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more than 900 students for the study, offers a glimmer of hope.  Students say their feelings of security and belonging increase with the presence of a supportive faculty, and a number of schools have mandated in-service tolerance training for teachers. What's more, many students, gay and straight, have decided they're not going to put up with intolerance either. In the past dozen years, more than 1,000 Gay-Straight Alliances, groups that work to create safe and welcoming schools for all students,
regardless of sexual orientation, have popped up nationwide.
Following are a few particularly noteworthy examples of how
faculty and students are combating anti-gay bias on their campuses.

ART APPRECIATION
Where: Wayland High School, Wayland, Massachusetts.
What: Using grant money provided by the Massachusetts
Department of Education, guidance counselor Virginia Buckley brought a traveling art show - "Love Makes a Family: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender
People and Their Families" - to Wayland High School last spring. The exhibit includes 40 photos and interviews about orientation and growing up in a
gay family. The school hosted an open house and a reception, inviting members of the community to its media-

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cultures remains.
Anti-gay violence remains the third largest category of hate crimes.  And a Kaiser Family foundation study published last month shows that fully 97 percent of gay people feel vulnerable to discrimination.  More than a quarter have experienced serious problems, mostly in housing, health care, and employment.  Yet gay Republicans maintain that we are only "virtual victims" of bias, a stunning example of their refusal to see beyond the brunch table. 
Last year, sociologist Mary Virginia Lee Badgett published convincing evidence that gays actually earn less than straights.  But the stereotype of fey affluence makes the gay right's spu

rious reasoning seem plausible to urbane heterosexuals.  It corresponds to the gay life they see around them:  A world that looks as primped and prosperous as a miniature village in a Christmas shop window.  They never see the other side of the electric train tracks.
What lies ahead in a year of hard times?  A series of challenges made more formidable because they stem from the bush administration's policy of stealth homophobia.  This strategy means stroking the elite by making a couple of gay appointments while promoting legislation with a hidden impact on many gay lives.  Charitable choice is only the most dramatic of these threats:  As currently constituted, it would make hundreds of thousands of sexual minority workers and clients subject to discrimination.  Consider the proposed welfare package, which

would penalize single parents.  As reported by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's policy institute, in the eyes of the law, all lesbian and gay parents are single.  We can't form families in the legal sense, so we can't avoid penalties aimed at convincing parents to marry.  It's like being offered a place at  the table without a plate.
Once the war on terror loses its news value, the media will return to the subject of homosexuality with its usual morbid fascination.  Next year's hot queer issue may be the one suggested by the title of a Nightline series that got postponed in the aftermath of 9-11.  It posed the trendy question of whether gay life was "a matter of choice."