I have never been able to fully grasp the hatred and terror that certain whites display toward human beings of other skin colors. Nor have I ever really fathomed the brutishness of so many males toward women. And I am always appalled by the hysteria of deranged straights on the matter of homosexuality.

Sure, I understand - I hope - the economic and social roots of these maladies. The cause lies in the history. Still and all, unreasoning bias continues to astound me, perhaps because nothing in my experience lends any credence to the garbage spewed by bigots.

On the contrary, in 70 crowded years of meeting people, I have found that the differently sexualized are less wedded to the sick popular culture and more attuned to reality. They tend to be respecters of persons and easy collaborators. They warrant your trust, and I trust my life to my lesbian and gay cohorts - at home, at hostile meetings, in dangerous demonstrations and on picket-line eruptions.

I would completely trust my life to them in the Army. And I would run like hell from the queer-bashers and forked-tongued demagogues that this society spawns.

Much can be learned from the tempest over gays in the armed forces - a furor which Bill Clinton's dishonorable compromise will not even begin to quell. The uproar reveals three aspects of the sexual minorities issue that have nothing to do with prejudice and everything to do with establishment politics, military depravity and the pivotal place of the traditional monogamous family in the machinery of capitalism.

Let's Hope Open Gays Endanger "National Security"
The generals argue that their bailiwicks were never designed to be conductors of social change. Indeed not.

The military juggernaut exists to protect the "American way of life," which depends on bitter feuding among workers. What's good for General Motors is very, very bad for non-males, non-whites, non-Christians, non-citizens and other non-conventionals (like my readers). The business of big business is isms - classism, sexism, racism, ageism, heterosexism. And the business of the armed services is defending big business.

Proletarian solidarity is dangerous to officers and orders. And now that blacks and women are entrenched in the ranks, somebody has to remain excluded or inferior or segregated.

What's more, expanded rights tend to make the execrated more uppity. Clinton's new policy won't end the witch-hunts; but if it did, would lesbians and gays then rest content? Even if the military's closets were abolished, would gays emerge quietly? Or would they protest against unjust and unneeded wars? Or maybe demand the right to elect their officers, ˆ la Trotsky's Red Army after the 1917 Russian Revolution?

And what would happen when these newly empowered vets come marching home? The lavender menace that terrifies skittish politicos is a beautifully clear and present danger to Amerika's fraying fabric.

The Military is Sick and Perverted
Gay people aren't the ones with a deviant, illegitimate, immoral lifestyle. The military establishment is the body with the disease, and its name is sexual fascism.

Army culture cements a male bonding based on shared misogyny and race-hate. Basic training relies on humiliating the raw recruit by calling him a pussy or girlie. Platoon spirit is buoyed by chanting jingoistic jingles about the racial/physical traits of the enemy.

Servicemen are indoctrinated to scorn open gays who won't endorse their view of women as hunks of meat, rape objects, and practice toys for sadism. Straight, male GIs are terrified that gay men will treat them the way they themselves treat women. Out lesbians are despised because they refuse to be part of the victim reservoir.

Yes, sexual marauding is intrinsic to the military, part and parcel of its climate of imperialist violence.

But if the institution is so evil, why should gays strive to be in it? Because it is their simple right not to be discriminated against. And because some of those gals and guys are equalitarians who want to be in the trenches beside their working-class sisters and brothers in order to better challenge the Pentagon, not promote it.

Moral pollution exists - in the stance of the war-mongers. And gays are the uncontaminated troops destined to clean out the stables.

Lesbians and Gays are Oppressed Because They Threaten the Fissioning Nuclear Family
It goes like this: The system extracts super-profits from the unpaid or vastly underpaid labor of women. And the patriarchal, male-headed family is the conduit for this rip-off.

A vast superstructure keeps fracturing families mortared together, despite widespread misery and repression in the home. Alternative ways of living are a Bad Influence, especially as practiced by lesbians. So bachelordom is chic, but old maidhood is pathetic, and lesbians are kicked out of the services six to ten times as often as gay men.

Yet the number of lesbians is growing, partly because hetero relations today are so unappetizing. The arrogance and boorishness of typical male egos eventually repels self-respecting women.

Face it, globo-cops: the values of the Victorian hearth are falling into the ashbin of history. Alternate mores are filling the vacuum. Cultural pluralism on the family front is truly, delightfully subversive!

A new day is dawning. The gay community, with a renewed life-energy propelled by AIDS and the specter of death, is politicized and afire.

But this expanded confidence needs all the radical vision and audacity it can muster, because our new Prez is as treacherous on civil rights as he is on the economy, stupid. Austerity and dashed hopes will be the sole rewards for his misguided supporters.

The message for kabor and all civil-rights and civil-liberties movements: insidt on gay rights now. Forge a united front against the homophobes, protest compromises and stalls and the "practical-politics" betrayals of "so-called" liberals. And ask not for whom the presidential sellout is being prepared, for the answer is you.

Sexual liberation will never be tolerated by a market, dog-eat-dog, cannibalistic economy. Free love can flourish only in a caste-free and thereby a hate-free community of equal and autonomous humans, who will bypass the nature/nurture niggling and serenely proclaim their affectional choices free of any pressure to vindicate their delicate, personal decisions to anybody.

The only antidote to sexual fascism is socialist democracy. The only road to gay freedom is a universal, across-the-board, non-exploitative family of earthlings. Gay Pride shall ring out when the human race as a whole becomes proud of itself.

The Freedom Socialist is published quarterly in Seattle by the Freedom Socialist Party, a Trotskyist/feminist political organization. One-year subscriptions are $5: write to FS, 5018 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, 98118.