Gay Men

LAUREL, Miss. -- It's dark at night out on the northern edge of town. A stagnant bayou lies beside abandoned railroad tracks, and silence hangs like moss from the trees. Marvin McClendon rode out to Laurel's outskirts in October with two men he didn't know -- two gay men he said had picked him up on the street near his home.Because Marvin emerged alone, only he can testify to what led the three to that spot. What is known is this: Ever since that night, when the high school student admits he shot Robert Walters and Joseph Shoemake in the head, this southern Mississippi town has become an unlikely national battleground over the issue of gay- and lesbian-related violence.

THROUGH the month of June, in most major cities around the nation, hundreds of thousands of lesbians and gay men are commemorating 25 years of resistance and struggle against those who wish to deny us equal rights. The culminating event, a demonstration surrounding the United Nations building in New York on June 26, will remind those in power around the world that basic freedoms and dignity are still denied to gay men and lesbians.However, change has indeed occurred since patrons of the Stonewall Inn took to the streets of Sheridan Square in New York City around 1 a.m. on June 28, 1969, to protest a seemingly routine police raid of yet another gay bar. That night, those inside and outside the bar resisted; for several days afterward, they protested their treatment and began to organize to change a society that had made their very lives illegal.

For gay men coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, especially those growing up in rural areas or suburban enclaves, there were few gay role models. Television and film offered little beyond the stereotypes of hairdressers and designers. What positive role models did exist were writers who could be labeled as gay or whose work could be detected as gay-themed: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal and William Burroughs are well-known examples. But while gay men were sometimes fully realized characters in their books and plays, they were still depicted as social outcasts, victims or doomed martyrs.

A little less than a decade ago, when scientists began unraveling the mystery of a deadly new disease that seemed to strike homosexual men with particular fury, gay activists were among the first to sound the alarm over what was to become a world-wide AIDS epidemic. They pushed for stepped-up medical research and were on the front lines of a public relations effort to promote "safer sex" through the use of condoms. As a result, the rate of new infections among gay men fell sharply in the late 1980s.

Most of us practice self-censorship at work. We refrain from calling the boss an idiot, we tone down criticism of colleagues, and we sometimes suppress opinions in order not to give offense. After all, we have to work with these people every day.But this self-restraint doesn't even approach the lies many gay men and lesbians feel compelled to make of their lives to survive and prosper in white-collar corporate America.As demonstrated in this eye-opening book by James D. Woods (Jay H. Lucas collaborated on research)

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton's solution regarding gays in the military already had a name -- "don't ask, don't tell" -- long before it was, in fact, a policy.And though they have been lobbying the White House fiercely behind the scenes, neither side in this historic controversy yet knows what the policy will mean to gay men and lesbians in uniform -- or to their commanding officers.Under his policy, which Mr. Clinton promised to issue this month, will gay soldiers, sailors or aviators be allowed to acknowledge in private, social conversations on base that they are homosexual?

NOW we have the numbers game. How many gay people are there in the nation? Ten percent? One percent? Four percent? It depends upon whom you ask, what survey you read, how statisticians and sex experts crunch the numbers, which respondents tell the truth and which don't. How many marched in Washington a week ago for the civil rights of gay men and lesbians? Three hundred thousand? Half a million? A million or more? It depends on whether you ask the Park Police or the march organizers.But at some level none of it matters at all.I know that gay men and lesbians have ample reason to believe their political clout in America, the most quantifying of countries, will be measured by their numbers.

THIS Sunday, supporters of gay rights are expected to converge on Washington for one of the largest demonstrations in the nation's history. As I await the event, and recall earlier marches in which I have participated with other parents of gay children, I am reminded once again of society's upside-down notions about the relationship between homosexuality and "family values."The latest flurry of misguided moralism was touched off by a popular comic strip in which a teen-age character reveals his homosexuality to his best friend.

OMAHA -- Americans are sharply divided over whether gay men and lesbians choose their sexual orientation, a split that shapes attitudes on everything from homosexuals in the military to gay life in general, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.Americans who say individuals cannot change their homosexuality -- 43 percent of those surveyed -- are more sympathetic to the gay view on these issues than the 44 percent who see it as a choice. The country is split evenly, 43 to 43, on whether homosexuals should be allowed to serve in the military.

He is every mother's dream for her daughter to marry: an ex-midshipman, handsome as can be, with a principled intelligence and a diffident way. But there is a hitch: he's gay. And therein lies the story of Joseph Steffan, his battle with himself and his battle with the Navy.These are hectic days for the 28-year-old Mr. Steffan. As the fight over homosexuals and the military rages on, he is in demand. Everyone, it seems, wants to hear how he was kicked out of Annapolis for being gay just a week before graduation in 1987.