One of the things that several of my gay friends and I noticed as we'd walk around Chicago's northside Lakeview neighborhood, we started calling "White Knuckle Syndrome".

The basic history of the area is that even as recently as the mid-80s, no one wanted to go there--my father refused to park his vehicle east of Clark during Cubs games because of a near certainty that when you went back to get the vehicle after the game, you would be likely to find no hubcaps, windows bashed in, or no car. Then the gay community, having gotten priced out of the Loop and Gold Coast and most recently Lincoln Park, started to move into the area. The general process works like this: gay people who can't afford the pricier neighborhoods move in, then they start renovating the area, and are publicly visible, so that policing becomes easier. Eventually, the gay people that are making significantly less than their straight coworkers have a nice little neighborhood that has gone through "urban renewal". (Logo's "Real Momentum" series had an episode on this a while ago.)Then the straight people that can't afford the extremely overpriced Gold Coast and Lincoln Park neighborhoods moved into Lakeview. It's a safe neighborhood, getting pricier, just right for the yuppy set. The only problem is that it's filled with gay people.

The easiest way to tell when a guy on the street is gay or straight is to look at his knuckles. If he's walking with a woman but has her hand clutched in a death-grip that threatens to break every bone in her hands, he's straight. If another guy looks his way, his pace picks up and a look of pain appears on the woman's face as he tightens the grip and the white knuckles appear. Gay people will walk with woman friends. They'll even occasionally hold hands with them. But the fear and anxiety induced white knuckles are a sure sign that someone is homophobic. Now, not all the straight people there are phobic. Some are great people. They have gay neighbors and friends in the neighborhood and will hang out and even occasionally go to the gay bars (we have actual dance floors). They like the diverse environment and will even politely smile and brush off advances with, "Thanks, but I've got a girlfriend." But for a sizeable proportion, there's the anxiety and panic that drives them past garden-variety bigotry.

It does get hard to tell, though. I agree random off-the-cuff comments are a sign of bigotry. That doesn't justify the bigotry--it's an increasingly smaller world, and we've all got to figure out how to live together. A big part of that is not making random "pansy" comments. Right now, I hope someone is taking, say, a certain governor of North Carolina, aside and explaining that to him.