The hoofprints of Lucifer are everywhere. And since this is America, eternally at war with the darker forces, the foremost Enemy Within is sex, no quarter given. Here are some bulletins from the battlefront, drawn from a smart essay on "Sex & Empire" in the March issue of The Guide (www.guidemag.com), a Boston-based monthly travel magazine that has "about the best gay sex politics around," according to Bill Dobbs of Queerwatch, whom I take as my adviser in these matters.

In February 2000, Matthew Limon, an 18-year-old, had oral sex with a 14-year-old schoolmate. A Kansas court sentenced him to seventeen years in prison, a sentence duly upheld by a federal court in February. Last July, an Ohio court sentenced 22-year-old Brian Dalton to seven years in prison because of sex fantasies he wrote in his diary. A woman teacher in Arizona faces 100 years in prison for having an affair with a 17-year-old boy. Frankly, I'd have risked two centuries in prison to have sex with Miss Hollister when I was in school.

Apropos the triumph of identity politics across the past thirty years, Bill Andriette, the author of "Sex & Empire," remarks that "the same PR machinery that produces all these feel-good identities naturally segues into manufacturing demonic ones--indeed, creates a demand for them. The ascription of demonic sexual identities onto people helps drive repression, from attacks on Internet freedom to sex-predator laws. Identity politics works gear-in-gear with a fetishization of children, because the young represent one class of persons free of identity, the last stand of unbranded humanity, precious and rare as virgin prairie."

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