The Race Is Not to the Swift

I have a lot of respect for the philosopher Antony Flew when he deals with religion. Not only God and Philosophy (1966) but The Presumption of Atheism (1976) and his contributions to New Essays in Philosophical Theology (co-edited with Alasdair MacIntyre, 1955) have helped me immensely in sorting out my own thoughts about religion.

When he deals with contemporary social issues, though, he doesn't do so well. I have never gotten past the opening pages of The Politics of Procrustes (1981), and I suppose I'd better try harder. I've been thinking again recently about race and racism, thanks partly to a small kerfuffle in a friend's comments on Facebook, incited further by the fuss over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the online controversies it inspired. Then I happened on this 1994 article (PDF format) by Flew, "How NOT to Eliminate Discrimination":

Judged by the stated intentions of those who guided its passage through the Congress the introduction of the 1964 Act was a spectacular and immediate success. The barriers excluding blacks from supposedly public accommodations tumbled overnight, while all forms of open and systematic anti-black discrimination in employment seem to have been effectively abolished soon after [118].

This seems to me a remarkably naive position for a sophisticated philosopher to take. Flew evidently believes that simply passing a law against something thereby eradicates it "overnight," knocking down barriers that have been deeply entrenched in the society for a century. This is implausible on its face; Flew would not suppose, I hope, that passing laws against theft immediately eliminates either theft itself or greed and need, the motives behind the crime. (I do believe Flew thinks that the "barriers excluding blacks" were purely and solely legal. They were extensively extra-legal too; Jim Crow laws were just the tip of the iceberg.) As far as discrimination is concerned, compared to theft or assault it is very easy to get around the spirit of the Civil Rights Act simply by observing its letter, by not specifying race in employment advertisements or telling applicants that they were rejected because of their skin color. This has been very effective; it's virtually impossible to prove discrimination if it's not overt and explicit. As Fred L. Pincus wrote in Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myths (Lynne Rienner, 2003, page 140):

These same racial differences in the incidence of discrimination can also be found in a variety of "testing" studies of employment and housing. A black/white or Hispanic/white matched pair applies for the same job or attempts to rent the same apartment. Since the pair has comparable (fictitious) backgrounds, similar speaking styles, and wears similar clothing, any differential treatment can be attributed to race. All of these studies find substantial discrimination against people of color in favor of the white applicants ...

Here Pincus cites Marc Bendick Jr., Charles W. Jackson, and Victor A. Reinoso, "Measuring Employment Discrimination Through Controlled Experiment", Review of Black Political Economy 28 (1) (summer): 24-48. That racial discrimination, usually tacit, is still a potent factor in American society has been shown by many measures, and Pincus's book is a good, short introduction to the problem.

Flew continues:

But this success did not satisfy either the unofficial civil rights movement or the bureaucracy set up to supervise enforcement. The movement extended its ambitions beyond the elimination of merely negative discrimination against blacks, while the activities of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) have gone far to confirm the universal validity of Hastie's Law: "For all societies the amount of perceived racism varies directly with the number of those in that society generously paid and prominently positioned to discover racism." Hastie's Law thus constitutes a particular application of the wider sociological truth that, whenever a substantial bureaucracy owes its existence to a perceived problem, that problem rarely if ever goes away. Never ask the barber whether you need a haircut [118-119].

Flew evidently bases his claims on a book he cites in the article's opening paragraphs, Richard Epstein's Forbidden Grounds: The Case against Employment Discrimination Laws (Harvard, 1992). Epstein, Flew says, had previously "thought that the [Civil Rights Act of 1964] was long overdue, that the patterns and practices of discrimination that existed in the South and around the United States were apt targets of legislative correction," but recanted, and decided that "the entire apparatus of the anti-discrimination laws in Title VII should be repealed insofar as it applies to private employers -- at least those who operate in ordinary competitive markets without legal protection against the entry of new rivals" (Epstein, 9).

Here, however, Flew appears to take an entirely different tack. Like Epstein, he opposes anti-discrimination laws on principle, on the ground that they interfere with the freedom of "private employers" and, presumably, landlords and educators, "in ordinary competitive markets". This is just a bit odd, given Flew's belief that the 1964 Act was spectacularly and immediately successful in eradicating racial discrimination. You would almost think that he objected not to the 1964 Act but only to its later use "beyond the elimination of merely negative discrimination against blacks", meaning affirmative action and "'racial quotas'" (124). Flew apparently believes that racial discrimination will fade away of itself as private employers discover that non-discriminatory competitors are snapping up the qualified blacks, to the prejudiced employers' disadvantage. "So wherever, absent Jim Crow laws or other forcible racist interventions, firms are operating 'in ordinary competitive markets without legal protection against the entry of new rivals' they will have a strong self-interest in eschewing occupationally irrelevant grounds of discrimination not only in their hiring and firing but also in their buying and selling and in all other business dealings" (120).

I think one key to the apparent contradiction can be found in Flew's jaunty attempts at humor (or perhaps attempts at jaunty humor): the "unofficial civil rights movement" (he'd prefer an official one, run by the state?), racism as a "perceived problem" rather than a real one, "supposedly public accommodations," and the digs at "bureaucracy" and the perhaps apocryphal "Hastie's Law" (I can't find any other reference to it with Google). Flew apparently believes that only official discrimination enshrined in law is a problem, perhaps because it interferes with the right of white employers in Mississippi to hire blacks if they wish, which he might even believe they wished to do before 1964 but were prevented from doing only by Jim Crow laws. And he thinks racial discrimination is a fiction perpetuated solely by blacks in civil rights organizations and government bureaucrats paid to find racists under every bed. It doesn't occur to him that ordinary black Americans might also be "prominently positioned to discover racism", simply by virtue of being its targets.

I'd love to ask Flew if he feels about university professors in publicly funded universities as he does about other government bureaucrats. Do they seek job security by finding perceived problems to publish about? I also wonder if he feels the same way about American whites who complain that they are being discriminated against because of their race, that white men especially can't get hired any more because all the jobs are going to blacks.

As part of his research Fred Pincus interviewed a number of whites who believed that American affirmative action programs had resulted in discrimination against whites, especially white males.

Sam, a 33-year-old white air conditioning mechanic, said: "Today you have far more discrimination against whites with all these programs and, of course, them getting the benefit of the doubt the minute they cry racism compared to when we do. No one listens when we say anything, the laws favor them today. There's no such thing as equality. To me, it's a one-sided issue" [7-8].

Pincus assembles a large amount of evidence, from job statistics to EEOC handling of discrimination claims to court cases involving racial or sexual discrimination, which shows that these claims are false. White men still dominate most fields of work in the US, so they are still getting hired in large numbers, disproportionately compared to their numbers in the general population. (Pincus gives detailed figures on page 9 through 18.) This holds true even when differences in educational attainment are taken into account.

Further, the laws governing affirmative action in employment require employers to consider the qualifications of applicants for jobs or promotions. Pincus details these complex laws in chapter 2 of Reverse Discrimination. This requirement applies even when an employer has been so blatantly discriminatory that voluntary procedures for compliance have failed, and a court imposes a quota. "Quota" is a popular buzzword among opponents of affirmative action, but imposed quotas are relatively rare, a last resort when other measures have failed.

Even under quotas, employers are not forced to hire unqualified people. Generally, the employer has some criteria by which a prospective employee can be considered "qualified," such as an educational credential, a minimum level of experience. Employees who do not meet these criteria cannot be considered for the position. All those who do meet the criteria are seen as eligible to carry out the duties of the position [27].

There is a widespread belief, especially among whites, that quotas are common nationwide. However, it is getting more and more difficult for hiring and promotion quotas to meet the test of constitutionality. A variety of court decisions has resulted in a set of "strict scrutiny" criteria that must be met. First, there must be a "compelling state interest" to justify a quota. This is usually interpreted as combating intentional race or gender discrimination when no other policy is likely to work. Second, the quota system must be "narrowly tailored," which is generally interpreted as not "unduly trammeling" on the rights of white males. The consent decree cannot require that 100% of new hires be minorities because this would make it impossible for white males. In fact, the quota proportions must have some connection to the availability pool. In addition, the quota system cannot be in effect indefinitely; for instance, it may be in effect until the percentage of minority or female employees reaches a percentage equivalent to the availability pool.

In fact, court-appointed quotas are few and far between. Reskin ([The Realities of Affirmative Action in Employment, Washington DC, American Sociological Association,] 1998) says that there were only 51 court-approved quotas in effect in the early 1980s. It is generally illegal for an employer to voluntarily adopt a quota hiring system without obtaining court approval. Courts impose quotas only when there is a long history of explicit discrimination and the employer fails to take corrective action [28].

To repeat: white males are still being hired and promoted in disproportionate numbers in the US. They now face more competition from women and minority men than they did before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but they still have the advantage. Pincus surveys court cases involving claims of racial discrimination by both blacks and whites, and concludes, "Everyone, regardless of their race or sex, has a difficult time proving claims of discrimination because the laws are very exacting" [137]. Sometimes white men win, which shows that in fact their complaints are listened to, and women and black people usually lose, which shows that they don't always "get the benefit of the doubt the minute they cry racism" or sexism. "There is no evidence that blacks are more successful than men in sex discrimination suits, although women are somewhat more successful than men in discrimination suits. Those who argue that the legal system is stacked against white men are simply wrong" [138].

Yet I still encounter the claim (and Pincus quotes some examples) that white men are being "punished" when jobs they want are given to women or black men. (Well, white men are "prominently positioned to discover racism.") Often this is accompanied by the claim that they are being punished for what white people did a hundred years ago, and that neither they nor their ancestors owned slaves. Racism, for these people, is a thing of the past. They do not, as far as I've been able to tell, think that black men or white women are being "punished" when jobs they want are given to white men. This seems to be the closest many whites can come to admitting that they think white men are entitled to entitled to jobs simply by virtue of being white men, and that no women or black men are qualified for the jobs white men want. (When Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, I was mildly surprised by how many white people claimed that Morrison had won solely because she was a black woman. The people I talked to generally hadn't read her work, but they took for granted she couldn't be good enough to win such a prize, or maybe any prize.)

Pincus quotes an article in which Pat Buchanan wrote: "A liberal elite is salving its social conscience by robbing America's white middle class of its birthright and handing it over to minorities, who just happen to vote for Democrats." Pincus comments, "It is not clear how the majority of white, middle-class Americans have 'birthright' to be admitted to Harvard, but feeling that they were 'robbed' of something would certainly make some of them angry" (51). Maybe if they voted for Democrats, they could get their "birthright" back.

Relatively few whites, it seems, will tell a pollster that they consider blacks inherently inferior -- that would be tacky, low-class -- but a good many more than will say so assume black inferiority, and that belief leaks out when they talk about racial discrimination in America. Antony Flew looks down on Jim Crow laws, but can't seem to get his fine mind around the idea that discrimination can take extra-legal, covert forms on a far wider scale even after legal discrimination has been overturned.

One final point: I've talked to a few white men, and heard of more, who say they were told by personnel staff that the jobs they'd applied for could only be given to blacks, that white men were not being hired. At first I dismissed these claims as folklore (especially the guy who claimed he was told that only unqualified blacks could be hired), but it turns out that people have in fact been told this. Why the personnel staff would tell such a lie I don't know. According to Pincus, some employers misunderstand how affirmative action is supposed to work, and impose quotas of their own; but this is illegal, and white males have won redress in the courts for it (see Pincus, page 122, for examples). I suspect some white personnel staff feel angry at having to hire minorities at all, and misrepresent company policy to disappointed white applicants; or maybe they do so in a "Don't blame me, I'm just following orders" way to someone they've had to turn down for whatever reason. Ironically, then, it does happen that some people are still being told explicitly that they were turned down because of their race -- but they seem mostly to be whites, and this is usually as false as the claim that blacks are not being turned down because of their race.

Tooting My Own Horn

... as if writing a blog was doing anything different!

Anyway, I keep meaning to start up a separate blog about Korean films, but never get around to it -- I can hardly keep this one going! Meanwhile, I'm still contributing the occasional review to Darcy Paquet's KoreanFilm.org site. My take on Bong Joon-Ho's latest film Mother, went up just a few days ago. Two of Bong's films, Memories of Murder and The Host, got limited US release on the screen and DVD; if you liked either one, you'll want to watch out for Mother, too.

I have maybe a dozen other reviews on the site, ranging from little independent films to TV dramas to older films. I like seeing older Korean movies, which are often quite good in their own right, but also to see what Korea looked like forty or fifty years ago. I feel good about getting my review of Mother online, though, because it's the first review of a current movie I've done there.

(Mother with the golf club in the bushes: image from Wildgrounds.)

Elitism for the Masses

Maybe this is a good place to begin, with a little piece I wrote for the university newspaper in the fall of 1996. It connects to some more current things I've been wanting to write about, so it's still topical.

Elitism is a funny thing. According to opinion polls, about 75% of Americans rate themselves above average. At least a third of those people must be wrong - but which third?

The Autumn 1996 issue of the Salisbury Review, a conservative British quarterly, contains a routine exercise in PC-Crying called "The Abolition of Thought" by philosopher Roger Scruton, adapted from a lecture to the British Housewives League. Scruton rebukes universities for abandoning excellence in favor of feminism and animal rights, Rastafarianism and comic strips, thereby producing a "wholly uneducated ruling class."

Scruton decries "branches of the curriculum devoted purely to the reading of feminist writers", though not those branches devoted purely to the reading of English or philosophical writers. He sneers at the very word "feminist studies – the assumption being that you have to be a feminist in order even to sit in the classroom."

This is what Scruton considers thought? On his, erm, logic Oriental Studies would require you to be an Oriental, Germanic Studies a German, and you would have to be a pagan suckl'd in a creed outworn to study "the intricate details of Greek and Roman mythology" which Scruton considers essential to an educated ruling class. A. E. Housman, who is more famous now for his sentimental verse than for his distinguished classical scholarship, once wrote: "Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome, and three minutes is a long time."

"Nietzsche," quoth Scruton, "... perceived that in the epoch of the democratic man there will be a vast conspiracy of the underclass to prevent any kind of human distinction." I suspect Scruton's the kind of fatuous mediocrity Nietzsche enjoyed shredding, but there's the rub. When someone modestly puts himself forward as a sample of the educated elite, how are we ignorant masses supposed to evaluate his claim? What's to stop some mass-oid from posing as one of the elite, and leading the Housewives League astray?

American discourse on this subject is often no better. From one side of their mouths liberals and conservatives mourn the death of high academic standards and the invasion of Academe by "barbarians"; from the other side they jeer at pointy-headed intellectuals who insist on studying arcane subjects too complex for regular folks. Much of their case has been made by clowns like Dinesh D'Souza, who is so dumb that he once supplied a magazine with documents which confirmed the accusations it had made against him. D'Souza is not a scholar but a propagandist and ideologue, so he can both lament declining standards and embody them.

Here at IU we have political science majors who believe U.S. economic policy is set by the voters, and I once had an interesting argument with a graduate student who wanted a graduate Gay Studies program but not an undergraduate gay studies class. He gave two reasons: it would lower academic standards, and anyway, most people have figured out their sexuality by the time they get to college. If that sounds like a non sequitur, it's because it is.

Ironically, those guardians of academic standards would themselves be denounced as postmodern enemies of excellence by Roger Scruton and Dinesh D'Souza. The "underclass" now conspiring vastly to prevent human distinction is composed of liberal and conservative pundits and politicos, often schooled in the Ivy League, who are so enamored of their prejudices that they want to canonize them. I'm all for the promotion of thought in education and public life. So when do we start?

Poetry Friday - To want what won't be given

To want what won't be given is a foolish
thing, since life so often makes us wait,
then gives us nothing, but we are a mulish
species. Stubborn is a human trait.

I save myself in hopes of some great task:
I count my steps, I study deprivation,
I circumscribe even my dreams. I ask
for nothing, yet I hope for my salvation.

Some love is keeping faith. Some faces haunt
us for a lifetime, flouting reasoning
and teaching us humility. To want
what won't be given is a human thing:

to aim at targets we can't even see,
succeed or fail, but never bend the knee.

21 May 1979

Topics for Further Research: Religulous

Last night I was browsing in my neighborhood video store while Bill Maher's Religulous was playing on the display set. The segment I overheard excited my interest in only a negative way, though: Maher was questioning some Christian believer on Jesus' credentials as a deity. He mentioned that all around "the Mediterranean" for a thousand years before the Christian era, gods had shared certain traits and experiences. Krishna, for example, according to Maher, had been hanging around the Mediterranean for a thousand years before Christ, and was also a carpenter. The Persian god Mithras was around the Mediterranean for a thousand years before Christ, was born on December 25, died and rose from the dead on the third day. Maher mentioned a couple of other examples of gods from the Mediterranean who were also born on December 25, died and rose on the third day, and were born to virgins.

Or something. I promise I'll watch the damn movie soon and take notes. But what I heard last night indicated serious problems with Maher's polemic. Where did he get his "facts," I wonder? I'm not an expert on Hinduism, but I know a little and did some quick checking, and I can't find that Krishna was thought of as a carpenter. It's certain, however, that Krishna was never part of the Mediterranean pantheons -- he's an Indian god, from a good distance away from the Mediterranean.

Numerous gods, especially those associated with the sun, were said to have been born on December 25, around the time of the winter solstice when the days start getting longer and the sun 'conquers' winter darkness. Jesus acquired some sun-god traits as Christianity assimilated itself to Roman paganism, just as he acquired a priesthood and other accoutrements of Roman religion, and that may be why he was assigned a birthday in common with Dionysos, Apollo, and even Zeus. Wikipedia says,

According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the date of creation was considered to be on March 25^th. The early Christian writer Sextus Julius Africanus (220 A.D.) thought this dating plausible and suggested that Christ became incarnate on that date. According to Julius, since the Word of God became incarnate from the moment of his conception, this meant that, after nine months in the Virgin Mary's womb, Jesus was born on December 25^th.

Whether his followers borrowed the date from other gods or by speculation about the date of Creation, December 25th didn't become Jesus' birthday until a century or so after the New Testament was written. The biblical writers didn't know the year he was born, let alone the day.

I'm skeptical about the other similarities Maher ascribed to Mithras. It's not certain that Mithras had been around for a thousand years when Jesus was born. Mithras' cult left behind no written material, unlike the early Christian churches, so everything you hear about Mithras is speculation based on the imagery -- sculpture and murals -- in sites devoted to his worship. Some modern scholars have speculated that he was born on December 25, but I will have to see what basis these guesses have. One of my readers pointed me to claims that the cult of Mithras, like that of Jesus, involved drinking the blood of the god, but this turned out not to be true: Mithras killed a bull, and the blood of a bull was used was used in the Mithraic initiation rite, but it's not clear that the initiate drank the blood, or that the blood was identified with Mithras. (In the Christian cult, the god's literal blood isn't consumed, unless you consider Jesus to be a wine god.)

Other gods, like the Egyptian Osiris, died and were resurrected, but usually in different ways than Jesus, whose story was rather historically specific. Osiris, for example, in some versions was murdered by his brother Set and brought back to life by his devoted wife/widow Isis. If it was so normal for gods to die and rise, why did the early Christians encounter such derision for saying that theirs had done so? A lot of people work hard to find correspondences between Christianity and other religions, but many of the supposed parallels collapse under examination.

Maher was more confident in the claims he made than the facts warrant. It doesn't look like he's in any position to criticize Christian believers for gullibility or carelessness about the truth. I'll watch Religulous soon and post more about it.

This Town Needs an Enema!

Okay, so some anonymous artiste has come up with this image of Barack Obama as the Joker. Apparently it was first sighted as far back as April, but it's caught on since then, posters have been made, and some liberals are whining about it. Consequently rightbloggers are crowing that turnabout is fair play, and liberals and the left (indistinguishable from that far to the right) were, like, mean to George W. Bush in the day, calling him all kinds of bad names, so suck on this, libs!

That's American political discourse for you. I think it's an insult to socialists to call Obama -- center-rightist that he is -- a socialist, but I also hope that socialists have thicker skins than to worry about it.

My first thought when I heard about this was: Well, cool. Since this sort of thing is okay according to the Voice of the Republican Party and others when the target is a sitting Democratic President, then a proper response would be to apply the same makeup to various prominent Republicans. Maybe with the word "fascism" emblazoned below them. I mean, they won't mind, will they? They certainly aren't going to complain like a bunch of wussy liberals, are they? I'm just learning to work with Photoshop, so I have my work cut out for me. But a few minutes with Google showed me that great minds think alike. For example, that one up there on the, well, Right.


Or this one.


















Or the lovely lady on the right.












Or this one. No one seems to have applied the makeup to a picture of Dick Cheney yet, but he's an obvious choice.

But enough of this trivia, when there are more important political issues to discuss, like the death of Michael Jackson, or what's going to happen to Kate and Jon?



P.S. August 16, 2009. I just found this one, and this blog post which adds a few more to the pics I found. (Still none of Cheney, though -- is the Dark Lord hunting down and shooting in the face anyone who defiles his image?) I don't agree with the blogger's take on this foofooraw, but all that hard work deserves acknowledgement.


P.P.S. March 12, 2010: And still, the only image of Cheney as Joker I can find is this one, which is pretty poor stuff.

Touching the Monolith

The New Gay has struck again. The site appears to be dedicated to giving a soapbox to people who're convinced that they're cutting-edge, but who are recycling some of the oldest and wackiest tropes known to Queerdom. Like the guy yesterday who, in the name of being "Green", declares that he believes "that modern medicine is for the weak" and that by getting treatment for tonsilitis, he "was bucking Darwin’s theory of natural selection, cheating the system." In an oxycontin haze, he says, "I started thinking about the idea of queers as population control ... [that] we homos are put on this Earth for a very good reason: to provide the benefits of extra bodies helping create order in the world without the risk of increasing the population. Personally, I find some comfort in this notion while I’m sure others will find it offensive." Several commenters set him, um, straight on this.

A few days earlier, a longer article floated the idea, from a so-far unpublished article in Out (strike one!) via The Gawker (strike two!), one Brian Moylan has declared ex cathedra that "instead of taking up residence for the entire weekend in gigantic clubs like Twilo or the Roxy like gays did in the ’90s, they’re now going to smaller lounges and parties that are catered more towards specific gentlemen’s tastes. Yes, my friends, it is officially the end of the monolithic gay culture…"

Fortunately or unfortunately, I've never lived in a metropolitan area. But that's the point: I have no idea how many gay men actually 'took up residence for the entire weekend in gigantic clubs', but I wouldn't assume that those who did live out this hyperbole were all gay men. Even when I visited large cities, I always found plenty of small bars and clubs (like the one I wrote about here), which seemed to be doing adequate business. A fair number of men from the small city where I live go to Indianapolis on weekends for variety, but I'm not sure that the scene there was limited to gigantic clubs either, what with the gay restaurants and other establishments I've seen.

And then there's the question whether bars define or determine gay culture. Apparently Moylan, and certainly "zack", The New Gay's writer, think they do. The size of bars and clubs will be affected by other factors, like real estate prices. William Leap has an interesting paper in Out in Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) on the changes in gay geography in Washington DC, how not only real estate developers but life-cycle changes among gay men affected the commercial gay scene in that city. As the men he interviewed got older, the kinds of establishments they wanted to patronize changed, which is not exactly surprising. I wonder if Brian Moylan was confusing his own life-cycle changes with changes in the entire gay community -- that seems to be a common mistake in journalistic writers. Who defines "gay culture"? Twenty-somethings fresh out of college? Forty-somethings? Or all of them? Do other community institutions, like churches and softball leagues, have a role too?

Like other gay writers, zack and Moylan seem to think that gay community is supposed to be monolithic -- meaning, characterized by lockstep uniformity and total mutual support (though the writers at The New Gay generally demand support for themselves and their lifestyles while crankily withholding support from everybody else).

Moylan cites some NYC parties that have sprung up in replacement of these spaces. Parties like Manthrax, a gay heavy metal party, or Tall Gay Agenda, for men who are 6 feet and over. And though it might seem like a digression, this is a good time to ask exactly what a culture is. Lets say for our immediate purposes that its a group of people so united by a common cause or interest that they have banded together and found some peace or comfort in their unity.

If that is the case, then this diffusion can only be positive. A culture based on sex, on “taking it up the ass,” is not a culture. It is a shared need, perhaps, or a hive-minded itch, but it cannot sustain a people any more than an orgasm can listen to your problems or encourage you to follow your dreams. ...

I think that this is not the end of “gay culture,” but rather a renaissance of an actual culture, no quotes needed, made up of gay people who are allowed to follow their own diverse interests and aesthetics without having to sacrifice their sexuality or safety. It’s a good thing.

Again, are these NYC parties really new on the scene or did Moylan just discover them and conclude, like Columbus, that they didn't exist before he did so? I vote the latter, since I've been hearing about such special-interest events and organizations all along. The New Gay also has a vested interest in crowing over every development that is new to its editors as marking a new beginning ("I think this development could be one of the best things to happen to gay people since Jerry Falwell died," Zack remarks), the end of the bad old gay culture (beware, children! The New Gay will be old, tired, and retrograde by the turn of the decade), and a harbinger of the glorious advent of the Queer Children of Light. Zack does well to conclude that "gay culture" isn't ending, but I don't see any reason to believe that a "renaissance" is going on. Even in NYC and DC, there have always been "diverse interests" and people who tried to create environments to act on them. I agree that it's a good thing -- it's the sort of thing I've always tried to encourage in my own locale -- but it's not new.