COLUMN ONE : Why Does America Fear Gays? : Homophobia is learned from kindergarten on. The tension, whether rooted in religion or society’s need to conform, has surfaced as homosexuals seek to serve openly in the military.

If you wear green on Thursday you’re a queer, a pansy, a sissy.

How many generations of contemporary Americans, particularly American boys, entered grade school and learned homophobia casually along with their A B Cs, long before discovering anything of the fluttering of the birds and the bees?

Maybe it’s little wonder, then, that practically half of America is red in the face today over you-know-who wanting to wear you-know-what-color in the service of their country, do or die.

Where does it come from, this furor over homosexuals? Why do so many Americans resist and resent them, or at the least say they feel uneasy about them?

Twenty years after the rise of the modern gay movement, with out-of-the-closet homosexuals now visible in so much of America’s life, it remains an exquisitely charged question. Any one ingredient--sexuality, morality, conformity--is enough to draw hot sparks. Combined, they explode across the landscape in a flash of sheet lightning.

Scholars, theologians and ordinary thinkers on the subject describe several distinct, if interlocked, components to heterosexual America’s resistance to homosexuality:

Some homophobia, perhaps what might be called classic homophobia, is that age-old fear of the unknown, of the little known or the misunderstood, fears that emanate from the viscera rather than the cerebrum.

From this wellspring seep the darkest and cruelest phobias--the demonization of homosexual men as obsessive predators with their eyes on America’s children and of lesbians as anti-social battle-axes.

Such fear can lead to violence. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reports a 30% increase in assaults and hate crimes against homosexuals during 1992 in five benchmark cities that maintain standardized reporting.

“We can say that violence against gays and lesbians is pervasive in America and surging in many areas,” the task force’s Robert Bray says.

Another source of tension over homosexuals is America’s contradictory view of itself as both a permissive and conformist nation. On one hand, there is a long tradition of some elements of society turning on “others”--whomever they may be at the moment--a sentiment that has intensified with the growth of gay influence and culture in America. On the other hand, Americans tend to honor the idea that their nation should be tolerant.

Thus, a 50-year study of opinion polling in America published under the title “The Rational Public” shows that nearly six in 10 Americans at the end of the 1980s believed homosexual acts should be legal, but that a fairly constant 80% of the nation feels homosexuality is wrong.

Some of the strongest anti-gay attitudes remain fixed in religion. Conservative Christian and Jewish denominations are outspoken in their interpretations of biblical tenets against homosexuality, but these beliefs extend broadly into middle-of-the-road denominations, too. Theologians and ministers, particularly those who have struggled with the issue, say that their views deserve to be characterized as conviction, not phobia.

The Bible’s Old Testament Book of Leviticus contains the most commonly cited passage, this from the King James Version: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

Literalists ask, what more needs to be said?

Other New Testament passages are sometimes brought into the debate.

Gay theologians argue that Leviticus establishes the terms for what is ritually unclean for Jews, not what should guide Christian behavior. (Heterosexual intercourse during menstruation and eating pork are among the other prohibitions in Leviticus.) Moreover, they say the word “abomination” is a poor translation of a Hebrew term historically referring to cult prostitution.

The predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Churches, headquartered in Los Angeles, publish a pamphlet on the subject, which says that the New Testament Book of Galatians declares that Christians “are no longer bound by these Jewish laws.”

“By faith, we live in Jesus Christ, not in Leviticus. . . . Jesus Christ said nothing about homosexuality, but a great deal about love, justice, mercy and faith,” the church says.

Shades of Acceptance

It is worth noting that not all anti-gay religious debate is as zealous and unyielding as sometimes portrayed.

Richard C. Looney of Macon, Ga., is a bishop of the United Methodist Church, which has argued the issue of gays in the ministry for some time. To follow Looney in conversation is to tread a winding path:

“Nobody should be condemned for their orientation. But for their conduct or behavior, yes. We insist that we all have civil rights that have to be safeguarded . . . (but) sodomy is a violation of the natural order, or God’s will.

“A practicing homosexual would not be admitted to the ministry, but someone of that orientation who is celibate would be eligible. . . . There is a lot of homophobia remaining. We preach that the task of people is to love the sinner and condemn the sin. That’s not always easy to do. . . . We also condemn adulterers in the church. And we know there are adulterers in the armed forces and they are accepted, aren’t they?”

Attitudes about homosexuality also are shaped by society’s perpetual striving to order itself by separating what is acceptable from what is deviant or taboo.

Today, some Americans continue to view homosexuals as having fallen from, or failed to meet, the standards contemporary society has set for itself. An angrier contemporary tone is expressed by those who say homosexuals have adopted, or are driven to seek, a self-indulgent and provocative style of life.

“The American culture, through all its 200 years and more, has shown this is not an acceptable lifestyle. . . . I will try to keep that a standard of our culture,” says Lon Mabon, leader of the Oregon Citizens Alliance.

The alliance was behind the unsuccessful November ballot initiative to classify homosexuality as “unnatural and perverse” in the Oregon constitution and thus repeal anti-discrimination/civil rights laws protecting homosexuals. Mabon now wants to test other states with similar measures.

“Americans don’t want employers to come through and fire homosexuals willy-nilly. . . . But they don’t like the guy next to him saying: ‘I’m queer so get used to it.’ ”

Homosexuals are one of the few groups, if not the very last one, in our group-conscious society whose legitimacy can be questioned. You are no longer likely, for instance, to be asked by a pollster about the moral rights and wrongs of advances by women, Jews, the handicapped, etc. But the question remains commonplace when it comes to homosexuals.

At the same time, one can argue that gays are the most diverse group of Americans to sustain prejudice: They cannot be isolated by race, gender, economics, social strata, region, religion or politics. And given that some homosexuals are celibate, the only thing that actually separates them as a group are their private feelings.

Perhaps the most complicated component of today’s tension between gays and straights arises not from the private feelings of gays, but those of America’s heterosexuals. That is, to what extent do homosexuals cause heterosexuals uneasiness with their own sexuality?

Heterosexuals’ Fear

Many gay leaders and their supporters say they think that this is an important, if difficult, concept underlying the national mood, particularly among men.

“Sigmund Freud would have a field day today,” says San Francisco County Supervisor Carole Migden. “What are straight men afraid of? . . . Their fears are irrational, their egos fragile. We Americans aren’t very frank about human sexuality on any front. It’s a subject that makes people squirm in their seats but it’s not a defensible ground for social exclusion.”

In the military, men seem to be most vocal on the subject. George Chauncey, a University of Chicago historian who is writing a book on gays in 20th-Century America, offers one example of how young men in the armed forces may feel:

“In recent decades, our society has created the image of the gay man as a sexual predator. So, straight young men in the military find themselves fearing that gays will sexually objectify them and treat them just like these straight men have been objectifying and treating women. It’s nonsense, but these straight men feel they will be effeminized by gay men.”

If all this were not enough, AIDS has come along to splash a “death stain” across the homosexual culture, and Americans are nothing if not squeamish about death.

Added up, society’s Angst about homosexuality seems deep, profound and overpowering.

Yet gay leaders and supporters today are as apt to be optimistic as not, sometimes uncommonly so.

“It’s true there is a lot of homophobia. But show me anywhere in the world where there is such a vibrant gay rights movement,” says Martin Duberman, professor of history and founder of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at the City University of New York.

“We have witnessed an extraordinary triumph against intolerance across the board.”

Changing Values

Historians like Duberman and Chauncey argue that Americans give little thought in today’s impassioned debate to the huge swings over time in social values about sexuality.

“We’ve come to believe in our society that one’s sexual identity is the heart of one’s self. That’s a very new concept, actually,” says Duberman.

He points back to the ancient Greeks, “whose identity was founded on other matters--family, kinship, how well they performed their civic duties, how brave they were in battle.”

At the same time, he continues, at the height of ancient Athens culture, sex was not defined as either hetero or homo, and even such behavior as intimacy between married adult men and boys, one of modern society’s strictest taboos, was well within the standards of the time.

The University of Chicago’s Chauncey says that recent history, too, proves “attitudes change. Anti-gay stereotypes change historically just like racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes change. They aren’t eternal or primordial.”

At the beginning of the century, he says, “gay men were a visible part of urban culture and were often tolerated. They might have been ridiculed as effeminate, but they were not feared and despised.”

This changed after World War II. “In the Cold War era, people became fearful of all sorts of hidden threats--the hidden communist, the hidden homosexual,” Chauncey says. This led to a “more ominous, unfounded stereotype in which homosexuals emerged as psychopaths or child molesters in public perception.”

That stereotype of the male homosexual as predator helps explain why there is stronger antipathy toward gay males than lesbians. In fact, lesbian sex acts are a common element in heterosexual pornography.

Today, gays and gay-rights supporters argue that the vast numbers of homosexuals in society, their visibility and determination make their social acceptance inevitable.

“I don’t care what someone’s version of the Bible says. Jesus spoke that all of us should love one another,” says novelist and playwright Larry Kramer, author of “Reports from the Holocaust; The Making of an AIDS Activist.”

“And you can’t say we’re against God’s will. There are too many of us--25 million.”

Portland, Ore., Police Chief Tom Potter knows how far, fast and unexpectedly the most rigidly fixed views can change.

Born in the Deep South and inculcated with the anti-homosexual beliefs of the Southern Baptists, Potter recalls his shock “at discovering the difference between how I thought the world was and how the world really was.”

That occurred when Potter witnessed a close male friend grapple in midlife with his sexual identity. “I watched as he worked through it and came to understand his homosexuality. And I came to understand he was the same good friend as before,” the chief says.

Since then, Potter’s daughter has become the first lesbian on the Portland police force and the chief has become outspoken “in trying to raise the awareness of people.”

“The very questions being raised today about military service were raised about gays and lesbians on the police force: Can they share a locker room? Can you count on them under fire?,” Potter says.

“Today, some police officers still have problems--those with strong religious views and those that you might say are the super-macho types. But we’ve crossed the threshold and we’re inside the door. And 20 years from now, we’ll look back and a lot of myths will have been destroyed.”

Times researcher Doug Conner in Seattle contributed to this story.