By Stephen McCauley | Boston Globe

MAYBE IT'S the holiday season making me uncharacteristically optimistic, or maybe I just quit therapy too soon - after all, 25 years on the couch isn't that long in the grand scheme of things. Whether crazy or merely upbeat, I found myself at a friend's Thanksgiving dinner arguing that the lack of coverage given the embarrassing arrests of two more Republican politicians last month is a positive sign, and that Senator Larry Craig's refusal to retire could be read as an act of gay liberation.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't heartbroken to read, on some obscure blog or other, about the November arrests of Florida State Representative Bob Allen and Daytona Beach City Commissioner and mayoral candidate Mike Shallow, Republicans busted in separate sting operations. I enjoy a political sex scandal at least as much as the next guy. And when the politician is one of those religious fanatics who wields his "values" voting record like a badge of moral superiority, the guilty pleasure can be intense.

I've had plenty of reason to gloat for the past 16 months or so. One high profile conservative after another seems to get caught with his pants down - either online (Mark Foley), on a madam's private phone log (David Vitter), or in a men's room (Craig).

If you consider the Reverend Ted Haggard a political figure - and given the current blurring of church and state, why not? - you can't help but notice that the vast majority of these incidents involve same-sex encounters. Haggard, once a spiritual adviser to President Bush, is the sanctity-of-marriage preacher who talked to reporters about his dalliances with crystal meth and a male prostitute while leaning across his wife and children in the front seat of his sport utility vehicle.

For those of us who feel personally stung by the Republican Party's demonization of gay marriage and homosexuality in general, these stories serve as vindication, irrefutable proof of the hypocrisy behind the homophobia. Ditto, on a grander scale and with more tragic consequences, the ongoing pedophile scandals of the Catholic Church.

Additionally, the misfortunes of Larry "I Am Not Gay" Craig and others like him have made public a truth of human sexuality privately known by a lot of us for quite some time: A surprising number of men believe that marrying a woman is enough to make you heterosexual, and that lying convincingly is enough to make you monogamous.

"If that's all true," said my Thanksgiving dinner companion, "I'd think you'd want as much media coverage and humiliation as possible for every disgraced hypocrite."

I'd think so, too, but Christmas is coming. And the truth is, I've begun to feel guilty gloating over the outing of another "not gay" man as a result of police entrapment and kiss-and-tell hustlers. Call me old-fashioned, but it seems to me if you're selling sexual favors, keeping your mouth shut about your customers should be included in the purchase price. And personally, I'd feel a lot safer flying if I thought the undercover cops working at airports were trolling for explosives, not married men with restless legs syndrome.

One glance at Craig's anti-environment, homophobic voting record makes me wish he'd done what his party hoped he'd do - resign and slip off quietly to some sexual deprogramming camp where Haggard and other lost causes are allegedly straightened out. But when you compare the contempt Craig received from the Republican hierarchy with the forgiveness shown to Vitter for his heterosexual transgressions, you can't help but notice a double standard at work. Couldn't you read Craig's return to the Senate, after spending less time in retirement than Paris Hilton spent in jail, a radical act, the equivalent of refusing to give up a seat at the front of the bus?

Maybe his reemergence - and the lack of coverage of the two Florida busts - are evidence that we're getting a little Frenchified in our attitudes. Maybe we're finally accepting that human sexuality is a lot more complicated and insistent than is convenient, and that restoring honor and decency to the White House and other political institutions has little to do with an elected official's sexual orientation. The latest polls rank Bill Clinton so far ahead of George Bush in competence and credibility, a majority might gladly allow the occasional Oval Office romp in return for eight years of peace, prosperity, and grammatically coherent press conferences.

"You're crazy," said a dinner guest to my left. "Craig's in such denial, he believes his own excuses. As for those guys in Florida, they're just not photogenic enough to get coverage. These days, the media has high standards, even for mug shots."

Too bad. I was hoping optimism was a sign of mental health.

Stephen McCauley, a guest columnist, has written five novels and teaches at Brandeis.

The well-publicized failure of Gov. Ernie Fletcher's campaign to secure a last-minute surge in conservative voters by telling them that Gov.-elect Steven Beshear would recreate Kentucky as a "new San Francisco" marks an important change in both Kentucky and national political strategies.

New analyses of Census Bureau data suggest that this failed "gay card" strategy may in part be a result of a dramatically more visible lesbian and gay population in some of the most conservative parts of the country -- including Kentucky's largest city, Louisville.

Since 1990, the Census Bureau has tracked the presence of same-sex "unmarried partners," commonly understood to be lesbian and gay couples. From an initial count of about 145,000 same-sex couples in 1990, the 2006 data show that this population has increased fivefold to nearly 780,000 couples. The number of same-sex couples grew more than 21 times faster than did the U.S. population.

Kentucky has seen an astounding twelve-fold increase from 862 same-sex couples counted in 1990 to more than 10,300 in 2006. In the same time period, the number of self-identified same-sex couples in other socially conservative Mountain, Midwest and Southern states exceeded a six-fold increase. Compare that with liberal East and West Coast states, where increases have been less than four-fold. Now either there's been a wildly successful gay recruitment campaign, or lots more lesbian and gay couples are "coming out" on government surveys.

Evidence strongly points to the latter. In a 1992 survey by the University of Chicago, 2.8 percent of men and 1.4 percent women identified themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Ten years later, a National Center for Health Statistics study pegged that figure at 4.1 percent -- almost one-and-a-half times more men and three times more women.

At the same time, national support for gay people grows. In the late 1980s, Gallup polls found about 30 percent of Americans thought "homosexual relations between consenting adults" should be legal. A May 2007 poll finds this figure has risen to 59 percent.

Louisville, now home to nearly 2,000 same-sex couples, serves as the bellwether for these changes in Kentucky. Since 2000, the city experienced the biggest percentage increases (151 percent) among the nation's 50 largest cities. As a result, its ranking among those cities for the percent of same-sex couples in the population has moved from 41st in 1990 to 28th in 2006.

While Louisville's increases in same-sex couples are consistent with those seen in other parts of the South, the reasons for the increase are a bit different. States in the upper South have experienced relatively modest population growth, suggesting that most of the increases in same-sex couples are likely a product of more gay visibility among natives, rather than a large-scale migration to the area. In contrast, Louisville has experienced above-average population increases that no doubt include an influx of gay people. Such changes are moving the social and political climate barometer (drawing on those ubiquitous red and blue maps) in a decidedly purple direction.

Kentucky now has five openly lesbian or gay officials, including council members in Louisville and Lexington, the vice-mayor of Lexington and a state senator. That's more than in regional neighbors Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi combined. Louisville has an ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, and last year the University of Louisville began offering domestic partner benefits for same-sex couples. And now it looks like the Jefferson school board is about to expand harassment and employment policies to protect gay and lesbian workers. Sounds pretty purple to me.

Closets are emptying in Kentucky and across the heartland, belying the notion that the rights of gay men and lesbians are somehow separate from those of mainstream America. As Americans across the country meet their lesbian and gay neighbors, all evidence suggests that they will become more supportive of gay rights. Politicians beware -- playing the gay card may just assure a losing hand.

Gary J. Gates is a senior research fellow at the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute and co-author of The Gay and Lesbian Atlas.