Lesbian and gay resistance takes many forms. For some of us, it takes the form of a demonstration or a political action group. For others, it takes the form of being openly different in a society that hates difference.

As John Rechy and Charley Shively told us two decades ago, queer sexual activity is in itself subversive in states that criminalize sodomy and uses it as an excuse for discrimination and violence.

"Historically, gay men have been willing to take many risks to fulfill their desires for specific sexual acts with other men," Eric Rofes writes in Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures. "Men have risked loss of jobs, loss of families, and loss of life."

All this can be attributed to the power of the sex drive-- the same force that makes salmon swim upstream leads some men to have sex in public toilets. But Rofes agrees with Ilan Meyer in his view that gay sex is more than just the means to scratch an itch: "Gay sex is also about identity."

The determination of four generations of American gay men to express our sexuality and fulfill our identity in spite of all opposition is the theme of John Loughery's new book The Other Side of Silence: Men's Lives and Gay Identities (Holt). Based on dozens of interviews as well as on familiar texts, The Other Side of Silence goes beyond New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles to uncover gay life and gay resistance in places like Boise, Denver, Louisville, New Haven and Omaha just to name a few. The Stonewall Uprising, the central event in modern gay history, is properly placed at the end of a "maelstrom" year of mounting gay oppression and resistance.

In The Other Side of Silence we are reminded of how gay men managed to survive and prevail against incredible odds. Gay men continued to live, work, love, cruise, have sex, find lovers and create literature and art in spite of others' repeated attempts to kill, maim, jail, raid, fire, evict, cure or vote against us. Acts of gay resistance happened all the time, and at the most unexpected places. One of them took place in Dania Beach, then as now a popular gay playground, in the summer of 1962:

"A problem that summer was that the stretch of beach where gay sunbathers congregated was under attack from a gang of redneck kids in their dune buggies who thought it was hilarious to drive at top speed across the sand, screaming at the queers, and veering as close to the men on their towels as they could without actually running them over. Not an unheard-of pastime, nor one in which the Florida police would have been especially interested.

The influx of gay men to Dania Beach and nearby Fort Lauderdale was more bothersome to the authorities, who had in recent years taken to bringing television cameramen with them on bar raids to further humiliate the arrested patrons.

One weekend, a few gay men, most around twenty years old, decided to fight back by burying pieces of wood with protruding nails in the sand to disable the vehicles. To their surprise, they weren't alone on the beach early the next morning. As many as a dozen gay men turned out to help, several with baseball bats.

When the riders came by later in the day, their tires got punctured and the occupants jumped out ready for a brawl. When the baseball bats came out from under the beach blankets, the local toughs beat a hasty retreat on foot, and four dune buggies were left in the sand. They were retrieved by their owners during the night - every light, windshield, and hood smashed - and so ended the troubles on the beach.

"They didn't call the police," Jerry Mitchell of Fort Lauderdale observed, "either because they didn't want to say a bunch of faggots had sent them running, or they didn't want to deal with us anymore and they knew we'd use the bats. But it had the same result. There's always a limit to how much you're going to take."

When Jerry Mitchell spoke about the incident - at the Stonewall Library's heritage of Pride or in an interview that I conducted for an article on gay history in 1994 - the ad hoc Dania group took on a name, "The Purple Panthers", and a place in Florida's gay history.

In a society that denies our right to exist; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have come up with ingenious ways of being and thriving. Often our people created a community where there was none before, and Loughery gives us a good example of one, again taken from Florida history:

"In the autumn of 1965, several gay men in Pensacola gathered at the turn-of-the-century manor two of them had recently bought to hatch a plan to acquire the books, magazines, and movies they wanted but were reluctant to order on their own through the mail.

Area postal authorities had a habit of opening the plain brown wrappers of deliveries for single men and, between the intelligence officers at the nearby military base and the local police, the existence of a list of the names and addresses of gay men in Pensacola was an open secret.

. . .The idea they came up with was to have a woman they knew open a post office box under a phony name, pool their money for their purchases, and meet once a month in their hosts' ample living room to screen the films and circulate the reading matter. A closed circle; a safe enterprise. And so 'Emma Jones' was born . . . Not an eyebrow was raised at the post office as the packages poured in over the next few years.

But the collective Emma Jones was a restless spirit. By 1966 the four men at the center of social life in Conservative Pensacola were looking for a way to widen their circle of acquaintances and stimulate more socializing . . . They decided that Emma would host a beach party on the weekend of the Fourth of July and sent out twenty-five invitations in her name.

Fifty people showed up. The next summer two hundred men and a fair number of women came to roast hot dogs, stuff themselves with shrimp and potato salad, and frolic on a section of the famous Gulf Coast beach of snow-white sand and pure blue water, far from the family section and the gaze of the police.

By 1968, with gay men from Mobile, Birmingham, and Tallahassee indicating that they were planning to join the fun, Emma was pleased to think that a need for community was being met far beyond her original impulse and, at her own expense, saw to it that the supplies were ready and the event properly coordinated. More than four hundred people were on hand for the third celebration."

To make a long story short, by the early 1970s "Emma Jones" was hosting "the largest gay gathering held in the South to date." Over two thousand men took part in activities which lasted all weekend long and included elaborate drag revues and the Mr. Gay U.S.A. contest. Black and white men partied together in what was still a segregated South.

"By the time the event radically changed course in 1974, when the Mafia wanted a piece of the action and local politicians stepped in, innumerable friendships had been made, an example of gay economic clout had been established, and an exuberant gay presence had asserted on the Florida panhandle that, whatever the setbacks ahead, would never disappear entirely."

It takes more courage to be gay or lesbian in small towns and rural areas, in the Midwest and in the Southland, than in the Castro, Chelsea, South Beach or West Hollywood. Just being on the streets and saying "I am gay" is an act of resistance, when it is done in the Bible Belt.

Each year South Carolina queers hold their Pride Parade in a town or city that has experienced recent homophobic acts, which in South Carolina could be anywhere. Last year South Carolina Pride was held in Greenville, whose County Commission passed a resolution condemning "the gay lifestyle".

This year it was held on Myrtle Beach, whose mayor has a record of making antigay remarks. In both cases thousands of lesbian women, gay men, bisexual and transgender people and our friends came out to celebrate Pride, letting the people of this Southern Baptist-dominated state know that we are here, we are queer, and we are not going away.

Jesse Monteagudo welcomes your comments. Please e-mail care of GayToday: gaytoday@badpuppy.com or: monteagu@bc.seflin.org