I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating again and again because it really says it all.  An old high school friend of mine told me once about taking a college course on human sexuality.  The course, he said, included a number of films which you might easily expect to find in an Adult Entertainment store then in a university classroom.  Most of the kids who signed up for that course did so, according to my friend who probably did also, just to see those films. 

What they didn’t bargain for was also having to watch a bunch of sex they didn’t much like.  In addition to the hot young babes there was also footage of folks old enough to be their own parents having sex.  This was after all, a course on human sexuality, not pornography.  My friend said the sections on geriatric sex generally grossed out the audience.  But not as much as the section on gay male sex.  But it wasn’t just watching two guys having sex specifically, that bothered the audience.  Some of them.

Which was what my friend was telling me about, in wide eyed wonder, since he was one of the few heterosexuals I knew back then who were really and truly unfazed by my sexual orientation.  We were all in college then and I was in the process of slowly coming out to my friends, one at a time.  He was one of the first I’d come out to and that afternoon he was telling me in wonder about his human sexuality class and the gay sex film they’d seen.  I remember it well, because in retrospect it was one of those rare moments where I could actually see someone getting it.  He said when the gay male sex scenes came on screen, the ignorant jock types in the class burst out laughing and mocked the couple.  But then images of them being affectionate with each other came on screen and the atmosphere changed.  Those scenes completely offended the jocks he said…far more, far, Far more, then watching them have sex did.

That was 1973 or ’74 as I remember it.  Back in those days if you wanted to watch pornography you either got some grainy 8mm stag films from some shady character or you went to an X-rated movie somewhere in the really bad part of town (or Viers Mill Road across from the Zayres if you lived in Rockville, Maryland…).  Nowadays you download it off the Internet and teens as young as 13 are way more sexually confidant and secure then my generation ever was.  The cultural scolds are bellyaching that the nation is swimming in sexually charged images and that it’s dragging our morals into the gutter.  But notice that one of their biggest bugaboos, their deepest fear, their prime target in the culture war isn’t the proliferation of pornography…it’s same-sex marriage.  This, this above all else, is their evidence that the culture is sinking into a bottomless pit: homosexuals couples are getting married. 

Try this experiment.  Open a gay bath house somewhere in the Bible Belt, and nearby, open a same-sex wedding chapel, and see which one gets the most protests.  Trust me it won’t even be close.  It will be as though the bath house isn’t even there, as long as the chapel is.

The lightning rod, the flash point in homophobic bigotry has always been same-sex love, not same-sex sex.  It isn’t that we have sex that bothers the bigots.  If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard that "I don’t care what you people do in the privacy of your bedrooms…" bullshit I’d be rich.  It’s when we Flaunt It that they start screaming about militant homosexuals.  And what, exactly, is flaunting it?  Well I can tell you what it isn’t: having sex. 

The tectonics of attitude are shifting in subtle ways that are geographic, psychic and also generational, suggested Katherine M. Franke, a lesbian who teaches law and is a director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University. “I’ve been attacked on the street and called all sorts of names” for kissing a female partner in public, Professor Franke said. “The reception our affection used to generate was violence and hatred,” she added. “What I’ve found in the last five years is that my girlfriend and I get smiles from straight couples, especially younger people. Now there’s almost this aggressive sense of ‘Let me tell you how terrific we think that is.’ ”

Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.

-The New York Times, February 18, 2007 – A Kiss Too Far

That Times article begins with a story about how a candy commercial featuring an accidental same-sex kiss generated enough controversy that it had to be withdrawn.  The article noted that the incident, "had the inadvertent effect of revealing how a simple display of affection grows in complexity as soon as one considers who gets to demonstrate it in public, and who, very often, does not."

And so it goes.  A same-sex couple is brutally beaten in front of a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona simply for holding hands inside.  So security guards at a fast food joint throw a same-sex couple out for sharing a kiss and then call the police on them.  So a same-sex couple, strolling too close to the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, get handcuffed and arrested for kissing.  That arrest for kissing in front of the Mormon Temple, so soon after it became apparent that Proposition 8 was funded by massive amounts of Mormon money and labor, made headlines all over the world.  The response of the Mormon hierarchy was to smear the kissers with accusations that they were groping each other in public.  Not a shred of evidence exists, apart from Mormon propaganda to support that charge, but look at it for what it says about the thinking here.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…

When they talk about their "deeply held religious beliefs", this is what they mean.  Not the belief in God Almighty.  Not the belief in Christ the redeemer.  Not the belief in the literal truth of the Bible.  This is the deeply held religious belief that they will not suffer doubt in.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  A kiss in public between a same-sex couple isn’t a gesture of affection, it’s a sex act.

In USA Today, the Faith and Reason section recently ran a column titled, When is a kiss not just a kiss? When it’s a gay protest…

One denomination after another is stressed — possibly to a breaking point for some believers — by furious battles over the roles of openly gay people in church life and ministry. Can they be clergy or bishops? Can their relationships be blessed?

And the newest protest symbol by gay activists is a kiss…

But this has always been the battle.  Not to have sex, but to be allowed to love.  The difference between the thugs who beat up Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost in front of the Frasher’s Steak House in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Mormon church, isn’t so much one of degree as clarity of purpose.  It came to this:  When Mormon security guards saw a same-sex couple share a kiss, they had to detain them and call the police.  When that arrest became a headline all over the world, the Mormon church immediately sought to replace the image of a kiss in the public mind with an image of two men groping each other.  You hear the anti-gay warriors say time and again that there is no such thing as a homosexual, there is only homosexual behavior.  But look at their attitudes toward marriage generally.  Men are the God ordained head of the household.  Women must submit gracefully to their husbands.  Their union isn’t validated by their joy in one another, but by the blessing of the church.  It isn’t something that exists for its own sake, but to further God’s plan for humanity.  It is not simply that there can be no homosexuals.  There is no such thing as love.  There is only authority.  There is only power.  And a kiss embodies everything that power hates and wants to exterminate from the human spirit.