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ANTI-GAY ACTIVISTS frequently claim that equal rights for gay and lesbian people are a threat to the civil rights of groups they deem “legitimate minorities,” including African-Americans. For example,…More

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LAST JUNE, a special issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) focused on suicide with the stated goal “to provide insights that might lead to successful prevention programs.”…More

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THE QUESTION of whether sex “is worth dying for” was posed by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality and speaks directly to why, in the third decade of…More

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For the first time in the more than thirty years that I’ve been engaged in the political fight against homophobia, I am beginning to think that my political career might outlast the legal embodiment of this vicious prejudice. If this turns out to be the case, …

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WHILE THE WORDS “we are everywhere” can be heard frequently at gay and lesbian political events, the 2000 United States Census provided the first empirical confirmation of this rallying cry. … In fact, these data can be used to open people’s minds.

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… Gay cultural critic Michael Bronski argues that the decision by many GLBT groups to take public positions both for and against the [Iraq] war is a sign of the movement’s maturity. After two-plus decades of focusing on gay issues and identity, he argues, the community’s “new willingness to take policy stands on national issues outside a narrowly prescribed gay realm” suggests “a return to an earlier mode of organizing … that places gay rights within a broader politics.”

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THE GAY & LESBIAN VICTORY FUND was established in 1991 to increase the number of openly gay and lesbian officeholders in the United States. At the time of its founding, there were fewer than fifty such individuals serving in public office. That number has grown dramatically in the interim:

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TO MOST gay and lesbian Americans, it’s an easy choice deciding who to vote for in the 2004 presidential election. John Kerry is the most pro-gay candidate ever to run for President, while George W. Bush is pushing for an anti-family Constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage. Yet the decision on how to vote is considerably more difficult for conservative gay and lesbian Americans. …

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Richard Mohr is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois-Urbana and author of The Long Arc of Justice: Lesbian and Gay Marriage, Equality, and Rights (Columbia University Press, January 2005), from which this essay is excerpted.

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ANDRÉ GIDE lived for his art. Born to a wealthy family, as a young writer he had no financial worries and he could afford to be experimental in his writing. For a brief time he associated himself with poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the Symbolist School. Later, his affiliation with the Communist party and his brief attraction to Christianity were both heightened and terminated by his aesthetic sensibility. Throughout his life, however, …

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