Gay okay: conservatives have become strangely tolerant of homosexual activity. They should not be afraid to defy the Zeitgeist

Never mind doomsday asteroids and giant iguanas; the summer's most frightening movie may be a romantic comedy. Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss opened quietly last month. In outline the plot is conventional: at a Starbucks-type establishment, a photographer falls in love with the young beauty who serves him coffee. His affection is not returned and disappointment lies in store, or does it?

Oh, did I mention that the young beauty is a man? "Sweetly goofy," chuckled the New York Times, not a bit startled by the idea of a gay romantic comedy pitched to mainstream audiences.

To gauge the evolution of our national culture, ask yourself this: If tomorrow your great-grandparents could be materialized alive and well and seated before a television equipped with cable, what new developments would surprise them most? Easy access to abortion? Oral sex in the Oval Office? The Internet? More likely it would be the extent to which homosexual intercourse has been accepted as routine, to be treated lightly, even applauded: the subject of "sweetly goofy" romantic comedy.

Forget your great-grandparents. The difference between now and just twenty years ago is striking enough. I first encountered the word "gay" in 1978. As a seventh-grader in suburban Southern California, I showed up at school one day wearing a bright yellow backpack made by a company called Velo. During lunch a popular kid named Jim Medall publicly assailed me for this. "There's nothing as gay," he declared, "as a yellow Velo backpack!" He kept at this line of attack until I got rid of the accursed backpack. For us, "gay" meant egregiously uncool.

Fast forward to 1998. This spring the Washington Post reported on a pair of gay students at a local suburban high school. The boy lovers had decided to attend the senior prom together. Accompanied by a photo showing the pair in a dance-floor clinch while unfazed straight couples nuzzled each other all around, the article noted that the popular girls at school regard the gay couple as their special favorites. For these kids, "gay" means chic.

A 1996 Gallup survey reports "a wholesale change in public attitudes" about openly identified gays. Solid majorities of Americans now feel at ease with homosexuals as elementary-school teachers and clergymen: 55 and 53 per cent respectively, compared to 27 and 36 per cent just 19 years earlier. According to Yankelovich polls, those who regard sodomy as "not acceptable at all" dropped from 59 per cent in 1978 to 39 per cent in 1994.

News stories make the same point, like the one where Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott sheepishly admitted his opinion that gay sex is bad for you, a disease of addiction like alcoholism. To this, no less an institution than the White House, in the form of spokesman Michael McCurry, responded that it's sad that Sen. Lott's view is shared by some "backward" people .

Even conservatives are in retreat. First we medicalize the sin, a la Trent Lott's comparison of homosexuality with alcoholism. This was in line with the recent Christian Right ad campaign directed at gays, politely offering religious conversion but dressed up as psychotherapeutic "cure." Second we minimize it. Thus a remarkably mild editorial in NR ("Other Persuasions," Aug. 3) about the politics of sodomy urged readers to "put the matter in perspective": the homosexual act "is clearly less destructive than some [other sins], producing neither illegitimate children nor abortions." The editorial proceeded to shrug off those who "quote Scripture [on the topic], which persuades only those who take [Scripture] literally." It concluded with the bottom line that we are all sinners anyway.

Why conservatives are in retreat is a question worth pondering. A movement is more than just a collection of individuals. It has a life of it own, distinct from those of its members, which sets the terms of their debates. While individuals like Sen. Lott or my colleagues at NR just want to be reasonable and to avoid rhetoric they think might hurt the traditionalist cause, the conservative Zeitgeist often seems to be afflicted by a certain social-class anxiety. The movement is headquartered in New York and Washington. And in the atmosphere of such places, to cite Scripture or speak of gay sex as a sin unmitigated by the concept of "addiction" is to join the ranks of hillbillies as pictured by the Barney's-attired Easterner as he squints through the window on a cross-country plane trip.

So defy the Zeitgeist. How should conservatives think and speak about homosexuality? Rednecks, open your Bibles.

A widespread misconception needs to be cleared away, articulated lately in a Times op-ed piece. Literary Brit A. N. Wilson would have us believe that to regard the Bible as informative on sexual morality you have to accept all its prescriptions at face value. In the case at hand, a naive reading of Leviticus would appear to require the death penalty for sodomy. Ergo you can't "quote Scripture" about practicing homosexuals unless you also want to execute them.