Sep 23, 2005  |  By: CHRIS CRAIN  | COMMENTS     

TO READ THE letters and e-mails to this newspaper in response to a few opinion columns by Jeff Gannon, you would think he represents a grave threat to the achievement of equality for gay Americans.

In fact, many of his loudest critics represent a much more serious obstacle to the success of the gay rights movement.

Gannon, of course, made headlines earlier this year after a softball question he asked President Bush at a press briefing led members of the White House press corps to do some digging into his background. They discovered that Gannon’s legal name was Jim Guckert and the media outfit he represented, Talon News, was owned by a wealthy Bush backer and published reports severely slanted in the president’s favor.

Then things got really interesting, when liberal gay blogger John Aravosis got a tip that before entering journalism, Gannon had advertised online as a gay male escort. Gannon largely evaded questions about the claim, suggesting he merely owned the sites or provided web consultation services.

Gannon also avoided questions about his sexual orientation, leading this newspaper to report in February that he attended a gay sex party in Virginia. A week later, we apologized for the story, saying that while accurate, we had unnecessarily reported on private details of Gannon’s life that were not critical to the story.

Since then, Gannon has become a target celébre for liberal bloggers, one of a handful of shorthand symbols they use for all they see wrong with George W. Bush’s America.

So it came as a surprise to many readers when the same Jeff Gannon showed up on the opinion pages of this gay newspaper and its affiliated publications, arguing in his debut column that liberal gay bloggers were too far on the fringe of American politics, dragging down the rest of the gay rights movement with them.

THE OBJECTIONS TO Gannon’s column came pouring in, mostly encouraged by Aravosis and others who were the target of Gannon’s first column and have long been his chief critics. Some readers disagreed with the substance of Gannon’s views, but most unleashed more anger at the messenger than the message.

The flurry of e-mails called Gannon every name in the book along with a few brand new entries. Predictably, many of the attacks were colorful if obscene references to the gay escort site. Others took aim at this newspaper and its editors, questioning whether we had taken leave of our senses or were merely stooping our standards to garner attention.

One particularly angry reader asked rhetorically if he could expect to pick up the following week’s paper to read an opinion column by an “ex-gay” explaining the way out of homosexuality. “I wish!” was my reply.

The job of any good opinion section is to challenge readers, not just preach to the choir. For that reason, our Forum pages are open to anyone, gay and non-gay, whether or not they support the goals of the gay rights movement.

But Jeff Gannon doesn’t represent that sort of challenge. He doesn’t oppose gay equality. In fact, he confirmed just this week that he is bisexual. Even still, he is very clearly a conservative who supports the policies of the Bush administration, and that plus his headline-grabbing past has been more than enough to enrage some gay liberals.

LET’S SAY, FOR the sake of argument, that the role played by newspapers isn’t enough to justify publication of provocative views by someone as controversial as Jeff Gannon. Let’s say that this man, or his opinions, somehow deserve to be excluded from this “tolerance” about which we all preach so much.

Then remember this: We gay Americans do not have the luxury of intolerance. When it comes to minorities, we are remarkably minor. Kinsey was nice enough to propagate the 10 percent myth, but subsequent surveys place us at even smaller numbers, well under half that amount. And about one-quarter of us — of us! — voted for the election and the re-election of George W. Bush.

If we cannot tolerate the viewpoint of someone who tries to explain why one-quarter of us like and support the president, then how can we expect the 96 percent of Americans who are heterosexual to listen seriously to our demands for equality?

The growing polarization of American politics has taken root within gay America as well. The explosion of liberal gay bloggers, many of whom spend about as much time on the “gray” of most issues as Rush Limbaugh and his “dittoheads,” has only exacerbated the proud queer tradition of disdain for gay Republicans ...