One such brushfire flared in Florida Today (Gannett), where Mrs. Karen Caruso complained that while the homosexually-inclined have their National Coming Out Day, the press has given little or no attention to the Religious Right's anti-gay media-blitz launched to counter gay men and lesbians' acceptance of themselves as such.

The fundamentalists and evangelicals have announced their own "National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day," designed to downgrade self-esteem among persons attracted to their own sex.

Mrs. Caruso, her criticism aimed at media, fretted, "This (National Coming Out) day, you said, encourages openness for those in the gay and lesbian lifestyle."

She described the newly manufactured National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day as "a day when tens of thousands of men and women who have chosen to leave homosexuality commemorate their departure from the gay and lesbian lifestyle."

This group of "former homosexuals," she claims, forms "quite a dynamic population and outreaches to men and women wishing to leave the homosexual lifestyle."

"One must demonstrate empathy and sensitivity," attempting to explain Ex-Gay movement strategy, she says, "toward those in the gay and lesbian lifestyle and extend that same empathy and sensitivity to those choosing to leave that lifestyle."

Among the strategies of the Religious Right's anti-gay propaganda campaign is its identification of homosexuality with "lifestyle," a designation implying that gay men and lesbians can easily leave that "lifestyle", forgetting special same-sex individuals loved and treating the abandonment of same-sex affection as easy, like leaving a barstool.

"We must reject—on every occasion—the fundamentalist's use of this word, lifestyle," said GayToday's Jack Nichols, replying to Mrs. Caruso's recruitment campaign.

Nichols, whose book, The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists, is part gay movement strategy blueprint, talked back (Sunday, Florida Today, p. 14-A) to the Ex-Gay recruitment forces. He said,

"Karen Caruso's pious plan to publicly recruit gays into what she herself considers good sexual etiquette, has not only a vulgar but a hypocritical slant.

"She's be the first, I'd wager, to scream foul play if amateur gay 'religious' psychologists set up recruiting booths and begged switchover converts as she does.

"America's famed psychologist William James, and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud both thought the human psyche to be bisexual at birth like Bonobo apes become in actual practice.

"If either side of the sexual continuum attracts the curious," said Nichols, "let's hope it's because each person is free to find his or her own truth rather than turning matters of attraction into an 'only true path' drum-beating contest, a missionary position crusade."

Some gay activists, including Dr. Franklin E. Kameny, the father of gay activist militancy who worked closely with Nichols in the 1960s, say that if there is to be heterosexual recruitment through the religious right, that this then opens the door for a similar homosexual recruitment campaign. Kameny told GayToday:

"Recruiting is a two-way road and a double-edged sword. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If, openly and overtly and with impunity, they can attempt to recruit us into heterosexuality--and that is exactly what they are trying to do---then, in effect, they have given us carte blanche to try to recruit them into homosexuality, with EQUAL impunity and openness, and they can have no valid objections when we do. Tit for tat! They have liberated us!!

"Over the decades, the gay community, and the gay movement particularly, have become hypersensitive to the point of paranoia about allegations that we are recruiting heterosexuals into homosexuality, and we have often overreacted with defensive, cautionary caveats, for example, that 'We are not promoting homosexuality'. Anita Bryant used the recruitment accusation against us with some effectiveness, in 1977. That hypersensitivity has been particularly acute with respect to younger people, with the result that, years back, gay organizations excluded minors, and even currently are overly cautious in their interactions with younger gays. Any effort to present homosexuality in a positive light, or, in fact, in other than a harshly negative light, to younger people, invariably provokes accusations from the nutty fundamentalists that we are trying to recruit, which accusations our community has tended not only to deny (truthfully) but from which they have tended to flee as in terror, engaging in much harmful overcompensation. We need no longer do so! We can now promote homosexuality to our heart's content, to everyone, young and old! "