Panic or panacea? Values of love, caring, honesty, and joy bind us as much as sexual pleasure.

These days I walk around muttering a typical New Yorker. I feel like the guy who leaped in front of Dan Rather a few years ago and shouted, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" He punched Rather in the nose when he didn't get an answer. I find myself muttering "What's so new about this so-called panic?" because the argument strikes me as age-old and overblown.

On one side are leading AIDS activists and queer theorists who founded an action group in New York City called Sex Panic! to defend public sex culture. They are joined by longtime organizers and writers based in San Francisco and San Diego who organized the Sex Panic Summit, a November 13 gathering that preceded the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's annual Creating Change Conference in San Diego. They include scores of people nationwide who care deeply about the survival of a liberation-oriented movement and are worried about the role government plays in policing sexuality. The activists argue that there is an escalating repression against gay men, manifested in the closing of bars, increased policing of cruising areas, and a demonizing of gay sexual culture. They cite the historical antecedents of this moral panic and assert that it is being fueled by the Right with the collusion of some gays themselves. They criticize the national gay political movement for abandoning issues of sexual liberation for a more pragmatic and marketable focus on marriage and cultural assimilation.

Differing opinions come from a handful of prominent gay writers. They are joined by AIDS activists from around the country who believe, equally passionately, that gay men must question some of the sexual ethics that have created gay culture. Fueled by concern over new HIV infections among gay and bisexual men, they argue that traditional HIV prevention efforts need to be augmented with new strategies. They urge gay men to develop non -- sex-based modes of behavior, to reduce the number of their sexual contacts, to challenge drug abuse, and to open up a free-ranging discussion about what -- other than a sexual culture -- bonds gay men. These writers see themselves as pro-sex but fear t union of gay male sexual culture and our longstanding libertarian defense of sexual freedom has resulted in untenable consequences.

In the mix are the voices of prominent lesbian theorists and writers who argue that state regulation of sexuality directly threatens lesbians and stems from the same roots as moral panic over women's autonomy. Some women see in these sex wars echoes of the antiporn fights that ripped apart lesbian feminists in the early 1980s. They urge gay men to see the policing of desire in the larger context of a heterosexist culture that represses women and men in profound ways. Others argue that the panic is resistance on the part of a gay culture desperately afraid of change. Still others think the whole discussion is irrelevant to anything that we really face today and are frustrated that the movement is needlessly marginalizing itself with a focus on sex.

Somewhere between panic and panacea lie several truths. One is that persecution for being sexual is a hallmark of queer oppression that persists to this day. State control over our sexual and reproductive choices is a central liberation issue. Police harassment of gay men and sex workers anywhere is wrong and needs to be condemned by our movement. But the additional truth is that HIV transmission rates are too high and that young gay and bisexual men and women are buying the hype that AIDS is over. The new cocktails are not a panacea. Neither is the bizarre mix of visibility and violence, toleration and condemnation, attraction and repulsion that defines what it means to be queer today. This is not equality, much less freedom.

Another truth is that moral values of love, mutual caring, honesty, a commitment to joy, and hard-earned self-esteem bind us as much as sexual pleasure. Unless we believe our opponents, we are not a libertine and valueless people. There are moral codes in queer culture -- codes of consent and respect for one another's autonomy and choices, for example. These and other moral values deserve to be articulated and affirmed generation to generation. We need the space to talk and to teach, to argue and to reach one another. And we need to give one another the space to disagree. The narrower our focus on whose sexual freedom we fight for, the more likely it will be that disagreement will feel like betrayal. I'm going to keep muttering until this argument moves from a defense of urban gay men's sexual privileges to a movement recommitted to freeing both women's and men's sexualities from their heterosexist straitjackets.