THE BELL CURVE:

I was pulling for “Milk� on Oscar night.

It didn’t win, but it brought me back to facing a desolate fact: Acceptance of our gay citizens — hammered home by the passage of Proposition 8 — is still tenuous, at best.

And this conclusion, in turn, wasn’t softened any by the recent flap over the propriety of staging the Broadway musical “Rent� at Corona del Mar High school and the ongoing civil trial in which Newport Beach police Sgt. Neil Harvey is suing his police department and its former chief for its alleged refusal to promote him because of rumors he says are false that he is gay.

Hold on a minute. I know the “Rent� episode has been resolved amicably as mostly miscommunication, with firm protestations that the gay characters and situations were never a factor.

But the fact that they came up at all in early speculation would seem to suggest that the topic is not ever very far below the surface.

They have broken that surface with Harvey’s contention that discrimination has prevented the promotion he feels he has long since earned.

His view was strongly supported by a former Newport Beach officer, now working in Huntington Beach, who testified that from the moment he joined the Newport Beach force he was taught that Harvey was “someone I don’t want to associate with. If I was considered one of his friends or associates, then all those bad feelings would come toward me.�

Newport Beach Sgt. John Hougan added some details to this sorry picture by naming 23 former and current Newport Beach officers — including the present chief — who allegedly make homophobic jokes directed at Harvey or hint that he is gay. Whether he is gay or not and however the trial comes out, he’s going to lose, and that’s a damn shame.

Harvey Milk lost, too. He lost his life to a fellow supervisor named Dan White who shot to death San Francisco Mayor George Moscone before pumping five bullets into the body of Harvey Milk.

Before he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, White served for 7 years in the U.S. Army, including combat in Vietnam, then as a police officer and firefighter in San Francisco.

He saw himself, according to the Wikipedia Encyclopedia as “a defender of home, family and religious life against homosexuals, pot smokers and cynics.�

White was charged with manslaughter instead of murder, an outrage that led to riots in San Francisco. He served five years in prison, then killed himself two years after his release.

We’ll never know how much hatred of gay people was responsible for this series of tragedies, only that it joins a continuing history of violence and discrimination.

When President Clinton was trying to resolve homophobia at top levels in the military, Barry Goldwater — a reserve general in the Air Force — stepped into the middle of the fray with a wonderfully tough and pointed blast that I have saved and refer to when overcoming homophobia seems most hopeless. Here’s a small portion of what Goldwater had to say on this issue:

“Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar. But most Americans should be shocked to know that while the country’s economy is going down the tubes, the military has wasted half a billion dollars over the past decade chasing down gays and running them out of the armed service.

“When the facts lead to one conclusion, I say it’s time to act, not to hide. The country and the military know that eventually the ban will be lifted. The only remaining questions are how much muck we will all be dragged through, and how many brave Americans will have their lives and careers destroyed in a senseless attempt to stall the inevitable.

“The conservative movement, to which I subscribe, has as one of its basic tenets that government should stay out of the impossible task of legislating morality. But legislating someone’s version of morality is exactly what we do by perpetuating discrimination against gays.�

What is it about this issue that brings Barry Goldwater into it so forcefully and that makes otherwise clear thinkers on the other side man the ramparts to deny gay people the rights we all should enjoy as citizens of this nation?

Is it fear? If so, fear of what? Of the unknown? Of people and things different from you and your experience? That homosexuality is contagious and would somehow insinuate itself into you or your loved ones? That its presence and growth are weakening the spirit and spine of your country? That gay people will somehow diminish your marriage if they are allowed the same right? That being in its presence makes you uncomfortable and needn’t if the afflicted would just get it fixed?

Or because your interpretation of a handful of Bible passages tells you that God regards homosexuality as a sin to be cast out?

One question can be answered with certainty. If you have gay people deeply in your life and have watched them deal with the knowledge that they are different, you would never again allow in your thinking the shibboleth that they had chosen this lifestyle.

Or that God looks on them with any less love than the rest of us.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.