A Column by Patricia Nell Warren

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR...GAY STYLE
A commentary on Matthew Shephard's death

By Patricia Nell Warren


As collective grief and outrage fill the gay media after the Wyoming murder,
I am hoping for some collective honesty about a deadly social habit of ours
that contributed to Shephard's murder.  It is one that makes our community
vulnerable to hate crime.  I'm referring to our habit of trusting strangers
too much.  Getting into cars with strangers, or letting strangers into our
own cars, or our homes, in the course of our hot pursuit of sex or desperate
yearning for a mate.

During the sexual revolution of the 1970s, newly liberated straight women
had their wake-up call -- they discovered the risks of taking the wrong guy
home from a singles bar.  A bestselling book of the time, "Looking for Mr.
Goodbar," spotlighted the horrors of being murdered by a first date -- it
really hammered the lesson home.  Who knows how many women's lives that book
saved?

Today we badly need a Goodbar wake-up on the gay social scene.  After many
decades of American-style gaybashing, "stranger danger" is a caution that we
should be teaching as a routine matter -- especially to our young people.
But we seldom do.  It appears that nobody got the message to a gentle
idealistic college student named  Matthew Shephard.  So (according to
reports) he trustingly, innocently got into a vehicle with two strangers he
met at a gay bar, and he rode off with them.  After all, they said they were
gay.  All gay people are good people, right?  

Whatever Matthew was looking for -- sex, or simply an evening of fun with
new friends  -- he didn't find it, because he got pistol-whipped and left
for dead.

If only some gay organization or adult friend could have convinced Matthew,
saying,  "Hey, man, don't ever go off with strangers.  You might run into
Mr. Goodbar."

We face threats from three types of strangers -- straight ones, gay ones,
and the sneaky ones who say they're gay so we drop our guard and think
they're good people.  Why do so many of us automatically jump to the
conclusion that anyone who is gay -- or alleges they are gay -- can be
trusted?  

It's true that many hate crimes -- murders, assaults, robberies, rapes --
are gratuitous.  You're walking down the street or across the campus with
your girlfriend or boyfriend, minding your own business, and BAM.  The
violence comes at you out of the blue.

But many crimes happen to gay people because we unwittingly make ourselves
vulnerable to attack.  We trustingly, willingly -- sometimes even avidly --
invite strangers into our cars, our homes, our bodies.  How does this
disregard for personal safety happen so easily with us?  

Since the '50s and '60s, many of us revolted against straight "morality,"
against rules taught by our parents.  This included our parents' no-nos
about strangers, which sounded so repressive to rebels of the Stonewall era.
 But in the heat of ongoing revolt, some of us go overboard and open our
lives to a stranger who has violent intentions.   We have a deeper need to
trust this stranger than straight people do -- all our lives, we were taught
to mistrust ourselves, to mistrust our intuitions about others.   We tend to
be more lonely, desperate and over-anxious for sex and/or companionship.  In
addition, getting into a car with strangers, or inviting strangers into your
own car, is an American folkway...and a gay folkway as well. The cute
hustler, the handsome boy looking for a daddy, steps into the shiny BMW and
rides away to his destiny.

To override all the barriers built by a homophobic culture, our media have
romanticized hot encounters with strangers.  This is especially true with
media targeting men  -- books, films, magazines, videos, pornography,
personal ads, the Internet.  Even with so much disease around,  the media
still push the idea that hot sex with strangers is innocent and fun and
adventurous and risk-free (provided you wear a condom, of course).  And
often it is (if you wear that condom).  But sometimes it's not (even if you
do wear a condom). When a man's hormones are pumping and he's hot for the
hunt, he can get so reckless that he forgets not only health dangers, but
social dangers as well. He can ignore his intuition -- that subtle inner
chill that warns even the animals of danger ahead.  A horse won't put his
hoofs on an unsafe bridge. But a gay man can meet Jeffrey Dahmer at a bar,
and recklessly go right home with him.

Sometimes the violent stranger is a sex worker. The older gay man who can't
get sex any other way will risk paying a  hustler -- and wind up paying with
his life, or his health and wealth and peace of mind.  He is left dead, or
battered and crippled, and robbed.  Was the risk worth it?  Only he can tell
us.   And not every  male sex worker is gay.  Some are straight.  Some 
harbor a homophobic  contempt for their gay johns, that may flash out in a
violent criminal act.  Indeed, some hustlers choose sex work because it
gives instant access to trust -- to a john's car, credit cards, home,
valuables, bank account information.  You don't have to pick locks or break
windows, or even use a gun.  

Some gay men can leap into car-rides, S & M and other risky scenarios for
hundreds and thousands of times, without harm. They even get off on the
risk. But they are riding their luck.  Gamblers who push their luck with the
dice can wind up losing everything -- and so can the gay man who pushes his
social luck.  Men who cruise public parks argue that they have a right to do
this -- especially the closeted ones who feel they can't have a sex life any
other way. But they are asking for their right to meet the Angel of Death --
a straight gay-basher looking for a victim, or a closet case looking for a
sex partner to vent his self-hatred on.  Those who do meet that dark angel
in the bushes might -- in their last moments of consciousness -- wish they
had been more careful.

Misplaced trust also makes gay men more vulnerable to undercover police
stings.

In my work with young people, I often hear horror stories about teen trust
of strangers.  Newly out and naive, our young people often learn the hard
way that going into a stranger's car or  home puts them at risk of date
rape.  One 18-year-old Asian student hesitantly told me how he met a
good-looking 20-something jock on Santa Monica Boulevard one evening, and
merrily rode off in the guy's Land Rover.  Next thing the student knew, they
were stopped in a dark parking lot and the good-looking jock was raping him.
 When it was over, the jock dumped him in an alley behind a club.  

Our teens learn to risk dape-rape  from our over-romanticized media, and
from watching their romance-ridden elders in real-life action.  Adults have
major flings with strangers, so it must be okay, right?   Adults who don't
value their own lives set a horrible bad example for young people!  The same
risk can face gay teens who make sex dates with strangers over the Internet.
 Ditto the teens who use the Net to set up living arrangements with adult
strangers -- they are desperate to leave home and be independent, and don't
want to live on the street.  Street-wise kids learn to date in packs, or set
up housekeeping in groups, with people they know and can truly trust --
finding safety in numbers.  

Often I ask myself what percentage of LGBT youth get raped every year simply
because they trusted some smooth-talking stranger.  Statistics are hard to
get -- few gay boys or lesbian girls or transgendered teens will talk about
being raped.  As with rapes of straight women, few rapes of our teens get
reported to police.  A  victim of date-rape drugs like "roofies" may not
even remember what happened.  

We do a great deal to educate our youth about safer sex -- but we do little
to teach them that danger isn't always a disease.  I wish that every free
condom and every pamphlet saying DON'T HAVE UNSAFE SEX were accompanied by
warnings like: DON'T GO OFF ALONE WITH 2 OR MORE STRANGERS...or DON'T LET
STRANGERS NEAR YOUR DRINK.

Nor are men the only victims.   We women have our own problems with
misplaced trust.  It's true that lesbians and bisexual women experience
fewer violent crimes involving trust of strangers.  With us, it's more a
question of how trusting we are on the second date -- or when we move in
together so fast!   A few years ago, I met an attractive charismatic woman
in her 30s.  She was definitely my type -- butch, outdoorsy. But some things
-- her possessiveness, drinking, personality change while drunk -- raised a
red flag on the first date.  Having survived a heterosexual marriage with a
violent possessive man, I sensed danger.  It turned out that this woman had
a history of arrests and jail time for beating girlfriends.  So I showed her
the door -- out of my life. 

Perhaps I will be criticized  for talking about this issue. Maybe I'll be
told that I'm anti-sex -- that I'm trying to put a chill on  true love, on
the rich and full sex life that we all deserve.  Hey, I'm not anti-sex or
anti-love at all.  What I am is anti-murder, anti-assault, anti-robbery,
anti-rape.  I am 100 percent in favor of surviving a social encounter, to
love and have sex another day.  If this means waiting a few weeks till you
know someone better, or doing a background check if something doesn't seem
right,  I say do it. 

We need to use our gaydar better, to identify threats to personal safety,
instead of just squandering this wonderful power on locating new sources of
hot fun sex.  "Gaydar" is just a fancy word for intuition as used by
homosexuals.  Intuition is what keeps every animal ahead of the fangs and
claws of killer animals.  If animals can survive successfully using their
intuition, then humans can too.  If your brand-new acquaintance at the party
makes the tiniest ominous blip on your gaydar screen,  he or she may not be
someone you want to know better!  There is no hot fun sex in a coma, or the
morgue.

Why is it that so many in the community won't acknowledge the dangers of
out- of-control trust?  Why this reluctance to publicize the dark and
vulnerable side of our social life?  Is it partly because so much money is
riding on that romantic myth of hot sex with strangers?  Massive financial
investments into the gay video industry?  Publications that depend on
personal ads for extra cash?  Sex clubs and circuit parties?   All these --
and others -- ride  the lure of  strangers.

Matthew Shephard's death has struck a national nerve, both in our community
and in the mainstream.  Maybe his killers will face the death penalty. 
Maybe a whole raft of federal, state and local hate-crime laws will now be
passed. But all the  penalties and laws in the world will not protect us if
we don't protect ourselves.  The murder of this Wyoming student is the
wake-up call -- the "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" of our time.  Matthew
Shephard's story will save some lives.   



Copyright (c) 1998 by Patricia Nell Warren.  All rights reserved.  For
permission to reprint on the Internet or in print publications, email
wildcatprs@aol.com or call 323/966-2466.


L.A. BOARD OF EDUCATION TERMINATES 
GAY AND LESBIAN EDUCATION COMMISSION

By Patricia Nell Warren


	
      For the past seven years, while LGBT students in many school districts
across the nation were struggling for the tiniest toe-hold of acceptance,
those in Los Angeles Unified School District actually enjoyed significant
acceptance and support from their Board of Education.  The Gay and Lesbian
Education Commission -- a unique body in American K-12 education -- was
created in 1991 by the L.A. Board to ensure that these young people could be
safe at school and enjoy equal access to education.  
      GLEC became not only a pioneering example but a source of how-to
information, as gay people and concerned heterosexuals  tried to enlarge their
niche in their own districts.   Increasing numbers of GLEC's Project 10 and
elementary-school packets were being requested from elsewhere.
      Now, LGBT youth in L.A. are not so sure of their Board's acceptance and
support.  In a sweeping move that may jeopardize seven years of pioneering,
the Board is terminating all eight of its education commissions, including
GLEC.
	As per a resolution now before the Board,  the commissions will be
"discontinued" on June 30, at school year's end.   According to openly gay
Board member Jeff Horton, who spoke at a March 3 emergency GLEC meeting at
district headquarters, the Board will likely pass it.
	It's not clear what the whole reason is for terminating GLEC.  According to
Horton, the Board heard its legal counsel's warning about Prop. 209, in which
conservative Californians voted to end affirmative action in California.  A
subsequent court decision had declared Prop. 209 constitutional.  Legal
counsel had advised the Board that several of its right education commissions
-- Gender Equity, African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-Pacific, American
Indian, Armenian-American  -- might possibly be in violation of Prop. 209,
because they each serve a single group exclusively.  GLEC and the Special
Education Commission are not affected by Prop. 209 because they serve both
genders and all ethnicities.  According to Horton, the Board was hoping to
avoid 209 lawsuits and demonstrate political fairness.  Dropping the gender
and race-based commissions, while keeping GLEC and the special-ed commission,
would not have "flown politically," Horton told the assembled members of GLEC.
      However, at the Board's March 23 meeting, as the "discontinuance"
resolution was formally introduced, legal counsel told the Board that, Prop.
209 or no, they have the right to ax  the commissions if they so choose.
      Beleaguered by building-contract scandals and political attempts to
break up the huge district, as well as controversy over bilingual education
and decaying schools, the Board has not yet responded to protests. On 3/25
GLEC chairman Bart Verry sent a strongly worded letter to Board president
Julie Korenstein, asking that other legal opinions on Prop. 209's
applicability be gotten by the Board.  Angry buzz about Prop. 209 still
courses through California, and the new law's constitutionality may be further
challenged in the courts.  The Board has also not yet responded to letters by
individual GLEC members including myself.
	In place of the eight education commissions, the Board plans to appoint a new
Human Relations Commission.   As yet, it is not clear how this new commission
will work, or if its members -- who may or may not be expert and sensitive in
all eight of the demographics previously concerning the Board --  can
effectively merge all eight umbrellas into one big umbrella.        
      Verry's letter addressed this concern.  He said:  
      "The needs of GLBT youth are not addressed legally nor constitutionally,
as are the needs of persons from different ethnicities, genders and physical
challenges.  We demand to have a voice in how the needs of our population will
be addressed.  We demand that we will be actively involved in all decision-
making processes regarding the Human Relations Commission, so that [GLEC] will
have the space, resources and opportunity to exist as we do today. If this is
not accomplished, you need to recognize that there will be considerable risk
of litigation so that we can continue to address the needs of the GLBT
community."   
      Already news of the commissions' fate has jarred many people throughout
L.A.'s ethnic communities, though the major media have yet to give the news
any major headlines.  On 3/23 Frontiers Magazine published an editorial of
mine.  In  the city's gay community,  the Board’s quixotic move is pondered by
students, teachers, district employees, educators, as well as GLSEN and PFLAG
groups.
	"What's going to happen to us now?"  one lesbian student asked me.  "Who can
we trust?   Why is the Board doing this to us?"
	For better or worse, LAUSD is a bellwether among U.S. school districts.  What
happens here, often happens elsewhere later.  With a vast smoggy geography
stretching from South-Central slums and "East Los" barrios to all-white San
Fernando rural districts -- it  is the nation's 2nd largest.  Of its 650,000
students, an estimated 65,000 might be gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgendered.  Add perhaps 15,000  runaways, who come to L.A. from other
cities -- many of these are LGBT kids who are homeless because of family
hostility and try to get back in school after arriving in L.A.
     In 1991 the Board did the bellwether thing by creating GLEC to meet the
needs of this small army of  LGBT students.  Every year, hundreds of students,
both out and closeted, quietly find support in Virginia Uribe's pioneering
Project 10, now a counseling fixture in most LAUSD high schools.   They could
find information on health, safer sex, suicide, substance abuse, family
hostility, transgender issues, getting out of gang life -- or be directed to
community-based youth services for such needs as employment, shelters, etc.
They could enroll in one of the four continuation programs for LGBT dropouts,
and get their high-school diploma.  They could attend the Gay Prom, or the
district-sponsored Models of Pride Youth Conference.  GLEC's growing
scholarship fund gets a number of needy young people into college.
	GLEC also held the line on safety at school.  Young people who were openly
harassed can go to GLEC for legal networking.  Because of the landmark Jamie
Nabozny case -- ending in a punitive million-dollar judgment against a
Wisconsin high school last year for having tolerated gay-bashing against one
student -- LAUSD's more reactionary schools are essentially on notice that, in
a similar case, a California jury might hold them massively liable for a
student’s injury or death from on-campus bashing.
      While the eight commission directors' salaries were paid by the
district, GLEC funded its own programs -- almost $150,000 in seven years,
which we raised by everything from A-list fundraising parties to yard sales.
      Are these programs effective?  Because of them, numbers of students
whose histories are known to me are presently happier and more productive in
their high schools -- like Armond Anderson-Bell, 19, promising writer who is
now anchorman of the TV news station at John Marshall High School.  There are
LGBT students in college or the workplace today -- indeed, who are alive
today, even reconciled with formerly hostile parents -- because of  LAUSD
support and sensitivity at key moments.  At some schools, the programs helped
create a buffer zone of gay-supportive straight students and teachers who feel
strongly about human rights.  They produced some outstanding teen leaders and
activists, including GLEC youth commissioners Louis Harvey and Joel Feldman.
At her home school, Fairfax, Luna Andrade founded the first gay-straight
alliance club in the district.  Dan Harris, a 1996 EAGLES graduate, went home
to his conservative high-desert community and forced his former high school to
clamp down on gay-bashing.  Another EAGLES graduate, Christine Soto, has begun
a promising career in social work.  Yet another, K. C. Barrow, went home to
Utah to help start the gay-rights movement in that state.  These are just a
handful of kids that I know.  Other commissioners can tell similar stories.
      With the June termination date  a grim certainty, GLEC commissioners are
bracing themselves for being "decommissioned", and for trying to interface
with the as-yet mysterious Human Relations Commission.  
       For the moment, some programs -- Project 10, the EAGLES continuation
programs -- will continue to operate because they were approved directly by
the Board.   Friends of Project 10 will still offer its growing array of
scholarships.  To better serve dropout youth, the special-ed EAGLES has just
merged with the Long Beach EAGLES to form a new program called Oasis.  No
matter what happens, Bart Verry says he plans to hold the next Models of Pride
at its usual venue, Occidental College, in October.   But it isn't clear what
the future holds.
	Will the new Human Relations Commission successfully meet the urgent needs of
L.A.'s ethnic communities?  In the city where the 1992 riots and the Watts
riots happened, this is a major question.  
      Will the Human Relations Commission care enough about the needs of gay
youth to shoulder the full burden of GLEC's hard-fought programs?  Or will
some members of the new Commission be people who willingly answer to right-
wing lobbyists?  To keep our programs going, and launch new ones, will we be
fighting anti-gay attitude every time we need a majority vote?  That's another
major question.  
      Far-righters like Lou Sheldon and Pat Robertson have already targeted
LAUSD for major attention.  The Christian Coalition has already actively tried
to keep Jeff Horton from being re-elected to the Board.  Lou Sheldon attempted
to target our GLEC programs during a 1996 Congressional investigation, hoping
to stigmatize GLEC as an example of the "pernicious" influence of homosexuals
in education.  Most local right-wingers don't give a hoot for the safety of
gay kids -- they have lobbied the L.A. Board about eliminating the district's
hate-crimes policy.  Their reasons: the policy "protects homosexuals" and
deprives Christian students of free-speech rights to criticize homosexuality
on their campuses.  So the "discontinuation" of GLEC might be interpreted by
anti-gay elements as a softening of the Board's position on anti-gay violence.
      A recent study showed that Los Angeles has the third highest statistics
on anti-gay violence in the nation, with 350 murders, assaults, rapes and
intimidations reported last year.  Many more go unreported.  Nationally,
violence against LGBT young people is on the rise.  These figures are
augmented by growing violence even against students  who are gay-friendly, or
who  might merely be perceived as gay -- or who who are the butt of cruel
student pranks (it's the "in" thing at some schools to start a rumor that so-
and-so is gay or lesbian).
      Yesterday's shooting spree at an Arkansas high school,  in which two
young teens clad in camouflage killed 5 people and wounded 11 in a pique over
a girlfriend problem, points up a stark reality.  The media is doing the usual
handwringing about how TV violence and the firearms industry are to blame --
yet we must look to others who are responsible for violence at school.  That
certainly includes school boards everywhere, who -- for better or worse -- set
the tone for their districts.  If a hail of gunfire can be perpetrated by one
angry heterosexual boy because he broke up with his girlfriend, a similar hail
of gunfire is possible over gay issues at a school where there is any level of
permissiveness on anti-gay violence.  
      In gun-happy L.A., home of the drive-by shooting, the Board of
Education's future performance on safety and welfare of its gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transgendered students needs to be closely watched.


Copyright 1998 by Patricia Nell Warren.  All rights reserved.
______________
ACTION ALERT:

     The L.A. Board of Education needs to know that the nationwide gay
community, and concerned students and straight people everywhere, are
watching.
      So far, only a few letters of support have been received by GLEC.  It is
vital for concerned Americans to pressure for GLEC's continuance, and a
positive performance by the new Human Relations Commission.  Contact GLEC's
executive director Kathy Gill at 213/625-6392  (phone) or 213/626/5279 (fax). 
      The Board itself may be contacted by writing or phoning: Los Angeles
Board of Education, Room A-201, 450 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90012,
213/625-6386 (phone) or 213/626-2815 (fax)
     For more information on GLEC programs, its web page can be still found at
http://www.lausd.k12.ca.us/lausd/offices/glec/

******************************************************************************
******

Patricia Nell Warren is a widely read commentator, as well as author of
bestselling fiction like THE FRONT RUNNER, HARLAN'S RACE and BILLY'S BOY.  She
is a member of the Gay and Lesbian Education Commission in the Los Angeles
Unified School District, where she helps raise funds for the scholarship
program.  Her publisher is Wildcat Press, whose web page is located at
www.wildcatcom.com.

This commentary may not be reposted on the Net, or reprinted in any print
media, without express permission from the author.   It must be reproduced
entire and without editing, including the above copyright notice and authors
note, and without editing.  Author is willing to provide cuts, if necessary
for space.  To request permission, email wildcatprs@aol.com.   Or write:
Wildcat Press,
8306 Wilshire Blvd. Box 8306, Beverly Hills, CA 90211, 213/966-2466.

**********************************************************************

CHOICE IN SEXUAL ORIENTATION: THE SWORD THAT CUTS BOTH WAYS

By Patricia Nell Warren
August 28, 1997


"Choice" -- and how both gay and religious leaders perceive it -- is a key
word in today's noisy national debate about gay rights.  The issue focuses on
the APA's quandary on how it can offer "reparative" therapy to gay people
without seeming to pressure us unduly, or lapsing back into old attitudes
that "homosexuals are sick" -- or even violating our civil rights.  

Today some radical-right church leaders wish to bend APA policy to their
belief that homosexuality is a crime, no different than murder and theft --
as per some passages of the Old and New Testament.  In their view, gay people
SHOULD choose therapy, because they OUGHT to stop being gay.  In their view,
all therapy should reflect penal law, and all penal law should reflect the
Bible.   Indeed, Donald Wildmon has dubbed the upcoming October as National
Coming Out of Homosexuality Day, in hopes that hordes of homos will step out
of the Life just like (snap!) that.

Unfortunately, in their struggle to evade control by this kind of religious
thinking, some in the gay community throw the baby out with the bathwater.
They reject the idea of "choice."  They insist that no choice is involved
in sexual orientation...that are driven by genes or environmental
conditioning or both.  "Homosexuals are born, not made," they say.

The fact is, we humans do choose.  We make choices about thousands of things,
big and small, every day.  Choice is what sets us apart from plants and
animals.   Choice gives us dignity, and allows us to shape our lives, our
characters, our destinies.   

Even within the gay community, there are landmark choices about how we live
and what we do.  Choice is involved in the initial decision to overcome fear.
"Do I or don't I come out?"  No matter what the root cause of homosexuality
is, this coming-out decision still confronts us.  So does the choice of
different scenes -- leather, drag.  There is the momentous choice to have a
sex-change operation.  Having unsafe sex with many partners is a dangerous
choice.  So is the choice to avoid drugs and alcohol as an occasion of unsafe
sex.   Likewise, a gay or lesbian or bisexual couple who decide to have a
loving, monogamous relationship are not operating blindly off natural
dynamics.   They CHOOSE to live together that way.

Straight and gay people have a RIGHT to make choices about their sexual
orientation.  This includes the right of some individual gay men or lesbians
to leave the Life and seek a "cure"  -- if that's how they feel.  If an
individual person decides for whatever reason that they don't feel good
living as a homosexual any more -- that they want to live as a heterosexual,
and have all the heterosexual bells and whistles -- then they have a right to
try to change.   After all, their destiny belongs to them. Their lives are
not the property of the gay community or  leaders who create our activist
rhetoric.  Community leaders should not tell people that they HAVE to be gay
once they're out.   Such pressure turns the gay community into the same kind
of prison that the straight world is.

The APA has a duty to the American public to maintain a neutral position on
religious beliefs.  It should not say to seekers of change that "being gay is
bad," or "sick", because this pushes a religious view on all of us.   Nor
should the APA guarantee the success of "reparative" therapy...after all,
they can't legally guarantee success of ANY therapy.   Today people seek
therapy to redirect their lives in many ways -- to be more assertive, to be
less assertive, to get rid of anger, to find more anger, to take control, to
give up control, to be more spiritually sensitive, to come down out of the
ether and get more grounded.  Therapy operates in all kinds of areas that are
not traditionally regarded as "bad" or "sick."  Why shouldn't it be the same
for sexual orientation? 

Private religious organizations that offer private "cures" for gayness --
Exodus, Desert Stream Ministries --  also have the right to believe as they
do about orientation.  So until the cows come home, they can go on telling
the APA that being gay is bad, and they can offer their own kind of
unlicensed help that operates off that belief.  But the APA  doesn't have to
listen to them.  Protestant evangelicals have no more right to pressure the
APA about the evils of homosexuality than Catholics have to pressure the APA
about teachings on Mary.  No religion has a right to pressure the APA into a
less-than-neutral position on anything. 

As to whether choice -- therapy or personal will-power -- CAN "change" sexual
orientation, well -- let's get real.  We still don't know how orientation is
formed, let alone how to change it or defend it from change effectively.
Science doesn't yet have a clear fix on this.  There is the nature vs. nuture
dispute.  There is evidence for genetic influence on orientation ...but there
is also evidence of profound social and environmental influence. Yet some
activists in the gay community have already built a hard-and fast position on
genetics, believing that it's the only workable basis for our rights as a
minority group, alongside other minorities who inherit characteristics like
gender and skin color.  

This seems like a risky choice of tactics to me.  Genetics is a slippery
slope for such a life-and-death political position -- if only because there
are variable genes that can kick in at different times of life and change us
radically.  Genes are volatile things, not cast in bronze, as Nobel
prizewinner Barbara McClintock discovered.   Some minority groups are not
based on unchanging lifetime characteristics.  Rather, they are built on
changeable characteristics -- like age. Civil rights protect minors and
elders, yet we don't stay in these groups forever.  People who are
"physically challenged" may not stay that way for a lifetime either, but
their rights are protected meantime.  Even gender is not immutable, as some
transgendered people can tell us.

Based on my own experience and the current state of knowledge, I suspect that
orientation may be something innate, but even some innate things are
changeable.  

Much community rhetoric is based on a concept of  immutable bronze-like
homosexualness. Many in the community exalt lesbians who have never wanted
anyone but women, and men who have never wanted anyone but men.  Bisexuals
and transgendered people are often made to feel embarrassed and unwelcome
because they are viewed as changeable and therefore untrustworthy.  Yet in
the 20-something years I've been out,  I have seen some individual people in
the gay community go all kinds of ways in their relationships -- from
"strictly gay" to "bi," and from "bi" to "hard-core lesbian" and back.
Transgendered people are big examples of how people can change.  Many gay
teens have a very elastic vision of who they are.  In real life, the labels
don't stick all that well.   So  community rhetoric and community reality do
not always jibe. If some of the community's citizens are that mutable, then a
few gay men and lesbians can choose to go straight.  And the sky doesn't have
to fall because they do it.

The true extent of any "change" -- and whether it's real change, or just good
camouflage -- is a question that goes beyond our ability to observe natural
phenomena, into hidden mysteries of the human spirit.  The ultimate effects
of this kind of "choice" is hidden away in that lonely zone between the
conscience of the individual and the Powers of the Universe.   Only God and
Goddess know if a person really changes...or if he or she is just trying to
conform to social pressure or religious belief.

My own experience taught me much about "choice" in sexual orientation.  I
knew I was "different" at age 13, despite growing up in the relentlessly
heterosexual America of the 1940s.  But at age 18, I chose to get
married...and stayed married for 16 years in an effort to deny my inner
reality.  In my writing, I chose to ignore the subject of same-sex conflict
-- or dealt with it in veiled metaphor.  My one stab at therapy showed me the
harsh judgmental attitudes of therapists in the 1970s (i.e. the therapist
believed I was "sick").   

After two decades of trying and failing to fit into heterosexuality, I
finally chose a different way -- that of coming out at age 37.   Nobody
actually held a gun to my head at any given moment. I had freely chosen to
submit to the prevailing heterosexual pressures in our country.  And I
finally chose to end that submission.  

Thirty-seven years of heterosexual indoctrination, and 16 years of
experiencing heterosexual sex, did not fundamentally "change" me, in spite of
my desperate efforts as both a Protestant and a Catholic to submit my will.
Was there something innate in me -- natural, genetic -- that made me
different, and helped me resist change?   Whatever it was, it survived.
When the prevailing winds bend a young tree long enough, it stays
bent...but it doesn't change its species. I was still that "different" being
who became self-aware at age 13.  But two decades of living as an adult
heterosexual did powerfully "bend" me and give me the sensibilities of a
bisexual.   I am not the same kind of person as a young dyke of today, age
13, who discovers her love of females and boldly comes out in junior high and
states that she likes only women.

When we talk about "choice" in sexual orientation, we have to distinguish
between a person's freely chosen, deeply abiding, existential sense of "who I
am," and a person's choosing to submit to social pressure in order to
survive.  Over the centuries, many gay men and lesbians and bisexuals were
coerced into functioning as heterosexuals, and they fooled everybody --
church, family, friends, children, perhaps even themselves.  If homosexuality
has a genetic basis, then it would seem that these people passed so well
because they discovered the power of changing a leopard's spots.  

People can be coerced in the opposite direction as well. Extremes of sexual
re-conditioning can be seen in American men who go to prison young and spend
10 or 20 years there.  When they get out, many are what the activist
organization Stop Prison Rape calls "functioning bisexuals."   For years,
they have conformed to the sex system in men's jails and prisons, which
includes "married" cellmates, gang rape of new young inmates, and systematic
brutalization of gay inmates.  These men were straight when they were first
sentenced, but in prison many reach the point where they like sex with men.
The film "American Me" gives us a graphic portrait of this type of man.

These grim facts of prison life create a nasty irony for the conservatives
and church people who demand that young male criminals be put in adult
prisons and punished by longer sentences.  On the one hand, prison life shows
that some homosexuals and bisexuals can be made, not born.  On the other
hand, in recent years, our prisons are responsible for massive coercive
change in sexual orientation.  Today the U.S.A. has the highest rate of
incarceration for young males of any nation in the world.  So we shouldn't be
surprised to see growing numbers of  bisexuals -- men who were the victims or
perpetrators of savage sexual violence behind bars.  When they get out, these
men may never "identify" as active members of the gay community.  But they
may choose to go on seeking sexual and emotional satisfaction with other men,
and they may do this in covert, even violent ways. 

A similar thing is happening to women, as we send more and more females to
prison.  Women prisoners are commonly brutalized by male guards.  Lesbian
relationships are common in prison.  In a word, women, too are sexually
impacted by the prison experience.  

In my opinion, church people should stop screaming so much about "liberal
permissiveness" in America today, and take a hard honest look at how their
much-loved prisons are re-shaping the sexual destinies of our citizens.

Choices relating to sexual orientation must be seen in context with other
controversies about choice.  Those who interpret the Bible in a highly
authoritarian way hold that we do not own our lives...that God owns them, and
society owns them at God's representative on Earth.  Therefore, according to
this view, our right to make certain life-choices ought to be restricted.
Some church people argue for greater Biblical control over our society, yet
Old Testament law already has a lot of subtle influence on laws that restrict
the American "right to choose."  When I studied the first five books of the
Bible, and saw their powerful influence today on laws regulating everything
from youth conduct to crossdressing, I was illuminated to the Old Testament's
role in shaping Western culture.

Juvenile law, for instance.  Americans under 18 are commonly denied most
rights of adult choice -- to make contracts, to refuse medical treatment, to
engage in consensual sex, to have free speech. Parents may have children
committed to mental institutions at will, or put them in protective custody
for the most frivolous reasons, or legally prevent them from running away
even when children hate them for their cruelty.  These laws have their roots
in  the Old Testament, where the Law of Moses required a father to kill his
children if they disrespected him, disobeyed him or departed from the worship
of Jehovah.   A girl's virginity was maintained under penalty of death, with
her father participating in the execution if she stepped out of line.  Even
the more recent U.S. child-abuse laws have not prevented some families from
cruel expressions of "child ownership."  Yet today, the authoritarians are
pushing the Family Rights Act, a proposed piece of federal legislation that
would shield family life from much police and social-worker scrutiny, and
restore an Old Testament rigor, complete with parents' right to punish
children by beating them.

Women's freedom of life choices has certainly been restricted.   When I read
the Law of Moses passage on a man's duty to kill his wife if she turned away
from worship of Jehovah, I understood why we have profound problems with
domestic violence today.  I also understood why my ex-husband was so obsessed
with controlling my thinking,  so convinced that he had the right to dispose
of my life.   Likewise, women are victims of forced therapy in mental
institutions, and suffer greater prison penalties for certain crimes, because
of culturally ingrained religious belief that their choices should be more
restricted.  

Last but not least, the authoritarians would deny a woman's right to choose
her own life over that of her unborn child -- even her right to regulate
births.  I am fascinated at noticing how the Protestant radical right is
joining with Catholicism in militating more and more against simple birth
control.  

Another big choice involves suicide.  The hot discussion about our elders'
"right to die" is a reflection of a larger religious belief that suicide is
"a crime against God."  Of course, some suicides do "evade the law" by
succeeding.  But in many states, if you fail at suicide, you are punished by
incarceration in a mental institution or prison.  Why?  Because there are
powerful people in our society who believe that only God may decide when a
human life ends...the human has no say in the matter.   

Authoritarians face some challenges  in their aim to impose the Bible on the
choices of all other Americans.  Some of us regard the Bible not as the
"revealed word of God," but as a collection of sacred and historical writings
created by various human writers.    It is a document that we all ought to
respect, just as the Koran, the Torah, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Book of Mormon,
and the Popol Vuh ought to be respected...but it's not a document that I or
some other Americans would choose to live by the letter of, or want to go to
prison because of.  Yet some Americans are working to restore the Ten
Commandments as a foundation for U.S. penal law and therapeutic practice.  If
they succeed, then the APA will become a puppet of church politics, and
"reparative" therapy will become the law, not a matter of personal choice.

If the United States is to remain a nation where church and state are
separated, then we must acknowledge our citizens' right of choice in how each
of them perceive their sexual orientation. 

In the long run, it doesn't matter whether orientation is caused by genes or
conditioning!  What matters is how people choose to declare themselves!
Declarations of one's sexual orientation should be respected and protected
as fervently as declarations of one's beliefs or politics.  And guess
what...people get to change from Mormon to Catholic, or Protestant to Jew,
without losing their human rights.  Offering people this choice on
orientation doesn't mean (as some church people insist) that we would be
opening the door to legalizing bestiality, rape, exploitation of minors, etc.
It simply means that, in the area of nonviolent adult consensual relations
-- if a person decides that he or she wants to "be gay," or wants to "stop
being gay," they can make that choice without being unduly pressured by
anybody.

Choice is a profoundly human thing that both the straight and gay communities
need to acknowledge and dignity in a more realistic way.  Gay people
shouldn't throw "choice" away just because the radical right have made it one
of their buzzwords.

Come to think of it, choice is a sword that cuts both ways.  If gay people
have the right to choose being straight, then straight people have the right
to choose being gay.  And maybe some straight people will do just that.

Copyright (c) 1997 by Patricia Nell Warren.  All rights reserved.
Patricia Nell Warren is author of "The Front Runner" and other
bestselling books, as well as a widely published commentator.
Her publisher is Wildcat Press. 

============

Note: This column may be crossposted on the Internet, without
change and in its entirety for noncommercial purposes, without
prior permission from the author. Just email us 
to let us know where it reappears. 

To reprint in print or other media, express permission must be
asked. Please call 213/966-2466, or fax 213/966-2467, or email
wildcatprs@aol.com. The last four lines of the column, containing 
author and copyright information, must appear with the reprint. 
Wildcat Press. 8306 Wilshire Blvd. Box 8306, Beverly Hills, CA 90211

============

Posted, August 28, 1997 by Maggie Heineman 
(Bridges Across the Divide -- http://www.bridges-across.org/ )
who added this commercial: 

Billy's Boy (sequel to The Front Runner and Harlan's Race) is 
now available at http://www.gaywired.com/wildcat/
As the website says:
Get Billy's Boy before EVERYONE ELSE !
Autographed copies can be pre-ordered on a VIP basis.
They will be shipped as soon as books are available,
which will be around October 15th.
General publication date is November 1st 1997. 


NEWS YOU DIDN'T SEE ON TV               ****************************
                                                              ****************
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Commentary by Patricia Nell Warren    ****************************
              
5/11/97                                                     ******************
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                                                               ***************
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VOLUNTEERING FOR OUR YOUTH
By Patricia Nell Warren



President Clinton thinks that more Americans should volunteer to do good
things.  More
time, energy, money and TLC is needed, he says.   I agree.  It's a
nonpartisan message that should galvanize every American, no matter what
their politics.  Hillary Clinton will probably add that it takes a village to
volunteer.

In the gay village, this message should give a little lift to people who are
feeling burned out.  Volunteers are the people who make things happen.  Yet
activist demands on our time and money are spiraling, as legislative attacks
on the community increase.  I could spend my whole day faxing letters to
legislators in support of -- or protest of -- this or that bill.  Nonprofit
AIDS organizations tell me that donations are down.  Ellen or no Ellen, we
have a ways to go.

In my opinion,  one effective way to do the most with volunteering is to do
it for our young people.  After all, they are our future.   More
specifically, we can help provide legitimate economic safety-nets for our
needier kids.  Because some of them aren't going to make it otherwise.   I'm
talking about scholarships,  for those bright students who are going to be
our future, our year 2001 in law, politics, the media, medical research,
social work, history, etc.  

As a commissioner of education in the Los Angeles Unified School District,
and as a speaker who travels the country, I have seen the danger signs among
the kids that I know.  While many gay adults are consumed with anxiety about
partner benefits, while some adults are consumed with anxiety about whether
kids are having safer sex, the fact is -- our young people are consumed with
anxiety about just getting through school and into the job market.   

More and more,  I am seeing the bright LGBT students from low-income
families, or families who have thrown them out, who are going into debt for
large amounts of financial aid.    One East L.A. girl I know is entering her
junior year of college (major in political science)  $20,000 in debt.  

Working your way through school is a good American tradition.  Many of us
older folks did it.  But today the game is different...more dangerous, more
stressful.   Many more kids come out in high school.  How many jobs are
available to openly gay kids?  I've already seen the students who dye their
hair back to normal, get rid of their lip bead, cover their tattoo, and act
super straight so they can pass at McDonald's or a computer-training program.
 Today's job training isn't always free, and companies are selective about
who they pick.  In short -- for the non-straight student, the transition from
high school to college is far more rocky  than it used to be.  The economic
load can be just as crushing as those bigoted attitudes at school.

The arithmetic is simple and brutal.  An LGBT senior out in high school +
family hostility + rising tuitions = no support for college from mom and dad.
 Or try it another way.  A high-school student out + leaving home because of
family hostility + living independently + jobs hard to get = a hair-raising
economic challenge.  Is it any wonder that some kids turn to the street or
the sugar-daddy system to make ends meet?  

Indeed, some suicides among LGBT youth can surely be traced to economic
desperation.   The  trend has already been reported among heterosexual youth
-- as in Boston recently, where a high-school youth coaliton demanded jobs
and job training from the city government as a remedy for the spike in
suicides among them.  If straight kids are seeing the connection this
clearly, it's time for the gay community as a whole to see it too.

We constantly hear heterosexual parents complain that a college education can
cost well over $100,000 these days.  Some states are thinking of starting
tax-free investment programs for the benefit of straight parents.   Time for
us homosexuals to start thinking along these lines.  It is very much in our
interests, even for those of us who have no children, to start thinking like
parents of our next generation.  If the government won't help us, forget the
government.   We can bootstrap it ourselves, just as people did in the
Chinese-American community for a long time, when they knew they couldn't
count on the "outside world" for start-up capital. 

Why don't our kids just apply for scholarships?  Terrific idea.  But it's
debatable how many of those thousands of mainstream scholarships might be
given to openly gay students.   Gay and lesbian scholarships do exist, but
information about them is not widely available, and there aren't enough of
them.   In Los Angeles, where perhaps 65,000 of our 650,000 students might be
gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, we have half a dozen local
scholarships, and I am working to fundraise for one more.   "Several" -- out
of even 10,000 -- is a small drop in a very big bucket.   We could probably
burn up the national total of GLBT scholarships in Los Angeles alone! 

Scholarships can be rainbowed in variety.  For people who have died of AIDS,
there could be more memorial scholarships like the Peter Kaufman Memorial
Scholarship, given by the Kaufmans, two parents who are commissioner
colleagues of mine.  There could be more diversity-minded big companies like
AT& T, whose GLBT employees persuaded their management to give scholarships
to openly gay kids.  Or PG& E, who partners with BANGLE on scholarships.
 More local organizations like the Atlanta FrontRunners and the Minnesota
GLBT Education Fund, who offer their own scholarships to local students.
 More national organizations like PFLAG, GLPCI and COLAGE, and more business
organizations like the Greater Seattle Business Assn., who all sponsor
scholarships.  More foundations like Uncommon Cause, who give scholarships to
lesbians...because women are more often in an economic shadow.   

Yes, and scholarships for bisexual and transgendered students too.

Fundraising possibilities abound, to tweak the imaginations of our most
financially creative citizens.  The Gay and Lesbian Issues Committee of UTLA
did  "Bowling for Dollars" for their  Stonewall Scholarship.  Our Los Angeles
Gay & Lesbian Education Commission got money the hard way -- selling candy,
bake sales, yard sales.  Students themselves are banding together to create
scholarships -- for example, the Liberty Foundation group at MTSU.  At
Occidental College, the Lambda Emergency Scholarship Fund, given by the
BGALA, is a model of student-based financial aid. 

Even at the graduate level,  the National Scholarship Fund for Gay and
Lesbian Students needs to be vastly supported if it is going to sweep our all
our needy students through a masters  in any subject.  

On the side, we also need more community businesses, and more national orgs
like GLSTN, who will volunteer job training, low-interest loans and paid
internships to LGBT students.  Many kids badly need volunteers who will show
them the ropes about job interviews, resumes, personal appearance, etc.  My
own company, Wildcat Press, employs students part-time, and we have kept the
wolf from a few doors over the last couple of years.  One thing we've learned
is how clueless many students are about the job world.

Some scholarship prospects also need doctors and clinics to volunteer free
medical help -- and I don't even include treatment for sexually transmitted
disease here.  AIDS is far from being the only health problem that these kids
face.  I've seen an astonishing amount of stress-related problems among the
kids I know -- from thyroid problems to ulcers.  There's Celia, an
18-year-old who landed a scholarship in spite of her ulcers, but has a ton of
medical bills to pay on top of her financial aid.  There's Alberto,
straight-A  high-school senior, who may be developing diabetes and has no
access to his family's medical insurance.  I've seen kids whose teeth are
falling out because they've been out since age 14 and their families refused
to foot their dentist bills.  What are these students to do?  Suceed in
reaching college, only to falter there because of mounting health problems? 

Last but not least, we need professional, responsible tutoring for kids
driven out of their home high schools by bias -- students who are struggling
to pass their GED test and get college-bound.  (My definition of a
"responsible" tutor  is one who doesn't exploit the teaching opportunity to
get dates with students.)

To a kid who has nothing, even $500 is a lot of money. $500 buys books.  It
buys some application fees for college.    The kids we help today will be our
achievers of the millennium.  The ones we don't help -- even the bright ones
-- may end up among the homeless or chronically jobless of 2001.  Or they may
provide yet more heartrenching suicide statistics.

As Hillary Clinton says, it takes a village to raise a child.  But it also
takes a village -- ours -- to put that kid through school, and launch him or
her into economic independence and a proud self-fulfilling career.



---------------------
Note: Infoseek and other search engines are a good start on locating LGBT
scholarship information on the Internet.   Search under "Gay and Lesbian
Scholarships" and "Financial Aid."   One good Web site is Web Resources for
Lesbigay teens at http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~chapman/index.html.  For a more
general search, try FastWeb, which offers personalized scholarship search on
the Net.  A good printed source is The Complete Scholarship Book, published
by Student Services, Inc., available through most bookstores.





Patricia Nell Warren is author of "The Front Runner" and other bestselling 
books, as well as a widely published commentator.  Her publisher is Wildcat
Press. Copyright (c) 1997 by Patricia Nell Warren. All Rights Reserved. 

****************************************************************************
Note:
This column may be crossposted on the Internet, without change and in
its entirety for noncommercial purposes, without prior permission from the 
author  -- just email us to let us know where it reappears.  

To reprint in print or other media,  express permission must be asked.  
Please call  213/966-2466, or fax 213/966-2467, or email 
wildcatprs@aol.com. The last three lines of the column, containing 
author and copyright information, must appear with the reprint.

Wildcat Press, 8306 Wilshire Blvd. Box 8306, 
Beverly Hills, CA 90211. 
******************************************************************************

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