A friend recently commented to me that negative attitudes toward gays are because “most Americans need to ‘come out’ like we have.” Truer words have never been spoken.

Most social historians will tell you that America’s attitudes on sex are no less rooted in religious influences than they are from the Victorian era – that buttoned-up, puritanical rein of Queen Victoria in the 19th century. But so long as these values permeate our laws and culture, a double standard will haunt the gay community.

Let’s face it. Just about everyone has some secret or two in their life that they’d rather not have revealed. As a result, when people who happen to be gay celebrate their gayness or (gasp!) ask for the right to celebrate their love and relationship with marital rights, well, it’s just downright threatening. If gay people come out about their innermost secrets, other people might be expected to do the same.

You need look no further than the newspapers to see what secrets some people are fighting from being revealed. The President can’t account for his missing records of service in the National Guard. The vice president is taking his fight to keep records of his secret meetings with energy lobbyists all the way to the Supreme Court. And Michael Jackson, free on $3 million bail for child molestation charges, probably wouldn’t be shaking up his legal team unless he was worried about what secrets may come out about him in court.

Americans love scandal, intrigue and sex. We rubber-neck at highway accident scenes with sick curiosity to see bloody carnage. We tune in to maggot eating on “Fear Factor”. And we check the Internet for more photos of naked Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. Army personnel.

The more people try to hide the truth, the more our appetite is whetted to see it for ourselves. But the fact that gay people are more visible in the mainstream of picket fences and the diaper aisle in the supermarket is too fast an adjustment for the many who prefer to pigeonhole us as flighty waiters and leather-clad sadomasochistic sex machines.

In a couple weeks, some monarchy fans will celebrate the 185th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s birth. During her 63-year rein as monarch of Great Britain and its subjects from 1837-1901, she married her first cousin, the German Prince Albert.

The Victorian era was more influential than the church when it came to sexual proscriptions. It brought about such contraptions as the bathing machine – a device in which beach folk could enter the sea, with the additional privacy of a floating booth that would hide any view of bathing suit-clad swimmers from opposite-sex on-lookers. Sex was only for procreation. And repression from its pleasure was seen as a badge of good breeding.

So isn’t it interesting to see how the Queen’s husband has been memorialized today – with tobacco and penis piercing.

The practice of mail genital piercing dates back at least to the Victorian era when men would install a “dressing ring” in their … (ugh) penis. This could then be used to tie down the appendage to the man’s leg to minimize any unsightly bulge in the tight pants popular in the time. How Victorian!

Admittedly, there’s no rock hard evidence that Prince Albert did have such a dressing ring, aka PA, which today honors his memory. But it does present quite a dichotomy, doesn’t it? Queen Victoria would do back flips in her grave if she knew that a current day practice aligned with sexual eroticism is associated with her husband. Which takes us back to today.

Some secrets do have a place in free society. It’s called the right to privacy, which is still a ground of battle in defining our constitutional freedoms. But too many people, with plenty of secrets of their own, want to push gay people, and their relationships, back in the closet.

I don’t expect Prince Albert parades to spring up from coast to coast, (though Janet Jackson’s nipple ring show at the Super Bowl was a good warm-up act.) But until the rest of America is ready to be honest about their private lives like us, they should stop trying to stifle our free expression and association. If it was good enough for Prince Albert’s dressing ring in the 19th century, it should be good enough for gay relationships in the 21st.