New century, old phobia.

The 20th century--remember that? Only six weeks, and it already has the faint echo of the Edsel, the eight-track tape, and ZaSu Pitts. There was a great deal of harrumphing and categorizing and list making. What had the last 1,000 years meant? Where were we in our collective journey to infinity and beyond?

And most important, wasn't everything just too gay, May? The way smart people dressed and spoke and related more to their newfangled extended families than to their old-fashioned nuclear ones? With nobody much to bomb, even the military's big news was of the lavender stripe.

We seemed to be just everywhere. Not just on Will & Grace. Everywhere. Although, when you think about it, it was pretty amazing that something like 20 million people thought nothing of tuning in every week to watch the adventures of a couple of gay boys in the big city.

In addition, a very important court in Vermont decided that gay unions--the ones involving sex, not screenwriters on picket lines--should have as much validity as straight ones. The inalienable right to equal protection under the law was then taken up by the two Democratic presidential candidates, Al Gore, a veteran of many a campaign, and Bill Bradley, a veteran of many a locker room. Even such political fixtures as Pat Buchanan, as natural an enemy to the homosexual as the cobra to the mongoose, began saying conciliatory words, even going so far as to actually deem us human--we really were mongooses to him before, it seems.

The Matthew Shepard murder, coupled with some other atrocities, put the concept of hate crimes squarely on the national consciousness. Crimes against us were at last being equated with crimes against other minorities. A superstitious queen could find all sorts of portents in this pro-gay activity. After all, millennium was approaching.

But even the crustiest old warlocks in the coven had to admit that our press was getting better. So it was an education to turn on the tube--remember tubes, before they were tied?--and discover the 20-years-later edition of a show called Scared Straight! The original was a much-hailed "reality TV" innovation that appeared in the late '70s, partially as an apologia for the many crime series that were dotting the tube and partially as a genuine effort to educate teenage drug users who had no real notion of where their trendy drug use might lead them. "

Using real prisoners in real jails, the show chronicled the decline and fall of real druggies. The idea was to scare delinquent teens out of using--to scare them straight. The stories were bloodcurdling, and the results heartening. Ratings were high, awards poured in, and drug counselors reported a drop in hard drug use.

Now it's the turn of the century, and a new version of Scared Straight! has shown up. This time the teens are put into a room and forced to listen to the rantings of some hard-timers on death row. Drugs don't seem to be the issue as much as crime in general. The convicted murderers strut and fret their hour on the stage with extreme relish, bellowing into the teen faces like Marine sergeants waiting for a "Sir, yes, sir!" And are they threatening the youth with this time? You know--prison sex.

C'mon, you know you've fanta-sized about it. Even if you're a lesbian (House of Women, Caged, Reform School Girls--I rest my case. Although the kind of prison these cons are describing in bone-chilling vignettes is, of the kind you only fantasize if you really have issues or if gone to bed after a particularly spicy chalupa. It's rape, forced copulation, violent shower-room sodomy, a truly terrifying of unsafe sex--all of it, of course, man-to-man.

In the old days the consequences of your crime were used as a weapon. Today, the only consequence of your crime is that you're going to be forced to have gay sex, and lots of it. They're still trying to scare kids straight, but they've moved down to the next definition of the word. How many thousands of years will it take before they stop being afraid of us?