By WARREN GOLDSTEIN

THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE

Men's Lives and Gay Identities: A Twentieth-Century History.

By John Loughery.

Illustrated. 507 pp. New York:

A John Macrae Book/

Henry Holt & Company. $35.



or many otherwise well-meaning Americans, homosexuality and its attendant controversies -- gay marriage, military service, AIDS policy, sex education curriculums -- make us think or talk about things we would rather treat with benign neglect. Even though most straight Americans oppose overt discrimination against homosexuals, 7 in 10 think sex between members of the same sex is wrong. A majority viscerally opposes teaching tolerance for a ''homosexual life style'' and seems happiest with a ''don't ask, don't tell'' approach to the entire subject.

''The Other Side of Silence,'' John Loughery's provocative history of gay male life in the United States from 1919 to the early 1990's, will have none of it. His title (from the name of a short-lived gay theater workshop in the 1970's) refers both to the millions of gay lives that have been lived according to a kind of omerta, as well as to those who refused to follow the code and thereby risked their livelihoods and, as in the case of Supervisor Harvey Milk of San Francisco, their lives. But the other side of silence (or discretion) is also speech. By using blunt, nonacademic Anglo-Saxonisms, Loughery, the art critic of The Hudson Review, insures that readers cannot pretend not to know exactly which sexual acts were being practiced, forbidden or celebrated.

The broad outlines of Loughery's story are becoming familiar to historians, if not to the general public. But Loughery goes farther. In ''The Other Side of Silence'' he combines original archival research, mastery of the secondary historical literature, more than 300 of his own interviews and a broad and deep knowledge of 20th-century American letters, theater and film into a narrative that is completely accessible to nonspecialists.

Despite our tendency to think of Victorian sexuality as repressed, dominated by the rigidly separated ''spheres'' apportioned to men and women, that very segregation encouraged a good bit of same-sex physical intimacy. How much of this activity was what our cruder age regards as the ''real thing'' -- genital stimulation -- remains less clear, though with so much smoke in the sources, the odds favor the existence of a substantial amount of fire.

Neither the terms nor the concepts ''homosexual'' and ''heterosexual'' even existed until the late 19th century, when a newly powerful medical profession began defining homoerotic behavior as ''perversion'' or mental illness. Still, the conceptual distinction between homosexual and heterosexual had considerably more force in the minds of clinicians than in the sexual practices of men, even the men who worked for vice squads.

In his opening chapter, for instance, Loughery recounts the juicy story of the 1919 sex scandal at the naval training station at Newport, R.I., in which the Navy ran a sting operation to entrap sailors and their civilian friends (known among themselves as the ''Ladies of Newport'') in homosexual conduct. The most striking part of the investigation, to modern eyes -- and eventually to an embarrassed Department of the Navy -- was the enthusiasm with which the presumably ''normal'' young detectives threw themselves into their work, enjoying (under often explicit orders) a ''fairly staggering amount of oral sex,'' Loughery writes, and admitting, in at least two cases, to ''having had anal sex to orgasm.'' But as long as they were on the receiving end of oral attentions, and on the giving end of anal intercourse, no one considered them ''fairies.'' What was common knowledge within gay communities -- that otherwise heterosexual men, known as ''trade,'' could and did enjoy sex with other men -- has been more or less suppressed in straight life.

The 1920's saw more cultural interest in sexuality, and if that decade's classic pantheon of writers (Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker) seemed to have all but ignored homosexuality, late-20's and early-30's vaudeville, theater and even movies experienced what Loughery calls a ''pansy craze,'' an ''implicit means of acknowledging, exploring and yet containing the specter of homosexuality.'' By the late 30's, however, in the grip of a national ''sex crimes panic,'' otherwise respectable newspapers ran lurid tales of murder, abduction and molestation on their front pages, frequently implying that sexual ''degeneracy'' -- code for homosexuality -- was fueling this apparent rampage. The pansy had become a ''public menace.''

World War II had an immense if contradictory impact on gay life. On the one hand, an estimated 9,000 servicemen and women were discharged ''on the basis of their sexual orientation,'' many of them entrapped and humiliated by ''periodic witch hunts.'' At the same time, thousands of gay men and lesbians discovered one another -- and the fact that they were not alone -- in the military. They also learned that whatever society's prejudices about ''queers'' and ''fairies,'' their ''capacity to survive and function -- and, for some, to excel -- was in no way impaired by their sexual life.'' These lessons of gay men's wartime experience resembled those of black Americans, who also felt, following the war, that ''the genie was not going to be forced back into the bottle.''

The difference was that the postwar years witnessed the rise of a civil rights movement that transformed the country, while the witch-hunting fervor of the 1950's also attacked homosexuals in a less well-known (if in certain respects more effective) crusade than that carried out against the political left. A 1950 investigation by the Senate Appropriations Committee, known as the ''pervert inquiry,'' netted about 200 homosexuals in Government agencies, while dismissals for sexual causes rose dramatically among Federal workers and military personnel.

There were stirrings of dissent and protest, however, and Loughery carefully and empathetically charts the beginning of the Mattachine Society and periodicals like One magazine in the early 50's. Most of the second half of the book is an account of the growth, splintering, trials, successes and failures of the struggles on behalf of gay rights over the past 40 years.

''The Other Side of Silence'' is exceptionally rich history by almost any standard. Loughery appears to have read every novel or play and seen every film in the past 75 years having anything to do with homosexuality. He consistently connects changes in gay life to larger developments in American society. And whether he is describing the Stonewall uprising, the intricacies of gay liberation political strategy, the antigay brutality of police officers in San Francisco (yes, San Francisco) or the sexual joy of the gay bathhouse scene of the 1970's, Loughery writes uncluttered, calm, controlled, exceptionally intelligent prose -- no mean feat these days in a field whose scholarly literature is increasingly prone to post-modernist jargon.

hile Loughery has favorites among gay activists (he admires Act Up, for example, and in two marvelous pages sums up the achievements and costs of the group's high-pressure confrontations), he treats nearly all his gay subjects with candor and empathy. Writing about issues and controversies that have called forth some of the most vitriolic rhetoric in modern politics, Loughery manages to be unfailingly, almost astonishingly, sensible. Pointedly noting the whiteness of most gay organizations in the last 30 years, for example, he also observes, quite reasonably, that there has been no reason for gay men to be any less racist than the rest of American society. And in a couple of pages Loughery deftly undoes the late-70's effort in which many gay men engaged in a ''display of groundless self-congratulation'' to portray themselves as wealthier and more educated than the general population and therefore in need of no legal protection.

By giving voice to those who have been too often silenced in the past, by engaging them in a serious dialogue, by placing their words and their lives in front of modern readers, Loughery has rescued their experience from (in E. P. Thompson's memorable phrase) the enormous condescension of posterity. This extraordinary book will shame anyone who still wishes that gay issues would just go away. Loughery has added a powerful voice to the chorus making sure that speech triumphs over silence.

