Cease fire!

Gay people condemning gay pride. Lesbian and gay activists telling others that they shouldn't march on Washington. Why does the media spotlight so often catch us locked in mortal combat with one another instead of our common enemies? Journalist RICHARD GOLDSTEIN confesses his own role in the infighting and offers his strategy for approaching the new millennium with a little more unity.

THERE'S SOMETHING DISTRESSINGLY PREDICTABLE about the spectacle of gay people meeting to accuse each other of treason. Wherever you look, it seems, queers are attacking other queers for being gay in an incorrect way. Sex, politics, religion, even carrying a rainbow flag: All are grist for the calumny mill.

Some of these battles truly involve matters of life and death--as in the sex wars that erupted during the AIDS epidemic's early years. But more often the "crisis" is like one of those absurd European conflagrations that begin when someone is thrown out of a window. No wonder many gay people who might otherwise be attracted to activism prefer to leave it to the zealous and the zany. We've lost touch with the first principle of any democratic community: Live and let live. Instead, we endlessly police each other for signs of impurity, fighting over symbols while the substance of our struggle remains unaddressed.

Take the great Millennium March debate. Now that organizational problems have been solved, the event will certainly take place in Washington, D.C., on the weekend of April 30--but not without intense criticism from many progressives, who object to its siphoning off of money and movement energy. There are also accusations that the march has been lax in its outreach to people of color, leading Gay Men of African Descent to withhold its endorsement of the event. Some activists even contend that the turn of the millennium is an unduly Christian occasion for a gay gathering.

If this sounds like a typical movement hissy fit, it is. After all, what's the problem with a group of queers celebrating their sexuality, whether they choose to do so by marching, dancing, or praying? But this latest ruckus is part of a larger culture war raging in our community. Like the culture war in American society, this conflict is ultimately about control. Behind the sound and fury lies a perennial question: Who owns gay liberation? The answer ought to be, No one.

Thousands of affinity groups--churches, caucuses, and cadres--form our movement's backbone. This attention to every variation on the theme of queer certainly has its comic side: If any more letters are added to the acronym GLBT, it will be unpronounceable. But rampant diversity is the key to our considerable success. A gay movement run only by conservative white males--or, for that matter, progressives of color--would hamper our ability to reach into every stratum of American life. Yet the very thing that nurtures our growth also feeds our discontent.

Unlike other minorities, tied together by race, class, or faith, all we ultimately have in common is our stigma. We are gay in many different ways, but we are all subject to homophobia, and we have always depended on the hatred of strangers to keep us together. So it's no surprise that our battles with each other reflect the structure of our oppression with such operatic intensity. Every aspect of gay life--from the sex we have to the attitudes we hold and the regalia we wear--becomes an occasion to attack.

What could possibly be wrong with carrying rainbow flags? Ask Dan Savage. This popular sex writer, who often manages to be both kinky and complex (not an easy combination, in or out of bed), loses his breadth when it comes to issues of identity. Savage is on a crusade to do away with gay pride. He's even gone so far as to cast it as one of the seven deadly sins. Never mind that for tens of thousands of people--especially during the crucial period of coming out--gay pride celebrations offer exhilarating evidence that they are not alone. You'd think a fellow queer would empathize with this impulse, but Savage can only see it as a flight from individuality. No fulminating `phobe has been harder on those who would be out and proud.

Why does someone who writes with such warmth about desire turn so punitive when it comes to pride? For the same reason gay radicals who are open to all sorts of diversity will mil against a march that features prayer. The need to divide and dis has less to do with ideology than with anxiety. Behind all the infighting is the impulse to perfect one's peers.

Whenever we move among those who look, live, or love like us, we're reminded in a vivid way of the stigma that still shapes us. Dine with straights, and unless you choose to flame (or have no choice), you won't seem very different from them. But break bread with other queers, and the difference shows in every gesture you make. You're never as out as you are in the tribe.

Yet you can't choose your companions in the queer tribe as you can at a dinner party. The only qualification for membership is desire that deviates from the norm. As the community expands far beyond its original homosexual base to include transsexuals and even questioning straights, it's become impossible to control the meaning of queer. Every stereotype is the basis of someone's lifestyle, and at any gay gathering large enough to be noticed by the press, you'll see the violation of your most cherished beliefs on flagrant display. No wonder we're so prone to demonizing each other in the name of purity. We expect the community we build to be a bastion against the world's contempt, not to mention our own. If it isn't the New Jerusalem, it must be sacked and burned.

But anxiety is not the only source of this urge to purge. There's also the naked need to be better than the rest.

Nearly everyone who comes out experiences a sudden loss of status, and many of us react with rage. The result can be militant activism, but in a conservative age, rage can easily become a lust for status, especially for affluent white males who grew up with a sense of entitlement. Now there's a chance to recover that lost privilege in the instant celebrity offered by the mass media. As the mainstream opens to queer voices, the major beneficiaries have been a group of writers and editors whose values reflect the yearning to emerge as a gay elite. And true to their mandate from the media, these pundits are on a mission to bash their sisters and brothers.

Minstrelsy is a time-honored role for us, which is no doubt why the first major gay rights organization was called the Mattachine Society--named, by some accounts, for medieval court jesters. But these days we seem eager to declare that the joke's on each other. And the press is all too happy to provide the punch line.

Courageous is the word you read in the mainstream media whenever a gay activist breaks ranks. So generous is the reward that virtually anyone who attacks the gay community from within is guaranteed a platform. Camille Paglia owes her notoriety largely to a steady skewering of lesbians and gay men. Her assertion that Matthew Shepard was asking for it by trying to pick up straight boys regaled readers of Salon, the same liberal Web site that celebrated gay pride last year by publishing a piece rejecting gay pride. The author, of course, was gay, and his message was something no straight liberal dares to send--but many love to hear.

Of course, queers are hardly the only minority group that suffers from this syndrome. Black writers who argue against affirmative action draw enormous attention, though they represent a tiny fraction of the African-American community. So do post-feminists "courageous" enough to accuse their sisters of hating men. The media seem to find it vastly amusing when minorities fight among themselves. The only thing more entertaining is a serial killer from the pariah classes. But next to Jeffrey Dahmer's final solution, the best way for a queer to get attention is to symbolically devour his or her own.

How ironic that a movement wedded to egalitarianism should foster a cultural caste system, with one group labeling others untouchable because they choose to cruise in leather, say a prayer while on Washington's National Mall, or carry the rainbow flag. This constant carping not only burns out gay leaders at an alarming rate, but it also threatens--far more effectively than our enemies ever could--to turn our movement into an activist equivalent of the Balkans.

As far as I can tell, this backbiting instinct has been with us ever since the Stonewall rebellion, which resulted in the formation of a left-linked group called the Gay Liberation Front Before long the inevitable schism produced a more centrist faction that chose the name Gay Activists Alliance--and the battle for the right way to be queer was on. Lesbian separatists joined the fray, distinguishing between "realesbians" and "politicalesbians" (those who were just in it for the feminist creds). The current demarcation between lipstick lesbians and their uncosmetic cousins has been further complicated by the rise of S/M dykes, not to mention the "polyamorous." At this rate there will soon be more divisions in the lesbian community than there are lesbians.

But when it comes to practicing the politics of divide and dis, no one has been more adept than Larry Kramer, whose crucial warnings about AIDS came accompanied by tirades against anyone who didn't share his vision of the gay community as an even more earnest version of the Rotarians. Kramer's thundering tone was soon adapted by a group of activists (led by Gabriel Rotello and Michelangelo Signorile) who declared war on anyone not out, proud, and rubbered up even in their dreams. Their agenda, like Kramer's, involved a formula for being gay, and anyone who didn't abide by it was subject to the vilest mockery.

Now there's a new generation of queer peer bashers, with a different agenda from Kramer's but a similar sense of intolerance. I'm talking about the Brahman caste of writers and editors who call themselves "postgay." Access to the mainstream has given them the illusion that our struggle has been won, and queer theory has bolstered their belief that all sexuality is fluid at the core. If that's true, why should we settle for a particular identity?

In the hands of queer theorists, this refusal to buy into rigid sexual categories is a liberating enterprise, but in the grip of media queens, it's an excuse to label everyone who uses the G word passe. Pat Buchanan used to say that AIDS would destroy the gay community; now it's queer intellectuals who blithely declare that "gay is dead."

Consider Andrew Sullivan's gratuitous attacks on ACT UP or his carve-up of the community into essentially two warring tribes: liberationists and advocates of assimilation. This division allows no room for the cohabitation of fighting for both freedom and a place at the table. Sullivan's rise signals the welcome emergence of a new, more diverse gay politics, but it also shows how far the urge to purge has come in our community.

I'm as guilty as these gents of taking the slash-and-bum approach to gay politics. I've done my share of savaging those who disagree with me, largely because it felt like a just response to the viciousness coming from the other side. At the height of this war of words, I lumped Rotello and Signorile together with Bruce Bawer, calling them all part of a vast gay right conspiracy. In fact, their politics couldn't be more different. Yet I'd come to mistake dichotomizing and demonizing for activism. In the environment of nonstop bashing, I couldn't resist declaring some gays good and others bad rather than demonstrating that their ideas were right or wrong. Thinking back on these bellicose exchanges, I realize that in the process of rejecting what I considered a puritanical AIDS prevention program--especially the part that advocated shunning promiscuous gay men--I'd forgotten that Rotello and Signorile were as motivated as I by a profound desire to save lives.

Perhaps this impulse to divide and demonize is in the nature of being a minority. The profound tension of living with a difference that is dangerous only in the eye of the oppressor must be the reason why, to cite an old cliche, for every three Jews there are four opinions--and for every three gays there' are four acronyms. Asserting yourself in a world that abhors you is a stressful process, as people of color can attest. But living in a halfway house that promises acceptance while delivering a kinder, gentler discrimination is in some ways even more destabilizing. It heightens the insecurity that produces a sadomasochistic style of politics. This S/M is evident in our tendency to seek power by controlling each other rather than by changing the world.

I think there's a better way, and it doesn't involve approving of all things queer. I will never agree with those who argue, as Sullivan does, that once we've won the right to marry and serve in the military, we should throw a big party and call the gay movement off. Nor will I concur with radicals who oppose gay marriage on the grounds that it promotes a patriarchal institution. But all these people share something with me. We've been through the wringer of homophobia and it has shaped us into that most intangible thing: a community. I am bound to Bruce Bawer, tied to Dan Savage, even stuck with Camille Paglia (though I'd rather be stuck in an elevator with Jesse Helms). These are my people. If they cannot flourish, neither can I. And as long as that's the case, I owe them something more important than mere consensus. I owe them respect.

Goldstein is executive editor of The Village Voice.