As a strong advocate of both free speech and reproductive choice, I found this case equally difficult to embrace or reject. The jury considered as evidence only a few specific instances of speech:

A poster listing the “Dirty Dozen,” doctors listed as “guilty” of “crimes against humanity” for performing abortions, along with their photographs, names and personal information. A “Wanted” poster with the name, address and photograph of a doctor who provides abortions. And a Web site called the Nuremberg Files.

The Files has several parts. Photographs of bloody fetuses and fetal body parts. A plea that readers “help collect evidence” for “dossiers” on abortion providers and supporters — such as photographs and “personal data” of all kinds, including license plate numbers, fingerprints and the names and ages of children. (This evidence, says the site, can be used for future trials against abortionists and for protest work now, such as “revealing to neighbors and colleagues” what the abortionist does.) Readers are exhorted to “Call Your Local Abortion Mill and Ask For Names, etc. Visit the Baby Butcher Shop and Take Pictures (Exercise Creative License).” There are also “especially weird and ghastly abortion horror stories in an evergrowing hall of horror stories.” And there is a list: the names of hundreds of doctors, nurses, judges, politicians, police officers, their spouses and other “blood flunkies” who have helped to provide abortions or protected clinics throughout the United States.

The posters and Web site are inflammatory and in many ways harmful. But as a longtime defender of broad protections for speech and expression, I don’t think it’s useful to claim that speech isn’t harmful. We who work with words, in fact, quite want our speech to be powerful and even dangerous, if only to the status quo or conventional wisdom. We want our words to be so strong they move our readers to new ideas — even to new acts.

The standard free speech motto is that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech.” Under such a banner, the speech I find most hateful of all is that which I must most vigorously defend, and it wasn’t very long ago that statements supporting a women’s right to choose abortion were as reviled as pro-choice people now revile anti-abortion words. To claim that opinions and even dire insults are threatening strikes me as a very dangerous approach to public discourse.

However, I didn’t observe Planned Parenthood vs. American Coalition purely from a free-speech point of view. I’ve written in the national media about my pro-choice beliefs for years — an action that alone would be enough to put my name on the Nuremberg Files. And I used to be an abortion provider, a nurse in a clinic here in Portland that did little else but abortions — thousands of them annually. We did a lot of first-trimester abortions, a fair number of second-trimester abortions and a small but steady number of late-term abortions sliding close to the delicate and controversial line between the second and third trimester.

The plaintiffs claimed, and the jury found, that the posters and Web site were, in fact, explicitly threatening in the current climate of anti-abortion violence and murder, and that “reasonable” people would know this. There is no uniform, national standard for what constitutes a “threat” — the Supreme Court has never dealt with this question, and so various jurisdictions have developed their own definitions. The 9th Circuit Court, where this lawsuit was heard, holds that a “true” threat is made if a “reasonable” person should have known that the listener or audience would perceive the words as a threat.

- – - – - – - – - -

Clearly many people have taken these words seriously. As soon as
the “Deadly Dozen” poster was released in 1995, the FBI contacted the doctors on the list and told them to seek protection. Two Florida doctors who were featured on the posters, John Britton and David Gunn, were subsequently murdered. (Gunn’s son is now on the Nuremberg Files list.) As one lawyer for the plaintiffs, Maria Vullo, said in her closing argument, a pattern has been created: “Poster. Murder. Poster. Murder. Poster. Murder.” After Dr. Barnett Slepian was killed in Buffalo last fall, his name was slashed through on the list, along with the names of other abortion providers who have been murdered. The names of people who have been wounded are shaded in gray. A photograph of Dr. Warren Hern, one of the plaintiffs, is currently on the Nuremburg Files site under the heading “Third Trimester Butcher,” followed by the address and telephone number of his
clinic in Boulder, Colo., and the line, “You might want to share your point
of view with this ‘doctor.’”

In November 1998, after
Slepian’s death, a federal task force of ATF and FBI agents, U.S.
marshals and local police was formed to focus on anti-abortion activity in
New York state. Dr. Robert Crist and Dr. James Newhall, two of the
plaintiffs, testified that they felt directly and personally threatened with
violence by the words of the defendants. Newhall said the FBI suggested he
wear a protective vest and have 24-hour protection, and he wore the vest even
while testifying.

The federal government has tried for years, and failed, to make a
criminal case out of the evidence used in this trial. There were no clear precedents here. This was apparently the first
case in any court in which language that was not expressly and directly threatening was being called an illegal threat based on a social context. That there were no direct threats was not in contention. The words in question contained only the shadow and suggestion of violence along their edges — only a vague image of retribution and the hint of seething rage in the speakers. In and of itself, this is protected speech. Lawyers observing the case agreed that the onus was on the plaintiffs to make a convincing case, precisely because the words in question are so unpopular. The question of context was essential.

In a 1969 lawsuit, Watts vs. United States, a war protester who had
been arrested for threatening the president won on the issue of social context.
The defendant had said, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I
want to get in my sights is LBJ.” The court held that his words, spoken
during an anti-war protest, were protected political speech. Context has been
used in other cases as well to prove that hateful and dramatic words are in
fact rhetoric, spoken in a context of drama or debate, and therefore not
“true” threats.

In legal terms, words are not solid objects or unchanging
qualities, but malleable and relative. Crying “fire” in a parking lot is not the same as crying “fire” in a crowded theater. In Planned Parenthood vs. American Coalition, for the first time, the context was being drawn to prove the opposite of what it has been used for in the past — not that dramatic speech is merely rhetoric, but that in certain climates, it cannot be. In a world where doctors on wanted posters are murdered, wanted posters become something more than words.

Some scholars hold that political speech must in some way be
politically “effective” to be so defined. Is there “political” power in listing home addresses and the ages of a person’s children? “You don’t really have a
debate if one side bullies the other side,” says Ashbel Green of the
Oregonian, one of the only reporters to attend the entire trial. Political
speech is, at least casually, defined as that which evokes response, debate
and dialogue from one’s opponents. Speech that effectively silences debate
by creating fear doesn’t fit this definition. But there is danger here, too —
just as I hesitate to allow anyone else to define “politics” for me, I
hesitate to allow others to define “effective.” These are evolving and
complex qualities best left as broad as possible.

Michael Simon, the ACLU lawyer who filed the friend-of-the-court
brief in this case, told me, “The critical issue in this case is to remove violence and the threat of violence from the abortion debate, but to do it in such a way as not to compromise free speech.”

- – - – - – - – - -

“If I was an abortionist, I would be afraid.” So said Andrew
Burnett, one of the defendants, on the stand. Burnett helped circulate the posters. He cried during his testimony, passionate in his belief that abortion is the cold-blooded murder of babies, and that in the face of such a crime a person could be morally justified in killing an abortion provider. But Burnett himself has not committed murder, and other defendants stated that they had signed pledges of nonviolence. Michael Bray, another defendant, is the author of a book called “A Time to Kill,” which defends the killing of abortion providers as justifiable homicide. But he hasn’t killed anyone himself. The defendants argued throughout this trial that their words are simply words, protected expressions of opinion and clearly allowed under the First Amendment. They have not threatened individuals, have offered no rewards, incited no individuals to act against the law.

There were small as well as broad legal questions being argued here,
and in this space I can only present the broadest. Facing the six plaintiffs were 13 defendants — 12 individuals and the American Coalition of Life Activists, a splinter group of the more mainstream anti-abortion movement. (Andrew Burnett also represented the Advocates for Life Ministries organization.) Even the central legal questions are labyrinthine, since the plaintiffs used FACE, the Free Access to Clinics law, which bars activists from inciting violence against abortion doctors and patients, and RICO, the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, which prohibits various kinds of conspiracies and extortion.

The creator of the Nuremberg Files Web site, Otis O’Neal Horsley
Jr., was not even a defendant, partly because the suit was filed in 1995. The Web site didn’t appear until 1996, even if much of its content was provided by the defendants, a fact still in dispute. In one of its stranger moments, the
trial used Horsley, instead, as a witness — for the defense, as he willingly
took full responsibility for the evidence in question.

The plaintiffs tried to include a bumper sticker that read “Execute
Murderers/Abortionists,” but the ACLU argued against this as an expression of
“abstract advocacy,” and the judge agreed. Since then, the ACLU has filed a
brief supporting portions of each side of the lawsuit. “We believe the
plaintiffs have the right to go to the jury,” says the ACLU’s Simon. “But we
would put a very, very high bar for the plaintiffs to recover. We do believe
there is a way to balance” the sometimes conflicting values of free speech and
freedom from the fear of violence.

The ACLU’s biggest objection was specifically at the 9th Circuit
Court’s test for a threat, since it doesn’t require the defendant to have clearly intended to threaten a person. In that definition, the speaker need not have meant to threaten, only to have known that the listener could interpret words that way. This, according to Simon, is clearly chilling to speech. “The speaker might have to worry” about his or her words to the extent that his “right to speak” might be intimidated. In its brief, the ACLU asked the court to apply a stricter standard, one in use in the 2nd Circuit Court, which requires “unequivocal, unconditional, immediate and specific” words that express a “gravity of purpose and imminent prospect” of violence.

More than one observer has noted the similarities to a previous
civil action here in Portland, in which white supremacist Tom Metzger lost a huge judgment to the family of Mulegeta Suraw, an Ethiopian man murdered by several of Metzger’s protégés. But there are actually few similarities. The court in
that case held that Metzger’s words and writings directly incited the murderers to act. Incitement goes to the criminal — threats to the victim.
The Planned Parenthood case didn’t claim that the defendants encouraged an
individual to commit a crime; rather, it claimed the intent was to terrorize
the plaintiffs with the possibility of a crime.

The trial (which continued through the recent 26th anniversary of
Roe vs. Wade) took place curiously outside of common debate. No cameras were
allowed in federal courts, and Judge Robert Jones put gag orders on everyone
concerned: plaintiffs, defendants and their lawyers. There were no
television snippets on the evening news, no press conferences. The eight
jurors are still unnamed, identified only by numbers. But it was still an
acrimonious event, full of objections and judicial scolding. One observer described it as “just a blood fight in the 25th round, an ugly fight.”

A friend of mine likes to say, “Rights divide, responsibilities
connect.” He believes the protection of individual rights sometimes goes too far, inviting
damaging divisions between people. He sees this trial as an example of that,
of speech that is clearly dangerous to society and shouldn’t enjoy any kind of
protection. Buried in these feelings is his belief in human goodness, his
hope that we will, in the end, find a way to be kind to each other. I want to
embrace this hope, but I wonder if it isn’t nearly as dangerous as hateful speech — dangerously naive. Questions of free speech always return to the central
issue of who should decide, who will define our words: What will we
consider kind? Good? Helpful? Harmful? Whose choices will prevail?

I have spent many years trying to see the world through the eyes of
anti-choice protesters, to continually remind myself that in their world, I am
dangerous, I am a killer, and they are as outraged by my acts as I am when I
read of Rwanda, Kosovo, Auschwitz. I believe in direct action and civil
disobedience in some cases, when legal avenues are exhausted. I consider
such acts to be ones of last resort, but sometimes forced upon those who would
stop harm when the government will not. This is not an attitude similar to
anti-abortion radicalism — it is, in its foundation, exactly the same. I may
think their speech is cruel and hateful and mine is compassionate and kind,
but they think the same of me.

Defendant Michael Bray said recently, facing down this suit, “If you are
blocked of
public protests, then people are left saying, ‘What are we going to do?’” He
made the point that any restriction on speech narrows the outlets for opinion
and expression, and can create a motive for action instead of words. He made his
position clear: “It leaves only one option: the covert use of force —
vandalism, blowing up places and terminating doctors.” While I find Bray’s
point sympathetic in the abstract, I believe he meant this comment itself to
be threatening to all who listen. And he didn’t discuss the inarguable fact
that force — including vandalism, including “termination” — is already being
used to try and stop abortion.

Joan Bertin, director of the National Coalition Against Censorship,
told me that she’d hesitated to visit the Nuremberg Files Web site. But when she did, she decided everyone should see it. “My first thought was that these people are completely nuts,” she said. “The more people see it, the more will know how completely kooky it is.” The best cure, to Bertin, is always going to be more — more people seeing the words and pictures in question, more people
talking about it. More words, more speech — not less.

One of the central ironies is that it has been getting steadily more
difficult to obtain an abortion, even as it’s become harder to protest
abortion. Pro-choice people feel we’ve seen the right to reproductive choice
steadily erode away and access to even early-term abortion become increasingly
difficult. But anti-choice people feel driven to violence because all their
efforts haven’t stopped abortion. “Both sides have lost their support,” said
Ashbel Green, “and the people left are the most passionate and the most
lonely.”

At the end of the trial, the judge gave the jury 49 pages of instructions,
almost a third of them devoted to RICO. He instructed the jury to apply the easier 9th Circuit test and determine if the words formed a threat in the current climate, even if the defendants had not intended them to be threats. Michael Simon of the ACLU was openly disappointed in the judge’s choice to use this looser standard.

Green reminded me that the First Amendment has been broadly interpreted only in recent years, and that this trial may be a mark of the limit of that trend. “In some ways you could see this as another way that the freedoms of the ’60s are being revalued,” he said. Believing in the concept of free speech no matter what it looks like is a lot easier in theory than in practice.

Throughout this trial, I’ve resisted the plaintiffs’ arguments even
while I embraced their courage and supported (financially as well as politically) their work. I have found myself reluctantly agreeing with our local newspaper’s conservative columnist, who said that defining threats entirely by how they are heard is dangerous. If we can be sued not for our words but for how they are understood, the possibility of political silence is real for all of us.

Then I went to the Nuremburg Files, searching for familiar names,
and found them — the names and personal details of doctors, nurses and other pro-choice advocates I know. The Files, its advocates hope, will become “an exhaustive listing of every Abortionist presently plying their bloody trade in the USA.”
I looked for my own name, and I felt both relief and disappointment when I
found it was not there. I imagined my face, address, telephone number, the
names of my children, on a poster calling me guilty of crimes against
humanity; imagined my name next to the crossed-off name of a dead doctor on
the list. And it was my shaky relief that finally swayed me; I realized with
a jolt exactly how Dr. Hern and Dr. Crist and others have felt when they saw
their face under the “Wanted” signs. I’ve come to believe these are truly
threats, that it is too late, too terribly late in the abortion debate to use
these tactics anymore. I believe that at least some of the defendants had
every intention of threatening the plaintiffs. But I’m not sure this case has
been good for anyone.

The techniques used are not the height of sophistication; in Exodus
workshops, gay men are encouraged to play sports and gay women to wear makeup.
At least some of the converters don’t really expect prayer, therapy and makeup
to work for everyone. They don’t all claim to end homosexual attraction or
create heterosexual attraction; the most many hope for is an end to homosexual
activity. Their “patients” are simply sentenced to abstinence and frustration,
and conservative politicians can point to the vast minority of people involved
as “proof” that being gay is choice, not chance.

I first had sex with a man when I was 16. But I wasn’t heterosexual — I
was still attracted to women. Mad about them, actually. I first had sex
with a woman when I was 18. But I didn’t come out of the closet,
hurrah! I thought about it, anguished about it. But the terrible fact was
that I was still attracted to men. I was just a mess, loving men and women
both, and so I spent about 10 years wondering what the hell was wrong with
me.

One word: bisexual.

No one, bisexuals included, loves the word. It sounds divisive when it means
inclusive. It has a laboratory ring to it. What it means to me and to the many
bisexual people I know is simply the ability to find emotional and sexual
satisfaction in people of both genders. This broadly based sexuality, one
enjoying but not bound by gender, explains much.

I do, in fact, believe it’s possible for a person to spend years in sexual
relations with people of one gender and then find true happiness in the
other. What I find sad is how many times people feel they need to either repudiate the past or deny the present. Whether a woman who considers herself a lesbian but occasionally sleeps with a man continues to call herself a lesbian, or a long-married woman still in love with her husband finds herself also in love with her best friend and then thinks she has to call herself a lesbian is
something of the same thing. Closets are closets no matter what they’re
called.

The mainstream media lately has accepted and used the phrase “converted gays” as if it were a statement of fact. Newsweek devoted a recent cover story
to the conversion movement without using the word “bisexual” once. I believe
it is bisexuality that allows any so-called conversion — or recruiting — to
take place, because what is happening is only the awakening of something
dormant in many people.

I’m not one of those obnoxious people who go around saying, “Everyone’s
bisexual,” either. I think most people are actually mostly heterosexual, and
some portion of the population is exclusively so. I also think a significant
percentage of people are mostly homosexual and a portion of them exclusively
so. It’s the mostly that interests me, because within that lies the
possibility of surprise and change and something not at all like conversion.

I suspect there is a genetic template of sexual orientation made unique by
environmental details. People don’t change their sexuality. Sexuality just
changes, period. Sometimes in big ways; more often in small, slow ways,
throughout each person’s life. But stark change is rare.

I am concerned with the sudden visibility of the conversion movement because
I think homophobia should interest everyone. But I’m especially concerned
that the response of the gay community not be one of increasing rigidity
inside itself. Misunderstanding isn’t the special province of the
conservatives and the converters. The gay community sometimes acts a little
like the “reparative therapists” in its insistence that sexual orientation is
defined at birth and we are all sentenced to one side or the other of a fence
too high to climb. In that worldview, there is nothing in between; in-between does not exist. On one side of this fence, your sexual and
psychological intimacies are met by people of one gender, and on the other
side, those same intimacies are met by people of the other gender. All or
nothing.

Many gay activists see any talk of bisexuality as diluting the coherence of
the community, particularly damaging in a time of attack. James Collard,
editor of OUT, recently tried to start a discussion of what he calls “post-gay” sensibility — a community identity not based entirely in sexual
orientation — and was met with anger. We have met the enemy, and it could be
us if we’re not careful.

Others simply don’t believe in bisexuality, seeing through the lens of their
own difficult coming-out experience. To those who’ve claimed their own
sexuality the hard way, bisexuality sometimes looks like internalized
homophobia, confusion, shame — or sexual opportunism. Bisexuals hear the
same things from straights and gays, friends, lovers and perfect strangers:
You can’t be both. You can’t be neither. You just haven’t faced the truth.
You’re secretly wishing for A or B. Insert gay, insert straight, and it
comes out the same — something essential is denied.

The conversion movement claims to be big and growing bigger, but Exodus
International (why does that name sound so much like a swinging singles club
to me?) has had to close 13 chapters because the directors returned to
their gay “lifestyles.” Two of the founders of Exodus — men who had left
homosexual relationships, married and had children — fell in love with each
other. And yes, they ran away together and seem to be living happily ever
after.

It is normal to me to have a flowing and unpredictable sexual orientation, although in my case it hasn’t been entirely unpredictable — there are patterns of who and when and
how I am attracted to people, of who populates my dreams, and there are patterns
in what I’ve chosen to do and not to do about those patterns. But my
experience of attraction is nothing like a fence between opposing camps. My
sexual self feels more like a winding river, going only vaguely in one
direction, with gentle curves here and there, fast water and slow, occasional
storms.

I have often wished to be another way, to “convert” fully and completely into a person whose community would be obvious — and welcoming. But there is
something wonderful in this, too. The only limit is how tiny the word “bi”
sounds, as though I lived in a world of two and not billions. What I live in
is a world where sexual attraction can surprise me in the middle of doing the
laundry, where I have discovered myself drawn to a person who didn’t meet a
single one of the multiple criteria by which I had previously judged partners,
where sexual attraction can disappear without notice and reappear where it is
least expected, where in the course of the many decades of my life I have come
to expect a library of possibility. I don’t know where the converters would
even begin.

Three chubby girls with identical black hair and ill-fitting swimsuits are playing Double Dare in the shallow end.

“Dare, or Double Dare?” the biggest girl says to the smallest.

The smaller girl flips her heavy, wet hair. “Double dare,” she says, without hesitation.

“I dare you to stand on your head under water.”

“Eeeaaasssy,” drawls the girl, jumping in and flipping over.

A heavy, self-conscious woman bobs in the deep end, watching the dark-haired girls.

Nearby, a pair of prepubescent sisters compete for the attention of an older boy. Their swimsuits bag on their attenuated bodies as they shriek and call; the boy, his bony chest puffed out like a mating frog’s, takes turns flinging them away from him so they can splash and scream.

A slim Japanese woman in a black tank suit silently leads her timid little boy down the steps.

And weaving through, as fluid and oblivious as the water, slide two teens.

The girl is blooming, about 15 years old, unblemished. Her shoulder-length brown hair is pulled back and clings to her small head like a cap. The boy is a bit older, perhaps, gawky and thin, and his shoulder-length brown hair is disheveled and loose around his long neck. In the tiny pool, in the noisy L.A. haze, they fold themselves together like gliding swans. He holds her for a moment like a man carrying a child, or a bride; then she turns slowly and wraps her arms around his neck. He comes in close to her ear and whispers, she turns her back to his chest and leans her glistening head on his shoulder. He pushes off the bottom and they float backward to the pool’s edge and pause against the deck, beside each other. He turns and she lays herself on his back and he slides forward; she ducks out of his reach for a second and he stretches after her, she laughs and rolls back to him, they bounce gently face to face, murmuring.

This goes on for a long time.

I read my book, drink my soda. And all the time, I watch. People slowly, sleepily come and go. The dark-haired girls are called away. The boy demonstrates his skateboard to the sisters. A young man arrives with fresh towels. Trucks rumble by. The boy and girl slither through the water together without a thought, seamlessly drifting between the changing swimmers. I watch from behind my sunglasses, and suddenly she catches me watching and returns my stare, stony, self-contained. The difference between us is simple. I am just another voyeur, dismayed by the distant object of desire. She is not dismayed. She is a universe of Two.

I’ve left behind my 13-year-old daughter, my youngest child. She is young at 13, younger than her own body, interested in books and soccer and her pet turtle. She is still very interested in me, in my position of safety and control between her and the world. She likes to sit behind me when we watch television and mess up my hair and tell me stories that invariably begin, “Guess what?” and eat big, messy bowls of cereal right before going to bed. She misses me terribly when I’m gone, and this time I wrote a note for the kitchen bulletin board to remind her when I’d be back: “Mom, Sunday, 12:30.” If she was here, she’d be winning Double Dare; she’d lie beside me, drinking soda and dripping on her mystery novel in the sun.

But that will end like everything else.

I remember how it feels, their dizzy height of obsession, the centering of the universe around Two. I remember how all else fades like a weakening signal, to a blur, how when you are together, all the world is the world made by Two, and when you are apart, there is only waiting to be together. I remember when love and sex were one thing, as unbroken as this moist ease in the sunlit water. I remember how one falls in love and longs for the body of the other and, longing, believes in love.

And I remember, oh I do remember, that the ghostly adults around you have no idea, because they have never felt like this, and so there is no reason to try to explain.

Many years ago, when my daughter was still toddling around with a ragged bear in her arms, I tried to explain to an old friend how it felt to be her mother. She was my third child and I was still trying to find the words.

My friend had no children, had no interest in children, tolerated mine with poorly disguised impatience. I wanted her to know why they mattered to me.

I pointed to my daughter on the floor beside us, and said, “I’m the giver and taker of the world to her.” I was trying to explain this enormous responsibility, the weight that sometimes feels intolerably large. “I bring good and evil whether I mean to or not. I might as well be God.”

My friend sneered at me. “Well,” she said, “aren’t you special?”

The boy and girl slide through the water. I watch, furtively, and think: Her mother. Somewhere her mother watches them make their smooth way through the water. He pulls her close to him, a large hand claiming her smooth belly. She strokes his cheek. I actually lean forward off my lounge, almost speaking, wanting only to beckon her to the poolside for a moment and whisper, “Be nice to your mother.” But I say nothing at all, and pretend to read.

I see the accelerating future approach. I’ve done this already, after all, with two boys — grieved for the silly 3-year-olds, the gap-toothed 6-year-olds, the willowy 9-year-olds. They’ve died and will never return, and I grieve. She ruffles my hair when we watch television and my back actually arches, like a cat, pushing into her hand, asking for more. She brings goodness to me and makes me fear evil; she gives and takes away the world. There are so many mysteries ahead.

I remember the world fading into the universe made by Two, and I remember how it shatters when that ends — and then, how it begins again, brand new. So much to do, so many mistakes to make for the first time. And what is there to regret? This is how the world goes, this is how it must be. I don’t grieve for her — I grieve for me, sitting by some poolside in a few years, pretending to read so my sunglasses hide my hungry, tearful eyes as she glides by, oblivious.

I haven’t seen my childless friend in many years, but I’ve replayed that conversation again and again in my mind. I hadn’t thought I needed to say to her that it’s terrifying to be God. I thought such a thing goes without saying. The risks are so enormous — the losses so sharp. For years, I’ve wanted to tell her how powerless that power feels. How it is to be a voyeur, subject to the most pleading of desires. I wish my friend were here, and I could say: I dare you to try this. I double dare you.

I run into the poet at a party a few weeks after his session ended, and he is sly and self-satisfied. “They’re going to eat you up,” he says, with enthusiasm. “You’ve gotta get right in their faces,” he adds, getting right in my face, “and show them what’s what.”

So I call the novelist who preceded me, a mild man with a grown daughter and years of classroom experience. “It’s the hardest teaching I’ve ever done,” he tells me. “And I’ll never do it again.”

I’m confident, even in my spring fever. I’ve taught only adults for several years, but I have three teenagers of my own. I’ve been rearing children for almost 20 breathless years, and for much of that time I’ve lived and worked half a block from the big inner-city high school where I’ll teach. It’s a huge campus, a handsome brick complex covering almost two square blocks next to a city park strewn with the teens’ discarded cigarette butts. The campus is “open,” and every day several hundred of the 1,800 students walk by my house on the way to their fast-food lunches and return a short time later, tossing Burger King and McDonald’s wrappers on my lawn. I think I know teenagers and their animal energy — their explosive pleasures, their dark grief, their eternal restlessness, their springs.

The two freshmen classes are full of loud boys and inattentive girls, daring me to interest them. Several set themselves distinctly apart. Anna, heavy and plain, surrounds herself with yards of empty space, crouches behind purple lips and raccoon eyes. Damon is 17, making his third and last attempt to pass freshmen English. He is tall and coolly handsome and self-conscious. “I’ve got a big penis,” he tells me on the first day, when we’re doing introductions.

Most of the freshmen disappear in the crowd. Pairs and trios huddle together in the back. They call me “Yo!”; they blend together, mouths hanging open when I speak.

The sophomores are calm, obedient, tranquil. Whether this is a difference between freshmen and sophomores, or bonehead English and honors, I’m never quite sure. The sophomores worry about my grading system and call me “Ms. Tisdale.” The young men are lanky out of all proportion, taller than me and quick to blush, easy to praise. Josie and Sandra (“that’s Sondra”) have wild hair and long skirts and sit together, self-consciously mature and outspoken. There are dozens of slim, button-nose girls with shoulder-length brown hair and schoolgirl skirts and short-sleeved sweaters. They are all tediously polite.

“The hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,” for me as well as them, and I’m surprised at how difficult it is to stand under fluorescent lights in front of this sea of staring faces all day long, these 110 faces all seemingly called Megan or Tyler or K’Shanti. I’m surprised at how difficult it is for me to see each one separate from the others, to meet each one, to simply remember names in the institutional havoc of high school.

Before I started, the classroom teacher gave me a paper listing the six separate schedules used, and a schedule for the schedules; every day before I walk the half-block here, I have to consult my schedule to find out which schedule we’re on that day. Sometimes there are 48-minute periods, and sometimes there are 31-minute periods. Sometimes there are assemblies or faculty meetings, and sometimes the entire school opens two hours late. I can’t get used to the giant hive’s obeisance to the chaos. It is all so far from the day I keep at home, the long silences and self-determined hours in which I write.

The bells ring and ring, two before and after every class. Bells ring, and the empty halls fill with 1,800 handsome, healthy young people wearing a variety of fashion mistakes, the air thick with sweat, pheromones and a hundred kinds of tension, like some three-dimensional model of chaos theory. They appear, a human tsunami, and disappear a few minutes later. During class, the phone rings. Unspecified “warning” bells ring. Staff walk in and out of the room, other students walk in and out of the room, carrying messages, asking questions. The daily announcement sheet is delivered. Almost every day, a half-dozen students stand suddenly in the midst of a period and grab their packs. “Where are you going?” I ask, and they say, “Field trip,” or “Track meet,” or “Yearbook meeting,” and leave.

The starting bell rings and they are still wandering in, to find their way into the semi-circle rows, chatting, yelling, shoving each other; they put on makeup, draw cartoons, sleep. Every day Jessica spends sixth period patiently scraping the silver lining out of pieces of chewing gum and rubbing it on to her binder cover, filling her mouth with a wad the size of a baby’s fist. When the second bell rings, I walk to the front and they turn mercilessly upon me, like a crowd awaiting the verdict, ready for anything.

My focus for these three weeks is a twisted autobiography, a memoir of their futures, looking back. For the final assignment, I want them to do a short scene from the book they might write when they are old — and it takes days for me to explain this.

First, imagine your future, I tell them on the first day. Any possible future. Outline it. The freshmen stare at me. “How am I supposed to know what’s going to happen?” one pretty girl asks, all innocent stupidity. The sophomores want to know how it will be graded. “What’s an outline?” ask several freshmen. “When’s it due?” ask the sophomores.

I start again. Imagine your future. From where you sit, I tell them, almost anything could happen. Almost anything. You could be rich or poor, happy or sad. You could become an interstellar traveler, a bum, an inventor, a criminal. What might happen that will affect you? Who will enter your life? What will you choose?

Make an outline, I say, drawing a form on the blackboard, my hands sticky with yellow chalk — events on one side and your feelings about them on the other. Think of love, wisdom, terrible mistakes, illness, luck, learning.

“You mean two outlines?” asks a freshman boy.

“Is this legal?” asks a sophomore girl in the next period.

“Legal?” I ask.

“I mean,” she says, “is it legal to write about something we don’t know anything about?”

The next day, a dozen freshmen scratch their heads in bemusement when I mention the outline. “What outline?” goes the chorus — that day, every day that week.

Meanwhile, I have to fill 31 minutes, 42 minutes, 48 minutes, four times a day. We do free writing (“What am I supposed to write about?”) and make lists of people who have influenced them, places they’ve been, things they’ve learned and what people and places and skills might come in the future. Quickly I find another surprise. The boys are wilder writers — less careful of convention, more willing to leap into the new. I start watching the dozens of vaguely familiar girls, who seem to have shaved off all distinguishing characteristics. They are so careful. Careful about their appearance, what they say and how they say it, how they sit, what they write. Even in the five-minute free writes, they are less willing to go out from where they are — to go out there, where you have to go, to write. They are reluctant to show me rough work, imperfect work, anything I might criticize; they are very careful to write down my instructions word by word.

They’re all trying themselves on day by day, hour by hour, I know — already making choices that will last too unfairly long. I’m surprised to find, after a few days, how invigorating it all is. I pace and plead for reaction, for ideas, for words, and gradually we all relax a little and we make progress. The boys crouch in their too-small desks, giant feet sticking out, and the girls perch on the edge, alert like little groundhogs listening for the patter of coyote feet. I begin to like them a lot.

Then the outlines come in. I am startled at the preoccupation with romance and family in many of these imaginary futures. But the distinction between boys and girls is perfectly, painfully stereotypical. The boys also imagine adventure, crime, inventions, drama. One expects war with China, several get rich and lose it all, one invents a time warp, another resurrects Jesus, another is shot by a robber. Their outlines are heavy on action, light on response. A freshman: “I grow populerity and for the rest of my life I’m a million air.” [sic] A sophomore boy in his middle age: “Amazingly, my first attempt at movie-making won all the year’s Oscars. So did the next two. And my band was a HUGE success. It only followed that I run the country.”

Among the girls, in all the dozens and dozens of girls, the preoccupation with marriage and children is almost everything. They are entirely reaction, marked by caution. One after the other writes of falling in love, getting married, having children and giving up — giving up careers, travel, college, sports, private hopes, to save the marriage, take care of the children. The outlines seem to describe with remarkable precision the quietly desperate and disappointed lives many women live today.

One girl writes of her future — and I feel this way, too — “Long awaited depression will fall on me, and I will be ready for it.”

For the second week, while I repeatedly remind them of the chapter they must write and then read out loud, we do exercises. More free writing, more lists. We make a list of childhood playground games, a rousing 20-minute shoutfest, and write scenes about them. We break into small groups. I bring my big box of crayons and a pad of art paper and have them draw maps of a familiar childhood place and try to remember everything that happened there. “More crayons!” they all shout the next day, and so we draw personal symbols of the future where our social security number will be replaced by logos.

I get to know a few students in the changing crowds. Anna turns in every assignment, speaks up in every discussion. Joseph, with his peroxide blonde fade and unreadable neon-orange pen, Joseph who never listens and never shuts up and drives me crazy, seems to genuinely care what I think about his work. Skinny little Hunter, with an opinion on everything, who loves to take the least popular position and start arguments, tells me his parents would be angry if they knew he did something as wasteful as “writing stories.” He sits next to Rebecca, pretty, plump, smart, and they fight constantly. Karen, quiet and self-contained with a perfect silver hoop piercing her left eyebrow, is a strong-minded and clear thinker.

On a quiet Wednesday in the second week, discouraged by the girls’ outlines, I talk to the sophomores about self-censorship. I should have done this earlier, I see now; I thought perhaps they wouldn’t need it yet, the way adults usually do. I thought maybe they wouldn’t understand it — but I was wrong about both things. I make lists on the board about what we’re afraid to write about and who we want to please and suddenly everyone is talking at once, Josie and Hunter and Rebecca and even a few of the Megans, tentatively raising their hands, arguing about censorship and offensiveness and politically correct speech, what is obscene, who decides.

But the next day, the real agenda returns. It is almost time to read the stories. The other writers, they tell me, didn’t make them read. I’m not making them, I reply, only giving higher grades for it. The other writers read their work for them — I won’t. One of the other writers read their work anonymously — I steadfastly refuse.

Instead I buy potato chips and pretzels, jelly beans and red licorice whips and M&Ms and come to class on the first read-out-loud day with overflowing grocery bags. The first reader chooses the first treat, I say, and Isaac surprises me by going first. Isaac is smart, shy, with one crossed eye, and Isaac knocks everyone out with his account of how he fell from grace as world chess champion, became a bum and finally rose to new fame as a Central Park hustler.

After class, four girls stop me and say all at once, “We can’t read!” They can’t read, they say, because Isaac’s story is so good and theirs are so boring and his is full of adventure and theirs is not. They are afraid to read out loud, fearful of being thought stupid or foolish or — what? I ask them. Girlish? Boring, says one Megan. (Which Megan? I can’t remember.) This is a terrible fear, I know — this fear of not being interesting — of being trivial, not special. It is almost as great, I think, as their fear of standing out and being special. I give them a little pep talk, but they aren’t consoled.

After a few days of the bravest students coming to stand in front of the class, showing everyone their personal symbol, reading their stories and then staying put to hear comments, one girl begs me to let her read while sitting at her desk. I list again the reasons why I want her in front: You’ll read better standing up; you need to claim your work; you’ll be more confident in the end. Please, she begs, but I’m tough and say no. Read in front or not at all.

“Slowly, clearly, please,” I say, and one by one they hunch over their papers and read: nervous, sometimes joking, sometimes stiff, smiles plastered on their faces, a few with ripe pimples and big feet, a few blossoming in perfect spring bloom.

And I am surprised again, to tears. There are bad stories, dull stories — and beautiful stories, better than the stories some of my adult students write. I close my eyes and listen to the voices, deep and high, fast and murmured, and sometimes stumbling and thick, and images appear, people in a London flat, a busy airport, autumn leaves skittering across a wet sidewalk, a bitter whispered fight, a sour resignation to mediocrity. The technique seems to leap beyond all they’ve shown me, the maturity beyond their years.

(Later, line-editing the stories, I see the misspellings and incomplete sentences and misshapen construction I fail to hear in my delight at their voices. The freshmen spelling! “This Japanise undeground fighting areana is one of the dingist raggity places I have ever fought in.” And the fatal danger of the sophomores’ dependence on spellcheckers: “I gazed upon a pear of muscular biceps.” “She turned summer salts.” And my favorite: “I raped the package carefully.”)

But the differences remain, more obvious than ever. The boys write about war and fame and money and alien contact. Damon writes about setting a world record in the 100 meters. It’s not a great story, or even a good story. But it has a beginning, middle and end, and he stands in front of the class and reads without laughing. Lots of the boys write about marriage and love and hard choices, too, layered through their scenes of movement and action. The girls write about marriage and love and hard choices and no more. Sandra gives me a technically proficient and strangely passive story about a friend’s pregnancy, and refuses to read. Jocelyn — loud, obnoxious, obscene Jocelyn — writes about her prayer to God to help her get a job. Anna, purple lips and raccoon eyes in place, reads an intensely detailed story about giving birth.

The exceptions occur even inside the rule. Nancy describes murdering her husband’s lover in a gothic tale of madness and imprisonment. Desiree imagines becoming a pro basketball player and, in the end, quits to be with her children so her husband can continue to work for the team. Rebecca is the only girl who writes a story primarily about her own professional accomplishment. She describes running for president, and the entire story revolves around the stress of her campaign being focused on makeup, hair and clothing.

I don’t know what to expect from Cindy. She’s beautiful, delicately featured, slender, with a soft voice. She’s beautiful in the way that makes adults coo and behave weasely. I suspect she’s been stared at and coveted by strangers since her birth. She reads an explicit story about a businesswoman caught in the equation between power, money and sex, leaving the room dead silent. It is too knowing for comfort.

And the best story to come out of all the classes — 110 students — is written by quiet Rose, who is fat and plain and a stutteringly bad reader. It is mature, complex, layered, subtle; there is almost nothing I can write in the margins to make it better, this tale of a compromised marriage to an unfaithful layabout.

Toward the end of the three weeks, I have lunch with a representative from the foundation. She wants to know what could be done to make the girls more “confident.” I rattle on, about girl-only classrooms, giving them room away from the boys, time to talk, permission to question and complain without being afraid of being seen as whiners, complainers, bad girls, tough girls. But I know that all of them, boys and girls both, are still only partly formed, soft as Playdoh. They are like golems — their bodies in full flower and everything else a work-in-progress. I don’t dare say there are essential gender differences here, though I wonder more and more.

“But girls have so many more role models now,” the foundation representative says. She is a petite, elegant, beautiful woman in a black suit, perfectly coifed.

More role models. Which ones, I wonder? An increasingly impossible physical ideal? A clear-cut choice between career and family? They’ve seen their mothers suffer from trying to do both. They know all about the “second shift” of endless work. When I was 15, my role models were burning bras, marching in the street, starting clinics, passing laws and getting arrested. Role models now are selling diet books and making music videos.

The simple fact is, I don’t know. I don’t know how to help them. I know that I have to keep checking my watch during lunch and rush off to make the final bell for sixth period, and that all of these children who are almost grown have spent their entire lives ruled by a clock and the demands of strangers. They have grown up in a fragmented and chaotic place over which they have no control. I know they’ve rarely thought about the possibility of getting out; they don’t see any place to get out to, anywhere to go not ruled by bureaucratic entanglements and someone else’s schedule and somebody else’s plans. If girls are somehow wired toward pliancy, then the helpless role of student in the shadow of the institution is the worst place they can be. If we want to teach them independence, the first thing to do would be to give it to them.

I’m sitting in the hallway at the end of third period, with three girls named Megan and one silent morose boy named Dave, trying to have individual conferences, which is of course impossible. There is simply no time, and no place to go but the hallway floor.

The Megans are all getting A’s, good, competent I-turned-everything-in-on-time A’s. Dave is flunking without apparent remorse, having done nothing, said nothing, for weeks. I tell the stocky, brunet Megan that I want her to read out loud and she says, “It’s so hard to read. I hate to read my stuff. It seems so boring.” And what I can’t tell her is that it is, a little, sincere and earnest and predictable and boring. So I give them another little pep talk about the way women writers have been demeaned for writing about the domestic and how it’s a great subject and great domestic stories have been written by men and women both, but especially by women, and how they’re going to have to cope sooner or later, whether they write or not, with this dismissal of the female realm. And they nod, good students, good girls, silently acquiescing to authority.

Dave sits cross-legged, staring at the floor, in dour sleepy silence. He will never write anything, but I will miss him anyway, this lumbering boy. I will miss them all; I miss them already.

So I say it again: “I’ll be listening to you. I’ll listen.” And what I want to say, long to say, and don’t, is: Dream a little. Oh, my girls, dream.

Then the bell rings again and the human ocean spills into the hallway like breakers in a storm. We scramble up off the floor before we’re trampled by the hurrying sea.

A number of people believe that the artist has a responsibility to uphold a particular value system, to be kind, positive or hopeful, to be gentle. I didn’t pay too much attention to this until I heard a poet I know saying it — an older, foreign-born, lesbian poet, a woman one would expect to have a finely-tuned sense of the shades of meaning and the misuses of words. This woman believes that in a brutal world, writers have a duty to be “nourishing and nurturing.” All over the world women like my friend are beaten, raped, and imprisoned because their sexuality threatens the definition of “nourishing and nurturing” behavior held by people in power. But like a lot of people, she thinks the solution lies in her definition. She has a lot in common with people like Jesse Helms — the problem isn’t in promulgating virtues, but in who gets to define the virtues being promulgated

ome would say there is a duty to make art that says what is rarely said, opens conversations and dialogues that society doesn’t want to have. That art needs to move outward into new territory. This is particularly seductive. It’s related to that voice-of-a-generation thing — the pioneer artist. Yet I can’t imagine saying it is irresponsible to make art that is totally obscure, or apparently meaningless, or art firmly rooted in the status quo.

Ann Powers, in a recent essay in the Village Voice, defends what she terms “violator art” — expression that is purposely disgusting or disturbing. At its best, Powers argues, such work is “truly transgressive,” leading her to “the compelling realization that, past the edge of whatever I don’t want to think about, there’s more.” Powers takes the opposite tack from my poet friend, who believes kind art will lead us to a kind world. Powers argues that we should not be surprised when a brutal and nasty culture gives rise to brutal and nasty expression. If we want polite, kind art we need to make polite, kind social institutions first. There is no guarantee, of course — the most brutal conditions give birth to astounding acts of hope, and the most nourishing of childhoods can create monsters. I would add to Powers’ point that the United States today is the most heterogeneous culture in history, consisting of so many subcultures that conflicts on a daily basis seem inevitable.

To really muddy the waters a little, I would also add that there are irresponsible acts associated with the making of art but which aren’t art themselves. Large-scale sculptures which cause long-lasting damage to a landscape are a good example of this. I wonder if it’s possible to tease the strands of this problem completely out. Something of this attempt at separation goes on when we argue about flag-burning, or graffitti taggers, and it can be one of the knottier problems faced by people defending the First Amendment. But it’s not that knotty. The landscape — including “view” — and natural resources are commonly held things, and should not be subject to massive change by individuals or private corporations. My real point here is that art may be brutal and cruel and it may be kind and nurturing, but that either of these results are best seen as irrelevant or coincidental effects.

What is often meant when people say an artist has a responsibility to do or not do a certain thing is the belief that artists have a responsibility to be and not be certain kinds of people. This is cogently described in Terry Zwigoff’s “Crumb,” a documentary about underground comics artist Robert Crumb.

Zwigoff offers us Crumb’s history, Crumb’s work, and Crumb himself, a little bewildered and bemused. Crumb is genuinely confused by criticisms of his art as misogynistic and racist, but he is just as confused by the art itself. He tells the filmmaker that he doesn’t analyze the work, he merely records it — that he has no idea where it comes from or what it means. His art appears in his life, half blessing and half curse, and he is bewildered by the notion many people have that he somehow should know what it means. The people who complain about his comics are really complaining about him. But he is, and his comics are, what he is and what they are, and the reader can make of it (in fact, must make of it) what the reader will make. And that will depend on the reader.

“Responsibility” and “response” are very closely linked words. Response to art is the responsibility of the audience. The artist is responsible for integrity in the making of art. Integrity in the artist is the willingness to face down one’s own demons, and this must include the demons of social censure and poverty and rejection. Integrity has nothing to do with form or subject but with doing one’s best regardless of what anyone else thinks.

Defenders of the most disturbing and violent art like to make the point that in some convoluted way it’s uplifting. Gangsta rap, shock performance and the like are said to be outlets for repressed rage; slasher films can be deconstructed into suppressed feminist manifestoes, and so on. They may be, but here we are again in that hypnotic territory of “good” and “bad.” If I make a claim that the most apparently reprehensible and upsetting piece of art must be protected because it is, in however obscure a way, “good for us,” I am still arguing that it is “good.” When Ann Powers talks about people learning “how to use the experience of being bothered,” she is essentially arguing that violator art is good for us. This argument is a way of making our comfort zone bigger, of talking ourselves into not being all that disturbed, after all. We should never forget that any argument claiming that any kind of art is “good for us” — or bad for us — relies on my version of what I think is good or bad for you. To believe this, I have to believe that art makes a difference.

I belong to the National Coalition Against Censorship, and just received the recent newsletter, with yet another defense of Huckleberry Finn. The fact that we live in a society where one group of white adults must defend the right of black children to read a novel like “Huck Finn” against the good-hearted censure of another group of white adults should be ironic enough. But the writer pointed out that the censors think “books are dangerous, and they’re not.” Well, excuse me, but of course they are. Writing, stories, literacy and books are a set of the most dangerous weapons known to history. A broadsheet can help change a religion or overturn a government. A book can permanently alter a person’s world view. Books can be damned dangerous and thank God they are; they would be pointless otherwise. All the arguments about the reponsibility of the artist to society are based on this tacit understanding: art counts.

Personally, I think Norman Rockwell is bad for us. He inserts into the collective mind images both seductive and pernicious, images subtly denying my religion, my sexuality, and my moral beliefs. I could make a case for why I should not have to open a magazine and see any Norman Rockwell paintings, why I should be protected from television shows and advertisements and films that promote things I find damaging — things like the nuclear family and the market economy. If we accept the basis for arguments against violator art as they are made by the Religious Right — that is, the government must uphold privately held moral values in the public realm — then we can make the same argument from the left.

In the end it doesn’t matter to me if we’re discussing Norman Rockwell or an entire genre of alienated, nihilistic metalhead rock. If I find Norman Rockwell offensive, that’s my business and not his. If he didn’t mean to offend me, if my offense surprises him, I would hope that interests him. But it doesn’t have to interest him. Norman Rockwell has no responsibility for my comfort level. My comfort level is not only my own business, no one else could possibly be responsible for it. Distaste is one of the most intimate of sensations. The urge to project our distaste on the world around us and demand it be fixed is one of the most damaging of human urges.

I mentioned Ann Powers’ defense of transgressive art. But what is transgressive? Transgression requires the crossing of a border, and it occurs only in response to the art, not in the art. A piece of art I find discomfiting in the extreme may simply bore another person, and vice versa. Transgression, like kindness and politeness, is more an experience of the viewer or reader than it is of the artist. That the artist meant for either to occur is irrelevant. (And artists have frequently been wrong about how their work would be received.) This act of response is the reason we look at art in the first place.

So, no. I don’t think there is such a thing as irresponsible art. And I dearly hope there is no such thing as responsible art. I believe that what we mean by responsibility and what we mean by art occupy two different spheres. As a writer I would say my only responsibility is to write — to cherish the power and limits of language and resist efforts to simplify the meaning of my own words. I have a duty to be a steward of language as much as my own ideas, but not a duty to the reactions of those who read.

Art exists not so much outside social responsibility, but within it — woven through it, through the social fabric, the political reality and the political vision, intermingled in and embroidered upon the daily life of culture in such a way that it can’t be held separate, imprisoned in a cage of changing values.

In Oscar Wilde’s words, “Art never expresses anything but itself.” Art must exist and cannot be contained, because art is that which humans must do. Art simply is.

(Excerpted from a speech given at the Law and Literature Symposium, University of California-Berkeley, October 1, 1995)