Over spring break, I went to visit some close friends in Miami. One night we went to a gay bar in South Beach, because "you haven't seen Miami unless you been in a room full of horny half-naked men who'll ---- anything that moves."

The experience was both refreshing and saddening. On the one hand, it was great to see gay men openly displaying affection without fear of repercussion in a gay-friendly venue.

On the other hand, I was bothered by how gay men reduced themselves to nothing more than sum of their sexuality.

Several times throughout the night, strangers walked up to me and rubbed my nipples or otherwise invaded my personal space.

I got a very good taste of what it must feel to be a woman in a bar full of drunk men, and I didn't like it one bit.

As the AIDS epidemic taught us, gay men really are promiscuous. But the question is: Are they promiscuous because they have been marginalized by society and forced to pursue gratification in an underground culture, or because they're men?

At the bar, I thought about what a State College bar would be like if all the girls wore shirts that said "Sure, I'll sleep with you," and really meant it. I decided the result would look a lot like a gay bar.

But most women don't wear shirts like that -- although some girls in town prefer to wear next to nothing -- because they balance the aggression of men by wearing looks that say "Yeah right, buddy, get lost."

The lesson is that while it's important to "out" homosexuals from the closet, you have to be careful not "out" them from the heterosexual world at the same time. If you do, all you get are creepy sex-starved middle-aged men grabbing my ass in South Beach.

It's Pride Week, the purpose of which is to bring awareness to issues of sexual orientation. But it seems to me that there are two camps working to bring about tolerance of homosexuality: those who are concerned first and foremost with increasing the margin of homosexuality -- that is, adding a more visible inch to the sides of the paper -- and those that are more concerned about moving homosexuality from the margin to the mainstream.

In the first camp, there are the gay activists that view Pride Week as the opportunity to "out" homosexuals in every sense of the word. They want them to dye their hair bright pink and shout "We're here; we're queer. Deal with it."

Of course, it's important to raise awareness of the issues and show the world that there are homosexuals in it. But this alone will not provide a safe environment for gays to come out of the closet, nor will create a healthy community for them to live in once they're out (the South Beach effect).

So long as we continue to create just two worlds, a gay one and a straight one, we'll continue to get pedophile priests -- gay men so consumed by Catholic guilt that they opt for the only life where sexuality is a supposed non-issue.

It does not take a psychiatrist to realize that anyone who chooses the priesthood as an escape, instead of a virtue, is bound to do more harm than good.

The key is to give gay men real options, and the only way you'll do that is by getting people to realize that homosexuality is non-issue, not by making it more of one with protests and pink hair. Force will never work. Trying to beat homosexuality into this heterosexual culture is like trying to instill democracy in Iraq with guns and bombs.

Remember, it's inclusion, not obtrusion we're after.

That's why I have a problem with the very title "Pride Week."

I have to ask myself: Am I proud of my sexual orientation? The answer is, well, kinda-not-really.

I'm about as proud of my orientation as I am of my hair or anything else I have limited control over.

I can primp, curl, cut, highlight and style it all I want, but no matter what, my hair still only covers my scalp.

At the risk of sounding trite, it's the rest of me that really counts, so why should I attract too much attention to my head?

I vote for a more inclusive approach. Instead of widening the margins of the essay, I would prefer every 10th word of the text to whisper, "And oh, in case you didn't know, I just happen to be gay." That way, the nine other straight words will keep the gay one in check and off my nipples.

And oh, in case you didn't know, I just happen to be gay.