PERSPECTIVES ON GAY RIGHTS : First, We Demand Recognition : Unlike others who have been discriminated against, homosexuals must constantly argue for their right to exist.

Imagine a situation in which African-Americans were routinely required to answer the racism of white supremacists or Jews the anti-Semitism of neo-Nazis or the disabled the claims of radical eugenicists. It is impossible to have a serious conversation with people who do not acknowledge your humanity and your equality before the law. And yet that is what lesbians and gay men are regularly expected to do.

In order to gain a public hearing, homosexuals are commonly expected, when they are allowed access to the media, to “debate” people who regard homosexuality as sin and gay and lesbian people as unnatural perverts. The result is that serious discussion of the situation of homosexual Americans and the discourse of civil rights that might emerge from it is too often over before it has begun. Most discussions about gay rights become demoralizing and unedifying encounters with radical anti-homosexual activists whose agenda is our obliteration, however much they decorate their intent with moralistic claims to reasoning about the social good.

Gays and lesbians have still a long way to go to securing equal protection of the laws. The issues of our inclusion in society are complicated and the policy decisions that will ensue equally so. We are a diverse assortment. Being gay is an identity that cuts across all others and does not lead to simple allegiance. What we now require is reasonable space to make our arguments, to identify ourselves and to educate our fellow citizens about who and what we are. The media need to move beyond prejudice and shock value to consider how gays and lesbians will be integrated into the American mix. Most gays and lesbians are eager for this discussion. We have it among ourselves all the time and our views differ as widely as do our lifestyles. We are eager to make the case for our civil rights and to go our contrary American ways after that.

Of course, a significant part of our movement is engaged in trying to respond to the widespread prejudice about and ignorance of homosexuals. The systematic way in which language reflects gender prejudice remains an index of the entrenchment of a patriarchal society. Homophobia, like sexism, has even deeper roots in our inherited culture than do racism and anti-Semitism. It flourishes in significant segments of all of the communities who have been themselves victims of extensive persecution in the United States. The result is that the prejudice against homosexuals is mixed up with the moral and cultural inheritance of most American citizens.

Much of the opposition to the recognition of lesbian and gay Americans comes from self-described religious groups, churches and sects. The argument is sometimes made that their religious and moral opposition to homosexuality is equivalent to the rights of homosexuals to make our case in the public media. Religious events and the views of religious people are prominently covered in the very newspapers that ration gay opinion for “balance.” Religious faith is as common among gays as among straights. Many scholars and clergy have shown how little the Bible has to say about homosexuality and how willful is the decision by anti-homosexual activists to highlight the prohibition against sodomy as opposed to other equally stressed prohibitions in the Bible. In addition, scholars have shown how much the anti-homosexual views of churches have been circumstantial and changing, examples of human rather than divine revelation.

Balance means representation of all sides within civil discourse. Even repugnant views require airing, but the issue for gays is the notion that there is an equivalency between views that in effect define us as outside the bounds of civil society or, at best, a tenuously tolerated group within it.

We do not enjoy exemptions from responsibility in exchange for our pariah status. Indeed, our tax burden tends to be greater for not enjoying the legal rights of heterosexuals to marry. Ditto our health plans. The time has come to include lesbians and gays within the conversation about rights and obligations that define civil society. That is impossible as long as our statements are considered equivalent to the statements of those who do not regard homosexuals as their equals under the law.

Heterosexual Americans may be unused to thinking about the equal rights of their homosexual fellow citizens, but they continue to believe in equal protection of the laws for law-abiding Americans. Democracy must apply to all Americans, or the freedom that a majority enjoys is not freedom but a restrictive privilege. Each of us shares the common right to live free as individuals, and what binds us is our common attachment to individual liberty--not just our own but the other person’s. This is why, like it or not, the fate of democracy hinges on the removal of heterosexual privilege as a qualification for full American citizenship.

There needs to be a much fuller conversation about sexual orientation, not only its formation but also its impact on individual lives. Substantial numbers of lesbians and gays indicate that they knew early on that they were drawn to members of the same sex. The alarming rise in suicide among gay teen-agers should make us help gay teens adjust rather than persist in the mindless recruitment to heterosexuality routinely practiced by a society that still believes it can make gays straight. It isn’t a good idea, it doesn’t work and it serves no public purpose. The role of internalized homophobia, which roughly means how homosexuals learn from society’s hatred of gays to hate themselves, needs airing. Family formation, gay marriage, the differences and similarities of gender, race and sexual orientation need to be discussed, as do the ways in which social policy will or will not consider the particular needs of homosexuals.

Reform and civil-rights movements always change the nature of the debate in a democratic society, introducing new participants in civic discourse, raising new concerns and new fears. But the price all of us have to pay for freedom is the uncomfortable accommodation of the apparently different within the circle of people we must regard as equals. Lesbians and gays deserve this respect. We grant it even to our most vociferous opponents. It is time we stopped having to answer those for whom our very existence is an affront.