Stranger Among Friends.

By David Mixner Bantam, $22.95

A good way to summarize society's stunning, if almost imperceptibly slow, transformation on the question of homosexuality is this: In the 1990s, one can be famous, not infamous, for being gay.

If you think I exaggerate the shift, consider that as late as 1988, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis turned down the offer of a $1 million lesbian and gay fund-raising campaign to be organized in part by a gay consultant and long-time left-wing activist, David Mixner. The Dukakis campaign's refusal went mostly unnoticed.

Four years later, Mixner's friend Bill Clinton would openly solicit gay and lesbian donations and would mention, for the first time ever, the word "gay" in his convention acceptance speech. And just last year, a Republican presidential campaign's refusal of a gay group's contribution became giant news, even before Robert Dole flip-flopped and personally directed his operatives to accept the money.

Before a few years ago, journalists rarely spoke of gays and lesbians who weren't "gay activists" Regular gay folks--even Hollywood moguls and members of Congress and corporate executives--remained in a closet they created and the media helped maintain.

AIDS would shove many from the closet--not just those who succumbed to it but their friends who felt guilty about remaining silent. For example, in his new memoir, openly gay Republican Rep. Steve Gunderson (Wis.) writes, "My friends and fellow gay men were dying, and here I was, a leader of the party of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, doing too little to combat their antigay rhetoric."

Now there is another openly gay Republican in Congress, Rep. Jim Kolbe (Ariz.), along with two openly gay Democrats. The cover of a recent Entertainment Weekly announced that primetime television will feature 22 gay characters this season. Famous gay entertainers and writers and businesspeople are coming out almost every day, it seems, a torrent that continues to normalize homosexuality in the American mind.

As the carapace of silence erodes, the rhetoric of activism is growing more foreign to the gay and lesbian experience. Just as today we rarely speak of "black leaders" in civil rights-era terms, the combination of social, political, and cultural forces building erratically toward gay equality surely can no longer be ascribed to any directed "action," however vigorous, for gay "rights." It owes much more to parents discovering that their children are gay, employees learning that their bosses are gay, and voters learning that their (Republican!) members of Congress are gay. The collective national shock accompanying the revelation that Rock Hudson was gay did more to focus attention on homosexuality than a decade of activism before it. Now there is no shock when famous people come out, only the constant reminder of a truth central to the advancement of gay equality: Homosexuality is a social fact, not a political stance.

Three new memoirs illustrate these changes usefully. David Mixner's Stranger Among Friends chronicles the life of a full-fledged '60s-era activist, complete with heavy LSD use, physical scars from the 1968 Chicago convention, and an all encompassing leftist politics. Candace Gingrich's appropriately named The Accidental Activist details an entirely different experience with the gay movement. Since reporters discovered her lesbianism in 1994, Gingrich has become less an activist than a symbol. Finally, Steve Gunderson is not an activist at all--the very term is anathema to the farmraised conservative. Yet the national attention surrounding Gunderson's long-delayed disclosure of his homosexuality jostled Americans' feelings about sexual orientation more than any March on Washington could. The movement for gay equality, in short, no longer looks like a movement at all. It's beginning to look like an inevitability.

The Intentional Activist

For David Mixner, activism was salvation. Growing up in late 1950s and early 1960s rural New Jersey, Mixner longed to leave the hardscrabble, workaday farm life of his parents for the outside world and "the fight for freedom"--the incipient civil rights and New Left movements.

Mixner says in the memoir that he contemplated suicide at age 8 because he believed his homosexuality was evil. By the time he reached Arizona State University he had begun experimenting with drugs. (By the 1980s, he kept only narcotics in his freezer.)

Mixner has survived more than his share of tragedy, including a nervous breakdown and the death in a car accident of his first lover. AIDS has annihilated more than 200 of his friends. (Mixner meticulously keeps a death count.) Through it all, political activism gave him a reason to keep going. His cafeteria politics led him from civil rights to Eugene McCarthy to Vietnam War opposition to the antinuclear movement and, finally, to gay rights. Stranger Among Friends doesn't take these movements very seriously, opting instead for tedious remembrances of the internal workings of various organizations. Mixner had an important supporting role in '60s politics, but he doesn't grapple with the ideas of his era. Like many activists of his generation, Mixner sees a political solution to just about any problem. This sentiment reaches a preposterous apotheosis with Mixner's assertion that his friend Bill Clinton, should he ever become president, could "set the gay and lesbian community free."

Mixner and Clinton had met through mutual antiwar acquaintances and stayed in touch off and on until 1992, when Clinton, hunting for gay votes, gave Mixner a campaign position. In the gay community, Mixner not only helped raise millions of dollars for Clinton but spoke in reverent terms about him: "With him, we could not only win back the White House but also our dreams, our hopes, and our lives."

Of course, Clinton could not live up to Mixner's wild expectations: He couldn't even overturn the ban on gays in the military, much less end the social opprobrium at the heart of gay inequality. No president--no political system, for that matter--could. For Mixner, though, political realities don't matter. Because Clinton accepted the military compromise forced by antigay elements within both parties in Congress and the Pentagon, Mixner has attacked Clinton repeatedly, even as other gay liberals such as Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) defended the President.

The book concludes with Clinton and Mixner achieving an uneasy truce. But in staying true to his activist principles, Mixner lost influence in the White House--influence that might have helped gays and lesbians win more modest, and realistic, achievements.

The Poster Girl

A generation younger than Mixner--a generation that makes all the difference--Candace Gingrich grew up indifferent to politics. She spent her mostly carefree childhood playing sports and chopping the hair from her Barbie dolls. Even coming out to her parents--the presumably conservative mother and stepfather of Newt Gingrich--was relatively easy.

In fact, it turns out that the Gingriches, Candace included, are largely apolitical folks. In The Accidental Activist, we see a different kind of activism emerge, one based on the social interactions of everyday gay life.

Gingrich recognizes from the first page that she was "born into" gay activism. Before 1994, she lived near her parents in central Pennsylvania, worked at United Parcel Service, and played rugby--ignoring politics even after her half-brother won national recognition. Because so much of her 30 years has been uneventful, the idea of her memoir is a little foolish: To fill its pages, she has authored an entire chapter on rugby and another that begins, "When it came to actually knowing how to perform in bed.. . " (Bored readers can entertain themselves by wondering how Newt Gingrich must react to the passages about his half-sister's clitoris.) Other pages, laden with pop music and movie references, offer aphorisms such as, "Hard work and aggressiveness can overcome perceived weaknesses and even the most daunting of odds."

Beyond its general ridiculousness, The Accidental Activist is a book at war with itself. On one hand, we have Candy, the hard-working, football-loving, beerswilling woman who courageously carved out a life in small-town America as a proud, uncompromising lesbian. And on the other hand, there's Candace, "serious lesbian activist," employing silly leftist rhetoric that's far less "revolutionary" than the life she led before a Washington gay-rights group came knocking.

Gingrich oscillates between these characters for most of the book. On one page, she says hers is "the story of family," and how we should all try to "get along" She says her sister Susan's membership in the Christian Coalition is "a reminder for me to avoid stereotyping the group's membership. Like gays and lesbians, Christian Coalition members are everywhere. They are us." Just so.

But on the next page, she is saying that Newt helped make her government "a monstrous vermin." The boilerplate leftist rhetoric sounds stilted on her lips. Even on gay issues, her positions have the tone of someone who's read them in a pamphlet.

But the book's major failing is that Gingrich makes no attempt to dissect and fully understand her half-brother's views, on homosexuality or anything else. Newt, who is a generation older than Candace, remains a stranger to her. Not that Newt cooperated--Candace spent months unsuccessfully attempting to "interview" her brother for the book. To discuss his opinions, she must quote newspaper articles and a biography of him. You want Candace to talk to Newt, reason with him, and she never has.

The Gay Man Next Door

More a sibling to Newt Gingrich than Candace is Steve Gunderson, who says, "Newt was instrumental in my coming to terms with my homosexuality." Gingrich knew Gunderson was gay even in the early 1980s, and though many of his supporters were antigay, Gingrich "made it clear to everyone that he trusted me, enjoyed my company, respected my judgment, and considered me a friend." Gunderson and Gingrich have talked much more about homosexuality than Candace and Newt have. And unlike Mixner, Gunderson felt no alienation from the American system, even as a young gay man growing up on a dairy farm.

For years, however, Gunderson adamantly refused to come out publicly. Even after he and spouse Rob Morris began attending Washington functions together (including two White House dinners as well as gay and lesbian fund-raisers), Gunderson tried to hide his homosexuality in Wisconsin. Thus he squandered his great power to influence the nation--to teach Americans that anyone can be gay. Indeed, in the end, Gunderson's coming-out would win him a national spotlight--a book contract, glowing press, TV appearances.

Odd as it may seem, Gunderson represents the future of the gay movement, for several reasons: He understands that the biggest problem confronting American gays and lesbians today is ignorance, not hatred--a message Mixner can't understand and "serious lesbian activist" Gingrich ignores. Gunderson's memoir is a paean to the careful reasoning and calm education it will take to eradicate bigotry.

Now that Gunderson is fulfilling his pledge to retire from Congress after this session, one only hopes that he won't shy away from that task. Recently, he told supporters not to conduct a write-in campaign on his behalf because Gingrich had told him that rightwingers would smear him with false rumors. He shouldn't have given up so easily. Traditional activism may be less relevant to gay people today, but only because the silence is ending.

John Cloud is a senior writer at Washington City Paper in Washington, DC.