DALE CARPENTER COLUMN:

Excerpts from one of many thought-provoking pieces by Dale, who is a professor of law at University of Minnesota, and whose columns are at independent gay forum, here.

FOR ANYONE who thinks gays should stand irredeemably apart from society--either because we ought to be outcasts or because we ought to be revolutionaries--the past decade must have been a frustrating one. The political causes that most defined our movement in the 1990s sought to weave gays into the larger fabric of American life. We fought to be Boy Scouts, to join the military, to worship God and preach His word, to raise children, and yes, even to marry each other. We wanted to be a part of these traditional institutions, not apart from them. We wanted a place at the table.

No author better crystallized this deep and widespread yearning than Bruce Bawer in his 1993 work, A Place at the Table, the decade's most important book on the gay movement. Containing few wholly original arguments, it nevertheless articulated better than any book before or since gays' rightful place in our culture. Although reasoned and mostly restrained in its rhetoric, the book drew a torrent of criticism that never seemed to rebut its underlying message. And although Bawer advocated no single political agenda, he fueled a self-conscious movement of gay moderates and conservatives that is still redirecting gay politics.

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