Sep 23, 2005  |  By: CHRIS CRAIN  | COMMENTS     

(“Nazi Jews”) and the caricature of conservative Christians (“religious right,” “religious political extremists”).

Whatever the public opinion surveys may say about the growing acceptance of gays, we have lost, and lost badly, every ballot measure to date on marriage, and the numbers haven’t improved since Alaska and Hawaii voted on the issue almost a decade ago.

Our activists groups have grown quite fond of talking about the “conversations” we need to have with straight America. Well half of that conversation involves listening, not talking. And if we won’t even listen to the heretical views of our own kind, then how can we be open to one of “them”?

CRITICS WILL UNDOUBTEDLY claim that the issue is Jeff Gannon and not his conservative views or his support for George W. Surely there are better gay conservative spokespersons, they will argue. Except “they,” to date, has not included a single gay conservative; only gay liberals have written in to demand more credible and upstanding right-wingers.

And what’s more, the vitriol that followed Gannon’s columns rings all too familiar to be just about him. In fact, almost a decade in gay media has taught me that Shakespeare had it wrong. Hell hath no fury like a gay liberal crossed.

When Cyd Zeigler, then a journalist with the New York Blade and now author of a blog called “The Dooryard,” dared to praise the legacy of Ronald Reagan, he incurred the same ugly vitriol.

So did Bruce Carroll, who now writes under the nom de blog Gay Patriot, when he argued in these pages that gay activists, not President Bush, started the gay marriage war, and they ought to have waited for more public support before pushing the envelope.

You don’t have to agree with Carroll or Zeigler or Gannon. I didn’t agree with any of them, on any of the subjects they wrote about for our publications. But that’s not the point.

If we can’t hear them out, and others like them, then we are woefully unprepared to make the case for our equality. For that reason, the intolerance of the loudest voices on the gay left is a greater threat to our movement than a few lonely voices on the gay right.