COLUMN RIGHT/ TOM BETHELL : We May Regret Going Along With This : The gay-rights agenda precludes any public doubts.

Organizers estimated the crowd at San Francisco’s Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day parade last weekend at half a million. If there were any disapproving bystanders, they prudently kept their thoughts to themselves.

There’s a good deal of implicit intimidation on these occasions. When a militant minority is confident enough to adopt a accusatory posture, the majority is likely to fall silent. Hate-crime legislation doesn’t exactly encourage dissent, either. Furthermore, the city’s political hierarchy, including most supervisors, the district attorney and the chief of police, with an escort of about two dozen gay police officers, participated in the parade.

The general atmosphere was jocular, let’s say, but I wonder if gays may not have been gayer when they were still in the closet. Now that they are out, and with a vengeance, their posture is too political to admit of much good-natured humor. Like other militant groups, homosexuals have an unfulfilled political agenda, no matter how many politicians seek their votes, and this gives them an air of grievance.

Mayor Art Agnos rode in pride of place, along with his wife, but his presence didn’t mollify the militant group ACT-UP, whose members conducted die-ins in front of the mayoral car. This dramatized their demand that intravenous drug users be given legal access to clean needles to curtail the spread of AIDS. It may also have made Agnos wonder if there was any satisfying a group he has always tried to placate.

Thematically, the parade could be divided into the political, the genital and the medical. Assembly Bill 101 topped the political agenda. This would add sexual orientation to the categories protected from discrimination. (If it becomes law--Gov. Wilson is expected to sign it--companies won’t be able to fire, or refuse to hire, people simply because they are gay.)

Throughout the parade there was a great deal of nudity--”people of both genders who appeared to be wearing almost nothing but body paint,” as the Associated Press reporter put it. One contingent chanted, “What do we want? Safe sex! When do we want it? Now!” The idea seemed to be that sexual indulgence should continue uninterrupted, but with a greater regard for its medical consequences.

Recent studies in San Francisco have shown that young homosexuals in the city are much more likely to engage in unprotected sex than their elders, and are beginning to show high rates of HIV infection. Thus the parade organizers had sex education on their minds. “Latex is play-tex,” read one banner.

The band must play on, apparently. The leather-clad Bay Area SM Community, and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (transvestites dressed as nuns) were marching, along with the Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights. One of the physicians carried a banner reading “AIDS hysteria is a social disease,” an apparent reference to the reluctance of HIV-infected doctors to disclose their condition.

About five people a day die of AIDS in San Francisco, nearly all of them homosexual men. In the last decade, more than 7,400 San Franciscans have died of the disease. It is incontestable that a principal way in which the human immunodeficiency virus is spread is through homosexual activity. Yet the old taboo against mentioning such unconventional sexual practices has been replaced by a new taboo against criticizing them. Rep. (and senatorial candidate) William Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) is willing to violate that taboo, and about every other marcher seemed to be carrying a “Stop Dannemeyer!” placard.

The longstanding appeal by the gay community has been that they should be treated with toleration. If it’s true that homosexuality is a biologically determined condition, comparable to race and gender, then we should be tolerant. Biologically determined conditions are difficult to avoid. But what are we to say when consenting adults begin to prosyletize in public about their private acts? What are we to make of the North American Man-Boy Love Assn., under whose banner a somber contingent marched on Sunday?

In recent weeks, an exhibit at Stanford University’s undergraduate library included the slogans “Promote Homosexuality” and “Promote Homoerotic Art.” We were told that “This campus is Queerspace,” and “bigots” were adjured to “behave or begone.” Increasingly, this is the rhetoric of gay rights.

Most “straight” people, including many conservatives, are quite complacent about all this. Ask them what they think privately, however, and some will reply: “They’ll all be dead in a few years.” This is both callous and uncharitable. The trouble is that the campaign of intimidation has worked all too well. The mildest and best-intentioned of criticism is construed as “bigotry,” and the rest of us turn aside and wash our hands of the whole matter. The result may be bad for us all.