Sex, lies, and ... us.

The country now knows what some of us have asserted for several years now: that, whatever other virtues, President Clinton is, indisputably, a liar -- a pathological, premeditated, serial, self-conscious, shame-free liar -- The occasion for this revelation is a sad and tawdry tale of infidelity, sexual exploitation, abuse of office, and perjury. But sex is not the fundamental issue here an never has been. And neither is the appalling nature of Clinton's enemies. Starr's inquisitorial excess is something gay, people are right to suspect and fear. But Starr's prissy puritanism does not and cannot excuse the presidential dishonesty that prompted it. For the fundamental issue here is honesty -- and Clinton's lack of it.

This is not the first time Clinton has lied, about sex or about anything else for that matter. From the beginning of his career, he has lied about virtually everything. He has lied about his golf scores, and he has lied about Bosnian genocide. He has lied about his core beliefs and his long-term goals. He has lied when it mattered and when it didn't matter at all, and the victims of his lies scatter the political landscape like leaves in October. That this seems to be news to gay men and lesbians is particularly odd because we were the first people he lied to, the first people he systematically deceived, the first people he wantonly manipulated for his personal gain, only to abandon the minute the going got even the slightest bit choppy.

To say this is to invoke a torrent of hostility and scorn from much of the gay political establishment, especially in Washington, an establishment that made a decision from day one to yoke the future of gay and lesbian equality to the fate of one deeply flawed and deceitful man. The price of that decision will be paid for many years to come, as it has been paid already, both in the credibility of our gay political leaders and in the havoc that the Clinton administration has wrought in laws that will affect gay Americans for the indefinite future. Whether Clinton is finally ousted from the office he has abused or whether, as now seems likely, he clings to faded and empty power matters little at this point. The damage has already been done. And we must learn the lessons from it -- both in Washington and around the country.

Of course, the origins of the gay love affair with Clinton are not hard to explain. Back in 1991 and 1992, Clinton was among the first candidates of either party to address the question of gay rights forcefully and eloquently. His promise to end the ban on gay men and women in the military was a stunning promise, unique in American history. He was personally charming and convincing. I know. I met him before the Iowa caucuses and swooned like everyone else. I wrote The New Republic editorial in 1992 endorsing him enthusiastically for president. I drank champagne at the inauguration along with the rest of them. Although I did not believe, as some others did, that Clinton was the gay messiah, I certainly believed he would be a force for good in the area of civil rights and that he would attempt to live up to his promises.

I was wrong. And it was clear from the first week. The gays-in-the-military debacle was the clearest indication of the nature of the man. We are told that we should be grateful that Clinton even brought up the issue, that he was the first president to do so, that the failure of the reform was due to the Republicans, and that blame should be laid at the feet of a gay movement caught unaware by the public backlash. But none of this makes sense. If a president decides to raise an important issue of civil rights, only he can make the case adequately to the country, only he can win the battle, only the prestige of the Oval Office can overcome the severest resistance that civil rights battles always provoke. But from the very beginning Clinton did no such thing. His own Defense secretary immediately handed the issue to Congress, and Clinton never made a speech or even an argument for the reform itself. Instead, he did what turned out to be his pattern for everything: He checked the polls and ditched the issue. Thousands of gay soldiers who had taken him at his word were abandoned to the winds. There was no attempt by the Administration even to make a symbolic stand against the self-evidently flawed arguments of the Pentagon.

Instead, there was a classically Clintonian solution: "Don't ask, don't tell." In a single policy Clinton summed up his entire legacy. He made it the law that lying should be a condition of public service. He imposed his own moral vacuity onto the lives of honorable gay and lesbian soldiers. The rationale, privately and publicly expressed, was that this compromise would be a quiet and subtle way to increase tolerance in the ranks. So, many of us in Washington were convinced that we should support the policy and, in return, the Administration would make sure it was implemented fairly.

The Administration lied to us. Over the next five years the rate of gay discharges actually rose to new heights -- almost 70% higher than the rate in 1992., George Bush's last year in office. And when this could no longer be ignored, did the Administration apologize or promise to do better? On the contrary, secretary of Defense William Cohen baldly stated that the policy was working as it should. To those who argue that, however bad the Clinton record is, the alternative would always have been worse, the military issue provides a damning response. Clinton virtually doubled the expulsion of gay soldiers. He lied to us every inch of the way. As commander in chief he fired more people for their sexual orientation than any private employer in America. His record in this regard is almost twice as bad as Bush's.

Well, he deserves credit for at least bringing it up, say his defenders. No, he doesn't. In the matter of civil rights, it is better not to bring the matter up at all if you are not prepared to fight, take the moral initiative, and pay the political price. It is better not to pick a fight at all if you are not prepared to battle your enemy to win. The alternative is to raise the issue, only to have it trounced by your enemies. The alternative is to make the situation even worse. That's what Clinton did. He not only made life immeasurably more difficult for gay and lesbian soldiers, he ensured that their persecution is enshrined in law itself -- far more indelibly than it had been before him. We should not feel gratitude for that. We should feel deep and abiding anger.

This same pattern can be seen throughout the Administration on gay issues. Clinton did not merely duck the issue of civil rights. He actually did his best to torpedo them when they threatened his political viability. Clinton's Justice Department refused to offer an amicus brief in he Romer v. Evans Colorado case and aggressively pursued the enforcement of "don't ask don't tell" through the courts. Clinton early on signed a bill that excluded all HIV-positive aliens from entering the country, and he signed a bill that would have ejected all HIV-positive service members from the military (the latter bill was mercifully repealed by Congress). He not only signed the Defense of Marriage Act (at the same time, we now know, he was committing adultery), he made sure his own Justice Department endorsed the bill even before committee hearings, and then he boasted about his support for DOMA on Christian radio afterward. He not only asked for less AIDS funding than the Republican Congress eventually assigned, he refused to provide federal funding for clean-needle exchanges, stabbing his own secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, in the back and imperiling thousands of lives for his own short-term political gain. Yes, he appointed gay men and women to office. But to what end? Very few of them stood up to the serial betrayals or had the integrity to that when confronted with deception. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they were used, used to defend the indefensible, to provide a facade of inclusion, to sell out the people they allegedly represented.

Despite all this we were urged to give Clinton our unconditional support. In 1996 the biggest gay political organization, the Human Rights Campaign, endorsed Clinton for president before we even knew who the Republican candidate was or whether an independent might enter the race. At HRC's annual dinner in 1997, the man who had signed DOMA and fired increasing numbers of gay people from the military was hailed as a conquering hero. Tuxedoed gay men wept for joy and shouted, "We love you, Bill!" as not a word of criticism came from the podium. The few protesters were actually shouted down by the monied gay elites. As recently as August 1, 2 1/2 weeks before Clinton's testimony to the Starr grand jury, HRC executive director Elizabeth Birch attended a gay Democratic National Committee fund-raiser, which honored Clinton. A gay man there likened Clinton's dilemma to that of homosexuals throughout history -- persecuted for our sexual lives -- as if honesty about our orientation were equitable with pathological lies and perjury. Our leading congressman, Barney Frank, who has performed sterling work over the years, nevertheless became the point man for excusing Clinton's serial deceptions. David Geffen, one of the wealthiest gay men in the country, with unrivaled access to the president, chose to mark the Lewinsky crisis with a fulsome public defense of Clinton in The New York Times and the maximum donation to his defense fund.

The most common response to this is to accuse Clinton's critics of a lack of realism. "Look at the alternative," they say, "a rabid religious right. Get real." There are two answers to this. The first is that a civil rights movement, while it should not eschew realism, is not fundamentally about realism. It is not about ducking and weaving between the devil you know and the devil you don't. It is not about choosing the lesser of two evils. It is not about the cynical Washington game of spin and counterspin. It is about speaking with uncompromising conviction to both your friends and your enemies. It is about sticking to principles, even when you may burn your insider access. It is about holding people morally accountable for their actions and remembering who you are ultimately answerable to. It is about speaking truth to power, not trading money for access. For far too long Washington's gay elites have forgotten these obvious truths and have been seduced by a corrupt man and a corrupt politics. The result is that the fate of our own movement has become fatally entangled with the fate of Clinton. He has trashed the credibility of the gay movement as surely as he has trashed the reputation of American feminism. And for what? A few cheap words and a few easy actions.

And the second answer to the world-weary realists is: Get real yourself. Yes, the religious right is a greater danger than Clinton. But who, exactly, has presided over the rise of the religious right? Who has given their moral posturing credibility by his actions? Who has thrown election after election to a Republican Party increasingly dominated by theocratic extremists? The answer is: Bill Clinton. By his narcissism and deceit and bungling, Clinton has done more to give grist to the far right than anyone else. He has fueled their hatred and linked our cause with his. He has entangled us in his lies and spurious defenses. He has milked us for money and returned the favor with empty words. And when it really mattered, when words needed to be converted into actions in the gays-in-the-military fight and DOMA, he ultimately left us to fight the far right on our own. The choice between Clinton and the religious right, in other words, is a false choice. Both are dangerous to our integrity to our future. We need to find other supporters and other allies. Above all, separated from this corrupting president, we need to find our voice again. And have it speak from the mountaintop.