Gay People

PEOPLE around President Clinton are saying he is surprised by the intensity of feeling these past weeks over his proposal to allow gays and lesbians in the military.This can mean only one thing: Bill Clinton has been isolated. He has never visited a comedy club.have earned my living in these laugh dens over the past decade. As one of those few Americans whose paying job is getting people to laugh, I've been surprised -- and disappointed -- by how easily we laugh at stereotypical gay-bashing.

LOS ANGELES -- The leading Democratic presidential candidates struck a delicate balance yesterday evening between showing commitment to expand the rights of gay people while justifying their opposition to same-sex marriage during the campaign's first-ever televised forum focused on gay issues. In an evening devoted to sensitive issues of sexuality and social mores, there were also riveting moments of frankness. Perhaps the most personal question of the evening was posed to Sen. Hillary Clinton by Etheridge, who told Clinton that she had felt personally hurt and abandoned by the Clintons.

City Hall sanity open to questionHas City Hall gone over the edge? Events over the past few days should lead citizens to question the sanity of the city's decision-making processes.The first event was the mayor's decision to go ahead with the construction of a new police station on Cold Spring Lane, despite potential savings in public money by instead using the modern but empty F&M building on 29th Street.The city does not appear to have done any analysis of the relative merits of the two sites.

IT WOULD have been unthinkable 25 years ago for thousands of openly gay fans to cheer openly gay athletes at Yankee Stadium, for openly gay artists to perform to the acclaim of openly gay audiences at Carnegie Hall, or for the mainstream media to provide extensive and sympathetic coverage of it all.The weekend's marches and the Gay Games and Cultural Festival are testimony to the legacy of the Stonewall rebellion of June 28, 1969 -- when a police assault on...

Dan Cathy, president ofChick-fil-A, says we are shaking our fist at God by supported gay marriage ("Crowds flock to Chick-fil-A to back owner on marriage," Aug. 2). I would like to say this to Mr. Cathy: We now know that sexual orientation is not a choice; it is in our DNA, we are born heterosexual or homosexual. If you believe in God, you believe God made us in His image. Thus, God made both straight and gay people. Over the years, religious people have been able to accept that the world is not flat and that the sun does not revolve around the earth and that these facts do not threaten one's faith.

CAN THE lesbian and gay movement find a model in Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence? Can gay people's right to love openly be won by Gandhi's tactics of fighting hate with love? These questions were raised recently in a Virginia Beach jail by Dr. Mel White, the former dean of the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, the nation's largest lesbian and gay congregation.In February, Mr. White and a delegation of interfaith clergy went to the Virginia headquarters of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and requested a meeting with Mr. Robertson.

Gays and lesbians have experienced a drastic rise in acceptance over the past two decades, according to a new Los Angeles Times poll. Almost seven in 10 Americans know someone who is gay or lesbian and say they would not be troubled if their elementary school-age child had a homosexual teacher. Six in 10 say they are sympathetic to the gay community, displaying an increasing inclination to view same-sex issues through a prism of societal accommodation rather than moral condemnation. On questions ranging from job discrimination to adoption to whether homosexuality is morally wrong, responses indicate that as gays and lesbians have become more open, heterosexuals in return have become more open toward them.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court issued a sweeping declaration of constitutional liberty for gay men and lesbians yesterday, overruling a Texas sodomy law in the broadest possible terms and effectively apologizing for a contrary 1986 decision that the majority said "demeans the lives of homosexual persons." The vote was 6-3. Gay people are "entitled to respect for their private lives," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said for the court. "The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime."

This year's National Coming Out Day - today - is a bittersweet one for me. Although I have been openly gay for decades, my partner of 14 years did not come out publicly until this spring - when her obituary appeared in this newspaper. Cecile had come out to her family only four years earlier, on the day she came home from the hospital after surgery to remove a malignant tumor. What fueled her fear of coming out? She did not have to be afraid of losing her job. She was a tenured, full professor at the Johns Hopkins University.

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.