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The most infamous legal characterization of homosexuality as contagious comes from a justice of the Supreme Court. In 1978, five years after the DSM deletion, William Rehnquist gave credence to a public university’s argument that it need not recognize a gay group’s First Amendment right of association because the group would spread homosexuality. Rehnquist observed that in the university’s view, the question was “akin to whether those suffering from measles have a constitutional right, in violation of quarantine regulations, to associate together and with others who do not presently have measles, in order to urge repeal of a state law providing that measle sufferers be quarantined.” Gays were not citizens who could assemble with others to persuade them of their cause. They were lepers who would infect all they touched.

The metaphorical contagion model captures a fundamental fear about homosexuality—that gays will spread our condition to others—better than the literal mental illness model. Under the mental illness model, it is heterosexuals who transmit homosexuality through “bad parenting.” Under the contagion model, in contrast, gays transmit homosexuality by infecting waverers. Casting homosexuality as such an act of aggression legitimates no-promo-homo measures by making them seem defensive.

This move obscures the aggression of the no-promo-homo statutes, much as a department renamed “Defense” obscures its war-making capacity. For if the children are honestly wavering, no-promo-homo laws are just as much attempts to convert them to heterosexuality. Moreover, to the extent such laws depend on a contagion model, they put the prestige of the state behind the figuration of homosexuality as a disease.

I want to pause to say something clearly: gays will not achieve full equality until the ultimate orientation of wavering children is a matter of state and social indifference. Those who seek equality for gays but support no-promo-homo measures should ask how consistent it is to treat gays as simultaneously equal and diseased.

The word “conversion” has mundane usages, as when applied to current or currency. When applied to human beings, however, “conversion” carries its weightier sense—a spiritual transformation of our core, something that happens on the road to Damascus. For me, the question of who will convert, who will be radically transformed, has always been the primal question of civil rights. Who will change? The gay son or the straight parents? The homosexual or the homophobe? Just thinking of such change can change us.

In grappling with these questions, early gay activists were wiser than many of us are today. Faced with a society that sought to convert them, they gave the plain-throated answer that gay was good. In recent years, I have seen a troubling trend toward defending homosexuality not on the ground it is “good” but on the ground it is “immutable.” I see why this immutability argument is tempting, but I want, with others, to argue that it be taken up cautiously.

An early form of the immutability argument sought a biological source for homosexuality. In the 1990s, a slew of studies sought to locate homosexuality in the body—in the brain, the X chromosome, the dermal ridges of fingerprints. One famous study purported to show identical twins were more likely to share an orientation than other kinds of siblings. Many of these studies posited the existence of a gay gene.

These studies have all been challenged. Neuroanatomist Simon LeVay’s brain study contended that gay men, like women, had smaller hypothalami than straight men. When I heard of this study, even the formulation of the hypothesis bothered me. The claim seemed too close to the historical stereotype that gay men were women trapped inside men’s bodies—now it was women’s brains that were so confined. As I began reading the study, I discovered that all of LeVay’s “gay” cadavers had died of AIDS-related complications. Then I stopped reading. This was a disqualifying move for any number