The New Republic

For the better part of two decades, I have spent much of every
summer in the small resort of Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod.
It has long attracted artists, writers, the offbeat, and the
bohemian; and, for many years now, it has been to gay America what
Oak Bluffs in Martha's Vineyard is to black America: a place where
a separate identity essentially defines a separate place. No one
bats an eye if two men walk down the street holding hands, or if a
lesbian couple pecks each other on the cheek, or if a drag queen
dressed as Cher careens down the main strip on a motor scooter.
It's a place, in that respect, that is sui generis. Except that it
isn't anymore. As gay America has changed, so, too, has
Provincetown. In a microcosm of what is happening across this
country, its culture is changing.Some of these changes are obvious. A real-estate boom has made
Provincetown far more expensive than it ever was, slowly excluding
poorer and younger visitors and residents. Where, once, gayness
trumped class, now the reverse is true. Beautiful, renovated houses
are slowly outnumbering beach shacks, once crammed with
twenty-something, hand-to-mouth misfits or artists. The role of
lesbians in the town's civic and cultural life has grown
dramatically, as it has in the broader gay world. The faces of
people dying from or struggling with aids have dwindled to an
unlucky few. The number of children of gay couples has soared, and,
some weeks, strollers clog the sidewalks. Bar life is not nearly as
central to socializing as it once was. Men and women gather on the
beach, drink coffee on the front porch of a store, or meet at the
Film Festival or Spiritus Pizza.

And, of course, week after week this summer, couple after couple got
married- -well over a thousand in the year and a half since gay
marriage has been legal in Massachusetts. Outside my window on a
patch of beach that somehow became impromptu hallowed ground, I
watched dozens get hitched--under a chuppah or with a priest, in
formalwear or beach clothes, some with New Age drums and horns,
even one associated with a full-bore Mass. Two friends lit the town
monument in purple to celebrate; a tuxedoed male couple slipping
onto the beach was suddenly greeted with a huge cheer from the
crowd; an elderly lesbian couple attached cans to the back of their
Volkswagen and honked their horn as they drove up the high street.
The heterosexuals in the crowd knew exactly what to do. They waved
and cheered and smiled. Then, suddenly, as if learning the habits
of a new era, gay bystanders joined in. In an instant, the
difference between gay and straight receded again a little.

But here's the strange thing: These changes did not feel like a
revolution. They felt merely like small, if critical, steps in an
inexorable evolution toward the end of a distinctive gay culture.
For what has happened to Provincetown this past decade, as with gay
America as a whole, has been less like a political revolution from
above than a social transformation from below. There is no single
gay identity anymore, let alone a single look or style or culture.
Memorial Day sees the younger generation of lesbians, looking like
lost members of a boy band, with their baseball caps, preppy shirts,
short hair, and earrings. Independence Day brings the partiers: the
"circuit boys," with perfect torsos, a thirst for nightlife,
designer drugs, and countless bottles of water. For a week in
mid-July, the town is dominated by "bears"--chubby, hairy, unkempt
men with an affinity for beer and pizza. Family Week heralds an
influx of children and harried gay parents. Film Festival Week
brings in the artsy crowd. Women's Week brings the more familiar
images of older lesbians: a landlocked flotilla of windbreakers and
sensible shoes. East Village bohemians drift in throughout the
summer; quiet male couples spend more time browsing gourmet
groceries and realtors than cruising nightspots; the predictable
population of artists and writers--Michael Cunningham and John
Waters are fixtures--mix with openly gay lawyers and cops and
teachers and shrinks.

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond
the poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big
cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples
have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is
beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may
one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that
homosexual men and lesbians will not exist--or that they won't
create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some
ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself
will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that "gayness"
alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The
distinction between gay and straight culture will become so
blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more
helpful not to examine them separately at all.

For many in the gay world, this is both a triumph and a threat. It
is a triumph because it is what we always dreamed of: a world in
which being gay is a nonissue among our families, friends, and
neighbors. But it is a threat in the way that all loss is a threat.
For many of us who grew up fighting a world of now-inconceivable
silence and shame, distinctive gayness became an integral part of
who we are. It helped define us not only to the world but also to
ourselves. Letting that go is as hard as it is liberating, as
saddening as it is invigorating. And, while social advance allows
many of us to contemplate this gift of a problem, we are also aware
that in other parts of the country and the world, the reverse may
be happening. With the growth of fundamentalism across the
religious world--from Pope Benedict XVI's Vatican to Islamic fatwas
and American evangelicalism--gayness is under attack in many places,
even as it wrests free from repression in others. In fact, the two
phenomena are related. The new anti-gay fervor is a response to the
growing probability that the world will one day treat gay and
straight as interchangeable humans and citizens rather than as
estranged others. It is the end of gay culture--not its
endurance--that threatens the old order. It is the fact that, across
the state of Massachusetts, "gay marriage" has just been abolished.
The marriage licenses gay couples receive are indistinguishable
from those given to straight couples. On paper, the difference is
now history. In the real world, the consequences of that are still
unfolding.

Quite how this has happened (and why) are questions that historians
will fight over someday, but certain influences seem clear even
now--chief among them the HIV epidemic.

Before aids hit, a fragile but nascent gay world had formed in a
handful of major U.S. cities. The gay culture that exploded from it
in the 1970s had the force of something long suppressed, and it
coincided with a more general relaxation of social norms. This was
the era of the post-Stonewall New Left, of the Castro and the West
Village, an era where sexuality forged a new meaning for gayness:
of sexual adventure, political radicalism, and cultural revolution.

The fact that openly gay communities were still relatively small and
geographically concentrated in a handful of urban areas created a
distinctive gay culture. The central institutions for gay men were
baths and bars, places where men met each other in highly
sexualized contexts and where sex provided the commonality. Gay
resorts had their heyday--from Provincetown to Key West. The gay
press grew quickly and was centered around classified personal ads
or bar and bath advertising. Popular culture was suffused with
stunning displays of homosexual burlesque: the music of Queen, the
costumes of the Village People, the flamboyance of Elton John's
debut; the advertising of Calvin Klein; and the intoxication of
disco itself, a gay creation that became emblematic of an entire
heterosexual era. When this cultural explosion was acknowledged,
when it explicitly penetrated the mainstream, the results, however,
were highly unstable: Harvey Milk was assassinated in San Francisco
and Anita Bryant led an anti-gay crusade. But the emergence of an
openly gay culture, however vulnerable, was still real.

And then, of course, catastrophe. The history of gay America as an
openly gay culture is not only extremely short--a mere 30 years or
so--but also engulfed and defined by a plague that struck almost
poignantly at the headiest moment of liberation. The entire
structure of emergent gay culture--sexual, radical, subversive--met
a virus that killed almost everyone it touched. Virtually the
entire generation that pioneered gay culture was wiped out--
quickly. Even now, it is hard to find a solid phalanx of gay men in
their fifties, sixties, or seventies--men who fought from Stonewall
or before for public recognition and cultural change. And those who
survived the nightmare of the 1980s to mid-'90s were often
overwhelmed merely with coping with plague; or fearing it
themselves; or fighting for research or awareness or more effective
prevention.

This astonishing story might not be believed in fiction. And, in
fiction, it might have led to the collapse of such a new, fragile
subculture. Aids could have been widely perceived as a salutary
retribution for the gay revolution; it could have led to
quarantining or the collapse of nascent gay institutions. Instead,
it had the opposite effect. The tens of thousands of deaths of men
from every part of the country established homosexuality as a
legitimate topic more swiftly than any political manifesto could
possibly have done. The images of gay male lives were recorded on
quilts and in countless obituaries; men whose homosexuality might
have been euphemized into nonexistence were immediately
identifiable and gone. And those gay men and lesbians who witnessed
this entire event became altered forever, not only emotionally, but
also politically--whether through the theatrical activism of Act-Up
or the furious organization of political gays among the Democrats
and some Republicans. More crucially, gay men and lesbians built
civil institutions to counter the disease; they forged new ties to
scientists and politicians; they found themselves forced into more
intense relations with their own natural families and the families
of loved ones. Where bath houses once brought gay men together, now
it was memorial services. The emotional and psychic bonding became
the core of a new identity. The plague provided a unifying social
and cultural focus.

But it also presaged a new direction. That direction was
unmistakably outward and integrative. To borrow a useful
distinction deployed by the writer Bruce Bawer, integration did not
necessarily mean assimilation. It was not a wholesale rejection of
the gay past, as some feared and others hoped. Gay men wanted to be
fully part of the world, but not at the expense of their own sexual
freedom (and safer sex became a means not to renounce that freedom
but to save it). What the epidemic revealed was how gay men--and,
by inference, lesbians--could not seal themselves off from the rest
of society. They needed scientific research, civic support, and
political lobbying to survive, in this case literally. The lesson
was not that sexual liberation was mistaken, but rather that it
wasn't enough. Unless the gay population was tied into the broader
society; unless it had roots in the wider world; unless it brought
into its fold the heterosexual families and friends of gay men and
women, the gay population would remain at the mercy of others and
of misfortune. A ghetto was no longer an option.

So, when the plague receded in the face of far more effective HIV
treatments in the mid-'90s and gay men and women were able to catch
their breath and reflect, the question of what a more integrated
gay culture might actually mean reemerged. For a while, it arrived
in a vacuum. Most of the older male generation was dead or
exhausted; and so it was only natural, perhaps, that the next
generation of leaders tended to be lesbian--running the major gay
political groups and magazines. Lesbians also pioneered a new baby
boom, with more lesbian couples adopting or having children.
HIV-positive gay men developed different strategies for living
suddenly posthumous lives. Some retreated into quiet relationships;
others quit jobs or changed their careers completely; others chose
the escapism of what became known as "the circuit," a series of
rave parties around the country and the world where fears could be
lost on the drug-enhanced dance floor; others still became lost in a
suicidal vortex of crystal meth, Internet hook-ups, and sex
addiction. HIV-negative men, many of whom had lost husbands and
friends, were not so different. In some ways, the toll was greater.
They had survived disaster with their health intact. But, unlike
their HIV-positive friends, the threat of contracting the disease
still existed while they battled survivors' guilt. The plague was
over but not over; and, as they saw men with HIV celebrate
survival, some even felt shut out of a new sub-sub-culture,
suspended between fear and triumph but unable to experience either
fully.

Then something predictable and yet unexpected happened. While the
older generation struggled with plague and post-plague adjustment,
the next generation was growing up. For the first time, a cohort of
gay children and teens grew up in a world where homosexuality was
no longer a taboo subject and where gay figures were regularly
featured in the press. If the image of gay men for my generation
was one gleaned from the movie Cruising or, subsequently, Torch
Song Trilogy, the image for the next one was MTV's "Real World,"
Bravo's "Queer Eye," and Richard Hatch winning the first
"Survivor." The new emphasis was on the interaction between gays
and straights and on the diversity of gay life and lives. Movies
featured and integrated gayness. Even more dramatically, gays went
from having to find hidden meaning in mainstream films--somehow
identifying with the aging, campy female lead in a way the rest of
the culture missed--to everyone, gay and straight, recognizing and
being in on the joke of a character like "Big Gay Al" from "South
Park" or Jack from "Will & Grace."

There are now openly gay legislators. Ditto Olympic swimmers and
gymnasts and Wimbledon champions. Mainstream entertainment
figures--from George Michael, Ellen DeGeneres, and Rosie O'Donnell
to edgy musicians, such as the Scissor Sisters, Rufus Wainwright,
or Bob Mould--now have their sexual orientation as a central, but
not defining, part of their identity. The National Lesbian and Gay
Journalists Association didn't exist when I became a journalist. Now
it has 1, 300 dues-paying members in 24 chapters around the
country. Among Fortune 500 companies, 21 provided domestic partner
benefits for gay spouses in 1995. Today, 216 do. Of the top Fortune
50 companies, 49 provide nondiscrimination protections for gay
employees. Since 2002, the number of corporations providing full
protections for openly gay employees has increased sevenfold,
according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Among the leaders:
the defense giant Raytheon and the energy company Chevron. These
are not traditionally gay-friendly work environments. Nor is the
Republican Party. But the offspring of such leading Republican
lights as Dick Cheney, Alan Keyes, and Phyllis Schlafly are all
openly gay. So is the spokesman for the most anti-gay senator in
Congress, Rick Santorum.

This new tolerance and integration--combined, of course, with the
increased ability to connect with other gay people that the
Internet provides--has undoubtedly encouraged more and more gay
people to come out. The hard data for this are difficult to come by
(since only recently have we had studies that identified large
numbers of gays) and should be treated with caution. Nevertheless,
the trend is clear. If you compare data from, say, the 1994
National Health and Social Life Survey with the 2002 National Survey
of Family Growth, you will find that women are nearly three times
more likely to report being gay, lesbian, or bisexual today than
they were eight years ago, and men are about 1.5 times more likely.
There are no reliable statistics on openly gay teens, but no one
doubts that there has been an explosion in visibility in the last
decade--around 3,000 high schools have "gay-straight" alliances.
The census, for its part, recorded a threefold increase in the
number of same-sex unmarried partners from 1990 to 2000. In 2000,
there were close to 600,000 households headed by a same-sex couple,
and a quarter of them had children. If you want to know where the
push for civil marriage rights came from, you need look no further.
This was not an agenda invented by activists; it was a movement
propelled by ordinary people.

So, as one generation literally disappeared and one generation found
itself shocked to still be alive, a far larger and more empowered
one emerged on the scene. This new generation knew very little
about the gay culture of the '70s, and its members were oblivious
to the psychically formative experience of plague that had shaped
their elders. Most came from the heart of straight America and were
more in tune with its new, mellower attitude toward gayness than
the embattled, defensive urban gay culture of the pre-aids era. Even
in evangelical circles, gay kids willing to acknowledge and
struggle publicly with their own homosexuality represented a new
form of openness. The speed of the change is still shocking. I'm
only 42, and I grew up in a world where I literally never heard the
word "homosexual" until I went to college. It is now not uncommon
to meet gay men in their early twenties who took a boy as their
date to the high school prom. When I figured out I was gay, there
were no role models to speak of; and, in the popular culture,
homosexuality was either a punch line or an embarrassed silence.
Today's cultural climate could not be more different. And the
psychological impact on the younger generation cannot be
overstated.

After all, what separates homosexuals and lesbians from every other
minority group is that they are born and raised within the bosom of
the majority. Unlike Latino or Jewish or black communities, where
parents and grandparents and siblings pass on cultural norms to
children in their most formative stages, each generation of gay men
and lesbians grows up being taught the heterosexual norms and
culture of their home environments or absorbing what passes for
their gay identity from the broader culture as a whole. Each shift
in mainstream culture is therefore magnified exponentially in the
next generation of gay children. To give the most powerful example:
A gay child born today will grow up knowing that, in many parts of
the world and in parts of the United States, gay couples can get
married just as their parents did. From the very beginning of their
gay lives, in other words, they will have internalized a sense of
normality, of human potential, of self-worth--something that my
generation never had and that previous generations would have found
unimaginable. That shift in consciousness is as profound as it is
irreversible.

To give another example: Black children come into society both
uplifted and burdened by the weight of their communal past--a
weight that is transferred within families or communities or
cultural institutions, such as the church, that provide a context
for self-understanding, even in rebellion. Gay children have no
such support or burden. And so, in their most formative years,
their self-consciousness is utterly different than that of their
gay elders. That's why it has become increasingly difficult to
distinguish between gay and straight teens today--or even young gay
and straight adults. Less psychologically wounded, more
self-confident, less isolated, young gay kids look and sound
increasingly like young straight kids. On the dozens of college
campuses I have visited over the past decade, the shift in just a
few years has been astounding. At a Catholic institution like
Boston College, for example, a generation ago there would have been
no discussion of homosexuality. When I visited recently to talk
about that very subject, the preppy, conservative student president
was openly gay.

When you combine this generational plasticity with swift demographic
growth, you have our current explosion of gay civil society, with a
disproportionately young age distribution. I use the term "civil
society" in its classic Tocquevillean and Burkean sense: the little
platoons of social organization that undergird liberal democratic
life. The gay organizations that erupted into being as aids killed
thousands in the '80s--from the Gay Men's Health Crisis to the aids
Project Los Angeles to the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington--
struggled to adapt to the swift change in the epidemic in the
mid-'90s. But the general principle of communal organization
endured. If conservatives had been open-minded enough to see it,
they would have witnessed a classic tale of self- help and
self-empowerment.

Take, for example, religious life, an area not historically
associated with gay culture. One of the largest single gay
organizations in the country today is the Metropolitan Community
Church, with over 40,000 active members. Go to, yes, Dallas, and
you'll find the Cathedral of Hope, one of the largest religious
structures in the country, with close to 4,000 congregants--
predominantly gay. Almost every faith now has an explicitly gay
denomination associated with it--Dignity for gay Catholics, Bet
Mishpachah for gay Jews, and so on. But, in many mainstream
Protestant churches and among Reform Jews, such groups don't even
exist because the integration of gay believers is now mundane.
These groups bring gays together in a context where sexuality is
less a feature of identity than faith, where the interaction of
bodies is less central than the community of souls.

In contrast, look at bar life. For a very long time, the fundamental
social institution for gay men was the gay bar. It was often
secluded--a refuge, a safe zone, and a clearinghouse for sexual
pickups. Most bars still perform some of those functions. But the
Internet dealt them a body-blow. If you are merely looking for sex
or a date, the Web is now the first stop for most gay men. The
result has been striking. Only a decade ago, you could wander up the
West Side Highway in New York City and drop by several leather
bars. Now, only one is left standing, and it is less a bar
dedicated to the ornate codes of '70s leather culture than a place
for men who adopt a more masculine self- presentation. My favorite
old leather bar, the Spike, is now the "Spike Gallery. " The newer
gay bars are more social than sexual, often with restaurants, open
windows onto the street, and a welcoming attitude toward others,
especially the many urban straight women who find gay bars more
congenial than heterosexual pickup joints.

Even gay political organizations often function more as social
groups than as angry activist groups. HRC, for example, raises
funds and lobbies Congress. Around 350,000 members have contributed
in the last two years. It organizes itself chiefly through a series
of formal fund-raising dinners in cities across the country--from
Salt Lake City to Nashville. These dinners are a social venue for
the openly gay bourgeoisie: In tuxedos and ballgowns, they
contribute large sums and give awards to local businesses and
politicians and community leaders. There are silent auctions, hired
entertainers, even the occasional bake-sale. The closest
heterosexual equivalent would be the Rotary Club. These dinners in
themselves are evidence of the change: from outsider rebellion to
bourgeois organization.

Take a look at the gay press. In its shallower forms--glossy
lifestyle magazines--you are as likely to find a straight Hollywood
star on the cover as any gay icon. In its more serious
manifestations, such as regional papers like the Washington Blade
or Southern Voice, the past emphasis on sex has been replaced with
an emphasis on domesticity. A recent issue of the Blade had an
eight-page insert for escort ads, personals, and the kind of
material that, two decades ago, would have been the advertising
mainstay of the main paper. But in the paper itself are 23 pages of
real-estate ads and four pages of home- improvement classifieds.
There are columns on cars, sports, DVDs, and local plays. The core
ad base, according to its editor, Chris Crain, now comprises
heterosexual-owned and operated companies seeking to reach the gay
market. The editorial tone has shifted as well. Whereas the Blade
was once ideologically rigid--with endless reports on small
activist cells and a strident left-wing slant--now it's much more
like a community paper that might be published for any well-heeled
ethnic group. Genuine ideological differences are now aired, rather
than bitterly decried as betrayal or agitprop. Editorials regularly
take Democrats to task as well as Republicans. The maturation has
been as swift as it now seems inevitable. After all, in 2004,
one-quarter of self-identified gay voters backed a president who
supported a constitutional ban on gay marriage. If the gay world is
that politically diverse under the current polarized circumstances,
it has obviously moved well beyond the time it was synonymous with
radical left politics.

How gay men and lesbians express their identity has also changed.
When openly gay identity first emerged, it tended toward extremes
of gender expression. When society tells you that gay men and
lesbians are not fully male or female, the response can be to
overcompensate with caricatures of each gender or to rebel by
blurring gender lines altogether. Effeminate "queens" were balanced
by hyper-masculine bikers and muscle men; lipstick lesbians were
offset by classically gruff "bull-dykes." All these sub-sub-cultures
still exist. Many feel comfortable with them; and, thankfully, we
see fewer attempts to marginalize them. But the polarities in the
larger gay population are far less pronounced than they once were;
the edges have softened. As gay men have become less defensive
about their masculinity, their expression of it has become subtler.
There is still a pronounced muscle and gym culture, but there are
also now openly gay swimmers and artists and slobs and every body
type in between. Go watch a gay rugby team compete in a regional
tournament with straight teams and you will see how vast but subtle
the revolution has been. And, in fact, this is the trend: gay civil
associations in various ways are interacting with parallel straight
associations in a way that leaves their gay identity more and more
behind. They're rugby players first, gay rugby players second.

One of the newest reflections of this is what is known as "bear"
culture: heavy, hirsute, unkempt guys who revel in their
slovenliness. Their concept of what it means to be gay is very
different than that of the obsessive gym-rats with torsos shaved of
every stray hair. Among many younger gay men, the grungy look of
their straight peers has been adopted and tweaked to individual
tastes. Even among bears, there are slimmer "otters" or younger
"cubs" or "musclebears, " who combine gym culture with a bear
sensibility. The varieties keep proliferating; and, at the rate of
current change, they will soon dissipate into the range of
identities that straight men have to choose from. In fact, these
variations of masculinity may even have diversified heterosexual
male culture as well. While some gay men have proudly adopted some
classically straight signifiers--beer bellies and back hair--many
straight men have become "metrosexuals." Trying to define "gay
culture" in this mix is an increasingly elusive task.

Among lesbians, Ellen DeGeneres's transition from closeted sitcom
star to out-lesbian activist and back to appealingly middle-brow
daytime talk-show host is almost a microcosm of diversifying
lesbian identity in the past decade. There are still classic
butch-femme lesbian partnerships, but more complex forms of
self-expression are more common now. With the abatement in many
places of prejudice, lesbian identity is formed less by reaction to
hostility than by simple self-expression. And this, after all, is
and was the point of gay liberation: the freedom not merely to be
gay according to some preordained type, but to be yourself,
whatever that is.

You see this even in drag, which once defined gayness in some
respects but now is only one of many expressions. Old-school drag,
the kind that dominated the '50s, '60s, and '70s, often consisted
of female impersonators performing torch songs from various divas.
The more miserable the life of the diva, the better able the
performer was to channel his own anguish and drama into the show.
After all, gayness was synonymous with tragedy and showmanship.
Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis: these were the models.
But today's drag looks and feels very different. The drag
impresario of Provincetown, a twisted genius called Ryan Landry,
hosts a weekly talent show for local drag performers called
"Showgirls." Attending it each Monday night is P-town's equivalent
of weekly Mass. A few old-school drag queens perform, but Landry
sets the tone. He makes no attempt to look like a woman, puts on
hideous wigs (including a horse mask and a pair of fake boobs
perched on his head), throws on ill-fitting dresses, and performs
scatological song parodies. Irony pervades the show. Comedy defines
it. Gay drag is inching slowly toward a version of British
pantomime, where dada humor and absurd, misogynist parodies of
womanhood are central. This is post-drag; straight men could do it
as well. This year, the longest-running old school drag
show--"Legends"--finally closed down. Its audience had become
mainly heterosexual and old.

This new post-gay cultural synthesis has its political counterpart.
There was once a ferocious debate among gays between what might be
caricatured as "separatists" and "assimilationists." That argument
has fizzled. As the gay population has grown, it has become
increasingly clear that the choice is not either/or but both/and.
The issue of civil marriage reveals this most graphically. When I
first argued for equal marriage rights, I found myself assailed by
the gay left for social conservatism. I remember one signing for my
1995 book, Virtually Normal, the crux of which was an argument for
the right to marry. I was picketed by a group called "Lesbian
Avengers," who depicted my argument as patriarchal and reactionary.
They crafted posters with my face portrayed within the crosshairs
of a gun. Ten years later, lesbian couples make up a majority of
civil marriages in Massachusetts and civil unions in Vermont; and
some of the strongest voices for marriage equality have been
lesbians, from the pioneering lawyer Mary Bonauto to writer E.J.
Graff. To its credit, the left--gay male and lesbian--recognized
that what was at stake was not so much the corralling of all gay
individuals into a conformist social institution as a widening of
choice for all. It is still possible to be a gay radical or rigid
leftist. The difference now is that it is also possible to be a gay
conservative, or traditionalist, or anything else in between.

Who can rescue a uniform gay culture? No one, it would seem. The
generation most psychologically wedded to the separatist past is
either dead from HIV or sidelined. But there are still enclaves of
gay distinctiveness out there. Paradoxically, gay culture in its
old form may have its most fertile ground in those states where
homosexuality is still unmentionable and where openly gay men and
women are more beleaguered: the red states. Earlier this year, I
spoke at an HRC dinner in Nashville, Tennessee, where state
politicians are trying to bar gay couples from marrying or
receiving even basic legal protections. The younger gay generation
is as psychologically evolved there as any place else. They see the
same television and the same Internet as gay kids in New York. But
their social space is smaller. And so I found a vibrant gay world,
but one far more cohesive, homogeneous, and defensive than in
Massachusetts. The strip of gay bars--crammed into one place rather
than diffuse, as in many blue-state cities--was packed on a
Saturday night. The mix of old and young, gay and lesbian, black,
white, and everything in between reminded me of Boston in the '80s.
The tired emblems of the past--the rainbow flags and leather
outfits-- retained their relevance there.

The same goes for black and Latino culture, where homophobia,
propped up by black churches and the Catholic hierarchy
respectively, is more intense than in much of white society. It's
no surprise that these are the populations also most at risk for
HIV. The underground "down-low" culture common in black gay life
means less acknowledgment of sexual identity, let alone awareness
or disclosure of HIV status. The same repression that facilitated
the spread of HIV among gay white men in the '70s now devastates
black gay America, where the latest data suggest a 50 percent HIV
infection rate. (Compare that with largely white and more
integrated San Francisco, where recent HIV infection rates are now
half what they were four years ago.) The extremes of gender
expression are also more pronounced among minorities, with many gay
black or Latino men either adopting completely female personalities
or refusing to identify as gay at all. Here the past lives on. The
direction toward integration is clear, but the pace is far slower.

And, when you see the internalized defensiveness of gays still
living in the shadow of social hostility, any nostalgia one might
feel for the loss of gay culture dissipates. Some still echo critic
Philip Larkin's jest that he worried about the American civil
rights movement because it was ruining jazz. But the flipness of
that remark is the point, and the mood today is less genuine
regret- -let alone a desire to return to those days--than a kind
of wistfulness for a past that was probably less glamorous or
unified than it now appears. It is indeed hard not to feel some
sadness at the end of a rich, distinct culture built by pioneers
who braved greater ostracism than today's generation will ever
fully understand. But, if there is a real choice between a culture
built on oppression and a culture built on freedom, the decision is
an easy one. Gay culture was once primarily about pain and tragedy,
because that is what heterosexuals imposed on gay people, and that
was, in part, what gay people experienced. Gay culture was once
primarily about sex, because that was how heterosexuals defined gay
lives. But gay life, like straight life, is now and always has been
about happiness as well as pain; it is about triumph as well as
tragedy; it is about love and family as well as sex. It took
generations to find the self-worth to move toward achieving this
reality in all its forms--and an epidemiological catastrophe to
accelerate it. If the end of gay culture means that we have a new
complexity to grapple with and a new, less cramped humanity to
embrace, then regret seems almost a rebuke to those countless
generations who could only dream of the liberty so many now enjoy.

The tiny, rich space that gay men and women once created for
themselves was, after all, the best they could do. In a metaphor
coined by the philosopher Michael Walzer, they gilded a cage of
exclusion with magnificent ornaments; they spoke to its isolation
and pain; they described and maintained it with dignity and
considerable beauty. But it was still a cage. And the thing that
kept gay people together, that unified them into one homogeneous
unit, and that defined the parameters of their culture and the
limits of their dreams, were the bars on that cage. Past the ashes
of thousands and through the courage of those who came before the
plague and those who survived it, those bars are now slowly but
inexorably being pried apart. The next generation may well be as
free of that cage as any minority ever can be; and they will
redefine gayness on its own terms and not on the terms of hostile
outsiders. Nothing will stop this, since it is occurring in the
psyches and souls of a new generation: a new consciousness that is
immune to any law and propelled by the momentum of human freedom
itself. While we should treasure the past, there is no recovering
it. The futures--and they will be multiple--are just beginning.

By andrew sullivan

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