THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Steinberg opines that if religious types who say their faith sets them against gays and that all gays are going to perdition '... then why waste your time trying to punish them here?' If you're of the moral sort, why not make their ( short, sinful, painful ) lives as pleasant as possible? 'Why the bottomless need to harass gays here on Earth?'

We have another delicious gay situation in which liberals and conservatives have no idea which side to be on. ( The previous was the meth-dealing gay foster parents. ) Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho and his attempt to have a short-term romance with a vice cop in a Minneapolis airport is responsible for this one. The Chicago Tribune ( Sept. 10 ) says Craig is the villain, not the rather cute officer who caught him in his toe-tapping pick-up act. Other conservatives are screaming at the police for invasion of privacy. The New York Times ( Sept. 10 ) is a little more sympathetic, saying many arrested in similar or worse situations were treated more lightly. Doonesbury, the long-running political cartoon strip in various newspapers, has a hilarious riff on the whole in-the-bathroom scene ( where we get to see inside the stalls—no doubt a first ) . Nobody can figure out if gay public sex in washrooms is disgusting, innocuous, dangerous, obscene, invisible or pro- or anti-personal civil rights. Is it publically private or privately public? And, by the way, gay men over the age of 40 who say they are totally unaware that this ever, ever, ever happened need to come clean ( but probably not in a public lavatory ) .