Gay Pride and Prejudice : A PLACE AT THE TABLE: The Gay Individual in American Society, <i> By Bruce Bawer (Poseidon Press: $21; 269 pp.)</i>

A few years ago, when I was working as editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner, an angry reader called one day to scream at me about a pro-gay rights editorial we had just published. “Well,” this reader demanded, “you’re a member of the gay community, aren’t you?”

Though I am a homosexual, I answered immediately and in complete honesty, “No, I am not a member of the gay community.”

By which I meant, first of all, that I do not consider myself a member of anything--certainly not any community. I am uncomfortable with group values, group identity and group think. No one speaks for me.

Secondly, and specifically, I do not share the view of the activist, vocal gay community that everything is political, that sexual orientation is the central fact of life and that homosexuality is a movement and an agenda. The professional gays certainly do not speak for me.

This viewpoint is the starting place for Bruce Bawer’s “A Place at the Table,” a remarkable, gutsy, even brilliant book that challenges the orthodoxy of the gay community. I don’t agree with everything Bawer says. What’s more, he fails to acknowledge the freedom that was won for him by activist gays. But I found this book the most interesting, provocative and original discussion of gay themes that I can recall.

“Being gay is not a political act,” says Bawer, a gay man in his late 30s who is an accomplished poet, literary critic and (gasp) political conservative. He writes knowingly of the “inequities, inconveniences, insults, and indignities to which gays are regularly subjected,” and he makes a passionate and reasoned argument for full equality for gays.

But he refuses to center his identity on his homosexuality. Being gay is just one element in his life. An important element, to be sure, but not the only one.

Let me state for the record that aside from our mutual belief that gays are entitled to full civil rights, Bawer and I probably share few if any political views. He is a conservative, and I am not. But that does not make me dismiss him, and it does not keep me from admiring this book.

Bawer argues that the conventional wisdom of the gay subculture is inherently limiting and ultimately self-defeating. It dooms gays to second-class status. You cannot expand your political base by shouting, “We’re here! We’re queer!”

Despite all of the self-congratulation, Gay Pride parades and marches on Washington, the gay political movement seriously misjudged its strength. Gays in the military failed as a political issue--and it failed badly.

In Bawer’s view, the gay subculture willingly and literally segregates itself in gay enclaves (West Hollywood, for example) and wants to be segregated at its own little table in a corner of the dining room.

Bawer envisions a society in which gays have a place “at the big table, with the rest of the family.” He wants integration, not separation, and he scorns the gay subculture for insisting that gays are different from straights and for playing up those differences.

“My point throughout this book,” he writes, “is not that homosexuals deserve preferential treatment of any kind because they belong to a victim group, but rather that gay individuals do not deserve to have their lives, their careers and committed relationships treated differently from those of heterosexuals simply because they are gay.”

In his own life, Bawer is monogamous and a church-goer, and he wants a middle-class life, which, he asserts, is what most gays want. Not surprisingly, the most important gay issue to him is the legalization of same-sex marriage.

He argues further that the gay subculture, despite its identification with the left, is anything but liberal, a word that comes from the word liberty. The gay community is intolerant, conformist and ideologically authoritarian. It tells you how to look, how to dress, how to act, what views you must hold and what products you must boycott.

Bawer correctly says that the gay subculture “disdains the notion of individual identity and takes a reductive, narrowly deterministic view of homosexuality.” He, on the other hand, believes that “homosexuality does not, by its nature, carry with it certain habits, tastes, mannerisms, politics, or sexual mores.”

Needless to say, Bawer’s views are not likely to be cheered by the people he is writing about. He will be denounced as a self-hating Uncle Tom who is suffering from internalized homophobia. That is how every movement treats dissenters nowadays--what Marxists used to call false consciousness. “Internalized homophobia” is the gay version.

So Bawer needs support from gays who agree with him. It is a difficult situation because all of the vocal gays, almost by definition, are members of the gay subculture. They control the debate, and they speak for all gays by default.

Those who disagree are unlikely to be speaking or writing on gay issues. Some are in the closet, and some just don’t want to get into the debate. Bawer describes himself as “the last homosexual who I ever thought would write a book about homosexuality.”

But he decided to write this book because he thought it important to challenge the claim of the gay subculture that it represents all homosexuals and to tell the straight world that there are lots of other gays.

In this regard, unfortunately, Bawer makes broad and unsupported claims that he speaks for the majority of gays. He says flatly that most gays agree with his view of things--that they “want to lead open, ordinary middle-class lives, not lives in the closet or on the bohemian fringe.” How does he know this?

He also asserts that many gays are political conservatives and that one conservative meeting he attended in Washington was the gayest place he had been outside of a gay bar.

Really?

Bawer’s relationship with two conservative publications he has written for should give him pause. For 10 years he was the literary critic for the New Criterion, and for four years he was the film critic of the American Spectator.

But after disputes with his editors about gay issues, he no longer writes for either publication. He describes his departure from the American Spectator in this book. The New Criterion blowup occurred afterward.

What did he think was going to happen at those publications? How naive could he have been? Didn’t he notice the anti-gay rhetoric that is part and parcel of the political right? Did he think his editors were just fooling when they published many gay-bashing articles?

Yes, as long as he didn’t write about gay topics, the editors let him write what he wanted to. But when he brought up homosexuality, he got into trouble.

At least conservatives tell you in advance what’s going to happen. Bawer was forewarned, though he apparently didn’t believe it.

In my life, on the other hand, the only overt discrimination that I have experienced has been at the hands of good liberals, people who said all of the right things but didn’t mean them. If you are a gay person in the straight professional world, sooner or later there is going to be a crunch, and in the crunch, you will lose. A faggot,after all, is a gay gentleman who just left the room.

So perhaps Bawer’s dream that gays will gain a place with the grown-ups at the big table is far from being realized. Still, it’s undeniable that progress has been made precisely by the activist gay community that Bawer derides. It put the issue on the map, and it has made important advances, which Bawer does not recognize.

Every despised (and oppressed) minority goes through a similar evolution. In the early stages, the group is seen monolithically, both by its members and by the outside world.

In part, this group identity provides necessary psychological and physical protection. Violence is not irrelevant. You can be murdered for being gay--or for being a woman, or for being black. Even if you are not murdered (most gays aren’t), you can certainly be harmed (virtually all gays are).

But as the group gains a foothold and political power, as gays have, its identity can become increasingly transparent, both outside and inside. Gradually, the world can see that the group’s individuals have many differences, and individuals who want to shed the group identity can do so.

In the process, however, they should not forget those who were out there in the beginning. Activist gay politics created the space that made possible both Bawer’s book and this review. Neither could have been written 20 years ago.