When I saw “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” for the first time, my mind raced with questions about the plot. Even as a little child, I understood that there was something morally questionable about a plot that calls for kidnapping young girls and having them serve as wives against their will, beautifully told as it may have been in the musical genre.

Well, last week my sense of unease about this became justified. Turns out that three brothers (or was it only one?— the full truth is yet to be revealed) in Ohio had kidnapped three girls to serve as wives for the past ten years. To make matters worse, none of these alleged kidnappers looked like Howard Keel and it’s very unlikely they can dance to the choreography of Agnes DeMille. And it happened in Cleveland — not the beautifully scenic Northwest, where “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” took place.

Then, this week, the Pentagon admitted to USA Today that a military officer overseeing sexual assault prevention in Fort Hood, Texas, has been relieved of his duties due to allegations of abusive sexual contact and forcing subordinates into prostitution. As it turns out, this was not the first case of an officer in charge of preventing sexual abuse in the military being caught committing the very abuse they are responsible for preventing.

I can think of no greater crime than taking away someone’s freedom and right to choose what to do with their body. Of course, there are those who actually like the abuse. As Zsa Zsa Gabor once said, “There is something about a man who hits you,” in describing her sexual turn-on for men who beat her up. If that’s your scene, I have nothing to say about it. But that is not the case for the majority of victims of sexual abuse and bondage. The Pentagon reports that, in a 2-year study, there have been some 26,000 unreported incidents of sexual assault in the military, and 3,374 cases that were reported. Of those, 25% refused to press charges. Of those who did press charges, only 238 resulted in convictions. Of the convictions, a significant number were overturned by superior officers.

One might think this is an issue related to women in the military. But as it turns out, the majority of cases of total assaults were those where the victim was a man. The vast majority of cases that were not reported or where the victim refused to press charges, were cases involving male on male abuse. Mind you, the majority of these incidents took place before “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” was repealed. So this is neither an issue that has to do with gays in the military. It’s an issue of one human being taking away another human being’s freedom. The high rate of unreported cases and has to do with the stigma faced by a man having been sexually assaulted by another man, and with fear of retribution.

But that doesn’t leave the gay community off the hook. There are plenty of cases of (often older) men who keep harems of young studs who put up with years of abuse because they have found themselves in a place of desperation. Sometimes, these cases are right under our nose. Sometimes, they exist across the street from where we live or work. And it doesn’t have to involve ropes or incarceration. Abuse and bondage is evident even when it is implied that the victim must perform sexual favors in order to keep their job, get a promotion, or stay out of jail. Sexual assault occurs when it is imposed on someone too young to be able to consent. We know about these cases and often joke about them, and we accept them as the norm of being gay.

On last week’s episode of “Mad Men,” Don Draper locks his mistress in a hotel room, taking all her clothes with him. He has new clothes delivered to her. But it’s not for going out. It’s for her to dress and undress exclusively for him. His idea is that she will never leave the hotel. She will exist in the room solely for his pleasure. Finally, the woman understands what is going on and brings the relationship to an end.

Even in the pre-women’s liberation of the early 20th Century Paris, Colette’s characters come to their senses and “Gigi” gets married to the man she loves, rather than live the life of a courtesan. In “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” created in the politically incorrect 1950s, Jane Powell convinces Howard Keel that the brides must be returned to their families. So too, in the gay world, we must change what we now consider to be “acceptable” relationships where one individual is taking advantage of another’s weakness to create state of abuse or bondage against their will.

One of the interesting consequences of that most bloody of all American conflicts that was addressed by the series, and by many of the historians who lent their expertise and knowledge to its production, is the literary and intellectual movement that developed in the Southern states in the years immediately following the Civil War’s 1865 conclusion.

As a movement, the so-called “Lost Cause” had a generally successful impact, over a roughly 80-year period, in reconciling the members of the South’s traditional white society to the military defeat of the Confederacy.

Authors, poets, artists, historians, and other intellectuals who contributed to the Lost Cause portrayed the Confederacy’s secession from the Union as a noble crusade for states’ rights (against a power-hungry federal government backed by industrial and banking interests) and a “lost way of life,” as described by Margaret Mitchell, the author of one of the most enduring examples of Lost Cause literature and its impact on American culture, “Gone With the Wind.”

The movement also portrayed many Confederate leaders—and particularly the well-loved military hero Robert E. Lee—as archetypal examples of chivalry and honor (like knights of old) who were beaten by the Union because of the North’s crushing military might and industrial power, rather than through virtue, personal bravery, or skill.

In Mitchell’s 1936 book, slavery, when it is portrayed at all, is presented (like other so-called “Southern plantation fiction” of that and earlier periods) from the point-of-view and through the values of the slaveholding class, rendering an image of slaves as happy and docile.

The slaves depicted in “Gone With the Wind” are loyal servants, like Mammy, Prissy, and Uncle Peter, who stay on with their masters even after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 set them free.

As can be seen in the 1939 film version of “Gone With the Wind,” adherents to the Lost Cause condemned the Northern-compelled Reconstruction that followed the war, seeing it as a form of cultural genocide devised by vengeful Northern lawmakers and self-serving business interests aimed on destroying the South’s traditional way of life.

In fact, the almost complete opposite was true. Prior to the Civil War, abolitionists, free state and territory supporters, Northern journalists, and independent commentators referred to what was known as the “Slave Power” (or sometimes “Slaveocracy”) to describe the out-sized influence and political power of the slaveholding states and the Southern aristocracy that dominated them.

This cabal of rich cotton and other agricultural planters and their sympathetic allies in Congress (and often the White House) conspired to use unfortunate Constitutional guarantees made by the Founders, along with pro-slavery laws (such as the Fugitive Slave Act), and Supreme Court rulings like the despicable Dred Scott Decision (to say nothing of the largely pro-slavery justices themselves) to force every American to become a co-conspirator in that vile institution.

After the Southern defeat, the myth of the Lost Cause gave former slaveholders and supporters of bigotry a form of cover, plus a chance to revise the history. Thus former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, one of the loudest advocates of the Lost Cause lie, would claim when the war began that slavery was the “cornerstone of the Confederacy,” while after the war he wrote that states’ rights, not slavery, prompted the South to rebel.

In fact, states’ rights was—at best—a secondary concern to the Slave Power, with the pro-slavery states arguing before they seceded that the U.S. Constitution—a federal document—constrained the national government from interfering with slavery in any state. After they seceded, they decided that the new Confederacy’s Constitution would impose a federal prohibition of any state interfering with their federally-protected institution. This speaks volumes to the notion that slavery, and not any peripheral concerns about states’ rights, is what really lay at the heart of their argument, and that of their Lost Cause apologists.

The arguments and ideologies that sustained the Slave Power and the later Lost Cause have strong parallels to those employed by the defenders of so-called traditional marriage. They can rant and rave about the religious antecedents that helped shape society’s idea of what marriage means, but as Rev. Durrell Watkins of Sunshine Cathedral notes in his Q-POINT piece on the following page, the Bible has been used to justify all sorts of things—including slavery, and polygamy—but in the end, the Good Book, like the law, like the history books, and like Supreme Court rulings, was and is written by men.

Let’s hope that homophobia—cloaked in the guise of tradition, religion, conservatism, and that old bugbear, states’ rights—is just another soon-to-be Lost Cause.

“I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, [DOMA] is itself discriminatory. It should be overturned.” Bill Clinton

One of the things I find most regrettable about Modern American Life is that we have such a deep disconnect with our own history. Although the History channel and its kins-networks, A&E, Biography, Discovery, etc., etc. are but a channel click away—to say nothing of, gasp!, books, or as my partner would say “Kindles” (whatever those are)—most of our fellow countrymen don’t have much connection to the Great Moments in Time which have shaped the framing of this still-being-framed (with apologies to the strict constructionist crowd) Picture of What and Who Is America.

Our nation’s Anti-Federalists, Frontier Hunter/Heroes, Mugwumps, Know-Nothings, Free-Soilers, Barnburners, Doughfaces, Copperheads, Fire-Eaters, Scallywags, Bourbon Democrats, Locofocos, and their likewise ash-heaped brethren will likely be remembered (if they are remembered at all) by a small sub-culture of sallow, wine-drinking, tweed-wearing, Metro-sexual types who listen to NPR (or its 22nd Century-equivalent) and stalk Wikipedia in the wee-small-hours.

I mention this because at this very moment, we stand upon the precipice of one such Great Moment in Time, with the U.S. Supreme Court hearing oral arguments this week in the cases which challenge the egregiously exclusionary Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and the last gasp of Jim Queer-disguised-as-states’-rights (or worse, Popular Sovereignty, another slave-era holder; check History for times and listings…), California’s Proposition 8.

Justice Anthony Kennedy himself, the Is-He-Or-Isn’t-Boy for LGBT Rights among the high court, wrote in his majority opinion for Lawrence v. Texas that, “As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.” That 2003 decision illegitimated sodomy laws as violating constitutionally-protected liberty.

When the voters approved Proposition 8, they rewrote the California constitution so that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in” that state. For purposes of all federal laws, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act defines the word “marriage” to include “only a legal union between one man and one woman.”

In their brief to the high court arguing in support of DOMA, opponents of same-sex marriage argued that, just as the states have a right to define marriage as they choose for their own purposes, so does the federal government. This is, of course, the same argument used to justify slavery (including, sadly, by the Supreme Court of its day; see History for the “Dred Scott Decision”).

This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on challenges to a section of DOMA and to Prop. 8. Though very different in nature (see this week’s POLITICS, “DOMA or Prop. 8: Which Ruling Matters More?” on the facing page, for an analysis), in both instances, the court has the opportunity to rule that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the federal government and every state from so narrowly defining the fundamental right of marriage, and that it likewise fully protects the liberty of same-sex couples.

As the California Supreme Court noted when they legalized same-sex marriage (prior to the enactment of Prop. 8), the reason for denying marriage equality was to officially label these unions as not of “comparable stature or equal dignity” to heterosexual marriages.

The intent of Proposition 8—passed, of all places, in the “Land of Fruits of Nuts”—was to enshrine discrimination into law and to encourage the stigmatization of gay men and women and same-sex couples.

DOMA has the same impact. And in depriving gay couples and their kids federal benefits and recognition, it fails to pass Constitutional muster.

It’s dangerous to compare what sits before the high court—particularly the Proposition 8 case—to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated schools (and the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal”).

The problem with Brown was the justice’s call for states to end racial discrimination in public schools “with all deliberate speed.” It permitted the states to drag their feet in meaningful integration of the schools much as the aftermath of Reconstruction (more History channel stuff) gave them an excuse to delay implementing the civil rights of African-Americans for a century after the Civil War won them their “freedom.”

Between now and June, the high court can decide—without ambiguity—that the Constitution upholds equally the right to marry for all couples, and that this right applies both to the federal government and to every one of the United States.

Participants in the Florida AIDS Walk and Music Festival comprise a diverse family who recognize that HIV/AIDS affects us all people, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, and all the other things that make us unique.

The Walk and Music Festival is a way of uniting and make a difference to those who need help the most, your friends and neighbors.

The Walk and Music Festival consists of a five-Kilometer Walk that kicks off at Greater Fort Lauderdale’s South Beach Park. Staging for the Walk begins at 9:30 a.m. After leaving South Beach Park, the route continues north along SR A1A, and then returning back to its point of origin.

All—that is, 100 percent—of the funds raised from the Florida AIDS Walk stay in Florida, to benefit the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Broward House, the Pride Center at Equality Park, SunServe, Latinos Salud, the South Beach AIDS Project, the Children’s Diagnostic and Treatment Center, and other local service agencies and groups.

Likewise, the Florida AIDS Walk benefits ongoing LGBT education, advocacy, specialized services (that meet the needs of the economically disadvantaged, marginalized youth, seniors, and peoples of differing abilities), specialized care for youth living with HIV/AIDS in a family-centered environment, and improving the lives of persons living with or at risk for HIV/AIDS.

The Music Festival features world-class entertainment, including headlining performer and 10-time Grammy Award-winner Chaka Khan, the Queen of Funk Soul, and the talented and inspiring Tony Award-nominated Sheryl Lee Ralph, whose award-winning work includes the legendary Broadway musical “Dreamgirls,”  and her one-woman play, “Sometimes I Cry,” a production written and performed by Ralph that explores the lives, loves, and losses of women infected and affected by HIV.

For more information, visit floridaaidswalk.org.

By the Numbers

More than 40,000 HIV/AIDS cases are diagnosed in the U.S. each year

4,000 of those cases are diagnosed in Florida alone

Florida ranks 3rd among states for highest number of HIV/AIDS cases (after NY and California)

Broward ranks 2nd among Florida counties for the highest number of HIV/AIDS cases (after Miami-Dade)

The latest statistics of the global HIV and AIDS epidemic published by the World Health Organization in November 2011, referring to 2010 (the most recent year for which reporting is available):

Orphans (age 0-17) due to AIDS (2009)                                                   16.6 million

I was reading a story last night, a pastiche of superhero tales that spans the era from the “Golden Age” of comics (roughly from the 1930s through the early 1950s), the “Silver Age” (the post-atomic 1960s and 70s), and more modern comic book fare.

In the story, the main character—a loosely adapted version of Commissioner Gordon from the “Batman” comics—reviewed old photographs of himself through various eras (standing next to a World War I Sopwith Camel aeroplane in one, shaking hands with FDR, and Richard Nixon, in others), all the while looking the same  (steely gaze, rock-hard jaw, well-trimmed mustache) through the passage of the decades (although his mustache did alter to account for the sensibilities of different epochs, resembling variously Douglas Fairbanks’, Clark Gable’s, and Dennis Hopper’s).

The story made me laugh for a few reasons, not the least being that it reminded me of how we human beings like to see ourselves as moving largely unblemished through various changes and times.

A look at the montage reel for the old “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” shows the “late” late night host sporting conservative Eisenhower/Kennedy Era gray flannel during the 1960s, followed by psychedelic patterns from the 70s, then the atrocious all-blue polyester suits of the 80s, and finally the steady knits of the early 90s. Throughout all eras, Carson’s face stays largely the same, like a latter-day “Zelig” (or “Forrest Gump”), observing radical changes in the culture and world around him, but generally remaining untouched, unaltered, forever in amber. If only.

I think LGBT Americans are standing at the precipice of a very exciting time, one filled with promise and recognition of our full rights under the law. It is with irony that I consider not every gay rights activist may be happy with the results of our mutual struggle, especially if it results in the GOP benefitting from the recent “outing” of many national Republicans as not being hostile, at least in principle, to marriage equality, and a mainstreaming of “the gays” into all political walks of life.

The death last month of C. Everett Koop, the former Surgeon General under Ronald Reagan, took me back 30 years, to the days when HIV/AIDS was spoken of only in whispers, and then often in tones that evoked judgment and recrimination. Koop—who likewise mobilized national awareness of the dangers of tobacco, leading to the smoke-free restaurants, airports, and workplaces we enjoy today—threw his own personal religious convictions (which favored sexual abstinence until marriage) by the wayside and released a controversial and life-saving report about the epidemic that acknowledged the importance of condom-use in slowing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Koop, who eschewed the pomp of the Surgeon General’s office (it still makes me shudder to think of Clinton’s Joycelyn Elders and her official Public Health Service admiral’s uniform; girl…), was every American’s Surgeon General, gay and straight, in a way that his boss, the genial but largely empty-suited Reagan, could never be, especially for LGBT Americans who knew what the support of the newly-minted Religious Right for Reagan really meant for them in the status quo of the time.

And when officials within the Reagan Administration dragged their feet in response to the AIDS pandemic, Koop took matters into his own hands, mailing literature about HIV/AIDS directly to 100 million households. In the years to come, Koop may come to represent that steady quality—call it Forrest Gump-like, but it is definitely an American trait—of not reacting to the hysteria of the moment (say “Dan Quayle” and “family values” in the same breath, but try not to barf), but responding with deliberation, sobriety, and a well-grounded sense of right and wrong.

I imagine, too, that in the years to come, the seeds planted in recent weeks by national Republican leaders with respect to overturning the Defense of Marriage Act will result in just as many LGBT Americans bitching about the Democrat in the White House (whoever it is at the time), while decrying the welfare state and “special privileges” given to interest groups of which they themselves are not a part. Now that’s progress.

I would have continued on in blissful ignorance concerning the ‘State of UK Telly Programmes’ but for a recent entry I read online concerning an old standard of British (and American-by-way-of-cable) television, “Doctor Who,” specifically a spinoff called “Torchwood,” which ran originally from 2006 to 2011 and is available on Netflix and other video services.

The series is a paranormal drama along the lines of the “X-Files” of the 1990s, with situations that reflect more modern sensibilities. But what makes it truly modern is that it has as its male lead an openly-bisexual character (“Jack Harkness”) played by an openly gay actor, John Barrowman.

The series is the creation of openly-gay British TV writer/producer Russell Davies, whose other groundbreaking television work includes the original British television version of “Queer As Folk.”

Now, the idea of an openly gay lead in a dramatic (okay, Sci-Fi) series may not seem like such a big deal in these days of “Glee,” “The New Normal,” and days post-“Queer As Folk” and “Will and Grace,” but the fact is, those shows play very much to camp, and if they have opened doors for tolerance and understanding (music and laughs are surely the way into the hearts of most decent folks), they are still very much a far cry from the hair-pulling, chest-thumping romance of man-on-man (I’m not talking porn here) that has been mostly relegated to LoGo, Here!, and the fringe of cable.

In an interview several years ago, Davies noted the Puritan (and Puritanical) cultural influences still being fed to American audiences. “I do watch a lot of television science fiction, and it is a particularly sexless world,” Davies said. “With a lot of the material from America, I think gay, lesbian and bisexual characters are massively underrepresented, especially in science fiction, and I’m just not prepared to put up with that. It’s a very macho, testosterone-driven genre on the whole, very much written by straight men.”

In Britain, Barrowman’s character is described as the “first openly gay” action hero, and as a “hunky bisexual.” Can you imagine that same verbiage being generated by a Hollywood publicist? I’m a gay writer, and I have hard time finding the acuity to break down that mental barrier. It’s just THAT ingrained into us.

Part of the appeal of the Jack Harkness character is that his sexual identity is simply a matter of fact—he doesn’t have an affectation and so people aren’t “affected” by it. There’s no doubt that the widespread acceptance of the show and character relate to changing societal views about what it is to be gay and how society sees gay people. The fact that Jack kisses both a male and female costar on the lips in a nonchalant and natural way makes it easier for an audience to believe it.

My partner and I were at the Florida Renaissance Festival last weekend, and during one of the live stage performances, one of the entertainers made a playful comment about the “gay guys in the audience” that the rest of the crowd took in the stride in which it was meant. But that gap has yet to be bridged on a larger, more mainstream scale. Maybe after these commercial messages.

We have the very real luxury of getting to take for granted living in what is, for the most part, a safe place in which to be an LGBT American. The existence of our little gay burgh—only two squares miles, believe it or not, plus the surrounding zip codes in Victoria Park, Coral Ridge, and further afield in Miami Shores and North Miami—is made even more astonishing when you consider it is surrounded by one of the most ruggedly-individualistic of all Red States, governed by Rick Scott, certainly no Friend of Dorothy he (or even Toto for that matter).

Dean Trantalis, a longtime Wilton Manors-based attorney and longtime Fort Lauderdale resident (who is in a March 12 run-off for that city’s District 2 commission seat) told me a couple of weeks ago that LGBT media outlets are dropping the ball in their coverage of matters of LGBT political importance, including his race against the latest holder of the commission seat, Charlotte Rodstrom (who herself had succeeded Dean; and people think the Gayborhood is a swap-a-thon).

In our defense, I pointed out that this publication had been diligent in our reporting of that race, and of profiling him for our readers as a community leader with a distinguished and laudable pedigree (including activism not least noted for his service in the mid-1990s as co-chair of Americans for Equality, and his work in successfully enacting and defending passage of Broward County’s Human Rights Ordinance, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation).

Dean graciously acknowledged our coverage, but as I sit here listening to the poet-singer Paul Simon remind me that “the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ away,” it occurs to me that he is right in a much larger sense (Dean, that is, although yes, I guess Paul Simon, is too).

Although we seem to have won numerous “big picture” victories—the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), the President’s refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court, that egregious law’s “day in court” this spring before the black-robed Supremes, and numerous state house, judicial, and ballot box successes for marriage equality—each of which is justifiably a headline-grabber, the real war is being fought in a way I’m not so sure that we are winning.

In last week’s Agenda, although we covered with pride and (a degree of satisfaction) on the establishment of a legacy to the memory of Tyler Clementi, a victim of ignorance and homophobia (NATION, February 6, 2013: “Rutgers Announces Memorial for Gay Student who Committed Suicide”), in the immediately preceding column, we reported on the tragedy of a 15 year old gay Oregon student who was literally bullied to death (“Bullied Gay 15 Year Old Dies following Suicide Attempt”).

Clearly, no one had made that high school student, Jadin Bell, aware that he was living at the dawn of an “enlightened” age before he chose to hang himself in an elementary school playground.

Jadin Bell didn’t die after a lonely suicide attempt because the House Republican Conference has decided that his rights matter less than those of his straight peers, and have chosen to defend DOMA in court (at least until the coming Supreme Court decisions). But he must have surely found himself living in an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and an inability to see himself in a better tomorrow, all of which contributed to that final act of desperation.

I recall House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) making quite an appeal in the interest of Terry Schiavo; does Jadin Bell matter any less to the defenders of tradition, life, and wedded bliss, the GOP?

Here in Florida, State Rep. Joe Saunders, an Orlando Democrat and—with State. Rep. David Richardson (D-Miami Beach)—one of Florida’s first openly gay legislators, introduced the Florida Competitive Workforce Act last week, which would prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

It’s not an end in and of itself, but it’s definitely a start.

Often times in the course of writing for and editing a weekly journal that caters to the LGBT community, one finds that it requires the skills of a mountain goat, navigating treacherous paths and risking disaster at many turns.

There is a story about the playwright (and Marilyn Monroe ex-husband) Arthur Miller, whose Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play “Death of a Salesman” had just opened on Broadway. Miller was walking around his old Brooklyn neighborhood, when he ran into a hotdog vendor with whom he had attended high school. The vendor asked him, “Artie, how you doing? What you been up to?” Miller told him, “Well, you know, I’m a playwright.” And the hotdog vendor said, “Playwriting, huh? I should’ve gone into that.” Because, you know, it’s just that easy.

Every writer who possesses an ounce of ethics and integrity (and a healthy fear of a just God) knows that each word he puts to page has power, and—in this day and age of online perpetuity—a very real and eternal life of a sort. (Take that, Dracula.)

I had occasion recently to meet a reader at a popular local watering hole. During our conversation, he told me that he had read (and thought well- and fairly-written) coverage in this journal on the ongoing story about Sidelines Sports Bar’s ownership litigation, and plans to move or expand to a second location (January 2, 2013 Agenda). He had also read a story about complaints from some Smart Ride participants who felt they had been bullied—intentionally or otherwise—by members of a competing team (November 21, 2012 Agenda).

In both of these cases, it was understood that some member (or an “angry member,” as the gentlemen who verbally accosted me this morning identified himself) or members of our community would wish that the story hadn’t been written, or may be unhappy with the way in which it was reported. Fair enough.

(Full Disclosure: A former employer of mine “enjoys” the dubious distinction of having his name included on the Forbes list of Longest-Serving White-Collar Prison Sentences; I’m sure there’s a great story waiting to be written that could include my name in the telling of it, were one ignorant of all the facts and context.)

There is not a single one of us, no matter how “good,” or “bad” he may be thought of by his fellows, who doesn’t roll his eyes when his name is spoken out loud or written about in a way that could be construed by someone as unflattering or disrespectful to them, or to their memory.

Several years ago, when I worked at South Florida Gay News, publisher Norm Kent oversaw the investigation of a local man who was presenting himself around town as the owner of a new local magazine, but whose list of unfulfilled promises was almost as long as his list of unpaid employees.

That cover story, “Dirty Larry,” was a hallmark of local journalistic investigation and writing, and it was written with a mandate to learn the truth, in this case because—the publisher’s editorial pointed out—the story’s subject was potentially or actually hurting people in our community.

We’ve always had free press in the U.S., and many of us who are privileged to write for our meager livings have learned to take it for granted.

I know and appreciate that not everyone will find value in a story that casts a friend or loved one in a light that could be viewed by the uninformed or mean-spirited as negative. It is when a writer reports on stories that risk such a reaction that he most wishes he was penning wedding announcements or greeting card niceties, trust me.

At this publication, we are never interested in bringing ridicule upon defenseless persons, nor in reporting about someone’s failures or missteps (except in the case of those accused of defrauding the helpless in our community, in giving an accounting of those accusations: Agenda, April 12, 2012, “Federal Authorities Detail Complaint against Oakland Park man charged in $11 Million Ponzi Scheme: ‘Rainmaker’ alleged to have Bilked Million$ from Wilton Manors Residents;” Agenda, November 14, 2012, “SEC Files Fraud Complaint Against Jim Ellis: Wilton Manors Man Charged with Defrauding Gay Investors”).

You won’t see reported here the failing grades of a business or community leader’s 12-year-old son or about “small” things that don’t even rate as journalism. In this pluralistic society of ours, we have people, on cable TV and on the Internet, who display no appreciation for that kind of finesse, who play fast and loose with the ethics of reporting for-the-record, to say nothing of an appreciation for common human decency. May such a thing never be true of this journal, or of its editor.

I also remember the young man from my days socializing in downtown Fort Lauderdale and seeing him with women going into various clubs that I managed at the time (including Dicey Riley’s, with the late Richard Cimoch). This putatively straight kid, who spends more time at the gym than I have allotted hours for “Walking Dead,” which is no small feat—can often be seen pacing back and forth down his street, speaking on his cellphone, shirtless and deep in conversation.

I have had occasion to see him—actually a lot of occasions—because my paths to and from work often cross those of his home turf, and I therefore have just as many occasions to bear witness to the behaviors of other members of our tribe who happen upon him while he is “peacocking”—displaying himself, strutting—unsuspecting and without the benefit of inoculation that prolonged exposure to the sight of him has bestowed upon me.

I have listened to friends speculate upon the nature and reason for this guy’s posturings. These friends are convinced that he is gay for pay, and at least one “well-informed” local confirms this.

Many of these once-unwary passers-by first encountered him when they turn down his street and—BAM!— glimpsed him texting, or posting to Instagram, or—sometimes—facing the sky, his eyes closed.

What happens next could be the subject of a sociology—or is it anthropology?—paper. I have seen cars literally stop mid-street, bicyclists risk permanent maiming and brain injury when they nearly collide, and pedestrians “stutter-step” into moving traffic because they mischanced to glance his way.

Don’t get me wrong: the guy is handsome (okay, hot), but I’m not going to get killed by a passing Schwinn just to sneak a gander. It wouldn’t be dignified.

Part of living here in the sissified east is that many of us are ignorant of the social niceties of something known as “castle doctrine,” this despite the fact that Florida itself has a Defense of Habitation Law.

Such statutes (also known more cutely as “Go Ahead, Make My Day” Laws) have as their basis the aforementioned Castle Doctrine, a medieval concept  and more recent (in terms of centuries) American legal doctrine that designates a person’s abode (or, in some states, any place that is legally occupied, such as a car or place of work) as a place in which that person enjoys certain immunities and protections, including, under certain circumstances, the use of deadly force to defend against an intruder without becoming liable to prosecution.

Castle doctrine comes from the English common law concept that “a man’s home is his castle,” a view that was established as British law in 1628 and taken to the New World colonies.

(The evocative phrase “Make My Day Law” takes its name from a 1985 Colorado law that grants immunity from criminal charges or civil suits to a person who uses deadly force in the course of defending against a home invasion. The nickname itself is hommage to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Law imitates “art:” Be very afraid.)

It’s easy to forget that such considerations exist outside the quite confines of our Gayborhood, or from the suburban-esque security of burgs like Victoria Park and other gentrified-by-gays sections of Broward County. But the outside world reared its ugly head a few nights ago when my partner and I and another couple were taking the night air on Wilton Drive.

As we were passing Jaycee Park—which was most recently the home of the city’s holiday Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa display)—I saw a youngish African American lady talking on her cell phone, a pre-adolescent boy bringing up her rear close behind.

Being the son of a single mother (and, of course, I have no reason to know if in fact this woman was a single parent, but my right brain was driving here) I usually try to have a smile for kids who (I think) are in circumstances similar to my own while I was growing up.

But as I prepared to dole out my Mary Poppins Best, the waif gestured at us in what could—in other circumstances—have been interpreted in a comedic way, if the message hadn’t been so clearly and viciously homophobic: he placed his hands in such a way as to mimic “blinders” so as to avoid seeing us holding hands and otherwise engaged in ‘couples’ behavior.

The emotions that passed among us ranged from blissful ignorance to polite indifference to DEFCON 1 preparedness. This last was most demonstrably evinced by one of our friends (who is of the dangerous-when-provoked-variety), and who was on the verge of giving the lad a mindful/mouthful combo when he was talked back from the ledge by his boyfriend (which is of the attorney-variety).

The outrage put me in mind for some reason of the provocative scene in the 1995 film “Die Hard with a Vengeance” in which Bruce Willis’ character is compelled by terrorists to wear a sandwich board in the streets of Harlem, New York, bearing the message “I Hate N******”—a word that is offensive in a way to which neither “faggot” nor “queer” measure up.

Happy (Proud? Relieved?) as I am to report that I was in no way prompted to rain that particular—and particularly loathsome—sobriquet upon the kid’s head (which would make me the story here), it shocked me that he and his mom were clearly “okay” enough meandering the nighttime streets of the Gayborhood, but not on a level in which “junior” would feel remotely remorseful about behaving so badly in someone else’s “castle.” As Tony Soprano might say, “They’ll let that kid say anything.”

On some Reptilian Brain level, I suppose I was strengthened by the knowledge that I was on my home turf—which gave me territoriality to add to my righteous indignation and moral outrage (what my mother might call “the high ground”). What right, quoth the Reptile, do these people have to put us on the defensive in “my house?”

I realized that being a gay man made it difficult for me to invoke, in the words of the philosopher John Rawls, a “veil of ignorance” and judge the situation on its “merits” rather than through the impulse of emotion. What was doubly ironic about the timing was that, just a few minutes later, we walked past The Manor and saw that it was hosting a predominantly African-American event in its nightclub. Progress has its small victories.

The election cycle of 2012 taught us that LGBT rights is a “winner” on the national agenda, and that in a meaningful way we have “won” the bigger conversation. Now we just need to translate that to weeknights on Wilton Drive.