in a New York Times op-ed "to take substantive action on behalf of gays", arguing that the U.S. government was "now lagging behind the American people on gay issues". Bawer commented frequently on the treatment of gays in the films and TV. In a March 10, 1996, Times article, Bawer argued that while new films from Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Germany provided fresh, human treatments of gay people, most Hollywood movies about gays continued to be timid, banal, and formulaic. On April 14, 1996, Bawer said on the CBS Evening News, apropos of the new movie The Birdcage, that "A good farce has one foot in reality. A gay person going to see this movie realizes this movie doesn't have a single foot in reality." Martin Walker in The Guardian cited Bawer's complaint about the makers of The Birdcage: "They don't get gay life. They don't get anything, outside of a narrow Hollywood idea of gay life. These characters have no dignity, nor pride." Bawer was a major subject of Angela D. Dillard's 2001 book Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America. Reviewing it for Salon, he described it as a book written from "the heart of Academic Country, where the very existence of conservatives who are not straight white males can indeed generate horror and confusion (or, alternatively, amusement, perhaps bordering on clinical hysteria), and where, as surely as a multiplicity of genders, skin colors, ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations is the collective dream, a multiplicity of viewpoints is the collective nightmare". He described Dillard's account of "gay conservative" as ill-informed and criticized her for, among other things, including him on "a list of people who have 'sided with the Religious Right'—even though I wrote Stealing Jesus (1997), which indicts fundamentalism as a betrayal of Christianity". In a 1995 Washington Post article, Jim Marks cited Bawer's observation that (in Marks's paraphrase) "[I]t gets harder to claim that gay men and lesbians are outside mainstream culture, when so much of mainstream culture—the Mona Lisa and Moby-Dick, to use Bawer's examples—is seen as the product of gay and lesbian minds." In a 1996 piece on gay marriage, New York Times columnist Frank Rich cited Bawer's view that there existed "a gentlemen's agreement" among Washington conservatives. He quoted Bawer as saying: "They say 'We'll socialize with you and your significant other and we'll all be charming, as long