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"A whole lot of things were happening and there wasn't any resistance," according to Sex Panic's Michael Warner, a journalist, editor and professor of English who teaches American literature and queer studies at Rutgers. "Bars and sex clubs were being closed, and increasing numbers of gay men being arrested on the streets of New York under public lewdness charges -- very old-fashioned kinds of intimidation. And there was no community protest. One of the reasons that there's no protest is that the only prominent gay spokesmen are a handful of media celebrity journalists who are, in fact, encouraging this kind of crackdown."

The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life By Michael Warner The Free Press, 229 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Warner didn't need to name names. Of the "celebrities" in question, Larry Kramer, Andrew Sullivan, Gabriel Rotello and Michelangelo Signorile were and are the best-known -- especially Sullivan, whose 1995 "Virtually Normal" urged the complete abandonment of gay identity politics and argued that marriage is "the highest form of human happiness," "a profoundly humanizing, traditionalizing step" and "ultimately the only reform that truly matters" for gay men and lesbians. It was time for gays to grow up, Sullivan wrote, to become "mature" and "responsible," to throw off the mantle of victimhood and join the ranks of the respectably coupled. Let civil rights and hate crimes take care of themselves -- only marriage, with its state stamp of legitimacy and regulatory power, could guarantee "the basic bonds of human affection and commitment that make life worth living."

After the public revelation of his HIV diagnosis, Sullivan turned his philosophical guns increasingly against the gay community itself, denouncing the cult of hedonism, "circuit parties" and casual sex among gay men as "a desperate and failed search for some kind of intimacy, a pale imitation of a deeper longing that most of us inwardly aspire to and deserve." Those who don't desire it, by implication, don't "deserve" it, either.

What began as a demand for inclusion, however sentimental, quickly turned into a morality crusade. In 1997, both the movement for gay marriage and Sullivan's politics of "normal" got a boost from developments in the AIDS epidemic and what was said to be a dramatic rise in "barebacking" and public sex following the advent of protease inhibitors and combination therapy for HIV. When they first appeared, the new drugs seemed set to turn AIDS from an automatic death sentence into "a chronic manageable disease," thus increasing the risk of unsafe sex among a gay population liberated from terror and gloom for the first time in nearly two decades. Just when the future had begun to look bright, the doomsayers cried, gay men had reverted to their bad old ways, boinking like rabbits in a perilous retreat to "multipartnerism."

In "Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men," Gabriel Rotello argued that existing HIV prevention efforts were inadequate and that the epidemic would never disappear so long as a "core group" of male homosexuals continued to practice unsafe sex. Rotello called for a community rather than a personal response to the problem, with an emphasis on monogamy and the peril of multiple partners. "Marriage," he wrote, more honestly than most, "would provide status to those who married and implicitly penalize those who did not." What would happen to the losers after that Rotello did not say. Sex Panic was founded in direct response to his supposedly mathematical analysis of AIDS epidemiology. Its inaugural flyers set the tone of the counter-attack: "DANGER! ASSAULT! TURDZ!" The "turdz" were Sullivan, Rotello et al.

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