The White Peril 白禍

I don't plan to make ex-gays a running theme here--Ex-Gay Watch, whose contributors all know a lot more about various programs and theories than I ever will, usually have that stuff covered just fine. Still, the topic is obviously of more than mere passing interest to me, and in the vein of yesterday's post about MSNBC's blandified article about Love in Action, here is an interview with an ex-ex-gay in Bay Windows (via Gay News).

Naturally, my sympathies are going to lie with Wade Richards, but I can't judge how accurately he's actually portraying people and events. One thing that he says that jibes with everything else I've heard and read about de-gay-ifying programs drew my attention anew, though:

I took a break from the press stuff and was hanging out in Los Angeles and my boss's sister was in an open relationship for 12 years with her girlfriend. We would visit her, and when my boss wasn't around I'd ask her sister Jenny questions. She had really been in a relationship for 12 years? What? You don't do drugs, you don't drink, you work for a youth organization? You volunteer your time most of the time? How weird? And then I'd be in her house and see scripture verses taped up to her mirror and little inspirational things, and I was like, 'What's going on? I thought this doesn't happen. Gay people aren't in monogamous relationships.'

Reparative (or however they style themselves) programs don't have any ethical responsibility to give equal time to the opposition. If you're trying to bring people out of homosexuality, of course, you're not going to be dwelling on the fact that there are gays in stable, long-term, sustaining relationships.

But just because people are confused and depressed doesn't mean they're dum-dums. If you drum into their heads that all gays are dysfunctional, the immediate effect will doubtless be to spook them away from homosexual behavior. But it simply isn't true that we all end up in the gutter (such a dusty place, you know, and not the sort of backdrop that flatters the skin tone). Unless kept under virtual house arrest, they're eventually going to run into some of us gays in regular old couples and start to wonder what other facts you were playing fast and loose with. Irrespective of whose goals you support, bad strategy is bad strategy. Not to mention that, in this case, it's dishonest.

I don't know that Terry McMillan's marital troubles constitute a conservative case for gay marriage, but I do know that it's a shame Ace's old boyfriend didn't turn out to be as gay as she is: Imagine the mileage he could've gotten from working the name of his employer! And as usual, Ace has good things to say about integrity.

Via the Washington Blade, MSNBC has this article that starts as a summary of the Love Won Out conference sponsored by Focus on the Family but ends up summarizing several of the different views of the origins and mutability of homosexuality.

What's fascinating is that everyone comes off looking more moderate and live-and-let-live than usual. Queer activists prone to hysterics are quoted in austere single-word bites about how "hateful" groups that advocate change are. The representative of Focus on the Family, Bill Maier, emphasizes tolerance for homosexual behavior. This isn't to say the reporter is being disingenuous, only that the side of each party is different from what's usually shown. You might start hallucinating that people with strong opposing opinions can live together in a free society without rancor.

BTW, Focus on the Family's official take (I assume, since the piece was written by James Dobson) on the origins and malleability of homosexuality is here. There's much to agree with: gay activists do engage in propaganda, and the evidence should not be suppressed that people who are troubled by their homosexuality to the point of being non-functional are capable of and better off not acting on it.

The narrative to explain how homosexuality ripens is internally coherent and doubtless appeals to Dobson's constituency, but calling it "definitive" is a bit much. Even if you accept that homosexuality starts with a genetic predisposition toward certain traits plus some kind of emotional dislocation in infancy, which seems like as good an explanation as any to me at this point, that doesn't indicate it's still fundamentally in flux until late adolescence. Dobson calls a dawning awareness of the sensuality of one's own body and a more-pronounced sense of difference from other boys a stage on the way to homosexuality; most of us who are out would say that we experienced it as the emergence, under the special pressures that start for everyone with puberty, of what it's clear in retrospect had been dormant all along. Neither has been proved, but what would help the pro-change side would be evidence that a high percentage of gays change successfully.

Unfortunately, radical gays, egregiously screechy though they be, have no monopoly on exaggeration. Dobson doesn't screech and, in fact, comes off as sincere and humane in intent, but in his hands Robert L. Spitzer's carefully qualified finding that some homosexuals with unusually high motivation can learn to function heterosexually mutates into the blanket statement "Change is possible." Parents and teenagers are assured, "Prevention is effective," without information about success rates. (After all, if Joseph Nicolosi has data to support the contention that 75 percent of boys with "untreated" gender issues become homosexual, isn't it reasonable to figure he'd know more about those who get treatment and are thus within the ken of psychologists? I suppose that kind of information could be elsewhere in the book, but it strains credibility to figure that Dobson wouldn't have cited it--he's advertising preventive therapy, isn't he?)

And the footnotes there are are suspect: Dobson refers to gays' "shorter lifespan" and cites William Bennett's "Clinton, Gays and the Truth" from the Weekly Standard (not on-line, AFAIK). William Bennett has many virtues--especially with respect to the field of education--but he is not a statistician. In fact, he was working from Paul Cameron's notorious "study" of gay life expectancy, which Walter Olson eviscerates here. Bennett himself later conceded that Cameron's survey was not a reliable basis for generalization about the gay population.

The average-lifespan-of-43 figure is not the crux of Dobson's argument, I know. I bring it up because it illustrates a willingness to accept uncritically arguments with which one already sympathizes--a problem that everyone in this debate seems to have in spades but, naturally, only notices in others. It matters even on small points because anyone drawing conclusions on a murky topic like the origins of homosexuality is going to have to look at the fragmentary evidence, make a lot of judgment calls, and ask readers to trust them. Lack of rigor hurts everyone whose primary interest is the truth.

For the foreseeable future, there are going to be a multiplicity of approaches, and we'll all be appalled at those that go against our views. Myself, I ache for gay kids whose parents think their brains have to be rewired for their own good--if they think they were setting the children faulty gender-identification signals, shouldn't they be signing themselves up for brainwashing, too?--but that doesn't make "reparative therapy" programs a special kind of social emergency. Parents do all sorts of things to screw up their kids (and adults do all sorts of things to screw up their own lives) that aren't legally punishable. Outsiders can criticize them but not interfere. What we can all do is work to strengthen our arguments as dispassionately as possible. And lead the sort of responsible, happy lives that make people want to emulate them.


Added on 1 July: Well, sheesh. I would've e-mailed Mike, but I thought it was Daniel's cage we were supposed to be rattling now. :) In any case, Ex-Gay Watch doesn't have its own post up discussing the MSNBC piece yet, but commenters are already starting to debate its weird even-handedness at the short one linked to in the last sentence. Should be interesting; I'll be looking forward to reading what Mike has to say, too.

Added on 7 July: Mike Airhart's post is up.

You'd think this kind of crap wouldn't get me exercised by this point, but it does:

The National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce entered into an agreement this month with the Department of the Interior Office of Small & Disadvantaged Business Utilization to increase outreach to gay-owned businesses and to educate gay business owners about contract opportunities.

"The agreement says it’s OK to be who you are," said Justin Nelson, co-founder and co-executive director of the NGLCC. "[The Department of the Interior] wants to do business with gay firms in a public manner."

The federal government should be impartial; an announcement from the Department of the Interior that federal contracts are available to businesses regardless of the sexual orientation of those who run them would be great. But we all know that's not what "outreach" means. More on that in a second.

What really jerks my chain, naturally, is that "The agreement says it's OK to be who you are" BS. Can we please, at least every third Thursday or so, not offload our own responsibility for self-definition on the government? Please. And anyway, how exactly does being officially defined as "disadvantaged" make what you are okay, of all things?

The assumptions underlying the program are hardly flattering, after all:

Nelson said that many gay-owned businesses shy away from working with the federal government, because of the perception that the Bush administration is anti-gay.

"Our community is very apprehensive about finding out about opportunities [with federal agencies]," he said. The NGLCC wants to tell gay-owned businesses that, "there's a separation of the policies of the administration and opportunities they should be afforded."

I apparently missed the speech in which the President informed America that gay-owned enterprises should be boycotted until they go out of business. I also wasn't aware that "apprehensiveness" in an entrepreneur was a trait to be indulged rather than outgrown. Aren't business owners supposed to be go-getters? If they want to know what kinds of contracts might be legally available to them as gays, they just need to ask one of their corporate lawyer friends. All of us coat-and-tie queers know twelve lawyers if we know one; for Pete's sake, I sometimes feel like the only middle-class fag in the entire developed world that didn't go to law school.

This nettles me even more than usual because a book I just got around to buying and reading spurred me to go back and revisit some sections of Geraldine Brooks's fascinating Nine Parts of Desire. Here's one passage that sticks in the memory, about a family in Saudi Arabia:

Basilah had invited a woman friend who helped her mother run a successful construction company to join us for tea. When her father died, she and her mother had expected his male relations to run the business and provide for her and her children. But they were lazy and incompetent, and it seemed that everything her father had worked for was going to be destroyed. "Finally my mother took over," the woman explained. "She went to the Ministry of Construction with the papers that needed official approval. No woman had been in there before. The officials ordered her out. She refused to go. She sat there, and sat there, until they were forced to deal with her. She turned out to be a very good manager, and she saved the business."

Fine, the analogy isn't perfect. Still and all, it does seem that if a woman in Saudi Arabia can stand up to a room full of male bureaucrats in order to do what she needs for her company (presumably against her male relatives' wishes), free American gays who run the kinds of firms that the government contracts with could figure out how to pursue jobs without having their hands held.

Honeychile? Seriously, take yourself off to a remote Micronesian islet already:

Former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey who came out, announced he had an extramarital affair, and resigned from office may be gone from the state capitol but he's not about to be forgotten.

A life-sized portrait of McGreevey will hang in the governor's office in Trenton. The official portrait was completed this week.

McGreevey sat for the painting, done at a cost to taxpayers of about $25,000, after he left office. It was done by Chen Yanning who has painted portraits of Christie Whitman and Queen Elizabeth II.

Details of the ceremony to unveil the painting have not been finalized.

Last August at a hastily arranged news conference McGreevey announced "I am a manipulative whore."

I edited that last sentence for clarity.

Who knows how it'll end up, but the Permanent Partners Immigration Act, under the slightly soggier name Uniting American Families Act, has been reintroduced in congress. I know I strike this gong all the time, but I'm far more concerned that policy-based impediments to our taking care of each other be removed than that the government confer [gag] "recognition" on our relationships.

Joe Riddle, who frequently posts at Ex-Gay Watch, has a post up that more succinctly and effectively makes a point I was trying to make the other day:

My advice to the gay child born to fundamentalist Christian parents: keep your head down and try to stay out of harm's way until you're an adult and you can get away from them.

And obey them as cheerfully as you can muster. They're wrong, unfortunately, about homosexuality; but other aspects of fundamentalist Christianity--constancy, honor, discipline, and the recognition that the world does not revolve around oneself--are not wrong at all. And you'll need them later.

I've finally found my gay spiritual leader, and sugarcakes, I haven't been this excited since Kylie hooked up with the Scissor Sisters.

I mean, finally! A gay public voice that's willing to cut the crap and speak the uncomfortable truth we so often try to avoid facing:

"Straight folks, all our problems are your damned fault!"

You know, I realize that op-ed writers with bylines speak for themselves and may have actually been chosen, at least in part, for their idiosyncratic, conversation-starter sorts of opinions. I also realize that The Village Voice likes scare-the-soccer-moms assertions of combative leftism. There's nothing wrong with shaking people up a little on the opinion page.

But couldn't some editor somewhere have given a thought to basic coherence before publishing this? Writer Patrick Moore makes a few passing, ritual acknowledgements that gay individuals might in some sense be responsible for their own conduct. He specifically uses crystal meth use as a point of departure for a discussion of what he thinks is a more general dearth of mentoring among gay guys. But the promising idea that we (as in, gays ourselves) need to change the environment in which gay men come of age is backed-and-filled into meaninglessness:

There are some problems with environmental prevention. First, if used in a simplistic way, it can lead to judgmental sexual repression that is anathema to gay culture. Second, the approach does not help those who have already entered into active addiction. So the question remains, how to create a healthier environment in the gay community.

The questions Moore asks about what we can do to help keep more people from wrecking their lives are important, but some of the answers are more apparent than he makes them seem. Sooner or later, anyone in a position to give spiritual and moral guidance to rudderless gay guys is going to have to address a few facts: exposing yourself to the mucous membranes of multiple partners a week is hell on the immune system. The problem is not just STDs per se: it's also the lowered resistance to colds, and the mysterious sore throat that keeps you from making a key presentation at work, and the tiredness from fighting things off all the time.

Then there are the psychological issues. Moore relates that he frequently asks residents in a drug rehabilitation program what it is that getting high allows them to do: "[F]or most, their fantasy is no more than to get fucked and to connect with another man. Albeit in all the wrong places and all the wrong ways, these guys are basically looking for love." Well, no. They're looking for the self-affirmation that comes from being loved without the self-discpline you have to exercise to love back.

Mentorship from older guys with their heads screwed on straight is, indeed, necessary to help the young and lost to avoid falling into the trap of short-term gratification that eventually turns into long-term disaster. Moore never seems to get around to explaining how that's supposed to work, though, if we're not going to tell guys that a little "repression" wouldn't hurt them. The most specific his advice gets is...okay, I'll tell you, but you have to promise not to laugh.

Seriously, promise?

Okay, here it is:

Coming out of the gay faerie movement, the Gay Men's Medicine Circle continues to create rituals that encourage spiritual growth. These organizations and their rituals may seem like quaint reminders of a more innocent time. However, they are vital models for the kind of programs that might actually change the tone of gay life in America.

Bitches, you promised! But then, I sprayed my tea all over the monitor when I first read that paragraph, too, so who am I to judge?

Speaking of exercising judgment: I can only assume that the, erm, "gay faerie movement" has developed rituals that celebrate nature and our place in it. As an atheist, I'm not troubled by the obvious paganism there. However, I do have to wonder what good such practices are for "spiritual growth" if they're incompatible with acknowledging that nature favors procreation and does not favor indiscriminate promiscuity. Our human civilizations are founded on defying and fending off the power of nature, true; but there are limits within which we must work, and there is ample evidence that screwing around all the time almost always leads to a sickly, short, destructive, miserable life. You would think that even those for whom monogamy has nasty bourgeois associations would be able to recognize that.

Added on 21 June: I stuck back in some stray phrases I'd cut out of the draft of this post when finalizing it. I hope it reads better. Also, Eric (to whom I sent a somewhat intemperate honey-will-you-get-a-load-of-this-crap! message when I started thinking about Moore's article) has a post of his own that comments more generally on the annoying tendency for people to ask to be protected from themselves.

A few months ago there was a story about a South African man's partner who was suing over inheritance rights. The parents have settled:

The parents of a deceased property dealer have agreed to give his home, furniture and several of his valuable art works to a French chef whose serious romantic involvement with their son they had previously denied.

And James Middleton and his wife, Joan, retired parents of Phillip Middleton, have agreed to contribute R250 000 towards the legal costs that Dominique Ripoll-Dausa had to pay to dispute their denial that he and their son had been involved in a "life partnership".

It's hard to tell whether they came around to recognizing the relationship or just didn't have the money and energy to keep battling in court. The judge encouraged them to settle, but there's no indication of how encouraging he was.

I don't entirely agree with Michael's quickie assent to Andrew Sullivan's comment on this poor kid, who's being packed off to a de-gay-programming retreat by his conservative Christian mother. (At least, assuming Michael was agreeing with everything Sullivan said.)

There are all kinds of things parents do to their children that most of us find cruel but aren't in a position to liberate them from, from telling them they're stupid and will never amount to anything to sending them to sports programs/music lessons with mean coaches who are supposed to toughen them up by tearing them down. Yes, of course, as a gay man, I feel this is in a different league--the reason I've been rewriting this for days without posting it is that I haven't been able to keep it even-tempered.

Here's something I think worth considering, though, if I can get it to come out correctly: we all have issues to resolve with our parents, and in my experience knowing that you've done what they asked and tried their way and not disobeyed them while you were under their authority is a real comfort when you're navigating life as an adult. No, I wasn't sent to several weeks of straightening camp, to be sure. I don't know what it's like to go through that sort of concentrated brainwashing in which your mind is not your own (the better to enable you to make a covenant with God as a free moral agent, one is left to assume?) for weeks at a time, and I won't pretend to. But Zach seems like a grounded, if understandably shaken-up, kid. There's a lot of ethical leverage in being able to point out later that you were never a compulsive, resentful little trouble-maker.

Straight guys are so cute sometimes. Gay News links to this piece by an English writer who gets all fidgety over whether it looks gay if you go out to dinner with another man. He seems not to realize that his and his buddy's thoroughgoing heterotude is proved beyond a shadow of a doubt from paragraph 1:

Not so long ago I was having dinner with a (male) friend of mine - just the two of us in a cosy little Italian restaurant in Soho - when he suddenly started laughing. "God, this all looks a bit gay, doesn't it?" he chuckled, indicating the plastic carnation in the middle of the table, the bottle of sparkling white wine, the tomato salad we were sharing. "I wonder if anyone thinks we're like... you know... a couple?"

You caught the important part, right? Of course, you did--otherwise you wouldn't be hanging out here.

But, okay, just in case you're having an off day, here it is highlighted:

Not so long ago I was having dinner with a (male) friend of mine - just the two of us in a cosy little Italian restaurant in Soho - when he suddenly started laughing. "God, this all looks a bit gay, doesn't it?" he chuckled, indicating the plastic carnation in the middle of the table, the bottle of sparkling white wine, the tomato salad we were sharing. "I wonder if anyone thinks we're like... you know... a couple?"

Not if they know any queers. In the language of flowers, a gay guy who takes another gay guy to a restaurant with plastic carnations on the table is saying, "You will NEVER get into my pants."

BTW, Paul Sussman, the writer of the Guardian piece here, may not be anti-gay, but he's a regular old fount of stereotypes. I'm aware that the tone of the article is tongue-in-cheek, but there's still room for clue-deprivation:

In a "two-guy" situation I always try to stick to "manly" beverages such as beer or whisky - the sparkling wine mentioned was a momentary aberration - and plump for cholesterol-packed, hunter-gatherer-type main courses (rump steak, rack of lamb) rather than flans, tofu or (the ultimate no-no) anything involving filo pastry and baby courgettes. I try to tell stories that involve me miming punching someone, or throwing a rugby ball, or unclipping a bra and squeezing it's contents. Most pathetic of all, I always but always make a point of telling the waitress in a jokey-but-firm sort of way as she leads us to our table: "We're not lovers, you know!" (On one occasion this drew the memorably caustic response: "That's unlucky, because I can't see any woman wanting to shag you.")

(Aside: Why is it that the nebbishy sorts of hetero guys like to invite the audience to laugh at the humiliating sexual put-downs women have delivered to them? So not charming. Anyway.) Half-joking or not, anyone who thinks gay guys are calorie-obsessed anorexic gym bunnies who gravitate toward fussy foods needs to see my friends some time as they tunnel ruthlessly through the romaine in a Thai beef salad to get to the meat. (Animals! You have any idea how long it takes me to wash and individually wipe those lettuce leaves dry, guys?) Or make a bowl of mashed potatoes and a boat of gravy disappear five minutes after I've put it on the table. I've been known to drink a wine spritzer or two, but I can assure you that most of us know our way around whisky and beer, too.

Be that as it may, a word to the wise: the best way to look gay--or, more precisely, look like a certain breed of see-and-be-seen gay guy you see plenty of in cities such as London--is to make it clear that you're taking in the effect you're having on surrounding diners and desperately hoping you're making the "right" impression. Secure people focus on their dinner partners, whatever plans they have for them afterwards.

The US Army is still having trouble hitting its recruitment targets:

The U.S. Army, facing recruiting woes and a reorganized force, will relax requirements for new officers, welcoming older candidates and allowing more tolerance of past minor crimes, officials said on Thursday.

Trying to stem the loss of current personnel, the Army also has made it more difficult to kick soldiers out of the military for alcohol or drug abuse, being overweight or "unsatisfactory performance," according to a recent memo.

At least there's no talk of letting in the non-closeted homos, who would clearly spell doom for the Republic.

I bumped the mouse while I was over at Eric's and happened to land on this site. It turned out to be a felicitous accident, because he (I think it's a he) has what looks like an author profile/review of a book posted. The book is by a Muslim lesbian, born in Uganda and brought up in Toronto. I could seriously learn to like this woman:

"[Gay Muslim activists] say, 'Don’t confuse me with being anti-Jewish, I'm just anti-Israel,'" Manji says. "I say, 'Hold on sister. I oppose that premise and so should you.' I have never said that Israel has a perfect human rights record. Neither does America. I make the case that Israel's existence does not lie at the heart of what's wrong with the Muslim world.

"I say, yes, feel free to criticize the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] and their policies. There absolutely is an occupation but there is also a political occupation inflicted by the Palestinian leaders," she says. "They have rejected every proposal for an independent state. They have always been rejected without the consultation of the Palestinian people. The last one, the Oslo Accords, was not translated into Arabic. This should burn every human rights activist."

That's something I've always found it difficult to get my head around. On the one hand, it annoys me to see people wringing sacred texts like dishcloths to squeeze out meanings that they happen to want to be there. I find it much easier to deal with Biblical literalists (like those I grew up around) than, like, Unitarians. On the other hand, debate (including that over meanings) is how you learn that strong, vibrant personalities are going to disagree, that you're not always right, and that the only thinking and behavior you can reliably change is your own.

Come to think of it, maybe it's the lack of self-criticism and constant finger-pointing at the same bugbear that makes gay activists feel such an affinity for, say, Palestinian activists:

"The fact that the neo-con right and preachers have called Muslims on their hypocrisy makes it difficult for the political left to condemn it," Manji says. "To criticize, they say, says you are only feeding into the so-called fear of Islam. It’s the same thing if someone were to say, 'Oh, I think we need to overthrow Hussein because of his atrocious record on human rights.'

"To criticize the gross human rights violations of Hussein means that you support the Bush administration," she says. "I long to see the day when gay and lesbian leaders will attend Muslim speak-outs and ask the Muslims in those protests if they in turn will speak out against gay homophobia. I don't hear too many queer activists hammering that."

Manji contends that Islam is the only religion that has no sense of moderation. Even Christianity has moderate factions, she says, despite the loud, mouthy rhetoric of apocalyptic social conservatives.

"Whenever I would air anti-gay remarks from Christian leaders on my television show, Christian viewers would flood our lines with tolerant biblical interpretations," she says. "But when I expose anti-gay feedback from Muslim leaders, not once did other leaders offer other interpretations. It is as if these bigots spoke for Islam. Even those who don't share mainstream Islam's prejudices against homosexuality won't speak up."

Manji says she hears from many Muslims on her Web site, www.muslim-refusenik.com, and face-to-face that they can't be public with their support of diversity because they fear persecution. She believes this is because literalism has gone mainstream.

"Every religion has its fair share of literalists but in Islam, literalism is worldwide. Even moderate Muslims believe that the holy Koran is God 3.0," she says. "Most Muslims still don't know how to debate because they have never been taught to. The same cannot be said of moderate Christians and Jews."

If their moderation is in conflict with their beliefs about God, I don't really see what the moderate Muslims Manji is describing can do except pick one. That doesn't make it much easier to explain why they bother offering her secretive shows of solidarity and support, though.

This is very cool--I'm assuming it's the "announcement of monumental significance" referred to in the last newsletter:

June is gay pride month and to mark the occasion, the gay community will gather for a mortgage burning party on Friday, June 3rd at 2 p.m. to celebrate a mortgage retirement gift of $274,000 to the William Way Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) Community Center. The donor, a respected community leader and businessman, will be announced at the event. The William Way Community Center is located at 1315 Spruce Street in Philadelphia.

The Center will save $391,270 in mortgage principal and interest payments over a ten-year period. For this reason, the gift will enable the community center to immediately develop a new spectrum of educational, cultural, social, and health services for Philadelphia's diverse sexual and gender minority community.

When I was looking for a gay community center in Philadelphia to donate to, I asked this guy, and it was William Way he suggested. He showed Eric and me around when I was in Philadelphia in December. Great place (love the URL, too). Congratulations.

Well, knock me over with a feather:

A rapid spread of AIDS over the past decade has reached a level that has confounded and alarmed the health establishment in Japan, a country that has long felt protected by a first-rate health system and widespread condom use.

Infections which had stayed at infinitesimal levels [as in, official levels--SRK] are surging at rates similar to developing countries, and some experts say the real number of Japanese with HIV or AIDS is two to four times the official toll.

The rest of the experts probably peg it at five times. This is one of those Japan stories that get recycled every few years (I commented on a few others last year when Susanna asked about a specific one). That isn't to say that such articles aren't addressing real problems; it's the air of discovery that's irritating. Likewise the tendency toward exaggeration:

Among women, Sato is one of the careful ones. The 23-year-old Tokyoite has unprotected sex with multiple partners, but at least she occasionally gets herself tested for HIV.

That first sentence is idiotic. Ms. Sato may be "one of the careful ones" among the women who live in Tokyo (or Osaka), go clubbing frequently, and hook up with strange men all the time. But Tokyo and Osaka don't represent Japan any more than New York and LA represent America, even if they do comprise a higher proportion of the population.

Still, the government is not worrying over nothing. I will leave straight people and their dissolute ways to those who know them more intimately. But I heard plenty of real lulus as a gay guy newly arrived from New York in the mid-90's. Chief among them was the one that said you can't get HIV from Japanese people (unless they've lived abroad, in which case they're practically foreigners, anyway). For at least two or three years, the messages with the free condoms in the bar toilets have emphasized that the incidence of reported infection in Tokyo has been on the rise and that Japanese-only saunas are not to be considered extra-safe. I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to bring down infection rates in a country in which "if nobody talks about it, it's not happening" is a major social principle and tolerance for male playing around is frequently taken to an extreme.

Now that Gay Pride is a full month, Paul Varnell says, we should find a way to use it that goes beyond just being one of the installments of the "Let's Celebrate [Designated Aggrieved Group]" routine:

If you are not impressed by any of these ideas, create your own. The point is to use Gay Pride Month to create circumstances where gays and lesbians get to know a few more people, learn a little more, develop a greater appreciation of the community they are a part of and experience something in common beyond the mere datum of being gay.

Pride is best expressed by viewing our sexuality as a potential good and talent to be cultivated. I understand the impulse toward "liberation," but when coarsely indulged in, it sends mixed signals: "We're ordinary folks just like you" + "We're freaks who run loose on the streets in magenta leather thongs" is not a message that's easily parsed, though it should be easy to figure out which part of it is likely to stick in the Middle-American memory.

Since I'm not a big organization-joiner, my own modest suggestions are of the pokier, everyday variety:

Gay people have to stop making excuses for each other all the time. Yes, we suffer. Yes, there's a lot of crap to take. Yes, it's wrong. But there's no more "pride" involved in listening sympathetically while our friends explain for the 100th time why they can't [break it off with that married man / stop drinking to the point that it affects their job / resist the impulse to flee whenever a relationship threatens to get riskily intimate / stand up to their parents] than there is in behaving that way ourselves. I don't recommend being sententious, but a little more shunning of chronic liars and cheaters would not do most of us any harm. Nor would making it clear to nebbishy friends that they cannot count on an inexhaustible series of bailouts when they get themselves in trouble.

That includes those who complain about society's attitude toward gays but have a litany of reasons they can't come out to their families. The only real way to address anti-gay ignorance is to refute it, visibly, in the way we live. If you're so blasted filial, by all means go the whole way: get married and start giving Mom and Dad grandchildren. Or stay gay and honorably closeted, and quit--as in, COLD TURKEY--generalized bitching about homophobia.

Straight people who support us have a role in this, too. The valuable kind of pride comes from solving problems, overcoming obstacles, and accomplishing things--that's no less true for us than for you. Considering it natural, even entertaining, for us to live brittle, neurotic, messy lives (while you do everything you can to stabilize your own) does no one any favors.

All of this is stuff that should be happening anyway, of course; but as long as someone has waved a wand over June and declared it All Hail the Queers month, there's no reason not to make the best of it.