Where did everyone go? When it comes to help on fighting sodomy laws, sometimes gay groups pass the buck.

As Election Day '98 approaches, gay and lesbian Americans can expect to read and hear plenty about gay marriage, equal employment, housing rights, and "ex-gay" conversion therapies. What they'll hear precious little about is one of the more fundamental issues facing gay men and lesbians -- the fact that 21 states still have sodomy laws. For that, many local activists fault the national gay organizations.

"I don't think national groups do enough," says Mike Pisaturo, an openly gay Rhode Island state representative who led the successful charge this year in the legislature to repeal the state's sodomy law (the governor has yet to sign the measure, however). "What we find is that sodomy pertains to a whole host of other issues. Judges use the prohibition to say the relationship is illegal, so you cannot adopt your partners children, you cannot inherit. This is a stumbling block on a lot of family-law issues from getting fair treatment."

The primary national organization actively combating sodomy laws as a high priority is not a gay group; it's the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project is fighting to overturn sodomy laws in court in Kansas, Maryland, and Puerto Rico, filling what project director Matt Coles called "sort of a vacuum." Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay and lesbian civil rights group, is challenging the sodomy statute in Arkansas.

Lambda and the ACLU work closely together and often file friend-of-the-court briefs in sodomy cases started by one another. The pending suit that Lambda brought on to overturn the law in Arkansas is its first such proactive effort on the matter this decade. But Lambda attorney Suzanne Goldberg insists that Arkansas is only the beginning: "We plan to attack all of these laws because they are in many ways the wellspring for so much of the discrimination targeted at lesbians and gay men. There is a heightened focus on challenging these discriminatory laws."

But the legal challenges alone are not enough for some activists. "States like Maryland, where [sodomy) still is illegal, have not had enough attention paid to them," said Mark Scurti, legislative cochairman of Maryland's Free State Justice Campaign. "We're fighting very hard to say we have to change the sodomy laws everywhere before we can get other changes on other issues."