Gay culture has gone from outsider rebellion to bourgeois organization. (by Andrew Sullivan)
Gay marriage is one more sign that gays are not outsiders anymore.

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. 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 we won't create a community of sorts and a culture that sets us 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 non-issue 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, 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.

The 1970s ushered in 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.

And then, of course, catastrophe. The entire structure of emergent gay culture met a virus that killed almost everyone it touched. Virtually the entire generation that pioneered gay culture was wiped out – quickly. 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. And those gay men and lesbians who witnessed this entire event became altered forever, not only emotionally, but also politically.

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. 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. 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, the gay population would remain at the mercy of others and of misfortune. A ghetto was no longer an option.

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.

The new emphasis was on the interaction between gays and straights and on the diversity of gay life and lives. This new tolerance and integration have undoubtedly encouraged more and more gay people to come out. 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. The speed of the change is still shocking. And the psychological impact on the younger generation cannot be overstated.

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 is as profound as it is irreversible.

Less psychologically wounded, more self-confident, less isolated, young gay kids look and sound increasingly like young straight kids. On college campuses, 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.

Gay culture has gone from outsider rebellion to bourgeois organization, and in so doing has made it possible to embrace any number of identities. 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 a Human Rights Campaign dinner in Nashville, Tenn., 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 anyplace 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 tired emblems of the past – the rainbow flags and leather outfits – retained their relevance in gay clubs 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.

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 and 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.

Andrew Sullivan is author of "Virtually Normal" and an editor at "The New Republic" (www.tnr.com), where a longer version of this essay appears. You may contact him through his Web site, www.andrewsullivan.com.