as you don't mention it in public, and we get to say anything we want in public.'" A 1997 Washington Post article about an upcoming episode of Ellen DeGeneres's sitcom, Ellen, on which her character would come out of the closet, mimicking DeGeneres's own recent coming out, ended with a quote from Bawer. "People used to do courageous things without having a publicist around to tell the world." Bawer's prominence in the gay-rights commentariat drew the ire of some leftists. Peter Kurth complained at Salon on November 30, 1998, that "Bruce Bawer, Gabriel Rotello, Michelangelo Signorile, and the inevitable Larry Kramer have, with [Andrew] Sullivan and a few others, secured a virtual lock on gay commentary in the American media." Paul Robinson's book Queer Wars: The New Gay Right and Its Critics, published by the University of Chicago in 2005, devoted the first of its three chapters to an analysis and critique of Bawer's writings on gay issues. Beyond Queer The Free Press published the anthology Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy in 1996. Edited by Bawer, it included essays by John W. Berresford, David Boaz, Stephen H. Chapman, Mel Dahl, David Link, Carolyn Lochhead, Daniel Mendelsohn, Stephen H. Miller, Jonathan Rauch, Andrew Sullivan, Paul Varnell, Norah Vincent, and John Weir, as well as Bawer. Booklist called it one of the "outstanding anthologies" of 1996", saying that it "marks the end of radical dominance in gay politics and culture" and "the beginning of a pragmatic and democratic approach to gay issues". Ron Hayes, writing in The Palm Beach Post, called it "complex, unsettling and thought provoking" and maintained that "No straight person who reads these essays will ever assume all gays are liberal again. And no gay person will ever assume that all conservatives are his enemy, either." To read the essays in Beyond Queer, wrote Joseph Bottum in the Weekly Standard, "is to experience, again and again, this sense of language broken loose, words unmoored from meaning". Bottum argued that the book's contributors fail "to understand the internal logic of the forms of life to which they demand admittance"; they "want... the tradition without the discipline, the gravity of dogmatic religion and conventional marriage without the duties and surrenders that create gravity. They want, in other words, a reformation of language to purchase for them the fruits that require a reformation of life." Bottum later reversed his views entirely,