Gay People

MIAMI -- I'm opposed to tolerance. The word, I mean. It has become quite the buzzword, but it has never sat right with me. After all, to tolerate something is not to accept it, but simply to put up with it. I've always thought the word represented a lowering of the bar, a compromising of the ideal of human brotherhood. You "tolerate" the noisy neighbors downstairs, you "tolerate" your spouse's snoring. Should we really be asked to tolerate Mexicans or Muslims or any other group of marginalized Americans?

Dumb, ignorant, drop-out losers killed the young gay man Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1998. Americans were genuinely horrified, but urban gay Americans, in particular, took the murder as a sign that they had made the right decision when they moved from the country (or, more likely, the suburbs) to the big city. They were safer in Manhattan, or Dupont Circle, or West Hollywood, or South Beach. But gay people put too much stock in smartness, sophistication and "culture" as signs of tolerance and acceptance.

MAYBE TRENT Lott didn't mean it.When the Senate majority leader went on a conservative radio show last summer and compared gay people to alcoholics and kleptomaniacs, gay and lesbian leaders took it not so much as a personal insult but as a sop to the Republican Party's restive right-wing base.As if on cue, full-page ads appeared in major newspapers, touting the ability of "ex-gay ministries" to convert gays to heterosexuality. And the religious right's top echelon, led by Gary Bauer, director of the Family Research Council, fanned out on the TV circuit, calmly explaining how homosexuality is immoral, a danger to children and a threat to the nation's values.

Once a month or so, electronic mail begins circulating among a little-noticed but active suburban minority group.It's time for another dinner gathering of the Gay and Lesbian Community of Howard County (GLCHC): some 40 or 50 county residents who meet at a local restaurant -- usually in Columbia -- to dine, gab and bond."One big thing that surprises people are the sheer numbers of gay people in suburbia," says Jim Hubbs, a GLCHC leader who lives in Columbia's Hickory Ridge village."You tend to think of gays in urban pockets, but there are so many people out here," he says.

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.

I THINK it started at Studio 54 in the late '70s," Hollywood super-agent Sandy Gallin told Out Magazine last November. "Somebody must have pointed to a group of people -- and some of them could have been straight, because Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager could have been there, and Bianca Jagger and Diane Von Furstenberg are supposed to be a part of it -- and said, 'Oh, there's the Velvet Mafia.' "Whoever started it, it stuck. These days it seems that whenever Mr. Gallin and his powerful friends David Geffen, Barry Diller, Calvin Klein and a few others are mentioned, the phrase "Velvet Mafia" cannot be far behind.

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.

Chicago. -- Blunt and cantankerous Barry Goldwater is back in the news. The famous right-wing candidate of 1964 is telling interviewers that he supports gay rights, even though homosexuality remains a mystery to him.Senator Goldwater's gay grandson, Ty Ross, says that he is close to the old man, even though he laughs at the way Mr. Goldwater says, '' 'You people need to stand up for your rights' -- one of those 'you people' kind of things.''Senator Goldwater, a military man and a longtime defender of a strong military, supported President Clinton's effort to remove the ban from gay participation in the nation's defense.

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...

The gay rights movement is little more than a collection of tactics in search of a goal. Since its beginning, this has been the case.This ''movement'' started 25 years ago when patrons of the Stonewall Inn -- a New York City bar catering to a gay clientele -- spontaneously rioted for two days. The rioters were fed up with their gathering places being randomly raided and with being roughed up by police, taken to the police station and otherwise being treated as second-class citizens merely because of their sexual orientation.