2001: an out-of-place odyssey: almost nothing about 2001 wound up the way we thought it would. Forget Kubrick's 33-year-old predictions--how about from Jnauary? (notes from a blond).

2001 was not the year Stanley Kubrick said it would be. Instead of hurtling through space for lunar lunch meetings, we were standing on lines at airports while grim-faced security suits threatened us with a cavity search if we tried to sneak aboard with a pair of tweezers. The airline Kubrick envisioned running the lunar shuttle, Pan Am, has more or less gone the way of the dinosaurs, and the Bell Picturephone a scientist used to ring up his daughter is a gadget most consumers have decided really isn't worth it. Kubrick and his Space Odyssey collaborator Arthur C. Clarke's dominant image, a huge monolith containing the secrets of the universe, was replaced in reality by another dominant image: the huge, monolithic World Trade Center collapsing under attack. America's wealth, including its wealth of ideas and ideologies, was suddenly not an inspiration but a target.

The stoned hippies who inhaled Kubrick's vision in 1968 and only wanted a world of peace watched in horror as their own luxuries and conveniences were turned against them. (Kubrick himself was not around to see it or to see his other vision of the future, A.I., get met with a resounding "P.U.") Almost nothing about 2001 wound up the way we thought it would. Forget Kubrick's 33-year-old predictions--how about from the beginning of the year?

A year ago we were crowing about inclusion, about how we weren't going to let the big bad Republicans take away the place we had finally gotten at the table. But the deeper we got into the new millennium, the more we began to realize our limitations. We could exist as a tolerated minority if we would allow ourselves to go quietly about our lives and not ask too much--forget the right to marry, how about domestic-partner benefits? (The Salvation Army, of course, decided to rethink those too.)

We could be seen as fictional comic or tragic characters all day and all night on network television, but a show about real gay people leading real gay lives--In the Life--could be found only on public television, usually after 11 P.M., like even the people watching public TV might get embarrassed or ashamed.

We could die as heroes on Flight 93, but NBC News would never mention that we are gay in a report that slavishly gloated over every heterosexual mourner left on the ground. We could die rushing back into a collapsing skyscraper to save others, but if we lived, we could not give blood to save those same people an hour later at a Red Cross station.

We continued to talk about how far we'd come. Some delusionals even decided that just because the right wing has had a slight shift of focus, just because some of its mouthpieces have apparently stopped demonizing us for the moment, the Right has somehow become a bunch of good guys. As if being a gay Republican somehow meant more than going out and beating yourself up in the parking lot.

Hold on just a gay minute, folks. We know the Right hasn't budged an inch; its members just haven't been as noisy. So, what, now they're OK? If the right wing isn't still calling us child molesters and minions of Satan, then how come this was the year we discovered that Osama bin Laden, Mohamed Atta, and--yes--Adolf Hitler all seemed to be gay? What did we do--affect too many people too deeply with the death of Matthew Shepard? Now they've got to hang Hitler on us? Who's spreading this stuff?

Everywhere we turn, we confront the basic dilemma of being gay in America in this century. As Americans, we are told to think outside the box, to avoid profiling, to be accepting of diversity. As gay people, we're told to stay in the box and cut an air-hole every now and then when things get too stuffy.

Just try and get a box cutter past security.