EXAMINE GROUP HATE AND ITS EFFECTS

The AIDS epidemic provides the excuse for gangs that like to beat up people.

When I was a boy, I would announce to my mother my latest startling sociological findings, some of which she believed any boy with one eye and half a brain should have known long before _ like how white people tend to be mean to black people. On those occasions she would look at me in mock wonder and say:

"Look at him. He is discovering America, a regular Christopher Columbus."

In the past few weeks, the whole country has been hugging itself in self-admiration for making two discoveries _ that most American women do not care to be regarded as meat and that men and women can give each other AIDS.

It took a smash senatorial TV show to lead us to the first discovery and the announcement by a national sports hero of courage and eloquence to wake us up to the second. I wonder how much longer we would have waited to make the land- sighting about AIDS had the basketball player been a grouchy, mumble-mouthed bench-warmer _ another decade maybe.

AND I wonder how long it will be before we look up and discover that in every American city every day, on the streets, at places of work, in restaurants and theaters and schools, acts of sexual harassment take place by the score that go unnoticed and unremarked upon except by the victims _ and even they often take the abuse and keep silent.

Harassment and assault of gays and lesbians is an illness in our society. What will it take to recognize it and try to treat it by legal medicine?

Most AIDS sufferers are homosexual, and unprotected sex between gay men is a common method of transmission of the virus _ in this country. In Africa and Asia, AIDS is chiefly heterosexual. But Americans insisted until Magic Johnson went on the air that it just did not happen here.

SOMETIMES I hear it said that harassment of gays is growing because many gay men have AIDS _ a piece of mealy rationalization. People do not suddenly become anti-Semites because some Wall Street swindlers are Jews. That allows them to come out with the bigotry that had been cooking in them. The AIDS epidemic provides the excuse for gangs that like to beat up people to roam the streets looking for gays.

Nor is it justification for looking the other way to say some gay activists can get unforgivably ugly themselves. I detest the harassment by some gays _ the defilement of the mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral, the "outing" of gays who prefer to keep their sex lives private, the threatening screams at heterosexuals they dislike for political or other reasons, which sometimes includes me.

BUT TO encourage or disregard violence against a whole group because you dislike how some of them act up is a disease in itself. It brought us Crown Heights, David Duke, the desecration of the host at St. Patrick's, and it is bringing us the harassment, beatings and murder of gays.

The only good journalistic job I have seen on gay-bashing as a national disgrace is in the November issue of The Advocate, a gay and lesbian magazine. Day by day it details just one "Month of Hate," August 1991. On Aug. 10, for instance, one gay man is beaten in Boston; another in Denver; four in Chicago, in three incidents; a gay bookstore is vandalized in Minneapolis; in Los Angeles, men in two cars chase a man leaving a gay bar; another is beaten in San Francisco, and in New York three gays are assaulted in full public view. So on _ just a day's beatings.

REPORTS ABOUT gay-bashing rise, but statistics do not mean much; most cities do not keep separate records. In cities like New York that do, the police are the first to say far more harassment takes place than the victims are willing to report.

And in Houston, a policeman tells what he has learned. A gay was beaten to death with nailed clubs. The police put a sting operation out in the streets _ officers posing as gays. Fifteen arrests were made in two weeks and the policeman said this to the Houston Post:

"You see what they go through on the streets out there, just for being who they are."

For all Americans to learn that, we may have to wait until some famous and admired American is shown on TV, beaten to a pulp but with enough strength to raise his head, smile and say with the charm and courage required of victims: "This happened because I am gay." N.Y. TIMES NEWS SERVICE