Truth or consequences.

It was a year crowded with promising events. AIDS news turned sunny; the Supreme Court nixed Colorado's hate amendment; gay TV characters proliferated. At election time antigay congressman Bob Dornan got booted, while newly out Rep. Jim Kolbe kept his job. In November, covers of the far-right Commentary and the far-left Village Voice blared out twin headlines: HOW THE GAY-RIGHTS MOVEMENT WON and HOW THE RIGHT LOST THE CULTURE WAR. It seemed a clear invitation to gay men and lesbians to feel sanguine, even complacent.

Yet have we won? Have we even come close? Commentary and the Voice may be political opposites, but their perspective on America is that of the famous New Yorker map in which Manhattan looms in the foreground and the rest of America is barely a backyard. In places like Manhattan, of course, we do look like winners. But elsewhere the struggle goes on. In late October I made a purchase at a small-town Georgia bookstore only to find later that the clerk had slipped into my bag one of last year's 45 million Christian Coalition voter guides, grading candidates on such issues as "Special Rights for Homosexuals" and "Homosexuals in the Military." In scale and effectiveness such a distribution program dwarfs anything the gay rights movement has ever attempted. We can't afford to underestimate the continuing impact of such efforts.

Nor should we overlook another phenomenon: the increasingly rabid antigay rhetoric of secular conservative journalists and think-tankers in New York and Washington, D.C. For some time these supposed intellectuals have been sounding increasingly like their anti-intellectual fundamentalist allies.

Take David Frum, long considered one of the more humane conservative opinion-mongers. No more. In a September issue of the right-wing Weekly Standard, Frum proposed that state legislatures respond to agitation for same-sex marriage by "reaffirming or reenacting sodomy laws." He noted that while those laws "invade precious rights of personal privacy," they "can serve as a legal weapon of last resort" against uppity gays.

But Frum's piece seemed only a warm-up for Norman Podhoretz's Commentary piece. This ten-page screed marked a turning point. Many secular conservative writers used to pretend that their antigay views were a matter not of irrational prejudice but of dispassionate, reasoned judgment. They've pretty much shed that pretense. And, at least where homosexuality is concerned, they've learned from their fundamentalist confreres how to deal with uncomfortable truths: Deny them, even if they're staring you in the face, and cling stubbornly to obvious falsehoods. Why this denial? To accept the truth about homosexuality would be to abandon their common dream of a prefeminist, pre-civil rights, 1950s-style America of rock-solid certainties, "traditional families," and self-loathing gays who stay in the closet.

Podhoretz, a thoroughgoing atheist, does an excellent job of sounding like a fundy. He rallies round the Levitical pronouncement that gay sex is an abomination and insists that people are "encouraged or seduced" into being gay. "Men using one another as women," he rails, "constitutes a perversion. To my unreconstructed mind this is as true as ever; and so far as I am concerned, it would still be true even if gay sex no longer entailed the danger of infection and even if everything about it were legalized by all 50 states and ratified by all nine justices of the Supreme Court." He might as well add: "To me it will remain true no matter how effectively you can prove it false." For this is the bottom line: Like many of his allies, Podhoretz isn't about to let the truth rob him of an enemy. Indeed, for many of our foes, we're dangerous not because we've misrepresented the truth but for precisely the opposite reason: We embody a truth they don't want to face - the truth that homosexuality is a widespread, naturally occurring orientation that cannot be willed, wished, prayed, argued, or moralized out of existence.

If the 20th century has taught us anything, it is that this combination of unreasoning antipathy to certain people and to the challenging truths they represent is the hallmark of the totalitarian ideologue. Stalin's followers liquidated millions whom they considered impediments to a utopian Communist state; the Nazis sacrificed millions to the vision of a pure Aryan Reich. In the same way, today's religious-right honchos and right-wing secular intellectuals look at the millions of their fellow Americans who are healthy, happy, and openly gay and see something that has no place in the America of their dreams.

It's a measure of the degree to which the gay rights movement has won that it has caused some supposedly civilized people to pull off their masks and reveal the barbarians beneath. And that's not a bad thing; it's preferable, certainly, to the kind of tactical silence that can lull us into a false sense of security. Indeed, in a way, we owe people like Podhoretz a vote of thanks: As long as his kind is around, we won't easily forget how much irrational antigay hatred continues to exist in the minds of supposedly intelligent (and, alas, highly influential) people. As we head into 1997, then, let's celebrate our victories - but let's also remain vigilant.