Author and OUT columnist Michelangelo Signorile, and other well-known gay celebrities, including authors Larry Kramer and Gabriel Rotello, are, as a result of their perspectives, locked in a pitched battle against other gay males— so-called Free Love Advocates— or Sex Panic members and queer theorists who, under various banners, are mostly, it was formerly believed, academics.

But now, those who represent sexual civil liberties find themselves backed by fledgling but growing vocal public constituencies in both New York and San Francisco.

The two warring sides have divided somewhat bitterly, and seem to charge each other with treason to the cause of gay male survival, both physical and cultural, a struggle between life and death. The adherents in this struggle come from all parts of the political map. But, ask some, are their journeys to this particular battle worth it?

Is this raging theoretical infighting about monogamy, marriage, promiscuity, semi-public meeting places, sexual manners, and the like a step forward for the larger community at present or a step nowhere?

Haven't people argued about all this before? Aren't there more important emergencies?

Is anybody really listening ? Will the presence of these arguments make a big difference-- or actually lead to immediate cessation of disease and death? Or, even if they don't lead with immediacy, isn't stating the viewpoints worth at least a try? But too many viewpoints peek through this very tangled mosaic of conservative views and their radical opposites as allies meet and bump heads on both sides of the questions.

Some, if not all, complain that their critics unfairly group them or incorrectly name their philosophies. But this whole issue, says a third less vocal group, is mainly a fancy debate among well-known media celebrities, authors with new books to push. And push they do:

"But truth be told," writes Michelangelo Signorile, in a letter to The Nation, "I cannot in conscience promote a gay sexual fast-lane that continues to result in disease and death?"

One of his less vocal opponents recently spoke to GayToday, "Nobody asked him to promote a fast lane. We'll be our own deciders on how fast we live, thank you. Who is he, talking about naughty fast lanes anyway? The Sex Traffic Cop? "

E.J. Graff, also writing in The Nation, predicts that same-sex marriage will indeed split the 'gay community' in two. Or rather, allowing the home-and-hearth-homos their gold rings, will expose the fact that those who want to be the sexual avant-garde are most properly grouped with other sexual dissidents…"

Are current mainstream media revelations about gay fast lanes— the barebacking parties described in Newsweek-- a proper focus in response to the threat to civil liberties and life and limb posed by fundamentalist religious foes?

Those who oppose public sexual regulations are accusing those who demand them of being a gay bourgeoisie that sides with Republican moralism and stirs up anti-sexual moralistic crusades. This kind of unwitting alignment—between socially conservative gay males, on the one hand, and powerfully repressive anti-sexual religious forces has been defined as certainly one particularly significant alliance in the overall cultural war—between restraint and liberty—that is at hand.

In a glaringly classist attempt to align his views with the man in the street, Michelangelo Signorile adopts a deliberate populist stance, placing himself in opposition to academics, "a queer intellectual elite." This elite, he charges, thinks it "must now take control from a band of dangerous, nonthinking commoners who have risen to power in the gay world."

He emphasizes, in this manner, a kind of intellectual class warfare by saying, "It's interesting that the 'thinking queers' suddenly have disdain for us mainstream types."

Meanwhile, though AIDS death rates and infections have dropped only fractionally, it remains in the minds of others to be as important as World War III, and civil liberties for people with AIDS in the trenches are under threat too leaving people with AIDS exposed like London's often shelterless citizenry during the Nazi bombardments. Other less pressing issues—luxurious ones like monogamy-- draw activism's attentions away from concerns about which communities might more rightly feel imperiled.

Sex freedom's banner-carrying New Yorkers see the matter partly as an intrusion onto once-acceptable urban turf—a war over old-occupied territory--as is shown in a September 16 opinion by long-time editorial staff member, Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice.

Goldstein, a long-time Manhattan resident, knows that New York's unbridled but non-violent sexual culture has long been among its primary hinterland draws. In his sentimental Village Voice resurrection-tour of the historic Hudson River Piers, he invokes even the name of Walt Whitman to add to their color.

In the heat of any such battle as this, any seasoned activists know that they do not always enjoy the luxury of choosing those issues that wantonly arise.

The injection of promiscuous turf vs. virtuous monogamy has its certain appeal, however, because in American culture the tension that has perpetually existed between monogamy and polygamy (or promiscuity) continuously troubles those who feel compelled to achieve monogamous relations. This tension is, in fact, the very stuff of afternoon soaps.

But is sexual behavior in urban locales likely to undergo any quick change due to trendy literary prodding?

Is it not true that these debates are occurring in near tandem with the increasingly threatening behaviors of Pat Robertson, James Dobson, the Pope, Beverly LeHaye, Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell and their colluding financial empires while in the real world public health care programs collapse from public inattention to serious economic fissures, overcrowding everywhere, polluting of the environment and low workers' wages, some are asking if the pro-sex, anti-sex arguments raging are now just luxury raps between straw men before the onset of a right- wing hurricane.

In theocratic dictatorships, the arts—movies, photography, and literature—are generally first on the lists of a tyrant's casualties. No serious inroads against anti-gay, anti-female behavior will be made, some argue, until conventional—or – socially conditioned masculinity—machismo--and its effects are examined.

And, say still others, isn't it true that there have always been moralists and puritans on one hand and skeptics and libertines on the other? Won't behaviors squashed in one venue resurrect in another? Won't human beings continue to find both exquisite and obtuse entrances and exists for the expressions of their desires?

The tendency on both sides of the sex debate seem to ignore one unhappy fact about a vast number of citizens, and that is that the extreme complexity of the great variety of sexual/ moral issues goes mostly unappreciated.

Furthermore, there has been little basic change in the more lascivious offerings of American commercial culture and the U.S. remains so insecure in the embrace of its sexuality that sex often erupts in unexpected bursts of irrational passion, activity impelled to greater stridency because of anxiety and long-simmering sexual/cultural repression.

One author, Ian Young, argues in his book, The Stonewall Experiment, that the effects of society's and state religion's unrelenting assaults on the self-esteem of many gay males, is expressed unconsciously in self-destructive or self-ignoring behavior that leads to carelessness and thence to AIDS. This observation has been linked to insights penned by the famed African-American sociologist W.E.B. Dubois who wrote that the worst effect of slavery and discrimination had been to make the American blacks "doubt themselves and share in a general contempt for others of their kind."

Sexual puritans and their self-harming behaviors do not vanish, argues The Stonewall Experiment, simply because the Stonewall era blipped onto history's horizon. Like the Boston Tea Party, nobody much gives thought to what the Stonewall era was really about. There is still self-denigration at loose in the general sexual culture.

In the meantime, Roman Catholicism and its legions—not to mention the Christian Coalition and such models as Jimmy Swaggart--fail to stop sexual philanderers. Theoretical battles in high brow books and periodicals are unlikely to save lives in the next twenty years as quickly as will an effective AIDS vaccine or a cure.

Perhaps this is at least one target where, AIDS activists assert, our sights might best be set.