ crazy?’”

By the late ’90s, Lindstrom was talking about the idea of a scholarship program with his boyfriend Carl Strickland (who is 29 years younger) and with his old friend John Pence, a San Francisco gallery owner and former social aide to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. One night in 2001 at Lindstrom and Strickland’s home–which they call the Point because it sits on a promontory on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe–the three christened the Point Foundation. Since then, some 5,000 young gays have applied, and 47 Point scholars have been named.

Lindstrom sees the United Negro College Fund and the Rhodes scholarships as his models, and in order to win, Point candidates must prove both academic success and commitment to gay causes. Not surprisingly, many also have biographies resembling Lindstrom’s–they come from conservative families that haven’t immediately accepted them. Candidates must write an essay on “how you feel you have been marginalized because of your sexual orientation.” When scholars were called upon to introduce themselves at the retreat, many offered heartbreaking stories of family repudiation. It was routine to hear sniffling during these presentations, especially from adults.

But when you talk to Point scholars when they aren’t performing for donors, you meet kids who are doing a lot better than those plaints suggest. Some remain cut off from their families, but many have repaired relationships with even the most conservative parents. If you read the online Point bio for Matthew Vail, 19, for instance, it says he “sits alone” at family events, “not allowed to have even a gay friend participate in his family life.” But in the months since Vail provided the information for that bio, his parents, who live in Gresham, Oregon, have softened considerably, and his boyfriend, Jordaan, was actually staying with Vail’s father while Vail was at the retreat. Several other scholars also said their online bios dwelled on old wounds and omitted evidence of resilience.

Even those point scholars with the darkest stories of adversity, like Emory’s Bryan Olsen, seem more buoyant than Point lets on. I heard Olsen speak to Point donors twice, once in New York City and again in Michigan. Both times he said that after his Mormon family learned he was gay when he was 15, he was sent to a boot camp for wayward teens in Ensenada, Mexico. Olsen says the facility, Casa by the Sea, required residents to wear shoes without backs so they couldn’t run. He says that as punishment for a three-meal hunger strike, he was forced to sit in a stress position–cross-legged, with his nose touching a wall–for two hours. Olsen’s small face, which is framed by a pop-star haircut that makes him look as though he’s still 15, scrunches with tears when he gets to the next part: “I could only come home when I wrote my parents and promised to be straight and Mormon.” There were gasps in the room the first time I heard him tell that story.

But much has changed since Olsen returned from Mexico in 2000. He and his parents haven’t completely reconciled, and they aren’t paying for his education. Olsen says they told him he had to choose between their financial help and “this lifestyle.” But Olsen and his partner, Kyle Ogiela–they met in 2002–are welcomed at the family table every Sunday. Ogiela, 26, even works for Randy Olsen, Bryan’s father, as the office manager of the family pest-control firm in Woodstock, Georgia. As a Mormon, says Randy, 53, “I don’t believe that men should be together. I never will. But I love him as my son. And he and his partner are good boys.” Randy says his first reaction to Bryan’s teen homosexuality was, “I’m going to find him the best hooker I can.” But he says he and his wife sent Bryan to Casa not because he was gay but because he was a “totally unruly kid” who was “just so mean … To go get that scholarship, I understand he had to be the poor little victim. But for three years, my wife and I were the victims.” Seconds later, though, Randy yields again: “It’s like God put a pair of new glasses on me … I thought I could talk him out of [being gay]. But it’s not something you can talk someone out of.”

(As for Casa, Mexican authorities closed it a year ago. The local health minister charged, among other infractions, that Casa was “not equipped with responsible staff to run a pharmacy.” James Wall, spokesman for the Utah-based World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, which ran Casa, says Bryan Olsen once publicly berated the facility’s director during school and that he “is probably exaggerating” his stories of abuse. “I wonder if he’s ever been [to Casa],” replies Olsen.)

Olsen deeply appreciates what he calls the Point Foundation’s “unconditional support.” But one night at the retreat, he also said, “I know they sort of want you to focus on the negative when you’re telling your story.” At the next fund raiser, Olsen resolves, he will tell the donors that he recently went with his mother, one of his sisters and Kyle to Los Angeles to appear on The Price Is Right. And Kyle won a new Buick LeSabre.

The point here is not that gay kids don’t have to cope with bigotry and bleakness. A Point scholar who asked not to be identified told me he swallowed 17 Tylenols one night just before his first day of ninth grade–and when that didn’t kill him, 30 more the following night. (He merely felt sick the next day; today he is a thriving university student.) He attempted suicide for various reasons–he says his parents ridiculed his desire to pursue acting instead of football–but being gay didn’t help. And while Marcel-Keyes says many of her problems have “nothing to do with my sexuality,” she has struggled with self-mutilation–at the retreat, her arms bore scars from shoulder to wrist.

Yet, according to Savin-Williams, most gay kids are fairly ordinary. “Perhaps surprising to researchers who emphasize the suicidality, depression, victimization, prostitution, and substance abuse of gay youth, gay teenagers generally feel good about their same-sex sexuality,” he writes. A 56-year-old gay man with a slightly elfish mien, Savin-Williams has interviewed some 350 kids with same-sex attractions, and he concludes that they “are more diverse than they are similar and more resilient than suicidal … They’re adapting quite well, thank you.”

Such statements have puzzled other researchers. “Ritch has never really acknowledged the fact that the average kid who is gay is facing enormous problems,” says Dr. Gary Remafedi, director of the Youth and aids Projects at the University of Minnesota. “Most of his subjects have been Cornell students, who are among the highest-functioning students of all.” Savin-Williams, who has included many low-income and non-Cornell kids in his work, responds that Remafedi and other clinicians have a warped view because they based early research on gay teens from crisis centers. “Are you only listening to hustlers?” he asks.

Savin-Williams opposes programs designed to change sexuality, but he has won admiration from some ex-gay proponents by writing that “sexuality develops gradually over the course of childhood.” Gay identities also develop slowly. Even kids who publicly reveal same-sex attractions can be uncomfortable calling themselves gay; instead they say they are “polysexual” or “just attracted to the right person.” Those vague labels sound like adolescent peregrinations that will eventually come around to “Yep, I’m gay.” But Savin-Williams says many of the tomboys and flouncy guys we assume to be gay are in reality bisexual, incipiently transsexual or just experimenting.

Because he routinely sees young gays on mtv or even at school, a 14-year-old may now feel comfortable telling friends that he likes other boys, but that doesn’t mean he is ready to enfold himself in a gay identity. “Today so many kids who are gay, they don’t like Cher. They aren’t part of the whole subculture,” says Michael Glatze, 30, editor in chief of YGA Magazine. “They feel like they belong in their faith, in their families.”

“Increasingly, these kids are like straight kids,” says Savin-Williams. “Straight kids don’t define themselves by sexuality, even though sexuality is a huge part of who they are. Of course they want to have sex, but they don’t say, ‘It is what I am.’” He believes young gays are moving toward a “postgay” identity. “Just because they’re gay, they don’t have to march in a parade. Part of it is political. Part is personal, developmental.”

The political part is what worries Glatze. “I don’t think the gay movement understands the extent to which the next generation just wants to be normal kids. The people who are getting that are the Christian right,” he says. Indeed, several of those I met at the Exodus event had come not because they thought it would make them straight or even because they are particularly fervent Christians. Instead, they were there because they find something empty about gay culture–a feeling that Exodus exploits with frequent declamations about gays’ supposed promiscuity and intemperance. “I’m just not attracted to the gay lifestyle, toward gay people–I’ve never felt a kinship with them,” says Manuel Lopez, a lapsed Catholic and University of Chicago grad student who went to the Exodus meeting. “There’s a certain superficiality in gay attachments–musicals, fashion … I do think it’s a happier life being straight.”

Lopez has only an exiguous notion of what real gay life is like, but such misapprehensions are not uncommon among young people with same-sex attractions. Savin-Williams recalls counseling a kid who, after the third session, referred to his “partner.” “And I said, ‘Oh, you’re gay.’ And he said, ‘No. I only fall in love with guys, but I’m not “gay.” It doesn’t have anything to do with me.’ He saw being gay as leftist, radical.” At Exodus’ Youth Day, I met several young gays who spoke of the need to “walk out of” homosexuality because, as a 25-year-old from Boston put it, “I’m not happy going to the clubs anymore,” as if being gay were mostly about partying. Frank Carrasco, a 20-year-old from Miami, told me his Exodus counseling had helped cure his porn addiction; Carrasco says that during high school, when he was Bible-club president, he routinely looked at gay Internet porn until sunrise. But he has never had a boyfriend or anything approaching a typical gay life. Carrasco says Exodus has helped him develop some heterosexual attractions, but I met very few at the conference who claimed to be completely straight. (At least two of the young men–one 21, the other 18–hooked up that week and still keep in touch.)

A common refrain from Exodus pulpits is that gays don’t form lasting, healthy relationships, but those Exodus youths who seemed most successful in defying homosexual feelings were the ones more interested in exploring themselves than in criticizing gays. “I know gay couples who are in their 40s and 50s who have sex parties and use crystal meth, and I know gay couples who have been in committed, monogamous relationships for 15, 20 years,” says Michael Wilson, 22, who lives outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. “So people need the facts before they say stuff like that.” But while he says he still has gay friends–among them, one of his three ex-boyfriends–Wilson believes God doesn’t want him to have relationships with men anymore. He often speaks of his “identity in Christ,” and to him that trumps his identity as a gay man. A lot of Exodus youths seemed captives of their Christianity, caught in a hermetic loop of lust and gay sex (or masturbation), followed by confession and grim determination. Wilson is different–calmer, more convincing when he says he communes with God. He doesn’t deny that he is still sometimes attracted to men, but he doesn’t seem to be struggling. “I don’t think God would give you a struggle,” he says. “I think he brings freedom.”

Until recently, growing up gay meant awaiting a lifetime of secrecy–furtive encounters, darkened bar windows, crushing deracination. That has changed with shocking speed. “Dorothy resonates so much with older gay people–the idea of Oz, someplace you can finally be accepted,” says Glatze of YGA. “The city of Oz is now everywhere. It’s in every high school.” That’s not quite true, but the emergence of gay kids is already changing the politics of homosexuality. When their kids come out, many conservatives–just ask U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, whose adult daughter Mary is a lesbian–start to seem uncomfortable with traditionalist, rigid views on gays. But what happens when your child comes out not at 23 but at 13? At least in the short term, it’s likely that more gay kids means more backlash.

“It kind of reminds me of the issue of driver’s licenses for kids,” says the University of Minnesota’s Remafedi. “Yeah, it’s great they can get around. But there’s also a greater chance you can have an accident … In my own life and generation, we separated ourselves from the straight community. We lived in gay ghettos, and we saw the larger culture as being a culture of repression. Hopefully, some of those walls between cultures have come down. But walking between those worlds takes a lot of skill.”

(A speech made at Cooper Union, New York on Sunday, November 7, 2004, presented by The Forum for Collaborative HIV Research in conjunction with NYU’s Office of LGBT Student Services, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Callen-Lorde and the Gill Foundation. Special thanks to Josh for bringing this important speech to my attention. I got the transcript from Queer Day and RuPaul’s weblog.)

I think this has been the most difficult speech I have ever had to write and to deliver. It is a long speech. I pray you will bear with me until its end. It is an attempt to give you some idea of who and what we are up against.

It is also an attempt to discuss our ability to deal with these. I recently learned about two dear friends, both exceptionally smart and talented and each in his own way a leader of our community. One, in his middle age, has sero-converted. The other, in his middle-age, has become hooked on crystal meth. Both of them are here with us tonight.

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we’re more tuned in to what’s happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people’s emotions, and we’re better friends. I really do think all these things.

To us it defies rational analysis that this incompetent dishonest man and his party should be re-elected. Or does it?

I hope we all realize that, as of November 2nd, gay rights are officially dead. And that from here on we are going to be led even closer to the guillotine. This past week almost 60 million of our so-called “fellow” Americans voted against us. Indeed 23% of self-identified gay people voted against us, too. That one I can’t figure.

The absoluteness of what has happened is terrifying. On the gay marriage initiatives alone: 2.6 million against us in Michigan. 3.2 million in Ohio. 1.1 million in Oklahoma, 2.2 million in Georgia. 1.2 million in Kentucky. George Bush won his Presidency of our country by selling our futures. Almost 60 million people whom we live and work with every day think we are immoral. “Moral values” was top of many lists of why people supported George Bush. Not Iraq. Not the economy. Not terrorism. “Moral values.” In case you need a translationSthat means us. It is hard to stand up to so much hate. Which of course is just the way they want it. Please know that a huge portion of the population of the United States hates us. I don’t mean dislike. I mean hate. You may not choose to call it hate, but I do. Not only because they refuse us certain marital rights but because they have also elected a congress that is overflowing with men and women who refuse us just about every other right to exist as well. “Moral values” is really a misnomer; it means just the reverse. It means they think we are immoral. And that we’re dangerous and contaminated. How do you like being called immoral by some 60 million people? This is not just anti-gay. This is what Doug Ireland calls “homo hate” on the grandest scale. How do we stand up to 60 million people who have found a voice and a President who declares he has a mandate?

The new Supreme Court, due any moment now, will erase us from the slate of everything possible in no time at all. Gay marriage? Forget it. Gay anything, forget it. Civil rights for gays? Equal protection for gays. Adoption rights? The only thing we are going to get from now on is years of increasing and escalating hate. Surely you must know this. Laws and regulations that now protect us will be repealed and rewritten. Please know all this. With the arrival of this second term of these hateful people we come even closer to our extinction. We should have seen it coming. We are all smart people. How could we not have been prepared?

They have not exactly been making a secret of their hate. This last campaign has seen examples of daily hate on TV and in the media that I do not believe the world has witnessed since Nazi Germany. I have been reading Ambassador Dodd’s Diary; he was Roosevelt’s ambassador to Germany in the 30′s, and people are always popping in and out of his office proclaiming the most awful things out loud about Jews. It has been like that.

All Mary Cheyney is is a lesbian! Even her mother is hateful! That Cheney must be one fucked-up kid to stick around that family. I hope she doesn’t want to teach school. One of the reelected Congress persons vows to make it illegal for lesbians to teach school.

I know many people look to me for answers. Perhaps that is why many of you are here. You want answers? We’re living in pigshit and its up to each one of us to figure out how to get out of it. You must know that by now. Crystal meth is not an answer. You must know that by now. And quite frankly statistically it is only happening to so few of us that it is hard to get anyone worked up about that problem. Just as it hard to get worked up about a middle-aged man with brains who sero-converts. You want to kill yourself. Go kill yourself. I’m sorry. It takes hard work to behave like an adult. It takes discipline. You want it to be simple. It isn’t simple. Yes it is. Grow up. Behave responsibly. Fight for your rights. Take care of yourself and each other. These are the answers. It takes courage to live. Are you living? Not so I can see it. Gay people are all but invisible to me now. I wish you weren’t. But you are. And I look real hard.

No one likes to be told to grow up. It’s insulting. But these are always the answers. They will always be the answers. The only answers. There will never be any other answers. Grow up. Behave responsibly. Fight for your rights. Take care of yourself and each other. Be proud of yourself. Be proud you are gay. I don’t know why so many find all this so complicated. But then I am 69 years old and have less patience for the many problems I had myself when young. It is one of the privileges of getting old.

It is 25 years since 100,000 of us marched on Washington.

The AIDS service organizations are all about to collapse. No money. And the problem is too big to handle anymore. We have not slowed this thing down at all. $100 billion we’re spending on Iraq. This is a conscious choice by our “leaders” and by a large portion of the population of this country. They have in thSir infinite and never-ending cruelty decided this was the most effective thing to do with 100 billion dollars that might also end AIDS, and a few other things like worldwide hunger. But the cabal doesn’t care about these. People say: well we can’t take care of the rest of the world. That is so stupid. The rest of the world is us. We are so intertwined geopolitically that we cannot separate ourselves off into parts, into sections. Those days are over. If they ever were here. We have everything required to save the world except the will to do it. In a recent New Yorker piece Michael Specter writes that because of AIDS Russia
is on its way to disappearing. Disappearing. Imagine that.

The immense knowledge we have learned about Aids has provided us with precious little more than that knowledge. HIV/AIDS is now the worst disaster in recorded human history. In parts of Africa 7,000 people are infecting each other each and every day. We who are here are idiots if we think this fact is not going to alter our lives mightily. If your company loses enough world markets, which it most certainly will, you are going to lose your job. You will not have health insurance, for a start. And for a finish. Economies are simply going to collapse. This is already happening.

In 1990, that is some nine years into what was happening, 46% of gay men in San Francisco were still fucking without condoms.

60% of the syphilis in America today is in gay men. Excuse me, men who have sex with men.

Palm Springs has the highest number of syphilis cases in California. Palm Springs?

I do not want to hear each week how many more of you are becoming hooked on meth.

HIV infections are up as much as 40%.

You cannot continue to allow yourselves and each other to act and live like this!

One of these days the miraculous drugs we have to keep us alive are going to stop working. Our systems cannot process these extreme chemotherapies indefinitely. That is what we are on. We are on daily chemotherapy. No one wants to call it that. We call it the cocktail. We are on chemotherapy! Chemotherapy either kills the disease or kills us! What are we going to do when they don’t work any longer?

Some 70 million people so far are expected to die. “July 3, 1981, Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.” When I first started yelling about whatever it was there were 41 cases. There are now over 70 million who have been infected with HIV. Somebody up there is really listening, don’t you think? There is no way that all infected people can be saved. No one ever says that out loud. Have you noticed? Somehow in some dream world we are going to get treatment into 70 million people. It is never going to happen. It is too late. We told them. But they didn’t do anything. Did you notice? Nobody every does anything. I hope it’s finally dawning on you that maybe they didn’t and don’t want to. So, in case you haven’t noticed, we have lost the war against AIDS. I thought I’d tell you that, too. I hope you might have noticed. I can’t tell.

The President refuses to buy generic drugs for dying people. He is still saying he is waiting to hear if they are safe. These drugs have been approved. In some cases for several years. Does this sound like a President who wants to save anyone?

I do not understand why some of you believe that because we have drugs that deal with the virus more or less effectively that it is worth the gamble to have unprotected sex. These drugs are not easy to take. There are many side effects. Not life- but certainly comfort-threatening. I must allow at least one day out of every week or two to feel really shitty, to have no sleep, to be constipated, to have diarrhea, to require blood tests and monitoring at hospitals or in doctors’ offices, and to have the shakes. The shakes, which come often, are not useful with a mouse or reading a newspaper or with a lover in your arms. And I don’t enjoy eating anymore. Keeping on weight is a constant problem. I have dry mouth. S get up six or seven times a night to pee. Many of the meds we are now taking are new meds and were approved quickly and side effects have a sneaky way of showing up after FDA approval, not before. I recently discovered that I was taking an FDA approved dose of Viread that has turned out to be five times the amount I actually need. We are all probably taking too much or too little of every single one of our drugs. Doctors don’t want to test for this; tests are not readily available. You have to do a lot of homework yourselves on these drugs. Is a fuck without a condom worth not being able to taste food? Obviously for too many of you it is.

My lover often sits on top of me to make me eat. The first time this happened I was in the hospital just after my liver transplant and I wouldn’t eat and Dr. Fung said I had to eat, or else I would die, and I just couldn’t eat (do you know how strange this is to someone who was always on a diet?). It was New Year’s Eve. We were in beautiful downtown Pittsburgh. David had brought a hamper filled with my favorite dishes. And I could not eat anything. Furiously he crawled into bed with me, boots and all, and started to cry. “We haven’t come this far for you to die because you won’t eat,” he screamed, tears streaming down his face. I will never forget that. I will never forget this man I love so much in bed with me with his snowy boots on starting slowly to spoon into me whatever he’d made and I trying so desperately hard to swallow it, looking at him, this man I love so much, doing this for me, both of us now bawling our eyes out and hugging each other in this strange bed in this strange town, wondering how we got here.

It’s so wonderful being a gay person. I said that before. I’m going to say it again. I love being gay. And I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we’re more tuned in to what’s happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people’s emotions, and we’re better friends. I really do think all of these things. And I try not to forget them.

Since the very first day of this plague we have been given, almost as if by some cosmic intentionality, American leaders who most assuredly wish us dead. There can no longer be any way to deny this fact. Each day brings more and more acts of hatred. Tell me it is not so. Tell me that the amount of good that is being attempted is not totally and intentionally overwhelmed by the evil. Point out to me how this is not so. I cannot see it. I have been unable to see it since July 3, 1981. I thought it was because it was a tricky virus. That is what we have been told. It’s a very tricky virus. I hoped for a while. But we are being played for chumps and it has been so since July 3, 1981. And we never saw it.

We of course continue to be in our usual state of total denial and disarray. Whatever structure the gay world had, if we ever had one, is gone. Our organizations stink. Almost every single one of them. I cannot think of one single gay organization that despite the best will in the world is now anything but worthless to us. Oh maybe one or two. We have no power. Nobody listens to us. We have no access to power. The cabal disdains us totally. We are completely disposable. It is a horror show. There is not one single person in Washington who will get us or give us anything but shit and more shit. I’m sorry. This is where we are now. Nowhere. And you expect me to cry for you if you get hooked on meth or can’t stop the circuit parties or the orgies. OK, I feel sorry for you. Does that change anything? I would say I feel sorry for myself, but I don’t. I know I am fighting as hard as I can. I may not be getting anywhere but I am trying. It’s exhausting and I have to do it every day, every single day, like taking my meds which if I stop I know my body will cease doing something or other. I have accidentally missed a few days of meds and boy do I know fast that waS a mistake.

I fear for us as a people. Is that crazy? I am always being called crazy by somebody. I love being called crazy. That’s a sign to me that I’m on the right track. Maybe it takes a crazy person to see into the future and see what’s coming. Straight people say “my how much progress gay people are making. Isn’t that Will and Grace wonderful.” If it’s so wonderful why am I scared to death? More and more I am filled with dread. That is my truth that I bring to you today. Larry is scared. Do you see what I see? I don’t think so. Most gay people I see appear to me to act as if they’re bored to death. Too much time on your hands, my mother would say. Hell, if you have time to get hooked on crystal and do your endless rounds of sex-seeking, you have too much time on your hands. Ah, you say, aren’t we to have a little fun? Can’t I get stoned and try barebacking one last time. Are you out of your fucking mind?! At this moment in our history, no, you cannot. Anyway, we had your fun and look what it got us into. And it is still getting us into. You kids want to die? Because that’s what I sometimes think. Well, then, die.

You cannot continue to allow yourselves and each other to act and live like this!

And by the way, when are you going to realize that for the rest of your lives, probably for the rest of life on earth, you are never going to be able to have sex with another person without a condom! Never! Every time you even so much as consider this I want you to hear my voice screaming like crazy in your ears. Stop! Don’t! Never! No way, JOse! Canadian scientists now warn that even partners who are both un-infected should practice safe sex. As I understand it, more and more new viruses and mutant viruses and partial viruses that are not understood are floating around. Are you ready for that one?

Does it ever occur to you how much you have been robbed by both your country and your behavior? America let the men who should have carved out a space for you in the social discourse, the development of your history and being, America let these men who should have been your role models die. So there is this big empty space in which you live. And you don’t know where to go or how to fill it in. This is not my original thought but Michael Brown’s of the NYU gay student organizations that helped to bring me here, who gave me this to think about. It is sad for a young gay person to feel this way.

I had people to follow and many of you have not. No baton was passed to you. In a way you must start everything over. You must invent a world from which you can move forward from. This is both an extraordinarily exciting challenge and a terrifying one, one that can just as easily leave you by the wayside as make a new man of you. I say man because it is gay men who appear to have the greatest difficulty, it seems to me, in moving forward, getting off their particular dime.

Many of you deny the horrors of what happened to your predecessors. That is something I do not understand. Every moral code I know of requires respect for the dead. I often hear that many of you don’t want to know about them or admit to them. You disdain anyone older who was there.

This is denial of a most destructive nature. You cannot move forward without accepting your past. I am going to say that again. We cannot move forward without accepting and understanding our past. We were as varied as you are. We were no different, really. We were very different from those who preceded us. We were the first free gay generation and we were murdered because of our freedom. And yes you were robbed of this freedom that for obvious reasons could not be passed on to you as your heritage. So instead of being understanding of all this, you condemn your predecessors to non-existence and flounder into a future that you seem unable to fashion into anything you can hold on to that gives you emotional sustenance. You refuse to be part of any community. But if you don’t have any community you have no political strength. YoS are too busy denying and disassociating to know that. You do not seem able, it seems to me, to fashion your future. To discover what you want. You don’t even ask what you want. You don’t even ask what you need. Your needs are as mighty as needs always have been, but you don’t ask what they are, which amazes me. How can you not have curiosity about your future as a gay person? Don’t you want to go anywhere? Do you want to stay where you are? That is too bad if you do because we are about to enter a place more monstrously worse. You can deny that, as you deny those of us who went before you, but just know that down this path of your numerous denials lies your own continued destruction, the continuing destruction of gay people as gay
people, which this cabal of haters I shall shortly describe, and its supporters, which are legion, are intent on accomplishing with increasingly ruthless vengeance. If you do not fight back you will be murdered in ways just as hideous as the ways in which we got murdered.

Every single president since 1981 has denied our existence and denied the existence of AIDS. And we let them get away with it. Oh a few thousand of us fought for the drugs that we got but many millions of us did nothing and of course an enormous number of them died. They died because they lost their health along their journey of non-involvement and their lack of responsibility to their brothers and sisters. Instead of learning from this lesson, you are repeating it. And you are acting like this with your health intact, many of you, which strikes me as even more perverse than what your dead predecessors did to destroy themselves.

Does it occur to you that we brought this plague of aids upon ourselves? I know I am getting into dangerous waters here but it is time. With the cabal breathing even more murderously down our backs it is time. And you are still doing it. You are still murdering each other. Please stop with all the generalizations and avoidance excuses gays have used since the beginning to ditch this responsibility for this fact. From the very first moment we were told in 1981 that the suspected cause was a virus, gay men have refused to accept our responsibility for choosing not to listen, and, starting in 1984, when we were told it definitely was a virus, this behavior turned murderous. Make whatever excuses you can to carry on living in your state of denial but this is the fact of the matter. I wish we could understand and take some responsibility for the fact that for some 30 years we have been murdering each other with great facility and that down deep inside of us, we knew what we were doing. Don’t tell me you have never had sex without thinking down deep that there was more involved in what you were doing than just maintaining a hard-on.

I have recently gone through my diaries of the worst of the plague years. I saw day after day a notation of another friend’s death. I listed all the ones I’d slept with. There were a couple hundred. Was it my sperm that killed them, that did the trick? It is no longer possible for me to avoid this question of myself. Have you ever wondered how many men you killed? I know I murdered some of them. I just know. You know how you sometimes know things? I know. Several hundred over a bunch of years, I have to have murdered some of them, planting in him the original seed. I have put this to several doctors. Mostly they refuse to discuss it, even if they are gay. Most doctors do not like to discuss sex or what we do or did. (I still have not heard a consensus on the true dangers of oral sex, for instance.) They play blind. God knows what they must be thinking when they examine us. Particularly if they aren’t gay. One doctor answered me, it takes two to tango so you cannot take the responsibility alone. But in some cases it isn’t so easy to answer so flippantly. The sweet young boy who didn’t know anything and was in awe of me. I was the first man who fucked him. I think I murdered him. The old boyfriend who did not want to go to bed with me and I Sade him. The man I let fuck me because I was trying to make my then boyfriend, now lover, jealous. I know, by the way, that that other one is the one who infected me. You know how you sometime know things? I know he infected me. I tried to murder myself on that one.

Has it never, ever occurred to you that not using a condom is tantamount to murder? I cannot believe you have never considered this. It is such a simple and intelligent thought to have. And we all should have had it from day one. Why didn’t we? That has been haunting me for a while, that question. Why didn’t we? It is incredibly selfish not to have at least thought that question at that moment, all those moments when we were playing Russian roulette.

From here on I am going to get even more complicated. I want you to pay attention. This is the most important part of this speech.

Bill Moyers recently said this in a speech on October 20, 2004 at the Palace Hotel:

“For years now, the corporate, political, and religious right — this is documented from 1971 on — the religious and political right has been joined in an axis of influence whose purpose is to take back the gains of the democratic renewal in the 20th century and restore America to a rule of the elites that maintain their privilege and their power at the expense of everyone else. For years now, a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life.”

“Take note,” Moyers continues. “The corporate, political, and religious conservatives are achieving a vast transformation of America that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest inequality in America since 1929, they have saddled our nation, our States, and our cities and counties with structural defects that will last until our children’s children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions, except rewarding the rich and waging war.”

In other words, our country has been taken away from us by a cabal that includes all the people who hate us.

These people make the rules. They are rarely elected officials. They may or may not know each other. They have several things in common. They are very rich or have strong connections to money or power. They are in agreement on what they do not want. They believe fervently in their God. And that they are doing all this for Him. And they stay in constant touch.

I hope you realize that all these people Bill Moyers is talking about hate us. Thriller writers write better histories of our times than actual historians.

Anyway, it is done. What Moyers is talking about. It’s already happened. On a scale of such magnitude that it is difficult to see how we can ever take it back. It’s all in place now, this cabal of power. It almost doesn’t make any difference who is president.

You want to know why AIDS was allowed to happen. This is your answer. You want to know why gay people have no power and are unlikely to get any. This is your answer.

The top 1% of wealth holders control 39% of total household wealth.

The richest 5% of households own 2/3 of the value of all stock owned in the our country.

The the top 1% have as many after-tax dollars to spend as the bottom 100 million.

The richest 20% of households received almost 50% of the national income, while the bottom 20% received only 3%.

At a time when 265 people in the United States were billionaires, 32 million people were living beneath the official poverty line.

This inequality gap in the United States is the highest in the industrialized world.

“That drive,” Moyers continues, “is succeeding with drastic consequences for an equitable access to public resources, the lifeblood of any democracy. From lSnd, water, and natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a broad range of American democracy is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.

“We are experiencing a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power.”

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a Richmond lawyer who called himself a centrist, was secretly commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Congress to write a confidential plan on how to take back America for the survival of the free enterprise system. Not democracy. Free enterprise. Barry Goldwater had lost, Nixon was about to implode, Vietnam had sucked the nation’s soul dry, the cabal saw their world unraveling. They saw the women’s movement, black civil rights. student war protests, the cold war. They saw the world as they knew it coming to an end. (We are not the first to feel our world crumbling and becoming powerless.)

This is what Lewis Powell wrote: “Survival lies in organization, in careful long range planning, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available through joint effort and in the political power available only through united action.”

This was the birth of what is now called the vast right wing conspiracy. It is known as the Powell Manifesto. You can google Lewis Powell (not the one who helped to assassinate Lincoln) and read it in its entirety.

Under the supervision of some of the richest families in America, that plan has been followed faithfully since 1971 and it has resulted in these past years of horror and the re-election of George Bush. Nine families and their foundations, all under the insistent goading of Joseph Coors, have financed much of this. The Bradley Foundation. The Smith Richardson Foundation. Four Scaife Family Foundations, The John M. Olin Foundation. The Castle Rock (or Coors) Foundation. Three Koch Family Foundations. The Earhart Foundation. The JM Foundation. The McKenna Foundation. From 1985 to 2001 alone they contributed $650 million to this conservative message campaign. They have helped to launch and gain financing for networks of newspapers and magazines. They have seen to it that hundreds of the most powerful think tanks have appeared, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise, Cato, Manhattan, Hudson Institutes, and many more. There are now in place an ever growing number of well-funded student organizations at many colleges. There are legal advocacy foundations, such as the Center For Individual Rights and Judicial Watch. There are Leadership Institutes and Action Institutes and Institutes on Religion and Public Policy and Religion and Democracy. There is a heavily visible media participation: Fox Television and Pat Robertson and Oliver North and Radio America and the Washington Times and Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, to name but a very few, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

For the preparation of this manifesto, Lewis Powell was rewarded by Richard Nixon with a seat on the Supreme Court, where among other things he voted against gays in Bowers v. Hardwick, and against Black people in Bakke v. University of California.

It is vital for us to realize that this plan was written in 1971. The people it was written for did not go off then to a disco, or to the Pines or into therapy, or into drugs. They took this plan and they have executed it religiously every day and night for the next thirty-five years initially with some 400 million dollars and always from then until now with unending hours of backbreaking, grinding, unglamorous work, of civic engagements county by county across the entire expanse of America. They took the richest and most liberal nation in the history of civilization and turnSd it hard right into a classist, racist, homophobic imperial army of pirates. 30% of America now self-identify as conservative or extremely
conservative. When Lewis Powell wrote his Manifesto that figure was less than 10%.

And on the morning of November 3rd we wrung our hands and wondered why. And we have a community that still cannot decide on what we want or what to do. We are completely inept at organizing ourselves and have a monstrously bad record of attempting unity.

The continuing existence of HIV is essential for the functioning of the totalitarianism under which gay people now live. It works out like this: HIV allows “them” to sell us as sick. And that kills off our usefulness, both in our own minds, their thinking we are sick, and in the eyes of the world, everyone thinking we are sick. All of this obliterates the consciousness of those who should help us and don’t. This liquidates and incinerates our individuality and our spontaneity, our abilities to fight back, to hold our oppressors to task. They want to keep HIV going as long as they can! Why haven’t we seen that? The signs have always been there! But like everything else we couldn’t believe them. No one could be as cruel as that. They want to make us superfluous. Their media, their newspapers, their networks will see to it that our good qualities are invisible.

It should therefore come as no surprise that when HIV came along they, this cabal, facilitated its rapid deployment and continue to do so. Before even making the feeblest attempt to commence any miniscule response or inquiry into what their press was not reporting, which they most certainly knew about themselves, they waited until masses of us had all been exposed to the whatever it was. We on the other hand chose to not believe that the whatver it was was a virus until this was incontestably proved. But they knew what it was, or were willing to take the chance and hope that it was, and they just sat back and waited. Their wildest dreams then started to come true. The faggots were disappearing and they were doing it to themselves! I can locate no work of any urgency, or indeed much work at all on aids for most of the period between 1981-1984. Oh many claim it, as many claim seeing cases many years earlier, which I also doubt, but I cannot locate whatever these are claiming. In those four years almost every gay man who had fucked in America had been exposed to the virus.

And when they did start doing anything it was with such feebleness that it amounted to nothing for ten years. You can give me all kinds of reasons why it took so long but my research has convinced me that the actual scenario was completely intentional neglect. Oh perhaps not the doctors or the scientists. But they had no money. And they were not going to get any money. Or enough money. People upstairs were going to see to it that there would be no money. Let even more people get infected first. Blacks, junkies, prostitutes. Every color of skin but straight white. Every religion but Christian. Excuse me, white Christian. Then we’ll throw them a few pennies to make it look like we’re concerned.

The cabals Bill Moyers talked about have called all the shots in facilitating and accelerating the plague of aids. If scientists discovered something useful, it has rarely been available. I spoke earlier about the refusal of this president to allow already approved generic drugs out to a desperate Africa and elsewhere. Of that huge Congressional approval of many billions for HIV around the world that Bush brags about, something less that 2% has left Washington almost four years after its approval. Does this sound like a President and a government and a country that wants to help?

I guess I have suspected behavior like this all along. But I never knew it in quite the way that I have now come to see it thanks to Bill Moyers: intentionality is the only word to describe the genocidal treatment the world is drowning in. Much of the world, most assuredly including us, has been inteStionally hung out to die. So far some 70 million of us. That is some manifesto Lewis Powell birthed. And all we have to do is keep fucking each other without condoms and the rest of their “moral issues” will be dead.

Do you seriously think they care about the continuing rise again of HIV infections? They are grateful for them. Do you think they care about a sudden plague of crystal? They thank us for our cooperation. And we thought for one brief second of time that we might even be allowed to marry the ones we love.

And while all this happened, even if we had enough suspicions to act, what did we do? We completely shrank from our duty of opposition. Those are Christopher Isherwood’s words: “the duty of opposition.” But he was flagellating himself with these words. He fears that should he have to live face to face with a war in his backyard that he “would shrink from the duty of opposition.”

Marriage? Forget it. Non-discrimination laws? Forget them. Those that have been enacted will be rescinded or amended into toothlessness. Adoption? Equal rights? Forget everything. We are going to be erased into nothingness. They hate us so much and now they are in complete and utter power, the most dangerous situation in the world for the unwanteds to live under. And I no longer think it matters who is President. Clinton turned out to be as rotten for us as George Bush, either one.

Ok, keep putting your life in jeopardy. 110 of their drug companies certainly want you to do so. Keep dancing your asses off at circuit parties all over the world as you go down to the sea in ships that are made to intentionally capsize and take you down with them. Ok, keep being bored and crying for your poor selves. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. With our complete cooperation they have already murdered several generations of us so far. They won’t have to murder so many more of us to get their wish. Like Russia, we will disappear. That is what they want to do. Disappear us. And now they are able to officially do it. George Bush has his mandate. Can’t you see all this! People high up there in their secret powwows don’t want us here. Word has come down from on high: get rid of the faggots once and for all. You think the law will protect us? Think again. Wait until you see the new Supreme Court.

You are here as a gay person because of certain events and certain people who lived and suffered and died before you. You must learn about them and not continually deny their existence and importance in our history, the history of gay people in America. You must learn about them! They have made your life possible! What kind of person doesn’t want to learn about themselves? I don’t know why but you don’t want to. Most of our fellow gays don’t read books about us. Or come to plays about us. What do you want to do? I don’t know. And for all I can tell in talking to many of you, you don’t know either. And this is very frightening. A large uncongealed mass of potentially superior beings doesn’t know what to do with themselves or bother to learn their history. So they dance. So they drug. So they go on to the internet to find more sex. These are useful lives being wasted. Why is that? Why is there no useful creativity going on? Why is there no mental agility visible, no audible questioning discussions … almost anything of importance? Don’t you long for some involvement in the humanity that you belong to, for your place in the scheme of things? You don’t know how to make entrance on these playing fields, is that it? I don’t know what is wrong with us. I wish you could tell me. What do you do with yourselves all week long, seven days and nights a week, that amounts to anything really important? I can’t see many of you as doing anything important, to give your lives meaning. Oh I can see lots of frocks on the runway but I can’t see bodies inside of them, bodies with brains and concerned with anything but pretty and orgasms. What do you do to make your world, our world, a better place? A world that needs every bit of help it cSn get, our world, not their world. You don’t seem able to connect with anyone beyond the basest ways.

“Why can’t we look at our bodies and see not just a sexual definition? Why can’t we see in the body all that the body represents? Sexuality, yes. But also mortality, humanness, humaneness, innocence, purity, health, sickness, strength, consideration, responsibility, divinity. When did we rob our bodies of all the complexity they possess? Why do we refuse to see all that we are capable of? All the other things that make us full beings.” That very beautiful paragraph was written by my friend, Jordan Roth, who is one day going to be a very fine writer if he just keeps at it.

Do you know you are taking the same crystal meth as Hitler? The stuff that was being used well into 1997, the government outlawed one of the ingredients and so the orignal process was resurrected, the one as used by the Nazis. It was first synthesized by the Germans in the early part of the 20th century. Hitler was a crystal addict. The new version is much more potent than the stuff you were taking before 1997, which is the main reason why it is so hard to break an addiction. Dr. Howard Grossman told me this bit of history. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you about the Hitler part. To the more twisted among you it may be a turn-on.

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all this.

But I am finding that I am not so proud of being gay anymore. It’s come over me slowly. As much as I love being gay and I love gay people I’m not proud of us right now. It’s disappeared. I almost could say we’ve disappeared. But since you are here I can’t quite say that. But that’s how I feel.

I do not see us, don’t you see? I do not see us! They are killing us. They are eradicating us from this earth. Little by little by little we are disappearing. I do not see us and I am beginning to see us less and less.

I have recently come to believe that gay men and women are tragic people. We are so wonderful but we are also so fucked up. So blind. So ignorant in ways to look after ourselves. So uninterested in the Outside World that is subsuming us when we thought we were making them pretty and giving them songs to sing. So without agendas to utilize our wonderful-ness. We know who the enemy is and we just stand here letting them shoot us over and over again. We stand there and let them do it! All of the brains and abilities we have among us are useless. The smartest among us, our famous ones, our rich ones, seem to allow this most of all. The ones who should help us and speak up for us refuse that responsibility. We have enough rich gay men and lesbians to finance a takeover of the world but their brains and their money and their skills are not available to to help us. To lead us. To inspire us. To finance us. To be like Lewis Powell’s Nine Families. That, too is tragic. To have so much money and to not to use it for brothers and sisters, for family, for our continuation here on earth. Why is that? Rockefeller tithed himself from his very first dollar, to go to his church for his salvation. Please, can we get word to every rich gay person to show up to help save us. We need our Nine Families desperately.

Public service: how many religions demand this of their members? How much public service in behalf of your brothers and sisters, your family, have you performed recently? Don’t tell me you don’t know what to do. If you can find another ass to fuck, and you seem endlessly inventive at accomplishing this, then you should be able to locate a more useful and responsible outlet.

For a few brief years we had some noble moments, of togetherness and anger and progress. Not many of us, mind you. If you are still alive, you know who you were and where you were during those worst years of our mass murder. You know Shat you did and what you didn’t. And I know too. I know that most of you, should you still be alive, didn’t do a goddamned thing. In fact, you were ashamed of us, many of you were. I remember that as well as I remember those who died. “Friends” crossing the street to avoid me because I was advising cooling it. I was actually told to not come back to Fire Island Pines. Lots of people come up to me now on the street and say, thank you for what you did for us. I do not consider that a compliment. My response quite often’s been a curt Fuck You, why aren’t you doing it too! I don’t do anything that anyone else couldn’t do. I just do it, and some 10 or 15,000 other people did it too then. And the rest of you sat on your asses. And, those of you who are still alive, know who you were and how little you did.

Yes for one brief moment in time we got angry. Correction, a few of us got angry. Of all our many many millions of gay people in this country, about 10,000 of us or so got angry enough to accomplish something. We got drugs. We got AIDS care. We got enough so we could continue fucking again. That in the end is what it amounted to. As soon as we got the drugs, you went right back to what got us into such trouble in the first place. What is wrong with us? The cabal can’t believe their good fortune.

How many gay people in America in those years of AIDS? Ten million? Twenty million? Thirty million? How many of us are there now? We don’t even know how many of us there are! Or how many we lost! And every time some statistical number is released by some faceless organization or government office, I always wonder: how the fuck do they know how many of us there are when we don’t even know how many of us there are? And none of our so-called gay organizations ever bothers to find out. It would be nice to know, helpful to know. Don’t you think?

You know, it isn’t meant to be easy, life. I don’t know why it isn’t meant to be easy, but it just isn’t, so we might as well get used to it and try to find things that give us a certain sense of pride. We must create ourselves as something we can live with. It takes energy, yes. Why are we so crippled intellectually? Oh, we study sexuality and gender stuff until it comes out of every university’s asshole but we don’t study history, who we were and where we came from and our roots, the wellsprings of our historical existence. We do not honor our dead as we do not honor ourselves. We continue without surcease to be and remain, endlessly, day after day, helpless victims. “In my country when they raise the bus fares, we burn the buses,” a Brazilian journalist said to me as she watched a
sparsely attended ACT-UP demonstration.

There is never one single hour that a disenfranchised minority does not have to fight to breathe and stay alive. The hate out there will never lessen. It only grows and grows, this hate. Most of you refuse to face this. I hate you for your doing that. I really do. I have no more patience for this kind of weakness. I know this is uncharitable of me. I don’t care. I am too tired of fighting with so few troops. You are now dancing your own dance of death, you know. And I hate you for this, too. Grow up, I beg you. Oh, grow up.

Time goes by so fast. We are allotted so precious little of it on this earth. How sad that you use it so stupidly. Every minute that goes by is gone forever. You who have been given a new lease on life, the very gift of life itself, piss it away. It is so incomprehensible to me who has come so close to death a couple times. I find your inactivity and ingratitude and lack of imagination on how to act in emergencies incongruous, incomprehensible, insulting. And unacceptable. I could never understand during all those years of AIDS why every single person facing death would not fight to save his own life. And I cannot understand now how, life having been given back to us again, again you treat your life with such
contempt.

Yes, all that I have spoken of tonight is the stuff of tragedy.

I wish we could truly look upon each other as brothers and sisters. It sounds corny I am told when I keep using terms like this. How can we be related I am asked dismissively. You do not know or want to know that we have been on this earth as long as anyone else and that we have as many available heroes and heroines as anyone else. Your family has been here a very long time and has an ancient and distinguished lineage. You must learn that Abraham Lincoln was gay and George Washington and Meriwether Lewis and so many others we are only just beginning to uncover. But they will not let gay history be taught in schools and universities. And we seem unable to teach ourselves. My own college, Yale, with $1 million of my own brother’s money to do just this, will not teach what I call gay history, unencumbered with the prissy incomprehensible gobbledygook of gender studies and queer theory. Abraham Lincoln did not talk that language.

We richly deserve the government we have received. We do not even know who we are. And our enemies participate in their convictions every day of their lives. We only show up when we want to, which is not very often. But then perhaps you do not love being gay. Or think we are better than other people, and smarter and more talented and more tuned into what is happening, and are better friends.

I leave the hardest topic we must face till last.

How do we fight as a united front when they don’t approve of our “behavior” and when our behavior is inseparable from our beings? How do we fight as a united front when some of us won’t or are unable to change certain behaviors that many of us have difficulty in supporting and defending ourselves? We’ve been so concerned about showing the world a united front. We feel the need to say that everything gay people do is good and it simply isn’t so. We must have an honest discussion amongst ourselves about what’s good and what isn’t. This is of course the problem that has finally brought us down because we have refused to deal with it, and perhaps is one reason today’s youngsters have difficulty in acknowledging our past. It is the unfaced devil in our closet, if you
will, that we have refused to deal with and which, now, now that they have achieved their position of imperial power, will be used to hang us once and for all. To be crude about it, how do we market and sell our wishes and our needs as they have been able to package and sell their wants and needs so successfully for thirty-five years? How do we frame this issue? How do we claim the God that they have subsumed into their own ownership? It is inhuman to think that the only way we can get through to some safe other side is by policing each other and in so doing destroy whatever hope we have of getting along? If they have been able to convince this country that the Republicans are the party of the people, surely so many sons and daughters can be smart enough to find a way to sell our parents permission to co-exist.

I do not know how to answer any of this. And I don’t think anyone among us does either. To talk out loud about what our bodies have done and continue to do is asking for trouble from others of us. How do we admit our past, own it, and evolve from it and move on? For we must do this.

I know some of you will immediately jump up to act. I caution rushing off to form anything quite so fast until we decide how we want to deal with what I have raised tonight. I know many of you are prepared to tough it out and say to them, “fuck you, I am what I am.” And point out quite rightly that they have simply pushed us too far and, no matter what we have done and continue to do we simply cannot allow them to treat us this way any longer. We are human beings as much as they are, and their God is the same as our God and He simply cannot be allowed to be as punishing as they are requiring Him to be.”

But this is perhaps too honest and reasonable to say to those who are not either. Reasoning like this has not worked for us in the past. But ISsense that ignoring this question of responsibility for much that has murdered us will only please them more.

These are the problems we must confront as we go forward. If you are going to fight in a united way, which I am convinced is now the only way that can save us, we must find a platform that all of us can support without divisiveness and shame and guilt and all the other hateful weapons they will club us with.

And if we do want to go out and fight again in a united way we must ask ourselves: are we able to replicate the kind of devotion and commitment and backbreaking thankless work and tactics that continues to bring them year after year into such positions of unlimited power. Thirty-five years of that? For thirty-five years the cabal I have spoken of has worked every single day and night to bring them their success. Quite frankly they deserve their victory and we deserve our loss.

I would like to quote this from a Baptist minister, Tom Ehrich, in Durham. By chance, I found it on a Christian website at 3:00 this afternoon. “It would be helpful if we started in silence and just listened to each other’s voices. Whether we can muster such maturity amid toxic political attitudes remains to be seen. If we are to have a meaningful national discussion of moral issues, we will need to start with the sexual issues, not because they are the most important but because they are the fire engulfing the tower. Let’s get it all on the table…

“And let’s do so openly and boldly, without the code language that we often use in moral debates, without our usual cherry-picking of Scriptures, without our usual blistering indignation, without the bullying that elevates one’s viewpoint into divine certainty.”

So we are being invited to this table whether we want to or not. We must be prepared.

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and better friends. I do, I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things.

And I passionately and desperately want all my brothers and sisters to stay alive and well and on this earth as long as they want theirs to.

Can we all help each other to reach this goal?

One of the most persistent debates surrounding homosexuality regards whether gays are “born that way” or whether homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle.”

The debate is ill-formed from the start, in that it conflates two separate questions:

1. How did you become what you are? (By genetics? Early environment? Willful choice? Some combination of the above?), and
2. Can you change what you are?

The answers to these two questions vary independently. My dark hair color is genetically determined, but I can change it (though I’d make a rather frightful blonde). The fact that my native language is English is environmentally determined, but I can’t change it. (I can learn a new language, of course, but at this stage it would never have the character of my native language.)

The fact that I put the last sentence in parentheses is a matter of willful choice, and, like most matters of willful choice, it can be changed (although my editors had better leave it alone if they know what’s good for them). Still, some choices are not so easily undone. Having chosen never to practice piano as a child, it would be possible, but rather challenging, for me to become proficient at piano now. How would one go about “choosing” to be gay?

Of course, sexual orientation is not like piano-playing. I never turned down “straight lessons” as a child. (“No, Mommy, I wanna play with my Easy-Bake oven instead!”) I never chose to “become gay,” and I’m not even sure how one would go about doing so. We do not choose our romantic feelings — indeed, we often find them thrust upon us at surprising and inopportune times. We discover them; we do not invent them.

So we must be born this way, right?

Wrong. For several reasons. No one is born with romantic feelings, much less engaging in sexual conduct. That comes later. Whether it comes as a result of genetics, or early environment, or watching too many episodes of Wonder Woman is a separate question that can’t be settled by simple introspection.

Moreover, the fact that feelings are strong doesn’t mean that they’re genetically determined. They might be, but they might not. Sexual orientation’s involuntariness, which is largely beyond dispute, is separate from its origin, which is still controversial, even among sympathetic scientists.

But here’s the good news: It doesn’t matter whether we’re born this way.

A lot of gay-rights advocates seem to think otherwise. They worry that if we’re not “born this way,” then homosexuality would be “unnatural” in some morally significant sense.

Nonsense. Again: the fact that I speak English rather than French is learned behavior, but it does not follow that my doing so is unnatural or in need of reparative therapy.

But wouldn’t a genetic basis for homosexuality prove that God made us this way? No, it wouldn’t — at least not in any helpful sense. Put aside the difficulties about establishing God’s existence or discerning divine intentions. The fact is that there are plenty of genetically influenced traits that are nevertheless undesirable. Alcoholism may have a genetic basis, but it doesn’t follow that alcoholics ought to drink excessively. Some people may have a genetic predisposition to violence, but they have no more right to attack their neighbors than anyone else. Persons with such tendencies cannot say “God made me this way” as an excuse for acting on their dispositions.

“Whoa!” you might object. “Are you saying that homosexuality is a disorder like alcoholism?” Not at all. The difference between alcoholism and homosexuality is that alcoholism has inherently bad effects whereas homosexuality does not. But this distinction just reinforces my point: we do not determine whether a trait is good by looking at where it came from (genetics, environment, or something else). We determine whether it is good by looking at its effects.

Nor does it matter whether sexual orientation can be changed. For even if it could (which is doubtful in most cases), it doesn’t follow that it should. Much like my hair color.

Remember: bad arguments in favor of a good cause are still bad arguments — and in the long run not very good for the cause. This is not to say that we shouldn’t frequently remind people that homosexuality, like heterosexuality, is a deep, important, and relatively fixed feature of human personality. It’s just that those facts can only get us so far.

In a 1964 speech to the New York Mattachine Society, an early gay rights group, activist Frank Kameny announced:

“We are interested in obtaining rights for our respective minorities as Negroes, as Jews, and as Homosexuals. Why we are Negroes, Jews, or Homosexuals is totally irrelevant, and whether we can be changed to Whites, Christians or heterosexuals is equally irrelevant.”

Kameny (who is still going strong at 79) was absolutely right. Too bad people still haven’t gotten the message.

“The job of the gay community is not to deal with extremists who would castigate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us. The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That’s our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment.” ~Bayard Rustin (civil rights activist and gay man who advised MLKjr and organized the 1963 March on Washington)

“Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group. || We have a lot more work to do in our common struggle against bigotry and discrimination. I say “common struggle” because I believe very strongly that all forms of bigotry and discrimination are equally wrong and should be opposed by right-thinking Americans everywhere. Freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender, or ethnic discrimination.” ~Coretta Scott King

“When someone asks me, “are gay rights civil rights?” my answer is always, “Of course, they are.” Civil rights are positive legal prerogatives: the right to equal treatment before the law. These are the rights shared by everyone. There is no one in the United States who does not, or should not, enjoy or share in enjoying these rights. Gay and lesbian rights are not special rights in any way. It isn’t “special” to be free from discrimination. It is an ordinary, universal entitlement of citizenship.” ~NAACP National Chairman Julian Bond

“What would you do? …if you were thrown out of your house as a kid? …if you were beaten up in school and your teachers did nothing? …if you were fired from your job? …if you were banned from serving in our military? …if a landlord refused to rent to you? …if a doctor refused to treat you? …if you could not marry the person you love? …if your kids were taken away from you? …if the government denied 1,100 benefits to you and your spouse, but not to other couples? …if the government deported your spouse? …if the hospital prevented you from saying good-bye as your partner lay dying alone? Welcome To Our Lives. We are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Americans.” ~The Dallas Principles

“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to.. fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.” ~Judge Robert H. Jackson 1943

“The only queer people are those who don’t love anybody.” ~Rita Mae Brown

“One should no more deplore homosexuality than left-handedness.” ~Towards a Quaker View of Sex, 1964

“It always seemed to me a bit pointless to disapprove of homosexuality. It’s like disapproving of rain.” ~Francis Maude

“As gay people are becoming more recognized as a demographic, a unique people with an innate and immutable attribute known as sexual orientation, the more that discrimination seems to be unAmerican and unChristian. And those who espouse it do, indeed, begin to be seen as cruel, discriminatory, hateful bigots unwilling to extend the rights they want for themselves to others who are not like them.” ~Timothy Kincaid

“The fact that we are all human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish humans from one another.”
~Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986)

“When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” ~From the tombstone of a gay Vietnam veteran

“The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love heterosexuals. It’s just that they need more supervision.” ~Lynn Lavner

“My lesbianism is an act of Christian charity. All those women out there praying for a man, and I’m giving them my share.” ~Rita Mae Brown

“Why can’t they have gay people in the army? Personally, I think they are just afraid of a thousand guys with M16s going: Who’d you call a faggot?” ~ John Stewart

“Soldiers who are not afraid of guns, bombs, capture, torture or death say they are afraid of homosexuals. Clearly we should not be used as soldiers; we should be used as weapons.” ~Letter to the editor, The Advocate

“If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?”
~Lily Tomlin

“Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?” ~Ernest Gaines

“If homosexuality is a disease, let’s all call in queer to work: Hello. Can’t work today, still queer.” ~Robin Tyler

“Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity…any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”
~John Updike

“War. Rape. Murder. Poverty. Equal rights for gays. Guess which one the Southern Baptist Convention is protesting?” ~The Value of Families

“If time and space are curved, where do all of the straight people come from?” ~Unknown

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.” ~Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947

“There is nothing wrong with going to bed with someone of your own sex. People should be very free with sex, they should draw the line at goats.” ~Elton John

“I’d rather be black than gay because when you’re black you don’t have to tell your mother.” ~Charles Pierce, 1980

“That word “lesbian” sounds like a disease. And straight men know because they’re sure that they’re the cure.” ~Denise McCanles

“If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nailbiters.” ~Anita Bryant

“Anita Bryant. Like Anita hole in the head.” ~Graffiti

“The radical right is so homophobic that they’re blaming global warming on the AIDS quilt.” ~Dennis Miller

“Jesse Helms and Newt Gingrich were shaking hands congratulating themselves on the introduction of an antigay bill in Congress. If it passes, they won’t be able to shake hands, because it will then be illegal for a prick to touch an asshole.” ~Judy Carter

“My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.” ~W. Somerset Maugham

“Drag is when a man wears everything a lesbian won’t.” ~Unknown

“I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated ‘all my homosexual patients are quite sick’ – to which I finally replied ‘so are all my heterosexual patients’.” ~Ernest van den Haag, psychotherapist

“For a long time I thought I wanted to be a nun. Then I realized that what I really wanted to be was a lesbian.” ~Mabel Maney

“When it comes to exploring the sea of love, I prefer buoys.” ~Andrew G. Dehel

“The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

“If male homosexuals are called ‘gay’, then female homosexuals should be called ‘ecstatic’.” ~Shelly Roberts

“My mother took me to a psychiatrist when I was fifteen because she thought I was a latent homosexual. There was nothing latent about it.” ~Amanda Bearse

“Some women can’t say the word lesbian… even when their mouth is full of one.” ~Kate Clinton

“No matter how far in or out of the closet you are, you still have a next step.” ~Unknown

“People who can’t think of anything else but whether the person you love is indented or convex should be doomed not to think of anything else but that, and so miss the other ninety-five percent of life.” ~Robert Towne

“The closet is an awful place to die. ~Unknown

“The American is hysterical about his manhood.” ~Gore Vidal

“Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.”
~G.C. Lichtenberg

“You can’t change the music of your soul.”
~Katherine Hepburn

“We are all omnibuses in which our ancestors ride, and every now and then one of them sticks his head out and embarrasses us.”
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

“The most important thing is to be whatever you are without shame.”
~Rod Steiger

“Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.”
~Oscar Wilde

“I can take any amount of criticism, so long as it is unqualified
praise.”
~Noel Coward

“Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”
~Gloria Steinem

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
~Mahatma Gandhi

“The best things and best people rise out of their separateness. I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.”
~Robert Frost

“I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.”
~Dorothy Parker

“Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.”
~Woody Allen

“The only reason I feel guilty about masturbation is that I do it so badly.”
~David Steinberg

“Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.”
~Frank Lloyd Wright

“It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.”
~John Cage

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
~Albert Einstein

“The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.”
~Brook Atkinson

“Sexual harassment at work — is it a problem for the self-employed?”
~Victoria Wood

“The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, is true perversion..” ~Harvey Milk

“I have tasted freedom. I will not give up that which I have tasted. I have a lot more to drink. For that reason, the political numbers game will be played. I know the rules of their game now and how to play it.” ~Harvey Milk

“If I turned around every time somebody called me a faggot, I’d be walking backward – and I don’t want to walk backward.” ~Harvey Milk

“I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you… and you… and you… gotta give em hope!” ~Harvey Milk